Ableton Idolatry

For the past few weeks, Ableton's website has been spiking with new visitors due to American Idol runner-up Blake Lewis giving Ableton a shout out on May 2, 2007 in front of roughly 28 million viewers. American Idol is an annual singing competition that strives to find the best young singer in the country through a comprehensive audition process and a lengthy televised competition.

Lewis has taken to Live as a way to remix his tracks to create unexpected arrangements of popular songs, such as Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" and "This Is Where I Came In," by the Bee Gees. Lewis also employed his beatboxing skills--creating a style reminiscent of a man-made stutter edit--to vault himself to the runner-up position.

"I use this great program called Ableton Live," said Lewis, in a recent conference call with reporters. "It's just an amazing program...as far as recording and producing and remixing." Blake goes on to describe how he brought his portable studio to LA for the competition and has been employing his music production skills to find the best bits of each song, cutting them down to fit within the show's framework. The full transcript of the interview is available here.

American Idol Website