ABLETON LIVE

With today’s budgetary constraints and time pressures it’s difficult to stay creative. But picking up that dusty Ableton Live disc you’ve got laying around may just be the amp-up you need. Follow these steps.

• Find an Ableton Live CD. Most of you probably have a free version of Ableton Live Lite but don’t know it. Lot’s of free software comes bundled with the hardware we buy these days. . M-Audio products such as the Axiom midi controller, the Trigger Finger, Fast Track Pro and the Audiophile 2496 audio card all come with free versions of Ableton Live. Digi also offers Ableton with Pro Tools upgrades and such.
• Install the Ableton software and register it. This will allow you to get discounted upgrades to full versions later on should you wish to do.
• Go to the Defaults tab in Preferences and change the Warp Mode to Complex. This will allow Ableton warp the song appropriately, i.e. interpret the tempo of the song properly. Now you are free to mash up your music
• The SESSION VIEW will be the first thing you see when you open Ableton Live. This view can be very useful but can take some time to get used to, so in the interests of time we will use the Arrangement View since it looks and feels similar to most other DAW platforms. Simply hit the tab key to flip over to the ARRANGEMENT VIEW.
• Click and drag the 1st tune you want to mash up into one of the tracks. Remember, the free version of Ableton allows only 4 audio tracks at one time, so you will have to double up if you wish to mash up more than 4 songs in one session.
• Double click on the clip (that’s the colored part of the music track you dragged in.) You should see an information pane called the SAMPLE DISPLAY open up at the bottom. There you will see the track tempo. A good sounding mash up will typically use songs of similar tempos so you may have to do some tempo sorting and weed out the songs that are too fast or too slow. But you can pretty much speed up and slow down any warped track you have dragged in the Arrangement by changing the main project temp at the top left.
• Now just edit out the parts of the songs you wish to use, splice them together and add your sound elements.
• If you get lost, there is a wonderful box at the bottom left called the INFO VIEW. Put your cursor over any part of the interface and a brief description of what you are mousing over will show up there.

BRAINSTORM OR JUST DRIZZLE?

Getting fresh ideas means using someone elses brain besides yours once in awhile. Resist the urge to be a one man band. Take the kick drum off your back, remove the cymbals from between your knees and for cryin' out loud put down the banjo. Here are a few tips to guiding a brainstorming session that'll help you get some new creative juju.

Assemble a group that can be controlled. Never put too many radio people together for free forming unless you've got a punch bowl full of ritalin.

Encourage pointless ideas. If you have endure a bunch of wacko crap to get one great idea, it's worth it. Let people's minds wander.

Set time limits. Keep the meetings under an hour. Also, try to limit each persons time for explaining their idea. If they can't articulate a concept within a minute, they'll derail the energy in the room.

Look for people that click in the group and have them pursue ideas further outside the meeting.

Do not rate ideas. This is important. Too many sessions start out with "there are no bad ideas" and then people are mercilessly ridiculed as others in the room compete for the best one liner criticisms.

Record the session. You can't take notes as fast as people can free form. Use a small unobtrusive recorder so it's not a point of focus.

Have a facilitator. That person should not contribute much but should provide encouragement and help move things along.

Be ready to act. People need to know that you're not wasting their time. Put the good ideas into action quickly and share the results. This makes people want to contribute more in the future.

TIME IS THE FIRE IN WHICH WE BURN

Being creative and productive requires quality time with no distractions. We have always had to deal with distractions that pull us out of our “zone” and destroy our momentum on projects. First it was the phone, and then came email, then instant messaging, and now…social networking demons like Twitter!

There is no way to eliminate all distractions, but it sure is nice to know how much and where our time is going. There are a million time-management tools out there that can help you track your time and set goals for productivity. One of the newest, and requiring almost zero setup and input from the user, is RESCUE TIME.

RESCUE TIME is a cross-platform web application that is designed to track your time spent on the computer. With very little input required from you as the user, it will do a remarkably effective job of giving you an idea of exactly what software and websites you actively use. Was it Facebook or YouTube that made you miss your deadline? Probably both.

As you get more familiar with the application you can customize it to set goals and alerts that can help you boost your efficiency, recovering quality time from other distractions that may simply be making you “feel” busy with work.

Oh yeah, and it’s FREE for individual use!

http://www.rescuetime.com/