Ableton Live In Worship (Part 6 – When Your All Alone)

01Jun07

I was thinking this week about my past years journey as a worship leader. For the sake of background, I moved to Texas a year ago and helped plant a church. Prior to that I was a youth pastor and had minimal experience leading worship, although I had played with a touring band for 2 years…. so I had some music/band background. When the church started it was Myself, piano and bass. It was up to me to create a much bigger sound and Ableton was my weapon of choice. So in this installment I wanted to address a couple very practical ideas for using ableton if you fly solo or with just another musician.

Lets assume your rolling solo (maybe from keys or acoustic). Rhythmically a simple drum loop and percussion loop (like a shaker or tambourine) makes all the difference. When it comes to programming loops, be tasteful. This is a tricky one and very subjective, I know. BUT I have a great idea on how to determine if your direction is “cheesy.” Ask the most musically gifted person you know what they think. I am constantly bouncing ideas off team members and even my wife (who has a great musical ear). Typically I have a simple loop for the verse and one for the chorus/bridge.

Next, trendy music (what you hear on the radio) has a couple key elements that I try to implement. Some people get a stick up their who-ha and hold the opinion that trendy music = bad (sell out, not “real creative” music). Im gonna be blunt here, but it works for the larger community for a reason! Musicians are some of the most critical people I know and to write off key elements that work for a good majority of the population should be something we study. OK, off my soapbox. All that said two elements stick out. First, the hook. The hook is that part of a song you hum in the car long after the song is over. For example, Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” Listen to his Acoustic guitar part. Hook through and through. So when I am programing I recreate that part and implement it throughout the song (just dont overkill it). Another good example is the piano part on the new Tim Hughes song “Highest and Greatest.” Sometimes it takes creating your own…. We did this with You Are The Light (Steve Fee) with a viola part during the second half of the verse. What is important is that something catch the people and help them connect via the music. Most music (worship or not) is written with a hook. Pull that out and set it as a loop that you can trigger in and out of a song. Sometimes its an electric guitar, sometimes a drum patter (ex – fall out boy does this), sometime piano or acoustic. Anyway, you get the idea.

The second element is dynamics. Using ableton I am able to create dynamics in a song that otherwise are pretty tough with just my acoustic. This can be something as simple as adding a tambourine to your loop for the choruses or layering in a thick pad during the high points in a song. Start simple and then experiment. A killer keys player I work with helps me write some dope string/pad arrangements for songs that totally carry the dynamics. One other quick word on dynamics… use your voice! Now this is coming from a guy who is not even close to be a great vocalist, but vocals are one of your best dynamic tools. Layered with the beauty of ableton a one or two person gig can be taken to a whole new level!

The last thing I’ll add is how to implement Ableton in a live worship setting. I have found if I am running solo or with one other person its easiest to use the “set and forget” mode of using ableton. This means layout the song and record the transitions like you normally would play through the song (usually to accomplish this I will spend time throughout the week worshiping through the music myself and feeling out the best flow). Next render (export) each song and the load each of those up into their own Live set. Then all you have to do is stay in time with your backing tracks and trigger the start and stop of each song… which you can do pretty easily from you laptop keyboard if necessary (If I were doing that I would key map the song number to a specific key – i.e. if its the first song in the set to the number 1 button on my keyboard, using the space bar which by default is used to stop the clips). This is much easier than trying to trigger multiple scenes throughout a song… although I am a huge fan of this as well… just more difficult and hard to do if your solo.

Hope that helps someone out there… feel free to ask any questions.

Filed under: Ableton Live In Worship Series, General, Resources   |  11 Comments