I had an amazing time speaking at the Cincinnati Symphony Educator workshop the other day. The event was well-planned and hosted in the exquisite Corbett Tower, and the coordinator Logan Kelly was very helpful and great in leading the discussion afterwards. Check out their other events – it’s a very cool program.
It’s a long watch, but it’s the best video I have right now of this session. Enjoy, and of course feel free to skip around.
If you want to learn how to use Ableton Live to make the sorts of music that Ableton Live users make, Interactive Composition is your starting point. It’s both a book of tutorials as well as a snapshot of electronic dance music and production styles and culture. Look for mini-versions of lessons from the book in the months leading up to its release on this page. The book contains 11 amazing projects and many more techniques and sub-projects to explore in your classes or personal work. Each project is dense with techniques like synth-building, patch programming, sampling methods, and more.
You can order the handsomely typeset physical copy on Indiebound, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and direct from Oxford University Press. Buy a set for your class today!
You can also read it on iBooks, Kindle and Google Play Books, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Watch the book trailer:
Hello folks, you might be interested in checking out my latest Disquiet Junto tune: Mighty No 139:
The technique I’ve developed here is really used for my high school courses on music production. The idea is to write harmonically complex music without having to learn a ton of music theory. To this end, I’ve modified a few existing M4L patches to make an “EZ Scales” and “EZ Chords” patch set that students of all levels can drop onto a track to allow them to play roman numeral chord progressions just by playing the root scale degrees. The result is layered riff-style music writing that can befit many different styles.
Download the Ableton Set and play around with the patches: www.dropbox.com/s/kgizcn6lzjnup57…0Project.zip?dl=0
Also in this patch is the “Chippy” M4L Instrument I wrote. It’s basically a waveform generator that can produce a smooth glide and vibrato with a few basic pulse widths. It’s a monophonic synth, and instead of writing a poly version I simply sample a note from it into Simpler.
I hope you enjoy this Mega Man – inspired chiptune!
Ethan Hein: Everyone Can & Should Be Making Music
A long treatise, but worth the read. Some big thoughts that are obvious to too few of us in the Music Ed world:
Not everyone needs to be able to play or appreciate classical music. Maybe people just need to be able to sequence basslines for their hip-hop tracks, or play three-chord rock, or understand a little music theory, or play rumbly ambient one-chord drones. The kids who want to dive deeper and move on to more challenging material can still do so. If everyone else is engaged actively with music, the pros will find they’ll have a much bigger and more enthusiastic audience. And maybe America will be a little less emotionally barren.
And also:
If we want music not to be “dumbed down” we need to be honest about where sophistication lies. If you want to learn about functional tonal harmony, by all means go to the classics. If you want to learn about rhythm, go to Africa, the Caribbean, India, Indonesia and American dance music. If you want to learn about timbre and space, go to electronica and hip-hop. Pretending that all the answers lie in scores written by men in powdered wigs is the real dumbing down of the music curriculum.
What I don’t get is why there aren’t more people getting out there and saying these things. What worries me is people my (and Ethan’s) age still bristling at these ideas.
A slightly older song, but a pretty good example of politically charged music from the last couple years.