hi my name is nathan this is a moog matriarch although that's not really what we're talking about today at all so this seems a bit unnecessary you see today i'd like to talk about the opposite of hardware which of course we all know is elon musk so go ahead and grab your dr pepper zero with cream soda which is not a sponsor of the program it's just something you get really excited about when you're in your mid-30s it's good and let's talk a little bit about daws digital audio workstations you see in 2014 i was
just your typical classically trained pianist and organist who wanted to get into film scoring i know that's a story you've heard a million times but i had no idea how to make that happen and i know what you're thinking oh nathan you mean you don't know how to meet directors or network or get your music out there to people so that they can hear it and want you to score their film or even care that you exist at all no i mean i actually had no idea how the process worked of scoring music to picture
in 2014. okay so um so i just i'm gonna write some notes here on on this page and uh and and you'll like it and you'll put it in your film right you'll make all that happen like there are people who are hired to do all the other stuff all i have to do is write the notes with this pencil and paper hello so it was at this point that i began to do a little research on my own into this witchcraft known as making music with computers and it was the first time that i
ever heard or read the word doll or is it d a w i i still don't know linda yeah is it is it daw or d a w there's no one here after doing a little more research i landed on cubase as my very first daw i still don't regret that choice because i feel like cubase still does a really great job of balancing innovative features and constant updates with the more linear traditional feel of daw like pro tools which is kind of the industry standard to this day i still use it for all my
scoring work because i can get into this later scoring to picture not exactly a strong suit of ableton fast forward to early 2020 i've made several albums recorded a few film scores in cubase and i'm starting to feel pretty good about myself and like it might be time to take that extra step you see i've had a few tracks that people have actually listened to and seem to like and people are responding well to my music so seems like the logical time yeah 2020 is going to be the year i take this show on the
road and finally do some live gigs [Music] even though things didn't go quite the way i or anyone else had planned for 2020. this mini tour that never was led me to download ableton live and give it a shot i mean that seemed like the application to use for playing live i mean look it it says live it's right there and uh don't tell cubase but i actually really started to like it like a lot not for playing live because you know that was illegal so let's talk about some of the things that i prefer
when it comes to ableton live the ease of routing and grouping is really really powerful so let's say i wanted to add as many audio tracks as i want here i could very quickly and easily group these just by selecting shift select those and control g boom they are all routed into a sub group right here which is not only in its own folder which in cubase folders and buses or groups are like two separate things you have to set up independently and they act in different ways in ableton everything's kind of tied together in
a way that makes sense both visually and in terms of routing and i love that so now we have all of the tracks that are under this group together being sent out to the master in their own bus which i can then affect you know i can put any number of eqs whatever on this whole group it's awesome if i want to take anything out of a group can quickly snap it out it's then taken out of that routing now as i say this i can actually feel some of you typing um actually uh you
can do all of this in cubase and uh it's just as easy or easier because you can just set up you know a template however you want so uh maybe you should do that instead you could do those things and while that is a valid point despite the passive aggressive tone that is conducive to youtube comments what i love is starting with a blank slate and the faster i can get to a grouping routing system that makes sense both visually and in terms of the way i want to bust things being able to do that
on the fly is so valuable to me so if i wanted to create some more groups say i wanted to take this one out of this group i could just drag it back down create a group here boom create another group here there you go let's make all of these the same let's change this to this putrid green color like so make everything the same color for visual reference we can collapse all of them and yeah very quickly we have a well organized project in general i'd say the way that the plugins are laid out
here at the bottom where you can see the whole chain kind of in a linear way it's very visual it's easy to see how things interact with each other and that kind of leads me into my next point which is probably my absolute favorite thing about ableton again i know there are other daws that do this i think bit wig is an example of one but this is a modular synth a modular daw we've got lfos in here that we can drag and drop and i can pretty much send this lfo to anything like like
that makes no sense why would you do that but i can do it if i want to just like modular there's also a quick easy work around say i had a third-party plug-in like uh every ambient artist favorite black hole and you can select which controls you want to appear in this configure window then i can also let's change this slow this down and change it to let's say random sample and hold i'm going to speed it back up for that actually and then i could send it to the feedback and there you see that
we are jumping around in a sample and hold type fashion yeah that's really great like think of the possibilities that that opens up not only lfos but envelope followers there's one right there so this would listen to the audio signal the audio level of this channel whatever channel it's placed on and would send that as an envelope to any of these parameters so think about that for like sidechaining and things like that it really opens things up in ways that maybe you wouldn't think about in the box i haven't even touched on max for live
which is this incredible open source network of creators who create incredible things for ableton so here i've got modulators 21 by k devices and it's just a set of really interesting lfos and sequencers that do things in weird ways that's really awesome so yeah if you are using live and you have not looked into macs for live devices definitely do that because man it's also let's see i may have to put this on a midi track yeah mod snake it's like a make noise renee style sequencer here why don't i get some sound going through
this maybe that would make a little bit more sense so i'm going to grab contact now this is a nice patch this is uh one of my sample packs it's a free sample pack that i made the rev2 resonant filter patch that you can grab like first link in the description why don't we say that and that sounds like this [Music] can set a certain range i believe [Music] for the randomization of course you can quantize it over here let's say phrygian [Music] for the sake of making that patch that i'm giving you for free
sound good let's just pump it through a reverb by the way your reverb sins are right here very quick and easy so you have each reverb or sand effect on its own channel down here you can insert a new one by hitting insert return track then i could set up let's say echo boy and i can then send that to [Music] slow this down [Music] add a little black hole [Music] i think one of the main draws to live is probably the session view which we've been in arrangement mode which is honestly what i use
the most because i'm accustomed to cubase and the linear timeline style workflow but session view is really incredible because you can basically compose loops and you can determine how these clips interact with each other through doing that you can basically compose an entire whatever track without ever pressing stop you can just have the sequencer running all the time and just compose loops on the fly arrange them so it's like a looping playback beast and it's really great for playing live for that very reason not that i would know [Music] so yeah i have absolutely loved
uh using ableton live just in my own creative work i find it really inspiring the workflow really good the built-in effects i haven't even touched on the incredible like fm and resonator synthesizers that just come pre-packaged with the live suite it's kind of crazy everything sounds great everything works really well i used to have a push too which is a great hardware controller for ableton i did sell that because i found myself not really using it enough to warrant owning it so i did let that go but uh yeah i'm just having a great time
with ableton since i started using it and it's really my primary daw now i do still use cubase for the film stuff as i mentioned but yeah this just creatively much more inspiring to me right now at this point in my life so it's what i like to use hey thanks so much for watching the video if you got anything out of it at all appreciate a thumbs up ring the bell subscribe all those things that i hate saying and you know honestly i shot this right after the intro so i really hope it was
good you
