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Tag Archives: ableton

The radial drum machine: background and inspiration

My NYU masters thesis is a drum programming tutorial system for beginner musicians. It uses a novel circular interface for displaying the drum patterns. This presentation explains the project’s goals, motivations and scholarly background. If you prefer, see it on Slideshare.

Remixing “Here Comes The Sun” in 5.1 Surround

For my final project in Advanced Audio Production at NYU, I created a 5.1 surround remix of the Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun.” You can download it here. If you don’t have surround playback, you can listen to the stereo version: I was motivated to create a surround remix of a Beatles song by hearing [...]

Using Ableton Live to teach music

Check out this presentation I gave at the December 2012 Advanced Ableton User Meetup at Tekserve, hosted by Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy. I speak about how useful Ableton Live is as a music teaching tool, using Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” as an example. Very shortly after I concluded my talk, my wife went into labor [...]

Live at apexart

This past November, I had the privilege of performing in the fourth Disquiet Junto concert of 2012 in the apexart gallery.

Sonic analysis of “Tightrope” by Janelle Monáe

The most fun Music Technology class I’m taking this semester is Advanced Audio Production with Paul Geluso. A major component of the class is learning how to listen analytically, and to that end, we were assigned to pick a song and do an exhaustive study of its sonic qualities. We used methods from William Moylan’s [...]

Catch my presentation at the Ableton Advanced Users Meetup

On November 1st, I’ll be presenting strategies for using Ableton as a music teaching tool at the Ableton Advanced Users Meetup sponsored by Shocklee Interactive and Tekserve. The lineup also includes AfroDJMac, Brian Jackson, Ben Casey, Thomas Piper, DVS and DJ Juice E. Be there!

Visualizing song structures

There’s no single standard method for notating pop, rock and dance songs. Some musicians write everything out in standard western notation; some don’t write anything down at all; many fall somewhere in between. One such compromise system in widespread use is the lead sheet: Other systems for song documentation include chord charts and the Nashville [...]

Inside Morton Subotnick’s studio

The seminar I’ve been taking with Morton Subotnick is sadly drawing to a close. As part of the end of the semester, we were invited to Professor Subotnick’s home studio, a few blocks from NYU, to get a demonstration of the setup he uses in performances.

Originality in Digital Music

This post is longer and more formal than usual because it was my term paper for a class in the NYU Music Technology Program. Questions of authorship, ownership and originality surround all forms of music (and, indeed, all creative undertakings.) Nowhere are these questions more acute or more challenging than in digital music, where it [...]

Teaching music with looping

Saville, Kirt. Strategies for Using Repetition as a Powerful Teaching Tool. Music Educators Journal, 2011 98: 69 When a student brings a recorded song to me that they want to learn, the first thing I do is load it into Ableton and mark off the different sections with a simple color-coding scheme: blue for verses, [...]