skynoise

On September 29, 1997 scientists discovered a link between mad cow disease and a human brain disease. On the ninth anniversary of that fine occasion, with a nod to the gods of mutation, Ableton dropped ‘Live 6’ into the audio ecosystem.

Vat Ist?

Revered with a cult fever since it’s first release many moons ago, and as it’s name suggests, ‘Live’ is all about real-time manipulation of audio – whether for performance or studio work. It’s latest incarnation sports a few major changes, as well plenty of minor ones, all the while building upon it’s wonderful interface – which has really set a benchmark for interface design. Live has and those wondering about whether they should chase DJ software or Live – simply haven’t explored enough of what Live can do for DJ and live remixing. With a little taste of Live’s capacity for dragging and dropping mp3 files into a mix, adjusting pitch or tempo to suit, adding FX, isolating loops etc – all done in real-time, there is really no question about Live’s superiority.

Fresh Meat

Whats New in 6? Movie playback! New instrument and effect racks ( that allow saving and control of multi-fx at once ). New Ableton devices and project management tools. Multicore & multiprocessor support. Mac Intel support. New crossfader curves. A giant instrument collection of samples. And much, much more, as well as various subtle tweaks.

Movie Import

Aye carumba~! While most people are going to want to use this long-requested feature for composing soundtracks to short or long films, the fact that Ableton 6 can play sequences of clips, and output that video to a second screen – also opens up a whole range of live audiovisual possibilities from within the one application. Drag and drop a William Burroughs narrated film about witchcraft onto the sequencer timeline ( weighing in as a hefty 90 minutes and 700mb cpu intensive divx codec ) – and bam – it’s added to one of the tracks in the timeline, the soundtrack is visible and can be manipulated, and layers of sound added easily.

Instrument and Effect Racks

Given the endless variables involved with an application like Live, endless noodling can often create wonderful results – somewhere in the middle of the night, in the middle of a mix. The newly added rack feature is a way to capture and harness those combined settings for instruments, effects and plug-ins. As a bonus these can be distributed and swapped online. As usual, this has been implemented in an ultra smooth and efficient way, and it’s astonishingly easy to switch between sprawling combinations without a hiccup. The racks also allow one midi controller button to control many elements at once. Live 6 comes with many preconfigured racks with both instruments and common processing tools like guitar and bass distortion, drum processing, and mastering.

Udder Assorteds

Deep Freeze editing technology : ‘freezing tracks’ temporarily renders multiple layers to audio to free up CPU, and in this version much editing can still be done on a frozen track.
Crossfader curves : fade between tracks in a number of ways.

Multicore/multiprocessor support : Get all the robots working for you.

New and improved Ableton Devices : Beat Repeat seems to offer a lot, there is now an EQ Eight, and the Impulse percussion sampler instrument continues to shine. Most effects seem to come with more presets than before, a huge array to explore even before considering personal customisation.

Project management tools : Easier than ever to save rich settings and related files for use on another machine.

Sampled instruments : from glockenspiels to orchestral strings, a whole swagger included.

Midi functionality continues to improve and expand.

Up to 32-bit/192kHz multitrack hard disk recording.

Tutorials & Community Support

Live’s intuitive interface remains unintimidating for spontaneous exploration, but there is vastness to explore in here, and so the in-built tutorials accessible right from within the menu will help most users grasp some of this application’s amazing potential. Ableton also have a thriving forum dedicated to Live, and as a measure of it’s popularity, have inspired a buzzing network of external forums, bulletin boards, blogs and professional tutorial CDs available to tap into online.
Looking to warp some acapellas, synthesise some drums or handclaps, try your hand at live mash-ups, create sweeps and swooshes, isolate sounds, splice samples or split keyboards? Try these :

http://www.ableton-live-fans.com

http://abletonlivedj.com

http://www.beatmixed.com

http://www.teragon.org/wiki/index.php

http://abletonlive.tribe.net

O’Reilly—Getting Started with Ableton Live

Want to trigger Ableton Live via a handheld PSP game device?

What about playing Live with a blue toothed Mobile Phone?

What do You need to Run Live 6?

There is a free demo at www.ableton.com to give a taste. Beyond that, you’ll need $499 US ( download) or $599 ( manual & samples ). Reasonable upgrade prices are available for earlier users.
Distributed in OZ by Musiclink.

