The third song on my first album, Initial Experiments, was started as chords on the bass which is how the song starts. This is the first tune I recorded with live instruments along with VST instruments. Once I came up with the chord progression, I manually entered it into Ableton using the pencil tool. All of the bass tracks were simply through a DI box on my desk. For the bass i used a few stock patches with some tweaks from Guitar Player. The percussion sounds were also recorded live at my desk when no one else was home in the apartment and also drawn in with the pencil tool.
When the pandemic happened, Ableton threw a big sale, and I bought the full version. This was a song that a spent a ton of time trying the different stock sounds within Ableton. I played with layering sounds from different Instruments for a part, while changing the voicing of the chord between the two tracks. I did use a few Kontakt free player options, but this song still is mostly the stock Ableton sounds.
This song was also started on my older computer. It was almost painful to work on especially after 12 tracks.
I had not learned about freezing tracks yet. Any heavily FX’ed MIDI tracks were bussed to audio,
and then mixed in after dumping the original MIDI. Mixed results on that to be truthful, but honestly this song I hit the CPU ceiling many times while working on this.
Live Instruments :: Bass Guitar, Hand Percussion
VST Synths for more drums and all other chordal instruments.
- Kontakt sounds that came with my purchase of the Maschine years back
- Ableton Wavetable sounds with little tweaking
- Ableton Simpler
- Ableton Analog
All of the tracks for this song were recorded in our old apartment.
It was mixed and mastered at Richmond House Studios.