Mash Ups With Ableton Live 8

So a couple of years ago I was lucky enough to win a full copy of Ableton Live 8 Studio in a competition run by Computer Music magazine.  A fantastic prize, worth about £800 in total.  The problem was my Dell laptop was not up to the job of running it, so after a few frustrating months of dabbling with music creation, it got parked on a shelf and gathered dust.

I am now the happy owner of an iMac, which is more than capable of running Live and more besides, so am back on the case with music production.  Live is a beautiful, feature rich product.  The question now was how do I go about learning how to use it? I have settled with going for a grey album style project.  This was Danger Mouse's mashup of Jay Z's Black Album and the Beatles White Album (in reality the album is just called "The Beatles" but has a white sleeve) Actually it will be more of a slack album project, as have lifted some of the grooves from this album and the person that did it has been very helpful on some of the theory aspects to their work.  

I am going to do this with a mash up of The Pixies "Trompe Le Monde" and The Black Album.  Have made a start and my first song will be "What more can I say" mashed with the Pixies "U-Mass".  The Pixies album (unsurprisingly) does not have the same tonal colour of a Beatles album and Frank Black does have a habit of swamping his music with vocals, but think there is enough variety to come up with something interesting and original.

I will blog my progress on this and post the finished songs as and when I do them.  My working title is Trompe Le Noir.  See what I did there?