Weekly musical sketches
Sometimes it's easier to share little ideas than anything else
Apologies for the slower output of content recently but I am taking a different approach by recording various ideas into a draft post over a week or two, publishing once it’s quite varied!
I have been playing around with the Spacewalk VST plugin with Ableton Live this week, as you will have seen from my last post and I have been having serious fun with it. So here is a gorgeous synth progression, very ambient and perhaps just the tonic for a wet Friday evening in November! cold, frosty/snowy day in November.
The above audio file was created using Vital synth, whereas the next one was created with the free Zyklop plugin from Dawesome, for a more spacious ethereal ambience.
I like the redesigned audio widgets by the way Substack, they look a lot nicer.
Experiments in AUM
The AuV3 plugin Atom 2 is a handy one for recording ideas straight from my controller keyboard, either in real-time or using step recording. I used the latter for this next example.
To describe the set-up in words, I added an audio channel and a MIDI channel to the project. In the Audio channel I loaded the Juno emulation plugin J6 from Audiokit, routing it through two audio effects, Bleass Delay and Fauve from K-Devices.
The Midi channel, I added Atom 2 with inputs from the keyboard, my Minifuse 4 audio interface (perhaps not actually needed) and the output to the Audio channel with the synth loaded.
Setting the number of bars to 8 in Atom 2 I step recorded a sequence from my Keystep Pro and then set the playback speed in Atom to be quarter speed.
Playing this back through the effects, just sounds wild!
Ableton Move
I’ve quite a few nice ideas bubbling away on the Ableton Move at the minute, especially this one and the audio clip below is a rough sketch for the moment, not a finished track but it helps reinforce the fact, I really love my Move. The updates roll out each month and it is as much part of the Ableton ecosystem as Live and the Push. I think it also helps you develop your musicality, I am convinced my keyboard playing has improved because my ear is being trained by the devices that are mostly locked down to a chosen scale.
Here is a screenshot of the project once synced from Ableton cloud into Live, ready for arrangement and an export of the audio file.
One thing I’ll try at some point will be to hook up the Move to the Roland SP-404, slicing samples and trying out a few things there. Taetro did something similar on his YouTube channel not so long ago.
Hook up gear you’d not normally consider using together, create some mad stuff.
Weekly downloads
https://www.dawesomemusic.com/plugins/zyklop/
https://www.higher-plane.uk/apps/spacewalk
Next time…
Probably some downloadable beats, some for free and some for paid subscribers.