Verdict :

If new to Live 6, this is definitely the best it has been, and represents a great time to dive in. If wondering whether the upgrade is worthwhile, that might depend on whether you want to play with video or soundtracks, want to better exploit your newer processor(s), and whether you want to take advantage of the new effects architecture.

UPDATE : skynoise review of Ableton Live 7

A brief wade through the embarrassment of audio riches online.

Near drowning in available Mp3s, the challenge has shifted from finding music to figuring out ways to deal with the waves of it being published. Podcasts and Mp3 blogs are one strategy – after finding some of quality, subscribing to them can deliver a fairly reliable source of new or interesting music. While plenty of these sample tracks from newer albums, there are also plenty that publish relentlessly diverse, out of print material, or their own personal mixes. A few samplers?

Scarstuff – huge collections of ripped and uploaded halloween records.
Record Brother - all kindsa oddness.
Wayne & Wax – have been enjoying various mixes and tracks posted here.

Huge archives of weird sounds also abound :
The Avant Garde Project - a series of recordings of 20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. New AGP installments are released as bittorrents each Friday night around midnight. “To the best of my knowledge, all of the recordings on this site are currently out of print.”

The Ubuweb sound archive is a stupendous collection of rare, avant garde and weird audio :
“Categories include Dadaism, Futurism, early 20th century literary experiments, musique concrete, electronic music, Fluxus, Beat sound works, minimalist and process works, performance art, plunderphonics and sampling, and digital glitch works, to name just a few.” Amongst other gems, DJ Food’s epic “Raiding the 20th Century” can be found here in it’s full 70mb sample-history compilation glory.

At the same site can also be found hosted the 365 Days Project where one MP3 was uploaded everyday for a year. Mostly oddities and humourous schtick such as William Shatner’s drunken rendition of Rocket Man, but well worth a browse.

Archive.org is famous as a hoster of public domain and creative commons licenced videos ( see this video which explains creative commons superbly in 2 minutes, but it also hosts a huge catalog of audio too : Audio Books & Poetry, Computers & Technology podcasts, ‘the Grateful Dead collection’ and a ‘Live Music Archive’, nearly 600 virtual record labels found in the Netlabels collection, the unique contemporary compositions and performances found in the Other Minds collection, News & Public Affairs podcasts, non-english audio, open source audio and much more.

Catering more specifically to sound artists, musicians and soundtrackers, The Freesound Project zooms in on sounds themselves, aiming to provide a giant database of individual sounds that can be used for music or audio projects. Has a great exploratory interface, is free, and filled with creative commons ‘sounds, snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps’. As with any collaborative project, users are very encouraged to upload their own samples so that others may use these too.

Connected to Freesound is CCMixter which expands on that database with a huge range of creative commons related music files ( both songs & parts – eg drum loops ). Amongst it all can be found legal Public Enemy & Beastie Boys samples, tons of acapellas, and multi-tracks for remixing songs.

Forward thinking record label Magnatune allows podcasters* to use all their music for free, allows easy sampling licences for much of their music and even includes track by track audio and midi files in some cases. ( *Podcasting doesn’t get any simpler than using the podpress plug-in for wordpress blog software )

Downhill Battle host a range of music and copyright related projects such as ‘Hippocamp Ruins Pet Sounds’ ( Beach Boys acappellas & synth sounds ), The Double Black Album ( Jay Z & Metallica’s Black album ), The Grey Album ( Jay Z & Beatles White album mixed by Dangermouse ), and the Illegal Art compilation by Stay Free Magazine – which hosts songs that have been the subject of lawsuits, such as music by Negativland, Biz Markie, The Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and De La Soul.

Splice Music offers browser based audio editing, collaborating and remixing ( a good companion to the browser based video editor – Jump Cut). Author Greg Palast has made his audiobook “Armed Madhouse’ available for remix & cc podcasting, and lastly, a follow-up to the online charity – Let’s Get Hasselhoff to Number One. They were trying to leverage net tools to get everyone buying David’s single at the same time and topping the Uk charts. On Sunday 8th October 2006, David Hasselhoff reached number 3 in the UK Singles Chart with over 26000 copies of “Jump In My Car” sold.

Greenpeace & Apple both have a sophisticated grasp of marketing and public persuasion, so this battle should play out interestingly. Say Greenpeace :
“A cutting edge company shouldn’t be cutting lives short by exposing children in China and India to dangerous chemicals. That’s why we Apple fans need to demand a new, cool product: a greener Apple.”

