Finally the first Ableton Drummer Festival took place in 2022. Here is a little review on the event.
The idea and concept for the Ableton Drummer Festival
When I met Mesut at one of his shows, we dreamed about how great it would be to have more time to nerd and hang about Ableton Live and music performances. I had this conversation over the last years with quite a few drummers who are using Ableton Live but the idea never got thrown into practise. Obviously organising and financing such a meet-up, workshop and concerts takes a lot of resources. And the idea never came to light in the last years.
Due to all the covid restriction my urge to meet and hang with Ableton-Nerds got bigger over the last 2 years. Through covid a lot of events shifted online, which is great for getting access to resources and new connections – but it is not the same experience like having a ‘drink ‘n’ chat’ with someone on an event. And I was missing this experience. So it needed to be done!
Workshops + Concerts
We scheduled a full day of Ableton Live Workshops and concerts with plenty of time in between for people to connect.
I present my technique on how to play melodies and chord sequences via drums and MIDI controllers. This approach involves some Max for Live devices which makes it possible to perform electronic music without being fixed to backing tracks and BPM. Jan “Stix” aka StixOnSpeed covered the subject „Automations in Arrangement View“ for live-performances. And Madeleine Bloom showed how she integrates her gesture controllers MI.MU gloves into her Ableton Live performance.
For the concert I played my “Egoformation” set – were I use the Erae Touch as my main playing device. Then Mesut played his MST act combined with some live-visuals. StixOnSpeed was the last act of the night banging out some live Drum’n’Bass.
“What no live-stream?”
Yes unfortunately we couldn’t afford to set-up a live stream or to do a video recording due to finances. We wanted to focus on meeting ‘away-from-keyboard’ and creating a space for interaction between (smaller groups of) people. Obviously as the Ableton Drummer community is quite international there were a lot of people who wanted to participate who were not able to. I have to see for future events if this can be improved.
Future plannings for Ableton Drummer Festival
Well it is currently uncertain how and in what kind of format another festival could happen. Of course there are many ideas but I need to see if opportunities will come up e.g. maybe including this as part of another bigger event. Especially for the financial side of things it would be great to have some more stake holders for this. If you have any ideas going into that direction, please get in contact.
Cheers Tobi