Ableton Live! Set

In my quest to learn more about taking music to live audiences, I began an Ableton Live! set that is tailored just for that.

I intend on writing a slew of new dance tracks (from house to trance) predominately inside a single Ableton Live! set. This will allow me to take the package and easily perform it live! It was exciting to piece together some of the routing and standard effects. There is already a solid beat and some supporting instruments going for a cool dance sound-- and you bet your ass I'm using my Rhodes skills for some chilled loops ;D

I have had a Waveidea Bitstream PRO for a few years now and I will finally be taking advantage of the entire board. Each knob and fader and button will do *something*. Since the board does not have any mechanical automation for the knobs or sliders, however, I do not intend to use more than one channel. I'm thinking about picking up something like this Behringer that has the mechanical sliders.

Work will still continue on my vocal tracks and I fully intend on "Ableton-izing" my non-Live! tracks so I can remix them live.

Tomorrow is the deadline to have the artwork finished for my benefit album. I have some ideas to crunch through today and, outside of some house chores that need to be done, expect to crank up the fire tonight and get the artwork finalized for tomorrow's deadline.

The next deadline I have set is to remaster and finalize the tracks for the City Shadows Vol.1 online release. I haven't forgotten about my plans to release this collection of down tempo tracks online. There is only a little more research to be done to determine which services I will publish through, but you can expect the album to be available for purchase on iTunes, and I would like to get it on Rhapsody and SNOCAP as well.

Beyond that, it is still up in the air as to what the track listing will be for the benefit album. I wanted to present a track or two from the project that Jeff and I are working on, but it may not materialize in time (which is okay.. we should have an EP ready mid-summer).

The next "big" (word used loosely) release I have planned is a compilation of the tracks released earlier this year with some remastering, interludes, and additional tracks in the same vein. It will make for a very congruent release.