Wisdom from the guys in the CHB

A few years ago, the Passion Subway Series had it's Long Island stop at our church. We got to know the guys in Charlie Hall Band and really enjoyed hangin' out with them. I've kept in touch online with Brian (keyboards) and Dustin (drums) and they've helped me get started with Ableton, Absynth and using a laptop for playing out.

Here is some collective wisdom from them...

Brian wrote:

Most of the sounds that I use are from Absynth (I recently upgraded to 4.0 also). I also sample a lot of sounds into Ableton's Simpler plug in. Think of it as a digital sampler where you can store sounds from gear that you could never possibly take on the road. I really love it.

This sparked my interest - he had already recommended Absynth, which I was using stand-alone. Perhaps I need to also think of it as a sound-design tool rather than just a great sounding synth. Create some textures, render it, then load it up back into Live and then chop it up and process is more in Live.

He also runs Absynth and Ableton separately, rather than Absynth hosted as a VST plugin inside of live. This brought up an interesting question with an even more profound response:

Q: how do you get your rhythmic stuff in absynth to sync with everything else that is going on?
A: I sync it via BPM rather than locking it to timecode. Absynth doesn't really sync to code and for the kinds of sounds I'm using it works just as well to sync to BPM. I tend to not use arpeggiated sounds at all in a live setting because it tends to just make the mix muddy.

This is just what I have been finding out too. I try to get these great time-synced things worked out which sound great at home, but they just don't sit will with the whole band playing. Back to the drawing board!

I appreciate them taking the time to help us out.

Live 7 came yesterday!

I like Live 7 so far. The slicer and Rex import are great features. Time signature changes are huge for me as we often do songs other than in 4/4. Last night was the first time I tried out the EIC - unfortunately my laptop only has a few gig free on the HD so I installed the LE version of the EIC and the full Keys pack. Pretty nice sounding Rhodes in there, but the Grand Piano LE was lacking - think I need to try installing the full Grand Piano to give it a fair try. The solo instruments have potential, but I think the ensembles need effects applied to them to really sound big. Need to experiment with it more.

Ableton Tutorials

Greg over at digitalworship.net has some excellent tutorials on how he uses Ableton Live. He also posts some of his set files which have really helped me understand how to set things up. I have been using Live playing with a band in church, but am experimenting with using it just solo or with an acoustic guitar player. I want to create a sound that is not too big or cheezy, but just right. He has some great suggestions for using Live.

Live 7 almost delivered!

Live 7 suite (boxed) almost here! Fedex site shows:

Date/Time

Activity

Location

Details

Jan 24, 2008

6:25 AM

On FedEx vehicle for delivery

HOLBROOK, NY

I've been using the downloaded version of Live 6 and upgraded to the 7 suite. Got the serial numbers two weeks ago, but it looks like the box will arrive today!

Well, here goes...

Why a new blog? Simply put, it helps me to organize my thoughts and discoveries. There are some great forums and blogs visited by very creative people that have helped me get started and develop my sound. At this point in my life, I need a place to stockpile all this information, as well as provide a place for others to join in. So rather than creating another forum, I hope that this blog will be a way to hold helpful ideas and links to help those wanting to use a laptop as your primary instrument. Some of this will document my original findings, but much of this will be links to other helpful stuff discovered on the net.

I began using a laptop to augment my keyboard sounds in 2006 - I am now exclusively using a laptop as my keyboard instrument when playing live.

Well, the blog has been created with the obligatory first post, so let's see where this goes!