My Approaches Towards Misuse in Ableton Live
I will here outline the experiments that I have conducted to generate audio content.
A common theme throughout these methods is that our current software era has brought with it an age of abundance. It was not too long ago that audio effects needed to come as big racks to be mounted into your studio space, or for the computer-based composer to have to slowly render a new file every time they wanted to process a piece of audio.
In contrast, todays DAWs are powerful processing units where CPU capabilities can easily allow several tens, if not hundreds, of effect plugins working in real-time to affect the audio content.
This creates huge possibilities for the practice of making that which was designed to be silent audible. By stacking the same plugin many times one can draw out its sound. Often when using effects units my sound of origin has only been a short sine wave burst to set the processing in motion, after which I could simply listen to the plugins play themselves out.
I have, as mentioned, approached this as a method of generating sound that I will eventually cut up and process how I desire when putting them in my works. This means that my process in workshopping different methods has been to choose a method and simply play around within its boundaries. Upon hearing something either unexpected or personally desirable I immediately start recording and carefully shift between different settings until I feel that I have squeezed everything I want out of a specific sound or setting.
Using this approach I have had several sessions using different plugin combinations and techniques. To limit the scope of my work I decided that I would exclusively work with Ableton Live stock instruments and plugins. This is also so that my experiments can be easily re-created by anyone who desires. It also doesn’t present much of a limitation as Ableton provides a suite of synthesizers and plugins that covers basically all classic tools of music production and signal processing as well as a few experimental tools.
My choice of methods have come from simply whatever I imagined would yield interesting results when looking through the Ableton Live repertoire. It also comes from observing the methods of teachers and friends credited in the introduction. Not every method tried has been included as some simply did not yield any desirable results nor any particularly interesting failures. There are still, however, many Ableton plugins and combinations I would like to experiment with in the future. There is of course also a virtually endless catalogue of third-party plugins for me to expand my practice with.
The sounds that have eventually resulted from my practice are of a varied nature. Some of them have a rather simple beauty to them, while some are rough and would need quite a bit of editing to suit my aesthetic preferences. However, all of them contain characteristics that interests me, often by revealing something about the inner workings of the plugins that I am using.
A Misusers’ Guide to Survival
For anyone inclined to repeat any of my experiments, I would like to begin with a word of warning. It is important to be aware that volume is one of the parameters where you need to be ready for unexpected results. Therefore, it would be my advice to always put a limiter that severely restricts the maximum volume at the end of your effects chain.
With some uses even severe limiting and volume restriction can result in surprisingly loud sounds, and I therefore also recommend avoiding headphones as much as possible while performing these experiments, and to always start from a place of caution.