ABLETON LIVE INTERMEDIATE COURSE

8 WEEK ABLETON LIVE INTERMEDIATE COURSE:

This is a practical music-production course about developing ideas, not just learning more software features.

• Make actual tracks: Move beyond loops and sketches
• Expand, iterate and develop: Turn one idea into related song sections
• Learn by listening: Use reference tracks to understand form, energy and arrangement
• Generate tension and release: Create transitions, risers, fills, impacts, reverses and effects tails
• Expand your sonic palette: Use Ableton Packs, Splice and selected free or entry-level plugins intelligently
• Develop your discernment: Choose stronger source sounds before getting lost trying to fix weak ones
• Create engagement in your music: Use automation, Racks and Macros to add interest and dynamic movement
• Deepen the unique style of any given track: Upcycle and repurpose elements of your track using Resampling and other self-referential techniques
• Make practical mix decisions that support the song, and develop your ears considerably
• Build a specific toolkit of techniques you can use to actually compose songs, and a much clearer pathway ahead.
• Finish the course with 1-2 solid drafts for tracks that you can walk away with (or 1-2 complete songs if you put in the work during the course!)

The core point of this course is to take the ideas that already work in a loop or sketch and push them further. Most people get stuck right here – going from the loop to the composition – and there are so many techniques to help you move beyond this very common and very normal sticking point. We will look at how to create sections, movement, transitions, variation and energy so that your music starts feeling more like a finished track and less like a short idea repeating.

Creativity is limitless. And that can be part of the problem! Creating within boundaries can free up creative overhead and allow for less overwhelm. Set some rules, and break them in the right ways to generate interest, surprise, and intrigue.

Those of you who have participated in the beginners course will be familiar with some of the formulas I regularly put forward regarding tension and release, song structures, dynamic progression through time, etc. During the Intermediate Course, you will see how allowing yourself to fully embrace these ideas in a multi-layer, multi-dimensional manner can lead you towards some of the biggest creative surprises and best music you have ever made.

We will explore interesting sound design techniques, building on your existing foundational knowledge of effects, automation, EQ and compression and audio editing – and learn how to create interest across multiple layers simultaneously. I want to help you HEAR what is possible. So much of music production is perception, and I will continue to help you intentionally choose where to direct your attention.

There will also be space in the course to explore concepts or techniques as a group, give in-class feedback on your compositions, plus more in-depth presentations of high level music production in action.

Across the course we will work on:

• Turning loops into sections: taking an 8 or 16 bar idea and developing intros, breakdowns, builds, drops, reprises and outros from the same musical material. You can create a surprising amount of variability from iterating an initial good idea – and often the best happy accidents that drive a track forward in surprising ways can come from this kind of exploration.
• Using reference tracks: listening to music you like and mapping what is actually happening with structure, energy, density, musical layers, effects and transitions. We will go from ‘actively listening’ to intentionally bringing references and inspiration from tracks we love into our own creations. 
• Transitions, risers and effects tails: creating the moments that help one section lead naturally into the next, rather than having parts simply stop and start. This is a particularly deep field of study and deserves our focus again and again. We will go deep into multi-layered risers, buildups and investigate how to create tension across ALL layers and textures.
• Sound sourcing and plugin choices: using Ableton Packs available with your version of Live, Splice where useful, and a small collection of free or affordable plugins/VSTs to build a practical sound library without getting lost in options. We will store our best sounds and devices in the User Library, developing a toolkit we can use again and again, instead of reinventing the wheel every time we start a new track.
• Racks, Macros and automation: setting up simple controls that give sounds movement over time and help a track build energy. Macros can allow you to reach into an otherwise complex device chain and essentially automate as many parameters as you like with a single knob – leading to many creative possibilities.
• Resampling and committing ideas: bouncing parts to audio so you can chop, reverse, stretch, process and develop them into new musical material. This is where some of the best sound design happens, and will really get your mind thinking towards a better understanding of audio engineering generally.
• Practical mixing decisions: balance, EQ, space, levels and dynamic movement – We will work towards a better understanding of separation and clarity in the mix, in particular focusing on common early perceptual gaps that all producers experience. We will work on training your ears to HEAR compression and mastering – giving you a deeper perception of sound and audio generally going forward.
• Finish the course with actual track drafts to take home: After laying down some foundations in the first few weeks, we will move towards deploying our new techniques on new tracks, with the intention of finishing the course with 1-2 drafts for you work on in your own time. If you put in some decent homework time during the course, these may even end up being finished songs (which is an amazing feeling!). Some tracks come together quickly, and others take time – however having clear methods and boundaries within which to develop songs can clear away plenty of guesswork, and set you up for faster, more fluent, more confident music production going forward.

By the end, the aim is not just to understand more features within Ableton Live. The aim is to walk away with specific techniques that will directly help with your compositions, a better sense of how songs develop, and a clearer workflow for continuing your own music after the course.