Within the last two years, I started playing around with Ableton Live and learning how to record audio and produce electronic music. I’ve become a big fan of Ableton Live as it provides a very powerful interface for making any type of music, whether for live performance or for recording and production. I’ve really taken a love to electronic music and recording recently. My inspiration for this music grew as I discovered interesting artists like FKJ, Marc Rebillet, and Reggie Watts. They mix electronic music and loop recordings with their songs, live. It inspired me to start making my own style of electronic music.
DAW & DAW-less Music
After learning a bit of Ableton, I became obsessed with hardware synthesizers and all their funky sounds and possibilities. I purchased a bunch of used gear on Reverb.com then went to work connecting MIDI and syncing the synths for a no DAW experience. I like working with and without the computer when experimenting with sounds and jamming with others while in sync via MIDI.
I started recording friends and family to simple beats then I took the tracks, and with some editing, made some electronic music. This has become quite a fun hobby for me and I’ve been putting up some of the recent recordings on YouTube.
Producing Music
I’m constantly learning new things about music production and ways to get creative in other mediums. As a result, I began to produce music under the name, Polafia. The following is a sample recording of my niece and nephew, then resampling their voices into a song. Their creativity is off the charts!
A lot of the songs we record are in Polish. Most of the recordings happen completely separate from the song itself. I’ll set up a simple beat to a particular tempo, then I record people as they start talking or singing along to the beat. I take the samples, come up with an overall theme, and then produce various songs from the recordings based on the message I try to deliver.
I’ve also started trying to sample live music. I record and sample clips of my friends playing various instruments and blend them into the electronic production. This has helped teach me a lot about the environment and properties of acoustics.
It’s a pleasure to take recordings of people and making a piece of art with them. I look for nuance sounds and ways to make entertaining rhythms out of them.
I hope to capture more sounds from nature soon on a 32 bit float audio recorder for future work.
