I'm genuinely thinking about buying a laptop and Ableton. Talk me out of it

Almost 1k replies. Well done mate! Catching up to the Cats thread.

1 Like

He bought the thing already, youre late

Sir, have you considered buying a Mac?

2 Likes

Anyone that’s listened to my music knows that perfectionism is not a problem for me.

I think it already is. It’s simple things really, like how much quicker I can get samples into the sampler. But the most important change is that I can now get most of the boring housekeeping tasks out of the way during the gaps in the daytime so that when I can sit down for a bit with my gear, I’m not wasting time with that, I can get straight on with jamming on the hardware.

Before I had a computer, sassions were very much mix first, jam later, which sucks the fun out of it when time is short. Now I can jam away and fix up the mixes later. I quite happy working with just Ableton and a couple of free plugins.

It’s also simple stuff like if I want to upload a track on here I used to have to record it into my tascam, take the SD card out, put it in my phone, transfer it, convert it to MP3 via a shonky freeware app, then upload it. Now I just hit export and drag it into safari. It’s all these little jobs that are just so much easier with a laptop.

I’m done with trying to find the perfect setup, mostly because there’s no such thing. What a laptop does is allow me a setup that I can actually make some music with without too much time wasting and frustrating limitations.

Believe me, if I didn’t have kids and all that, there’s no way I’d be using a laptop, but life is what it is, just have to adapt.

21 Likes

it was a bit condescending maybe but who cares, raising yr post count is what matters

I hate when people push limitations as a positive. Yes if what you have has restrictions then master what you have and get the best results you can but don’t actively avoid better solutions as some kind of badge to wear. It’s like those people on YouTube who think putting dawless in their videos elevates it to a higher level with the actual music being secondary to the clickbait video title.

Embrace advances and utilise all at your disposal to make your life easier. It’s too short to purposely make it more difficult like some kind of martyr of realness.

Look at modular, people spending thousands on modules to cover every intricacy is seen as creative but doing the same with software is frowned upon by the elitist dawless society.

Bottom line, make music using whatever works for you

4 Likes

Hmm, a blanket statement such as this doesn’t quite work, because I guess when people often talk about limitations as a positive thing they mean that limitations can boost your creativity or help with creativity, not that limitation themselves are necessarily always good. For me setting limits to what gear to use, a deadline etc. are a positive since the boundaries help me concentrate on the essentials, creating instead of giving into impulses or getting sidetracked by options that won’t necessarily make the music any better.

Coming from a band backround I’ve always felt that using simple tools for the compositional phase is more productive, such as just a few synths, a guitar or a piano. Maybe a drum machine that you first flesh out the songs with. I’ve written all the recorded songs with bands I’ve made witha a bass, then added the rest later. But the songs existed when there was nothing but the riffs and structure. Similar approach to electronic music works really for me.

2 Likes

If limitations werk :+1:t6:
If having tons of choices werks👍🏿

Whatever makes you make stuff.

For me less is more. Better to know how to use some, than having lots I have no idea how to use.

The biggest waste of time, though, is stressin over how someone else does it.
Just focus on yer own shit. And enjoy listening to everyone here’s output.

oh and if anyone wants to flow a couple 100k my way, I’d be very appreciative :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Ya for sure. Was just responding to blanket statement that limitations are bad

1 Like

I’m talking in context to this thread. That computers are bad for too many possibilities but limiting yourself by avoiding them is good and being dawless is some kind of badge of honour.

I stated working with limitations is fine, I have 3 different setups for that exact reason but I don’t see the point of actively avoiding simple solutions as some kind of positive

2 Likes

Ah, right. Well I agree, working dawless if you actually want finalized music or to release something is maybe not that smart. It can be done, but requires a lot of experience to produce great results. I’ve recorded an album that was 100% analog, from the studio, 8 track tape to mixing to mastering (old school, mastering straight to vinyl. Very interesting process!) to sending the master plates to the vinyl plant. Both the vinyl record and tape we released were 100% analog, the sounds had never been in digital format. It was time consuming, expensive and the end result while good had a few errors that would have been easy to fix in a DAW. So, fun experiment but I’m never doing it again!

5 Likes

I decided to just lower the bar and settle on limitations, so I bought myself a laptop for music making, but I’m not going to put any music making software on it.

6 Likes

Reminds me of that compilation on Tigerbeat6 from about 20 years ago where they got a bunch of artists to make music out of non-sound files like PDFs and whatnot.

No idea what’s going on with most of it, but there’s some good shit in there.

4 Likes

Great Fin you make what you want and trying new or old forms of being creative or productive is a process and shure you get something good from here also you can make your artwork for your music! On the laptop Congratulations

2 Likes

There was a great (free) software years ago called Soundhack which did just that- feed it text files, JPEGs etc and it would re-interpret (via some sort of FFT calculations) those files as audio. Great for really horrible noisy dissonant stuff. No idea if it still exits now, just did a cursory Google and what did come up wasnt the same as what i recall using back then. Of course Max would also be able to do this sort of thing no probs

1 Like

I know I’ll be feeding it into a granular synth engine that is definitely not on my laptop.

1 Like

@Fin25 @HotdogLothario This is exactly my situation right now. Zero getting done due to life pressure and just needing to rest at the end of the day instead of starting out on some music. IT helps to know others are in this too. I wish I’d learned more about production BEFORE I had kids!

3 Likes

I need limitations!

I’m at my most productive when I don’t get stuck in decision paralysis.

2 Likes

Camel Audio alchemy did this too. I assume the new version in logic would as well, but I don’t have it. Alchemy still works fine on Windows though.

Are these NE plugins working on apple silicon natively?