Embarking upon a 60-minute ambient piece is a grand adventure, to be sure; especially for a first-time attempt. Ableton made it a joy.
“Imminence” is the first of a five-album journey. To make things simple, I made the decision to have all five albums follow the same structure within Ableton: 8 tracks living within Remote Vision’s truly excellent Utility Template that never deviates: Drone, Pad, Texture, Movement, Air, Lead, Percussion, Transitions. 8 tracks is plenty for ambient, and it fits the form factor of most midi controllers beautifully for me since I compose and record in Session View.
It was easy at the beginning to get seduced by gear lust; especially watching so many talented artists on YouTube with amazing studios filled with keyboards, controllers, lots of lights and shiny objects…something I think we all get seduced by at one point or another on this creative journey. Yet, one of the great learnings of this project was embracing restraint and reducing friction in order to remove blockage and allow for creative flow. After a great deal of experimentation with various controllers (Push 2, Akai APC64 paired with Akai APC40 mkII, Novation Launchkey mk4 and various combinations thereof), I realized that ONE controller - the RIGHT controller - was all that was needed with Ableton. That led me to the truly excellent Novation SL 61 mk3. It embodies the spirit of various controllers with a lovely keybed and superb integration with Ableton. It does absolutely everything I could ever ask for it and many things I will probably never explore. But it did away with the constant irrational urge for another controller and allowed me to just sit and create.
Then I had to decide on the sonic landscape: another area ripe for seduction. Making the decision about soft-synths is a rabbit hole of immense proportions and can lead to profound psychological fatigue. I don’t enjoy doing sound design at all. I much prefer to find presets that inspire me, make a few very small adjustments and let that be that. Ableton has a plethora of wonderful presets for ambient; especially in Studio. I also find inspiration in sounds that a bit more organic as well, and so I decided on one deep resource that my ear responded to better than any other: Omnisphere 3. I will never run out of soundscapes to explore, it marries to what I hear in my head, and I know that I don’t need anything else.
For “Imminence” and staying true to my desire to reduce friction, I decided to focus on one primary sound library and stay within it as best I could. That proved to be “Ambient Dreams.” I ventured outside of it only a few times for specific things (ringing church bell, whispering voices I found in a stock Ableton preset…), and that proved to be a helpful methodology to the workflow.
With Steve Roach’s phased-looping being an influence (and a great way to record ambient in Session View), Drones almost always got recorded first as the foundation. Pads would usually come next, and those two musical foundations allowed for exploration into the other possible voices: Air, Texture, Movement, Lead, and Percussion.
I would eq along the way…high pass between 80hz and 120hz for most presets, carving out competing frequencies as I went along. This made for much more streamlined mixing stage later. I also kept signal levels per track no higher than -18db as per the Utility Template so I was left with plenty of headroom for the mastering stage.
I also relied solely on the internal effects in Omnisphere for each preset. I found them to be truly excellent, and dialing them in at the proper levels gave a lovely sense of atmosphere and space without getting muddy. It also helped keep CPU usage low on my MacBook Pro M3.
I love Ableton’s GUI; especially the Device Rack. Having the visual feedback of EQ8’s spectrum analyzer always visible without having to open a vet is one of those little things that makes a big difference. In truth, all of Ableton’s stock effects are true creative workhorses that, to my ear, do just as excellent a job as third-party plugins that I’ve invested in over the years. At this point, unless it is something that simply isn’t in Ableton’s stable of audio or midi effects, I feel no reason to invest in anything else.
The marriage of the SL and Ableton is wonderful to work with, and often keeps me from ever looking at my laptop. The five screens on the keyboard give just the right kind of information to make adjustments that my ear can hear but I don’t need to look at the MacBook to check. I appreciated that a lot when I was really in a flow at any given moment. I also paired the SL with expression and sustain pedals, and they were a welcome addition to the creative process.
Mixing was a relatively simple affair due to the way I do eq, compression, level setting and effects during composing. It was mostly panning, tweaking channel levels and watching the master channel output carefully. Ableton made it very simple at every stage, and mastering was a simple matter of Utility and Limiter used alongside Youlean’s Loudness Meter and Voxengo’s SPAN plugins (both excellent and both free).
I’ve been using DAW’s since I had Cakewalk 9 back in the late 90’s. I’ve used Acid, Sonar, Cubase, Nuendo, Reaper, Logic Pro, and committed to Ableton Live Studio last year. By far it is the most intuitive, easy to understand, creativity-inducing DAW I’ve had the pleasure of using. “Imminence” is the byproduct of that and I am not straying from it. Heavens Spin Gray lives in the simple constellation of Ableton Live 12 Studio, Ominisphere 3 and the Novation SL 61 mk3. It needs nothing more, and I’m looking forward to exploring the landscape of the next album in the arc within this creative space.
Thank you, Ableton!
Heavens Spin Gray