NPR had a cool piece on composer David Morneau. If you follow the link you can listen to the story and a few pieces of his music. Basically he he set out to create 60 seconds of music a day for an entire year. He somehow succeed. OK, digging out garage band samples and the Amen Break might be a little cheap but it had to be hard just due to the nature of life if nothing else.
Once I get settled I want to try something similar only more like a piece of music a week. I have no trouble starting it is finishing that is the problem. I will give it a go when I able.
Ableton user should check out Vitamin L from Tonearm. If you haven’t heard of it here is what it is and does:
Vitamin L is a system of over 100 shortcuts and tools developed for speeding up the workflow in Ableton Live. It combines accelerated access to most frequently performed tasks with many functionality enhancements. The features include:
- a set of ergonomically placed “smart” single-key shortcuts
- context-sensitive mouse wheel assignment
- easy keyboard access to many clip properties and envelopes
- quick modes for adjusting clip gain, pitch and BPM from the timeline/session
- keyboard timeline navigation, play-from-mouse-cursor, etc.
- a quick and simple solution to recording and combining multiple takes
- power-zoom: mouse-wheel zoom, accelerated zoom, vertical zoom, zoom presets
- precision editing (nudge, move/copy to an adjacent track and more)
- automation tools, including working with lanes and editing the tempo envelope
- sample-audio-to-midi-track function and shortcut
This really corrects one of the weakness with Ableton. I have not been one for shortcuts. I played all those old school RTS games to develop mad point and click skills right? Well it is like learning to type correctly. It is slower going at first if you have been hunting and pecking but pays off huge in the long run. I am not that great at remembering shortcuts. My brain is just wired to make that easy. But it something I need to get better at if I am serious about getting more done. More doing and less time clicking about sounds good to me.
