I did it, I finally purchased Ableton. After an extensive period of experimenting and crucially learning, I decided that if I owned it, my own boundaries and preconceptions could be truly tested. Perhaps even bested.
I have been moving back and forth between Ableton Live 12 and Logic Pro, favouring Ableton for tracking and recording, and favouring Logic for mixing and dynamic attenuation. I wanted to add a dramatic element of alarm into my final piece, a consciously romantic application of the guitar, drawing on the earthy yet ethereal playing of Conny Veit on the latter half of Popol Vuh’s ‘Wehe Khorazin’. Using Logic initially, I recorded a minimal phrase of two power chords, separated by an octave.
In the contemporary, digitally exploratory field of sound arts, I still feel an innate connection to the guitar as a sonic object. It holds real gestural power, the ability for monstrous sound as well as the delicately beautiful.
Moving forward, I want to experiment with taking these sound files into Ableton’s Simpler and expanding the sonic capabilities of the electric guitar in a metal form. The way highly specific compositional choices can define the progression of a piece alongside the sonic, textural juxtaposition of the very organic instruments, and the very processed, manipulated sound sources is exciting to me.