A rarely tapped resource for me are clips found in the sound file folders of Ableton Live sets I use for performances. My group Keston and Westdal use two laptops running Live synchronized using a MIDI network. We usually play instruments during our performances and use the laptops for live looping and triggering loops and “scenes” as we construct the arrangements during the show. Our drummer gets a click so we can we can leave out or bring in sound from the laptops as we like. This way we can have purely live instrumentation intermingled with sequenced and live looped audio. It’s a bit of a learning curve to perform this way, but very liberating once you get it down.
This short sample of a guitar chord was played by my good friend Jason Cameron based in Seattle. While jamming together last June, 2008 I captured a few of his phrases in one of my Live sets, and came across it today while browsing through the sound file folders, looking for something to post. I dumped it back in Live, resisted the urge to reverse it, and added distortion, delay and reverb for a little texture.
Guitar Chord
Wow, you even work on weekends! Truly a new sound every day.
hi there, excellent website! thanks for all the great info. im curious, when you post your one sound every day snippets to the site do you add some compression or run them through some mastering chain or are they just exported from daw and compressed to mp3?
Hi, Stephen. Most of the time I just export from the DAW and convert to MP3 format. Sometimes I normalize the clip to -3db. On the few instances that there is any compression, it’s there as part of the original processing, and not applied to attempt any sort of mastering.