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Gustavo Bravetti Show Us How To Glitch out Ableton Live

by Josh Jancourtz

If your musical production sense tends to gravitate towards the clicky, minimal, and weird, you will appreciate the results you can achieve with Ableton Live by employing a few well-placed tricks. Gustavo Bravetti–the Uruguay-based producer / DJ / maker / tinkerer / entrepreneur we interviewed last year–walks us through his process of glitching out Live with a few tweaks, namely some well-placed volume envelopes, using follow actions and legato and then adding swing to groove-ify the whole thing.

Ed.: Okay, this isn’t necessarily helping Live shake its reputation as just this — a wonderland for glitchers. You really can make stuff that isn’t glitchy in Live, and that new compressor and mix engine sound fantastic. But you still have to glitch it out every now and then. It’s good, clean (erm, digitally dirty) fun. 4-bit 4ever. -PK

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  • Cort3x

    Nice little guide. I haven't really made that much use of follow actions, but in this context, it really makes sense.

    What do you guys use follow actions for?

  • dinerdog

    That is some funky stuff. That's the kind of tutorial I'd like to see. A+

  • Greg

    Cool!

    I'd love to see more tutorials like this. It looks like Bravetti is making some more, which is great. Does anyone have any recommendations for Live tutorials that cover advanced techniques or styles like this one?

    In regards to the "glitchy" sound, I agree that the style is very prevalent (which is good and bad) but I think it's useful because it's so flexible, and it's fashionable to boot. It's also a way for electronic music to be more subtle (as background music, etc) without waxing ambient.

  • http://www.createdigitalmusic.com Peter Kirn

    Hey, I never said I didn't love the glitch. :)

    More tutorials like this? You bet.

  • http://www.ekeler.com Bastiaan

    Cort3x:

    I like to use follow actions for all sorts of things. Setting up a nice 12 bar blues to jam along with, make drum loops do a break every so many bars or add some subtle random variations in patterns. Of course you can do this in other ways, but I like the little tool a lot.

    Also, thanks for the tutorial, keep this little "Live tips and tricks" things comming, I love to see people using tools in new ways.

  • http://music.damaged.us Cynic

    Cool. What software are you using to make this video with?

  • http://seismo.blogspot.com/ seismo

    follow action is nice. i like to take a pile of similar, or not-so-similar live drum loops and set them up (legato) to just jump around randomly. it's constant variation, but the groove doesn't get lost.

    the process is explained really well in the live manual. go forth.

  • Ap

    So this is IDM in 2008.

    Kill me now please.

  • http://myspace.com/k1ru k1Ru

    i thought that was certainly helpful..i can certainly appreciate recycling a beat and morphing it into variants anytime! bravetti wins

  • http://www.myspace.com/cutoutcollective Jason

    I like the follow actions… I agree with Peter though – its a waste to view Live as only a glitchy music creator. Don't get me wrong, I love making glitchy music in Live, but these days I also don't think that I could go make to recording in a traditional environment (like Cubase, Pro Tools, etc.)

    An example to illustrate – I recently recorded a rock band using live, but after recording the guide tracks they realized they had played the song too slowly. Time stretching in most other DAWs is almost more effort than rerecording the guides, but in Live I just changed the warping to complex and played with the tempo DJ-style on the fly, til the song felt right. That combined with never having to put in a cross fade when you connect two pieces of audio, and being able to move audio around and chop it up really easily makes me never want to go back to a normal DAW.

  • adamo

    no intentional disrespect to gustavo, but are tips on how to make faceless, bland clicky house not the absolute last thing anyone needs? in my opinion there is enough of that copycat drivel around without encouraging people with tutorials on how to make it more minimal and less unique. gustavo is a very technical guy from what i've read so it would be interesting to see what he could do in the way of tutorials that don't support clicky techno/house whatever.

  • hema

    IDM? really?

  • http://www.createdigitalmusic.com Peter Kirn

    Yeah, but adamo, if you do get those techniques out there, then it’s all the more pressure to try to make it your own — doing the opposite, taking this and doing something completely different, whatever.

    Maybe providing info on some of the stuff that’s a bit cliched at this point is *exactly* what we need! ;)

    Anyway, having seen what Gustavo is doing live, I think he’s using it successfully. And he’s got a whole tutorial series, so hopefully we see more, including more on how he uses his various controllers (as seen in our interview with him).

  • http://www.thebulkdump.com Mr. Tunes

    i see that the sharing of ideas makes some people uncomfortable :sigh:

  • rudestar

    awesommmmmeee!!!!!!

  • Richie

    Hmm I think that magicians doesn't should reveal his tricks to every mortal.

  • http://myspace.com/k1ru k1Ru

    lol..wonderful…

    @richie…

    what it really comes down to is us the users never really fully reading the manuals to our gear…

  • Richie

    seems braveti does

  • http://www.myspace.com/pax lost

    sweet. I wouldn't say idm though…whatever that means. Definitely a nice microhouse tutorial tho.

  • Pingback: Create Digital Music » Ableton Live Tutorials: DIY 808, IDM 101 - Gustavo Strikes Again

  • http://blah qwissy

    intelligent dumb music ?

  • floor

    It's just a tutorial people. He's just showing some techniques. How you use it, is up to you. If you don't like IDM, then don't comment on the genre IDM. You can use this technique with any type of music. I'm sick of comments by people who don't think before they write. And all the fighting is very exhausting. Please post constructive criticism, or at least come up with an idea of your own.

  • reverb

    This guy has some very useful tutorials on some pretty clever techniques with live.
    http://www.cosm.co.nz/

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