Awful Song no. 143198

This is the awful song I made this morning with the help of Ask Metafilter. Relax to the smooth sounds of two minutes of obnoxious beeping!

I wouldn't really characterize this as a finished song in any way. This track was mostly an excuse for me to play with the drum tools in Ableton Live, which were fun, but I also learned a little bit about playing with the MIDI clips and making some of my own.

Your commentary and derision of my lack of skill and poor taste is welcome!

(Also, I wasn't kidding about the obnoxious beeping.)

• play
• pause
• min volume
• max volume

posted by majick (5 comments total)

Hey that was pretty good! It was actually quite tasteful, since you resisted the temptation to put every single sound to tape. Keep playing with it, you'll only get better.
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 8:37 AM on January 17, 2010

Hey majick. This has a really nice use of space. I dig the low end bump and the beeps are pretty darn lyrical. Good show!
posted by snsranch at 4:49 PM on January 17, 2010

I really like this. Did you "Play" percussion, manually, with a keyboard? I have not been able to figure out how to make "drum machine"-type patterns with Ableton.
posted by DMelanogaster at 10:18 AM on January 18, 2010

Thanks for the complimentary comments. I won't go so far as to say I'm proud of this songlet of mine, but I'm pleased to have made it.

I created the percussion as a series of clips using one of the Impulse instruments, overdubbing the tom for the first variation, the kick for the second, and then shaker and hat for the third. I started out with manually played rhythms and then made edits with the pencil tool. Pretty much the entire percussion section is a direct application of the Live lesson.

The beeping is pretty much the same thing: a manual rhythm with successive overdubs until it had a vaguely melodic thing going on. I'm less happy with the background sweeper, but that was just a clip I pulled out of the default library and made a variation of.

Also, having listened to this on tiny laptop speakers, I realize the sweeper sounds even more loud and awful than I meant it to be. I guess the lesson here is that just like software, audio needs to be tested, too.
posted by majick at 10:45 AM on January 18, 2010

Don't do yourself down man - people won't listen to stuff if the artist apologises for it up front. Be bold! Like others have said, this is promising and you must keep going. I liked what you were doing rhythmically. In terms of constructive criticism, all I'd say is: watch your timing. This kind of material needs to be really precise - so a click track or sequencer is probably a must. Meant to be helpful not nasty. Well.....what are you waiting for - get on with the next one!
posted by MajorDundee at 1:01 PM on January 19, 2010