System Agnosticism
Yesterday I was sitting here thinking about my live set. It is obviously Ableton based, as you’ve read here before. And it occurred to me that there’s really no reason why you couldn’t do it on the MPC, replacing the generative stuff with probability and a few different chords and tricks because the chord sets and all that are so good on the MPC, and arranging is so easy.
I thought to myself, in a very YouTube sort of way, “Can the MPC dub techno?” Does it?
The answer is yes. So I will remove the suspense right off the bat. I tried it. It works.
The interesting part is that this could have taken, I don’t know, in the early days maybe a month to do. It took me about a couple hours to get this up and running in an acceptable way and bring in the Grandmother, and I brought in my Sony Sports Walkman with an old… I had an incredible haul at Goodwill years ago of self-help tapes. It is like an endless supply of brilliance. And even an old Sony handheld radio that basically only gives you static. So I used that for noise.
And like I said, within a couple hours, I had this thing up and running.
Tried it last night. Didn’t really work, just because the framing of the shot was wrong when I filmed the video. Then I figured I’d just drop it right into my regular setup look this morning.
Worked like a charm. It went off.
My timing with the quote from the cassette was lucky, so even that worked.
And this is all to say that I feel like I’m approaching system agnosticism, where I can kind of get what I want done on either Ableton or MPC, and it can sound like something that I’m doing.
(And by the way, this publishes a day late, so just pretend it was yesterday.)
But that is something to celebrate. I’m not gloating, but I am celebrating that I can get what I want done in two systems.
There’s still so much I don’t know about the MPC and a lot I don’t know about Ableton, but I’m starting to be able to do what I need to do on both with relative ease. I can take chances. Like when I was doing that video, I was trying some new things, trying new ideas, and was doing that with relative ease.
And there’s still so much more to do.
So it’s the cross training, the time watching videos, but most of all, time on the clock with these machines, that is producing agnosticism, if that’s even a word.
And I couldn’t be happier.
So be agnostic.
About this.
Not about religious stuff.
Anyway, different blog.