Ricky Gervais, writer and actor behind the painfully self-deprecating humour in The Office and The Extras, ( or see the Ricky Gervais Microsoft Training Videos ) also holds a little known career as a skinny little prancing singer in an English synth-pop duo known as ‘Seona Dancing‘. Videos of their TV performances have inevitably surfaced on youtube, which makes all the funnier and stranger – a recent cameo by David Bowie on a second series of the Extras. Upon forcing his way into a conversation with Bowie at a lounge bar, Gervais in his role as bit-part actor tries to imply he suffers the same pains of super-fame as David “the man who feel to earth’ Bowie, and after shoving his foot deeper and deeper into his mouth, prompts a wonderfully savage improvisation from Bowie with heartfully sung lines such as “the little fat man with the pug-nosed face”. Such a delight to watch the camera keep switching between Ricky’s mortified face and Bowie’s vigorous delivery.

So Bowie might think he knows a little about scamming, having been the first rock star to float himself on the stock market ( Gained $55 million overnight based on the projected royalties of his first 25 albums over the next 15 years. Mmmm, speculative economics. ) – but for real insight into corrupted minds, we’d have to give Scorcese the nod. And the grim grain of the underworld he has portrayed so many times, is arguably seen in no better place than this Sesame Street Scorcese remix which matches gruff mafia voices on top of a day in sesame street, a superbly edited lil number. Found via the ever fruitful WMFU radio blog.

Copyright car-crash waiting to happen, or pixel voice of the masses? Either way youtube.com continues to carve out a video niche. Doomed for replacement like Napster the mp3 file sharing software? Irrelevant really, it’ll only be replaced by a gazillion even better sites or services.

Germany’s most famously eccentric yet arrrestingly provocative documentary maker, Werner Herzog was in fine form on Henry Rollin’s TV show recently, but proved a little too much for his interviewing host to grapple with. To be fair to the bodybuilding Rollins, it’d be a challenging interview to have the person opposite you speaking with Werner’s distinctive voice, and telling tales of ‘ecstatic truth’, a need for ‘new ways to use film to document reality’ and dismissing ‘minor flesh wounds’ ( about a sniper who had shot him during another recent interview, an event which didn’t seem to worry him too much ).

This is the same man who made a film about eating his shoe, an event he filmed on stage while give a talk ( he boiled it up apparently ), travelled to the jungle to drag a huge ferry up and over a mountain(!) and well, so many other crazed adventures that Rollins never stood a chance.

Not sure what Little Superstar would be like at interviewing Herzog ( tho i’d be watching every minute of it), but if we were talking dance-off – any sane gambler would instantly dump their life’s savings on the Little Grinner. As others have written, you may well ask “Why did no one tell me about the awesomeness of “Little Superstar”?” Ask and you shall receive ( from the combined words of several enthusiasts ) :

“If you haven’t seen Little Superstar yet, just please trust me – your life isn’t complete. the newest and smallest viral video superstar.A short little something to haunt your dreams… Little Superstar – a Dancing Machine! Breakdancing indian midget. Watch this 1/2 pint get down to some good ol’ hiphop! He dance like usher!! yeah!! The greatest video I have ever seen. Ever. This video is indescribable. It’s spectacular. I want it playing on all my TVs, looping over and over all day long. Little Superstar of Bollywood. Gotta be a little man … thats no kid. There’s not much to say, except that guys like Usher need to watch out, because this little guy is ready to take over. Emmanuel Lewis aint got shit on Little Superstar. That little oompa loompa scares the hell out of me. That little guy is so clearly gonna get gang banged by that group of kids ( thanks for the imagery, metalboxproducts at the dubstepforum.com )[ MAKE IT STOP SMILING. MAKE IT STOP. ] “

The 2 minutes of youtubed gold that is Little Superstar, is already ( ja, ja ) remixed as a drum n bass version, a death metal version and a rave version, each still utterly compellingly, mesmerisingly brainmelting. Via the ‘Little Superstar aka King Kong’ blog, it can be discovered that this clip is from a 1990 Tamil movie called Adhsaya Piravi ( the tamil movie industry is called Kollywood, the Hindi movie industry is Bollywood ). There’s also a link to a google video of the entire feature film for those inclined, and via Monkeys for Helping – a youtube link to a videoclip for the song being played in the background – Holiday Rap by MC Miker G and DJ Sven.