Friday 31 October 2008

Making Music with Ableton Live

Ableton Live is a little different from some of the other music software packages. The program is set up to encourage a more improvisational approach to making music. In addition to the traditional timeline based approach we saw in Reason, Logic and Cubase, Ableton Live also features a unique "Session View".

The session view is a kind of musical sketch pad that allows you try out lots of different ideas before adding them to your track. This approach is particularly appealing if you are performing onstage, or using Ableton as a DJ tool.


Ableton Live is increasingly popular with music producers and is widely used by DJ's, because it allows you to produce remixes, re-edits and mashups very quickly. Check the video clip below to see how:



To learn more about producing with Ableton Live check out our Ableton Live Courses here.
To learn more about DJing with Ableton Live check out our Ableton Live Courses here.

Tuesday 28 October 2008

Learning Reason 4


This time round we'll take a look at Reason. Like I said before this is a good choice if you are new to music production because it's reasonably easy to pick up and features all of the synths, samplers, drum machines and instruments you need right out of the box.

In fact it behaves very much like a hardware studio as you can see in the video below. You connect up the various instruments and route them into the mxing desk in exactly the same way that you would with a "real" studio. You can even flip the rack around and see how everything is connected behind the scenes as demonstrated here:



Want to know more? Learn Reason on our Reason courses.