Ableton Live User Groups

Happening right now all around the globe, Live user groups mix power tips with power performances in a party atmosphere. If you have been looking for a good reason to venture outside your studio, this could be it...

The phrase "user group" usually conjures up images of geeky gatherings of computer aficionados and endless demonstrations of software features. Perhaps it's the unstable, evolving nature of computer music-making in general that makes Live get-togethers more interesting. Rather than "how I do X?", the question most often heard is, "how do you use Live?". It's like asking for someone's favorite recipes: the answers are never the same. Against the background of Live's largely open-ended and accessible interface, novices and advanced users alike share tips on how to arrange clips, advice on unusual hardware controllers to use, power tricks for triggering loops, and new ways of keeping performances musical and dynamic.

Get together

As musicians and DJs improvise new ways to make use of computers, performances have a way of spilling over into user groups, and user groups into performances. New York's near monthly party Warper is regularly combined with meetings of New York's Ableton Live User Group, and the Line between party and user groups regularly blurs, with demos and masterclasses mixed in with featured artists and perhaps more tellingly "talking shop" informally over drinks. On one evening laptop mash-up artist and Warper co-organiser Moldover walks his audience through his personal method of using Live in combination with a custom Reaktor ensemble, and it's not so much a demo, or even a masterclass, as a personal show-and-tell. Moldover has shown up to Warper parties navigating Live with a P5 Gaming Glove, and has even installed his "Octamasher" — an interactive array of Oxygen8 keyboards and full-surround audio — so that clubbers at Warper can try their own hand at mashing with Live. Young clubbers hold a vodka tonic in one hand and plunk notes with the other, triggering tempo-locked beats while collaborating with other DJs around the room.

To see the Octamasher in action please follow this link.

A small world

Live is now 5 years old: adulthood for software, perhaps, but infancy for musical instruments. Communities are only now beginning to take hold. New York has the advantage of hosting Ableton's sole office outside of Berlin, an outpost of the global capital of computer music in a country that adopts musical technology more reluctantly. There have been one-off user group events in Paris, London, Indianapolis, Indiana, Amsterdam and Sydney, and smaller-scale events in Melbourne, Copenhagen, Detroit, Dallas, Adelaide, Australia, and Baltimore.

Suprisingly though, the most active group is in Seattle, Washington. The Seattle Live User Group — with the unfortunate but memorable acronym SLUG — meets monthly at the internet radio station OseaO (www.oseao.com), a venue long known for its support for electronic culture and underground music.

"SLUG came about in an effort to achieve a couple of goals," says organiser Chris Moon, who also runs the educational component of Seattle's Decibel Festival and organises local and national laptop battles. "I wanted to build a community based on electronic music education in an effort that spreads the word about Live, Decibel Conference and OseaO. I'm also interested in teaching a course on Ableton, and it's a good opportunity to work on those skills and get an idea of what kinds of questions people have about using Live." These converging events taking place in Seattle have built a whole community and scene around laptop music-making.

Seattle is exporting its unique brand of computer music events to the rest of the world, as with the laptop battles: what began as a local event and a way to make laptop music more competitive and fun has new become a national event. In December 2006, regional winners from Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Miami, Austin, Chicago and New York City will take on the home-team champion from Seattle in a national laptop music battle. Again, while software choice is not a factor in participating, Live remains the tool of choice. The Live community increasingly wants opportunities both to cooperate (in user groups) and compete (in battles) — an alternative of being stuck alone with a computer.

One thing in common in all these groups: they're wide-open and open to participation. "It's all over the place," says Ableton's David Cross. "There are as many types of users as there are applications of Live. A group may consist mostly of live loopers one instance, then DJs, then producers and so on. In terms of expertise, it's almost always an even spread between beginners and experts."

Join in

Want to form your own group? The best place to start is simply to reach out to potential participants. "The Ableton forum is the most direct way to connect with other local users," says Seattle's Moon. "Local electronic boards and lists are important as well. Enlist the help of college music departments and retail outlets. Dave Hill at Ableton has been a huge help as well."

If the New York experience is any indicator, the other essential ingredient is to make an event out of Live, to blend parties and user groups. That, if anything, may be the biggest new trend. As technology becomes more sophisticated and more part of creative activity, just getting out of the house is the first big step (and grabbing a drink, a date, or hitting the dance floor doesn't hurt either). Cooperating on the technical details of making music frees up more opportunities to share dynamic, live music making and to compete musically via laptop.

As the performance skills get deeper and more virtuoso, no one could accuse on of the other group members of "checking their email" rather than playing. With a little sharing of inside techniques, a growing number of Live users are proving that a piece of software can be a musical instrument in its own right.

More Information

Community Sites:

Seattle:

New York:

Ableton would like to thank Computer Music magazine for permission to reprint these sections of "The Party Line", taken from Computer Music Special vol. 20: The Insider's Guide to Ableton Live. For more information, visit: http://www.computermusic.co.uk