My first set of attempts at controllerism used samples of the Beatles and Michael Jackson. For the next round, I thought it would be good to try to create something completely from scratch. So this is my first piece of music created specifically with controllerism in mind.
The APC40 has forty trigger pads. You can use more than forty loops, but it’s a pain. I created eight loops that fit well together, and then made four additional variations of each one. That gave me a set of loops that fit tidily onto the APC40 grid. The instruments are 808 drum machine, latin percussion, wood blocks, blown tube, synth bass, bells, arpeggiated synth and an ambient pad.
I tried to design my loops so that all of them would be mutually musically compatible. I didn’t systematically test them, because that would have required trying thousands of combinations. Instead, I decided to randomly generate a song using Ableton’s Follow Actions to see if anything obviously unmusical leapt out at me. The first attempt was not a success — hearing all eight loops all the time was too much information. I needed a way to introduce some space. Eventually I hit on the idea of adding empty clips to each column that would be randomly sprinkled in.
It is exceptionally relaxing watching a song write itself while you sit there drinking coffee.
The result was a mix of pleasing and not-so-pleasing. I edited the random sequence into a more coherent shape:
Even with my editing, the result was not too hot. But it was useful to have something to react against. Finally, with all the prep behind me, it was time to play all this stuff live on the APC. Here’s the very first take of improv I did.
I let it sit for a couple of days while I was preoccupied with other things, and when I finally listened back, I was pleasantly surprised. Here it is, minimally edited:
The piece has a coherent shape, with lifts and lulls, peaks and valleys. It’s quite different from the way I’d structure a piece of music by my usual method of drawing loops on the screen. It’s less symmetrical and orderly, but it makes an intuitive sense of its own. I’ve been looking for a way to reconcile my love of jazz with my love of electronic dance music for many years now. I think I’ve finally found it. For my next controllerist opus, I’m going to blend samples and my own MIDI loops, and have more odd-length loops. And maybe I’ll play these things for an audience too.
