Reflections on teaching Ableton Live, part two

In my first post in this series, I briefly touched on the problem of option paralysis facing all electronic musicians, especially the ones who are just getting started. In this post, I’ll talk more about pedagogical strategies for keeping beginners from being overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of sampling and synthesis.

Building a pop song structure

This is part of a larger argument why Ableton Live and software like it really needs a pedagogy specifically devoted to it. The folks at Ableton document their software extremely well, but their materials presume familiarity with their own musical culture. Most people aren’t already experimental techno producers. They need to be taught the musical values, conventions and creative approaches that Ableton Live is designed around. They also need some help in selecting raw musical materials. We music teachers can help, by putting tools like Ableton into musical context, and by curating finitely bounded sets of sounds to work with. Doing so will lower barriers to entry, which means happier users (and better sales for Ableton.)

Software needs to be embedded in a pedagogical approach

Traditional music education is not of much use to would-be producers. In music pedagogical circles, the terms “popular musicians” and “informally trained musicians” are used interchangeably, and rightly so; musicians who want to learn anything outside of classical and jazz are left substantially to their own devices. When music educators do approach electronic music, they tend to treat the composition side and the audio engineering side as two separate fields of study. In the case of the laptop producer, though, the distinction is no longer meaningful.

In the absence of formal schooling, the presets and default sounds that come with Ableton and software like it are critical educational resources. Bedroom producers may learn everything they know about EQ or drum programming simply by scrolling through the built-in settings and factory sounds. As Adam Bell puts it, “purchasers of computers are purchasers of an education.” How good an education are the bedroom producers buying? How could it be better?

Meaningful structural simples

Beginner musicians do best when they start by learning what Jeanne Bamberger calls “musical structural simples.” These are the smallest meaningful units of music: motives, phrases and sequences. The sample and loop libraries that come with Ableton, Logic and the like gives beginners a set of such structural simples to work with. However, these materials are usually complex and compound, which limits their generality. Also, the naming and categorization conventions are usually slang-heavy and idiosyncratic, to the point of being totally opaque to the uninitiated.

As a teacher of electronic music production, my main task is not really to teach the nuts and bolts of the software. The software companies do a perfectly good job of that already. Instead, my job is to give students a set of structural simples to work with, carefully curated according to their musical background and level of sophistication. Usually the samples I provide come straight from pop culture. Students do better when their best raw materials are familiar and meaningful.

Samples of real stuff

Wayne Marshall observes that students don’t have to passively absorb pop culture in the classroom the way they customarily do on their own. Ableton Live makes it possible to actively engage the artifacts of our culture, to remix and recombine them, to personalize and mold them, and to use them as raw materials for entirely new work. The ability to claim creative ownership over pop culture is a tremendously empowering sensation, especially for young people who may not feel much empowerment otherwise.

Marshall advocates particularly strongly for the role of the mashup in music education. By deconstructing and recombining familiar pop texts, mashups open the door to broader critical thinking. As Marshall puts it, through mashups “we discover correspondences, connotations, and critical readings of performances that we may not have given a second thought—or even a first listen.” Marshall also recommends that the study of mashups go hand-in-hand with producing them, thus “folding musical analysis into musical experience.” The artifacts of our culture are usually copyrighted, but educators have nothing to worry about. We’re protected by Fair Use, and by general popular good will; that’s why Peter Gabriel has been so cool about letting us use his original multitracks for Play With Your Music.

Preventing option paralysis is all about curating the right sample set

Here are some examples of sample sets I or my colleagues have curated for various purposes.

If you teach Ableton Live or something like it, what do you have your students work with? The factory sounds? Something else? Let me know in the comments.