For my PB2, I wanted to create a piece of ambient music that would match perfectly with the video I selected. But unfortunately, producing a piece of ambient music with multiple instruments isn’t very easy without the right program. For the last few years, I’ve wanted a program to write and record music on, but the applications that I downloaded were either too complicated for me to be motivated to learn, or just unobtainable.

I decided to download Ableton, and use the deadline for PB2 as a motivating factor to learn how it works. It started off as a very complicated and intimidating workspace, and I’m still struggling to really get a feel of how everything works. Here’s a screenshot of the main two interfaces with the tracks of a very simple melody I created. I really would like to produce soundtracks and supporting music for my films in order to emphasise the media that I create, and I’m really hoping that Ableton will be a tool that can really help me with that.

I’m learning prodominantly through youtube tutorials. The first being this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wt_NNYMwJY&t=11s&ab_channel=Cymatics.FM

I thought with 50 minutes of video, I would have a very fair understanding of the application, but there’s still so much more to learn, with 5 seperate parts all for beginner users. If I can’t figure out how to use Ableton effectively by Saturday, I’ll have to record my musical piece straight to my computer from the piano through midi.

Here’s the first piece of music I’ve created with Ableton, a really simple melody with a beat.