Interview Liam Howlett

STEP-BY-STEP Tips on changing arrangements on-the-fl y

Live has revolutionised Prodigy gigs, so why not take advantage of its flexibility to add some on-the-fly excitement to your tunes? There are many ways to get creative in real time with Live, but one of the

easiest is to use hot keys to manipulate a loop, changing the length, the start and end points, and even bumping the loop markers backwards or forwards through a clip seamlessly. So the crowd’s

going wild during that monstrous build-up? Just add another 16 bars to get the place jumping. Need to add a little variation in that repetitive loop? No worries: here’s how.

1

Choose your clip to play – it will be better here to have a whole tune rather than a smaller loop so that you can really mess about with the various sections. Above the clip you’ll see what’s known as the Loop Brace – drag the edges to encapsulate an eight-bar loop and then hit the Loop button to the left of the clip to activate the function.

2

Press Play and the timeline will loop through the section selected by the Loop Brace – but why just leave things there? Using the Up and Down arrows, you can bump the Loop Brace forward or backward through the loop by the loop length. So, if you have an eight-bar loop you’ll skip through the track in eight-bar chunks, making it easy to repeat sections before moving through the track.

3

But that’s not all. By holding [Command]/[Ctrl] and using the Up/Down cursor keys you’ll double or halve the length of the loop. In this way it’s possible to keep halving the loop until it’s running at a 16th of a bar to get that funky stuttering effect. So without touching the mouse you can remix clips/tracks on-the-fly with just a few keystrokes, making any tune ‘your own’.

“In the studio I’m using Live alongside Logic and Reason.” Liam Howlett

The Prodigy’s recent stage shows have made maximum use of Live as Liam is able to spin different ideas together so that no two sets are the same.

He explains: “Well, we only use Live on stage. It’s the perfect tool for our band because it’s so easy to change the arrangement of a song on-the-fl y or throw beats over the top. It’s great for that instant fi x. You can go off into a jam in the middle of a tune and push one button and you’re back in your arrangement again.”

“It’s made the live show more fun from my side. It’s also a great tool to have travelling around – many an idea has been put down in a hotel room with it. It’s great at keeping me up all night!”

But Liam’s not just using Live for the touring experience. “In the studio I’m using it alongside Logic and Reason,” he reveals. “Some of the songs have been totally

Liam’s recognised the attraction of Live in a concert scenario, writing in hotel rooms on the road and back home at the studio.

50 Ableton Live MusicTech Focus

If the urge takes over to jam in the middle of a set, Live enables a smooth return to the script.

created in Live. It’s great at delivering weird timings on loops and creating off-the-wall loops that I couldn’t do any other way.” Futurescope So what would Liam like to see incorporated in future versions, and is there anything in its present incarnation that frustrates him?

“I haven’t found any annoying things – it’s more how other people use it. I’ve heard mix albums done on it where you can clearly hear the 16th slice chops in the music. That’s plain lazy – it mucks up the bass too much. It takes time to mark out the right waveform hits, but it can be done.”

So does Liam have a philosophy for music production; a rigorous system to get those tracks written? It seems not.

“Playing, drinking, recording, production,” he replies. So what does he have planned for the future?

“Writing the record, then I might have some sushi later. That’s about as far ahead as I think.” MTF M-16DX

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