Texture and Context

I started to really enjoy playing and listening to ambient music when I got into the Eurorack modular world. The only module that never left my case and was used in nearly every session was the Radio Music sample player. In fact, I had two pretty much always plugged into a mixer: 1 for voices/dialogue, 1 for atmospheric texture. It made a big difference in allowing me to play simpler, repeating patterns and sparser arrangements while still drawing the ear with evocative, transportive soundscapes.

I found it rather tedious to find the same immediacy in Live. Of course, it’s pretty straightforward technically to play those kinds of samples, but it takes a demotivating amount of clicks and compromises to set up. Even then, samples aren’t designed to continue to play while the transport is stopped, or remain unwarped and looped, or arbitrarily repitched. All this happens with next to no set up with Scenery.