Improvising with Live
My adventures with Live continue. One of the things that is interesting about Live, as opposed to the standard way I do electronic music, is that I can map out the general outline of a piece and then tweak and direct it as the piece unfolds. If I want to delay the entrance of the bass drum a few bars or bring it in early, I can do that. If I'm really jamming on a particular segment and want to stretch it out I can do that too. Even better, since I have the footswitches next to the piano, I can do all of this without even leaving the keys. I can tweak a lot more at the controller if I want to commit my left hand to the task (still a bit tricky to do and keep coherently complex flow going in the right hand.
I'm still limited by the initial shape of the piece that I sketched out at the outset, which is fair. It's not a totally free improvisation (I have to hit the points on the way through the piece for it to make sense), but rather an opportunity to be expressive each and every time I play a piece through. This is without any of the complex Max patches I've been experimenting; when I bring those into play it'll be a very different experience for me as a improvisor as things will happen that I'm not entirely expecting.
If you want to hear what this all sounds like, you can take a listen to a single take I did of a sequence I call Sculpture Spotting. The piano is live audio, everything else is precomposed in Live and moves from section to section via footswitch control.
Sculpture Spotting (first take) by Artemis Seven
I'm still limited by the initial shape of the piece that I sketched out at the outset, which is fair. It's not a totally free improvisation (I have to hit the points on the way through the piece for it to make sense), but rather an opportunity to be expressive each and every time I play a piece through. This is without any of the complex Max patches I've been experimenting; when I bring those into play it'll be a very different experience for me as a improvisor as things will happen that I'm not entirely expecting.
If you want to hear what this all sounds like, you can take a listen to a single take I did of a sequence I call Sculpture Spotting. The piano is live audio, everything else is precomposed in Live and moves from section to section via footswitch control.
Sculpture Spotting (first take) by Artemis Seven