Ableton have created the potential to revolutionise music making with their first foray into hardware design. If you require a hands-on approach to song creation, effortless in-key playing, song arrangement, and live MIDI sequencing, you’ve found your partner.
Capable of igniting a new love for production, Ableton’s new Push controller presents a whole new dimension to the process due to the speed at which you can work, and the fun had while pressing buttons which aren’t a mouse cursor. We spoke to Berlin-via-New Zealand producer Rodi Kirk about how he used Push alongside a Space Echo and a Juno 106 to perform his sparkling dub-infused track Underwater at Berlin’s Humboldthain. Read our interview below, and check out the videos to watch Kirk perform Underwater and discuss Push in further detail.
What kind of emotions do you like to express with your music, and what kind of vibe do you like to create at your live shows?
A lot of my music is inspired by imagery or scenes from films. I like to mute what the actual soundtrack is any see if my songs do a good job of syncing up cinematically. For my Solms EP I took inspiration mostly from the films of Antonioni and Herzog.
We’d like to ask about that performance of Underwater. Playing that guitar sample on Push, it sounded almost indistinguishable from real, organic guitar playing. What is about the way Push works that enables you to achieve this?
Well first of all, thanks, I am really happy you’re digging the performance. It was my first idea actually to use the huge touch strip and isometric pads of Ableton Push to emulate a pedal steel guitar as it’s actually super hard for me to play a real one, yet I love the sound of it so much. I really love the music of BJ Cole and Speedy West and wanted to find a way to incorporate these sounds into my own music in a way I could still have a lot of control over.
What are the benefits of controlling your Juno through Push and Live, as opposed to directly on the synth?
The benefits for me of having Push at the centre of that performance is that it means I can ignore the laptop completely. All the parameters of the Juno 106 and all the arrangement and mix elements of the song can be controlled directly from Push and I can also just reach over to affect the echo settings on the Space Echo. It is a way of limiting the options I have with Ableton in order to get more out of the performance itself.
And finally, tells us about your plans for the upcoming months.
At the moment I am working on a new live show with Aron Ottignon. Aron is a jazz pianist who comes from a very different world than I do musically but in that there are a lot of very interesting moments where our skills really complement each other. It’s very easy for jazz music to get left behind sonically with the relatively huge amount of sound design potential in electronic music and yet it’s also very easy for electronic music to fall into a trap where it can be quite static and lose some of the spontaneity of an improv performance. We hope to debut some material in the new year with a few shows and a live recording – I’m really excited about it!
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