Exploring some quiet ambient sounds, effects and loops in an Ableton Live set

An Ambient Work-In-Progress

Blog post here: https://www.tomsmithguitar.co.uk/post/towards-live-performance-improvisation

16.02.22

Instrumental score for a dance & lighting retelling of the first book of Virgil's Aeneid, performed in London in October 2022.

Lighting Design: Tyson Miller and Edgar Bermon
Choreography: India Smith
Music: Tom Smith
Classical Reference: Dominic Kane

Arma Virumque Cano

Experimenting and improvising with some effects in an Ableton set - mainly two instances of the Pitch Hack device, with a processed field recording of a walk through London as a backdrop.

Classical Guitar And Electronics - Ambient Jam 1

This is a work-in-progress draft of a new piece, working title 'moving, but not moving'. Initially inspired by the photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Sugimoto talks of the camera as a time machine: a device that can stop time so that we can inspect moments in more detail. He also uses the camera to collapse time; long exposures condensing periods into a single frame.

My plan was initially to use time-based effects (delays, granular synthesis) to manipulate the temporal profile of material played on the classical guitar, but here I hint at that through the material itself. Thinking of works like Reich's Four Organs and Nicholas Moroz's guitar and electronics piece Semantron, I took the approach of gradually augmenting a simple idea, here a descending three-note scale. I start by playing this as a block chord, then gradually arpeggiating it while adding in further notes until it becomes a sort of melodic riff, I suppose. I then poke around within this riff, exploring what I'm calling 'microphrases', as if concentrating on a small area of a photograph and teasing out its contents in more detail than possible if looking at the whole image.

The electronics (a long reverb and two bitcrushed delays in Ableton Live) augment the guitar's sustain, and allow time to be 'stacked-up' on itself. The delay chain creates a drone by the end which reminds me of the sea in Sugimoto's photograph - frozen by the medium, but somehow giving the impression of movement.

Lots more work to do on this, including developing the melodic material further (to move it away from D major, more than anything) and fine tuning the electronics (boring stuff like the amount of feedback on the delay and the EQ on the reverb). I also need to map the effects to some pedals, so that I can play this in real time (here I recorded the guitar dry and then added the effects afterwards). This should make the whole thing feel more interactive, and I'd like to exploit the call-and-response potential of the delay lines more.

moving, but not moving (Draft 20/01/24)

This is a classical guitar improvisation into a Max patch created by Kory Reeder, for his piece 'If The Thought Evaporates'. 

The patch contains six 'intelligent oscillators' which listen to the input and each make decisions about frequency, duration, amplitude and effects processing. I've written an analysis of this recording here: https://tomsmithguitar.substack.com/p/improvisation-and-analysis

I recommend listening to the album of realisations of this piece, released on Full Spectrum Records: https://fullspectrumrecords.bandcamp.com/album/if-the-thought-evaporates

For more on Kory Reeder, visit www.koryreeder.com

Dronebot Improvisation (classical guitar and live electronics), 21/07/25

Improvisation using devices from Rodrigo Constanzo's Confetti suite of Max for Live devices (www.rodrigoconstanzo.com). More info in the blog post here: https://open.substack.com/pub/tomsmithguitar/p/confetti-while-the-cat-sleeps?r=36ygdb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Equipment: 
2015 Angelo Vailati classical guitar
Warm Audio WA-14 (dry signal) and DPA 4099G (for processing)
RME Fireface UC
Ableton Live 12 with Confetti M4L devices by Rodrigo Constanzo and LiquidSonics Reverberate

Confetti (while the cat sleeps) [Improvisation]

Experiments with generativity and chance in Ableton Live... There's no guitar in this yet, but maybe it can open up a pathway for me to improvise?

Contains three field recordings by Luftrum Sound Design, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0) (https://www.luftrum.com/free-field-recordings/). These recordings are fed through a granulator. Everything else is generated using software instruments within Live.

Generative Jam

This is a short clip of a play with a recent electroinstrumental improvisation system I've been developing in Ableton Live. It uses one-to-many mappings and automation to create a sonic terrain in which I am instantiated as a wayfarer. I'll be talking about this performer-centred system at the Royal Musical Association Conference in Southampton this September.

Equipment:
Angelo Vailati 2015 classical guitar
Warm Audio WA-14 (dry guitar mic) 
DPA 4099G (processing mic)
RME Fireface UC
Ableton Max for Live, with an additional M4L device from Rodrigo Constanzo's Confetti suite and Shuffling from the GRM Tools Classic plug-in bundle
iRig Blueboard & 2x M Audio EX-P expression pedals

Audio mixed in Logic Pro, with Liquidsonics Reverberate (Bricasti M7 Fusion-IR)

Interdependence 1.1 (extract) (150825)

I'm composing a piece that uses concatenative synthesis at the moment, and this recording was intended as a test of percussive, non-pitched guitar material with which to play the concatenation. On finding that nothing seems to be quite giving me what I want, I ended up using this exercise primarily as an excuse to let off some steam. 

This will probably be used in a blog post very soon - check back for the link!

Tech:
2015 Angelo Vailati classical guitar
Warm Audio WA-14 (dry mic)
Schertler Basik (for audio feed into the concatenation) 
RME Fireface UC

Concatenation system built in Max using Rodrigo Constanzo's Data Knot toolkit: https://rodrigoconstanzo.com/data-knot/
The corpus is Constanzo's own 'Accordion Noise', which comes with DK
Mixed in Logic Pro, using iZotope RX and LiquidSonics Reverberate

Burnoff

Five Short Preludes for Prepared Guitar - Nicholas Barrett

classical guitar
live electronics
comprovisation

PhD researcher at Goldsmiths University, London

Tom Smith

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