The DubSpot Student Experience: 'Learning Ableton Live'

"Learning to Make Music with Ableton Live"

My name is Jass. I'm an aspiring artist living in Williamsburg Brooklyn, and am writing a blog about my experiences of taking a music software production / remix course called Ableton Live Level 1:Remixing at DubSpot - a world class electronic music production and DJ institute that was one of the first Ableton Live Certified Training Centers in the world and currently only one of two Ableton Live Certified Training Centers in the United States.

This is my first time taking a music class. I moved to New York City five years ago from a ski resort town called Park City in Utah. For three and a half years, I helped my friends promote 140 events for a local New York City minimal techno, electro and house electronic dance music party called ROBOTS. I had a lot of fun helping artists and friends build their musical careers, but the time involved did not allow me to create myself. After the ROBOTS party ended, I had the motivation, but not the knowledge to create my own music - that's why I went to DubSpot - to learn the best music production software from some of the best instructors in the business.

My intentions for the blog are to capture the experience of a beginning musical student at DubSpot by focusing on the community vibe, documenting the interaction with the instructors, analyzing the process of learning Ableton Live, and recording the evolution of remixing a song. I hope this blog will inspire you to stop thinking about pursuing you musical happiness, and allow DubSpot to help you actually capture it.

TheDubSpot Blog: First Day

One Sunday afternoon, I started my first three hour Ableton Live Level 1:Remixing class at DubSpot. Before entering the classroom on the second floor, I stopped for a drink at the DubCafe, located on the ground floor of DubSpot and noticed a plaque on the wall stating, "Life is Too Short for Bad Coffee". DubCafe serves La Calombe gourmet coffee, and a variety of smoothies, and snacks. Walking upstairs to the classroom, I immediately felt the excitement and energy blasting through the door.

DubSpot students were using the eight DJ/production workstations during the open house / lab time to practice their DJ mixing skills by tapping their foot on the wooden floor, and editing their audio productions on the Apple computers. When the rest of my class arrived, we walked through the central pathway towards the back of the room and sat down to meet one another. DubSpot focuses not only on teaching electronic music production, but also building a community environment through all of our interests in music.

Our class has a wide variety of musical interests and diversity in ages and music production experience. We have a fourteen-year-old student who previously took a DubSpot classtwo years ago, and fifty-year-old beginner student who could not find any music he liked, so he decided to take a DubSpot class to make his own. Another student in my class is Dan Giove, DubSpot's founder who is also taking the Ableton Live class for the first time.

Dan is a DJ himself whose musical style shifted as the years went by and started playing down tempo tracks. He was only getting offers to play at restaurants rather than dance clubs, and at that point, Dan decided to focus on producing music. At the time, the only way to learn music production software was to take private lessons or to learn it yourself. This gave Dan the idea to open DubSpot. DubSpot also teaches other music production software such as Logic Pro 8, and Reason, but primarily focuses on Ableton Live because as Dan puts it, "I've never seen anyone who does not get it."

Ableton Live is a professional loop-based software music sequencer for Mac OS and Windows. Our class at DubSpot teaches the latest major release of Live, Version 7, which was released in November 2007. Unlike other software sequencers, Live is designed around the notion of being as much an instrument for live performances as a tool for composing and arranging. It is also often used for precision mixing of tracks by DJs.

Our main instructor is Jon Margulies, a New York-based producer, guitarist, composer, DJ and author of Thomson Technologies Ableton Live 7 Power! The Comprehensive Guide Book. I am reading Jon's book in conjunction with the class and finding it very helpful.

Jon has been performing professionally since he was 11 years old. He purchased his first sampler in 1998 and has been passionate about discovering and using music technology ever since. Jon's latest gigs and projects are listed on his site: http://www.heatercore.net/ In addition to Jon, we have Mike who is a new instructor at DubSpot and comes from http://warperparty.com a monthly showcase that provides a venue for producers and artists to break new ground by using Ableton Live to perform. Jon and Mike have great personalities; they understand what a new student goes through while learning Ableton Live and make sure everyone understands each lesson while keeping the pace of the class moving. After all of the introductions were complete, we moved to our individual workstations.

Jon set up in front; plugged his laptop into the video projector mounted on the ceiling and pulled down the projection screen. Our individual custom-built metal table workstations are amazing! They consist of: two Technics SL-1210 MKK5turntables that push forward and pull back to reveal an M-Audio Axiom 25 keyMIDI keyboard. In the center of the table is a Rane TTM 56 performance mixer, a mounted M-Audio BX5a mounted speaker monitor, a Native Instruments Traktor Scratch and RANE Scratch Live set up, Ultrasone DJ1 Pro S-Logic headphones, and a Apple IMac17" 2.33ghz Core 2 Duocomputer. DubSpot prefers you work on their computers in the classroom to make sure everyone has the same software versions and hardware settings, eliminating the loss of time in configuring everyone's individual computers to the same preferences.

