Well this is cool:
Woke up stupid early this morning.
Wanted to work without waking up my family.
But most of today’s work involves recording examples—way too loud for 5am.
What to do?
Mission drift: the solo act’s curse.
After you’ve been playing a song solo for a few years, it undergoes subtle changes:
Maybe you add a measure before the last chorus,
or skip the mediocre bridge.
Maybe the original has an unnecessary number of repeats…
…or a fade-out ending.
Obviously you can just record your version (and make sure your chart matches).
But that’s so time-consuming (and ill-suited for 5am!).
My version of Don’t Look Back In Anger is shorter than the original:
shortened the turnaround getting back to VERSE 2
no guitar solo
(goes to back to the PRE CHORUS instead)
no double CHORUS at the end
down in A (instead of the original’s C)
The greatest arranging tool ever.
You know it: I’m talking about Ableton Live 11.
Here’s how I used it to mock up my version of DLBIA:
downloaded the original audio
dragged it into Ableton Live 11.3
(with Auto-Warp Long Samples turned on)
set
Audio
toLead
(ie Ableton Live follows the tempo of the audio file)used empty MIDI clips to label the sections: INTRO, VERSE, PC, etc
copied & pasted sections of the original to match my arrangement
retuned the audio (it’s in-between keys)
changed the key to match my voice
It’s SO fast.
About that “copied & pasted sections”…
Ableton Live has the ability to create or delete time:
This makes it so so easy to experiment with ideas.
For example:
Highlighting a section of audio and hitting
delete
removes the audio……but
shift
-command
-delete
removes that whole section, “healing” around the excised measures
If you want to move a section from one place to another, you can use
shift-command-x
to delete those measures AND copy their contents to the clipboard……and
shift-command-v
will create measures to paste them into.
This made it trivially easy to:
remove a few bars from their turnaround…
…but copy the two beats’ worth of vi-V that make my turnaround work.
Then copy PC 2 into the place where the SOLO normally is.
And then cut the repeated CHORUS at the end.
The tempo information isn’t attached to a specific moment on the timeline.
Instead, Ableton Live is taking its tempo information from the clips themselves, on a measure-by-measure basis.
This means that it’s never hard to find the perfect edit point (it’s always lined up with the beats & bars of the grid).
And that’s true even if you’re starting with audio that wasn’t recorded to a click—you don’t have to force it onto the grid to make editing easier.