What to do?

I have not been particularly creative of late. A combination of too much work and pondering a workable approach to making music.

I love the ease with which I can get ideas down in Live but I hate mixing down.

Moving stuff over to Logic is laborious. But Logic is a joy to mix in.

So what to do?

The thing about Live is that it is also part instrument - in the sense that you can 'play' it and 'create' new sound in it - in addition to capturing ideas. I do wonder if, on occasions or even all the time, 'printing' to an audio file in Live and then working on these files in Logic might be the best way forward.

I am a bit loath to work primarily with audio. No reason why really. A lack of familiarity - which is absurd the more I think about it. It seems like a rather week excuse to me. Of course I am familiar with audio files. Duh. So what is holding me back? No idea. Pure muppetry.

Write and create in Live, finish in Logic. Why not. And of course I can use the ReWire link for some of the effort perhaps. Mind you I am looking at the Record & Reason combo and wondering how that might fit in my workflow. I suspect it would just add unnecessary complexity right now. But further down the line that combo might offer some pretty interesting results.

Its all enough to get me back into the swing of things and perhaps to actually get some tracks finished off. I don't lack material - just a sense of misgiving over the workflow and 'style'. Music can be presented in various ways. At the moment I don't feel my approach is leading to a finished result that I can be happy with. And I do think this is my workflow rather than the material itself. I want to create a particular sound that appeals to me. No I don't know what that is but yes, I will recognise it when I hear it.

Getting the workflow right will give me this sound.

I guess one of my biggest problems is a lack of time to just simply experiment. But no more excuses, come May when my calendar clears up, I will be making some noise.

The great choke

I have been trying to upload my old material from Elka CR99 floppies.

First I tried Sonar PE (6.2.1). I got quite a few tracks loaded but the biggie. The huge 'medley' we used to perform live, well that was just too much. Sonar go boom. It had already done this on some of the other tracks but had scraped through on subsequent attempts. Not this time. Same thing each attempt: boom. Sonar died.

So I loaded up Ableton Live (6.0.7). The medley recorded ok but the following tracks killed Live as well. Gah!

Its late and I have had enough for now. It does make me wonder that stuff I did around the early 90s on far less capable computers and software causes such difficulties now. My current PC and software is in a different universe. And therein lies the problem I guess. Power and complexity bring their own problems.