You may have seen the article I wrote the other day about how I discovered Ableton Live.
It sounds like a trivial thing to find out about some random piece of software doesn’t it?
But I believe that software can completely change your life, like Ableton changed mine.
14 years after that afternoon when my buddy Dan convinced me that I just had to see this piece of software he had just discovered, I now make my full time living online thanks to Ableton creating such a kick-ass revolutionary piece of software.
That, along with a person’s passion for creating music led me down this path towards eventually building BassGorilla.com 3 years ago,
…but we’ll get to that later…
Anyway, I divulge….
I told you at the end of the last email that I would continue the story of my life with Live, so here goes…
Rewind to 2001 selectaaa….
Around this time when I discovered Ableton Live, I had also been heavily into drum and bass for many years.
Fun fact: I had established a name for myself as a DnB MC in Cardiff.. My name was MC Tripwire, and I MC’ed with the likes of Adam F and regularly with the then-up-and-coming High Contrast, who had been signed to Hospital Records and was putting Cardiff firmly on the drum and bass map.
However, the next year, I was to graduate with a degree in Architectural Engineering and decide that I needed to get out of the UK and see more of the world, especially a place that had been blowing my mind non-stop since I was 10 and my mom’s best friend had hosted a lodger from the country of..
Japan.
So upon graduating, I packed my suitcase and fucked off to the land of robots, earthquake proof skyscrapers, Pokemon and a lot of other weird shit. (I never went back to do engineering, and ended up living in Tokyo for 8 years.)
While I was living it up in Tokyo at the age of 22, I was also dearly longing for some time with my computer and my Akai MPC sampler.
It took an entire year before I got a new PC with Ableton Live, and eventually got my Akai shipped over as a birthday present from my dad (the thing looks like a cash dispenser and cost over $200 to ship!)
So there I was again, back to the beat making.
What did I love about Ableton so much?
Coming from a background of using Reason, where you had to fiddle with virtual cables and a lot of other inefficient processes, using Ableton was so intuitive it was insane.
Ableton came as easily to me as playing with Lego, or riding a bike. It was so easy to lay out your ideas, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted.
I find streamlined workflow of Ableton so effective that the software allows you to focus your brain on musical ideas rather than have to switch gears to figure out some technical issue that holds you back from creating amazing music. I love it long time (14 years now haha!).
Back in 2003 though, the kind of music I was making was all sampled hip hop. I was a crate digger, spending my weekends (and hard earned cash) on vinyl records around the Shibuya area of Tokyo.
I was hugely inspired by MoWax Records, DJ Krush (from Japan), DJ Shadow and others.
Suffice to say that the VST plugin revolution had not happened yet, and if you wanted to make more technical music like DnB or techno, you needed to invest in some hardcore hardware.
It wasn’t until 2010 that I started discovering plugins from Native Instruments and other companies. When that finally happened, it was the tech that I had been missing.
See, even though I had been in love with more technical forms of music in addition to sample based hip hop, I had never been able to invest in $1500 hard synths, and when I had the ability to get VST soft synth and effects in 2010, a new world was opened up to me.
Mathematical equation:
Ableton + 3rd party synths = infinite possibilities.
It was on December 29th 2011 that I left Tokyo and moved to Vancouver, Canada. I would spend an entire year waiting for my work Visa during 2012 (and this was by my choice so that I could focus on making music all waking hours of the day with no interruptions or responsibilities).
It was during 2012 that I invested all of my time and energy into electronic music production.
It was during 2012 that I had my first ever release with Adapted Records. There have been other releases with other labels since then, but this was the one I will always remember.
In January 2013, I got to work on building BassGorilla.com, interviewing producers, writing content, creating tutorials. The rest is history as they say.
BassGorilla has grown into an online school that features courses by leading artists like Varien, Haywire, Seamless, Frequent, Ryan Ended and others, and the way I see it, it’s all down to that one afteroon in 2001 when my friend told me about Ableton Live.
Imagine if he had never discovered it and introduced me to it…
I shudder to think what life would be like. Big ups Dan 🙂
To Be Continued…
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