I finally got around to recording a brief snippet of piano to use in Ableton.

I don’t know why this has taken me so long – probably I thought that miking a piano would be hard. In fact I went lo-fi by opening the lid and popping the mic in the top. Job done.

The un-effected, untreated, warts and all piano line is here. You can hear all the creakings and hi end noise that presumably comes from throwing a cheap mic into the top of an old piano.

I recorded onto my MacBook but DropBoxed across to my PC to do the Ableton stuff – I’m in a kind of transition period between PC and MB for doing tunes – all my VST’s are on my PC but I’m loving the ease and portability of the Mac.

Once in Ableton, I did some effectmagic (technical term) on the piano line, removing the high end noise and hopefully most of the creaks (most of which are actually a pedal which badly needs oiling..) and then chucked in some quick samples to pad it all out.

As always, it’s unfinished – in fact, it’s downright lazy – but then hey, my neck hurts and it’s time to go do something else. So for now, here it is. Hang around until the piano line comes in about half way through – it gets better.

For other [mostly unfinished] stuff, go to the tunes page on my website.

I’ve been aware in my music writing recently that I’ve got a bit of an obsession with order.

I have a tendency to automatically reach for the quantize option to pull all the notes into time – and much as I love fiddling with the various effect options in Ableton, I’ve realised recently that I’m a bit regimental with the way I use these.

One of the loveliest things about Ableton is that it give you pretty much infinite opportunity to make the thing sound rougher, which is ironic given that driving for higher quality is probably foremost in the feature set of most music software.

So, with this in mind, I spent an evening last week knocking out a rough cut of a new tune:

Ballache6

In this cut, I’ve tried deliberately to push and pull the shape around a bit. The random morse code tune over the top for instance is an arpeggiated single note but with a beat repeat to give it a random edge. Underneath there’s a whole bunch of filters and a “scratched vinyl” VST which I think works quite well.

All the usual disclaimers apply – it’s unfinished, needs a bunch of work, etc.

I’ve never been a CompleterFinisher