During our three hour course, Jon emphasized the main points about learning Ableton Live at DubSpot: this class is like studying a musical instrument, you need to continually practice, and become really good at the basics to cut down the time from your creative idea to recording it on your sequencer. Everyone has different ideas and musical styles, but Ableton Live is such a versatile software program, that it can be utilized to create anything you want. We covered a lot of ground to understand exactly how Abelton Live 7 works, learning that it's a laboratory working style program that brought hardware and software together to create music in one window with two different views, an 'arrangement' view and a 'session' view. Understanding the different views was the foundation of the first class and will remain the focus in class two. In classes three and four we will really take off and start producing/remixing music.

Before my first class ended, Jon taught us to create an audio piece and how to save our work. We were asked to bring in a portable USB hard drive (instead of flash drives that do not stream) for the next class in order to save all of our creations. If we were not familiar with navigating an Apple computer, Jon recommended that we go to an Apple store where they provide free classes on the differences from a PC.

Looking back on my first day, I feel very confident that my instructors, fellow students, and DubSpot's welcoming environment will help me achieve my goal of transitioning from being entertained by the music, to being the musical entertainer.

Update on Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 11:09AM by Jass

DubSpot Blog Class 2 & 3: Session View & MIDI

With our course overlapping the holidays at the end of the year, a few students and I missed the second and or third class. I was vacation in Japan and missed both. The cool thing about taking classes at DubSpot is that if you miss a class, you can catch up during lab time, or at a makeup class. Jon scheduled our makeup class to cover the main points from class one and two (navigating around the interface of Ableton Live) and focus on what we missed in class three, which was all about MIDI.

Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) is an industry-standard protocol at enables electronic musical instruments such as keyboard controllers, computers, synthesizers, sound cards, samplers, drum machines, and other electronic equipment to communicate, control, and synchronize with each other. Holding up the M-Audio Axiom 25 MIDI keyboard, Jon showed the class that MIDI does not transmit an audio signal or media - it transmits "event messages" such as the velocity of musical notes to play, controlling signals for parameters such as volume, vibrato and panning. As an electronic protocol, MIDI is notable for its widespread adoption throughout the musical industry. Jon emphasized the key to becoming a successful producer in Ableton Live is to become a good MIDI editor, thinking of music not in terms of a classical piano keyboard, but thinking like a mad scientist is the best way to find new ways to create music on software programs.

For the rest of the day we worked in the session view of Ableton Live, it's primarily used to organize and trigger sets of sounds called clips. These clips may be arranged into scenes which may be triggered as a unit. For instance a drum, bass, and guitar track might comprise a single scene. When moving on to another portion of the composition - a new scene - some or all of those parts might differ and could be triggered in parallel. Jon showed us how to program a beat using two MIDI tracks, and explained that customizing our clips would create interesting dynamics, allowing sections in a song to breathe, creating more a groovy sound. The session view is the basis of improvisation. It was at this point that Jon drew our attention to the projection screen to talk about understanding note duration and divisions.

Jon brought up the website: musictheory.net and told us that the position and duration of any given note is essential for western style musical production - excluding abstract / experimental music. While Jon did go through years of music school to learn how to read and write musical compositions, Ableton Live users only need to understand the basics of musical notes and bars. For instance, engaging the metronome to have a tempo reference plays four quarter notes in a bar; the backbeat hits on the two and four of the bar, and 1/8 notes are subdivided beats that are associated with the high hat sound in house and trance electronic dance music. Most importantly, Jon told us to listen while we work, train our ears to really hear what our eyes overlook on the computer screen.

 As class wrapped up, we were given our first homework assignment, to create a musical sketch of two or more MIDI tracks that incorporate a melody and beat in the session view. We will use this in class four when we begin to make a remix. Now that I had my first homework assignment, I had to get Ableton Live on my personal MacBook. Being unsure which specific version I should purchase as a beginning student, Jon recommended I download a two week trial version that includes: Ableton Live7, Sampler, Operator, Electric, Analog, Tension, Extensive built-in step-by-step tutorials, Localized software menus, tutorials, and PDF reference manuals.

The download process was very easy and quick, I logged into the Ableton site, clicked the 'Downloads' link, selected the Ableton Live 7 Trial Version, chose my language ENGLISH, my operating system Mac OS X, input my email and clicked 'download'. Immediately I was downloading the trial version and was told to log into my email account to grab the trial serial number to complete my download. Jon mentioned that Ableton Version 8 was coming out this year, and if we purchased Version 7 now, we will be able to upgrade to Version 8 for minimal price. As for the moment, I am now able to get my hands dirty and develop more experience in deciding which specific program to actually purchase in two weeks: Ableton Live LE, Ableton Live 7, or Ableton Suite.