THOMAS FAULDS: Hi. I'm Thomas Faulds. I'm here hosting the Chicago Ableton Music Group. We meet once a month, the first Wednesday of every moth. It's a community that we get together to show tips and tricks and basically how individuals use Ableton Live. I find that the coolest thing about Ableton Live is the versatility. It really becomes like a swiss army knife of an audio application. Especially for live performance, you can use it in a whole bunch of different ways. So I'm here and I'm going to show you how I use it to jam with my friends.

Basically, I started out with a 16-step sequencer drum machine. I've got a a Korg ESX here that I'll be showing you in a second. This gave me the idea to turn Ableton Live into my own sort of meta-sequencer or workstation, so everything that I do with Ableton is completely improvised and live. I have some beats that I've created with my MPC4000, load them into Ableton and bring them out here. I've got an audio interface, a Korg ESX drum machine, and a MIDI controller. And I like to stress to everyone that comes to the clinics that this is really all you need to get into this. You know, everyone has a computer. All you really need is a microphone, a cable, an audio interface, and some sort of MIDI controller so you that can utilize the software.

[THOMAS FAULDS PERFORMS WITH ABLETON SETUP]

We demonstrated a bunch of that. I have an M-Audio Trigger Finger that I use the four pads on the lower half as mute groups. I use the top eight pads to turn effects on and off, and then I have knobs and sliders that use to control my effects. I've got Beat Repeat, Transverb, low pass/high pass filters, Sonic Decimator, and a buffer override all on the master output bus of my Ableton Live session. And what I'm going to be doing is playing with Katie Wiegman. She's a local vibraphone player, plays in a local group, Algernon, and I'm going to be looping her live as we improvise with a drum machine and some beats that I have on Ableton. I'll then loop her. You'll see in the Clip View in Ableton, you'll see me change the pitch without affecting the time and also changing the time without affecting the pitch. Ableton is really good at this. It keeps everything in time. You'll also notice me changing the tempo in the live performance. Ableton keeps everything and synced up in tempo always including all the effects and the recording itself.

So here we go. This is a little demonstration with Katie Wiegman using Ableton Live's live looping capabilities.

[THOMAS FAULDS PERFORMS WITH KATIE WIEGMAN]