Recording - August 2011 - 46

REVIEW BY M I K E M E T L AY

FaderPro Are You Able?
FaderPro has a unique take on the process of audio technology education. If the first thing a novice asks is something along the lines of, “Isn’t there any way I could sit in a room with someone who really knows how this stuff works, and follow along with him or her and watch how it all comes together?”, then maybe that’s what their tutorials should provide. With that in mind, FaderPro offers tutorial videos and supplemental materials that aim to put the user in the studio with a knowledgeable professional, watching how a song or remix is assembled, and then given the raw materials to try it at home. One of the first of FaderPro’s offerings is Are You Able?, an Ableton Live-based start-to-finish guide to song creation and production. I had a chance to go through the course and see for myself how the FaderPro approach works. What you get, how you start The product is available as a download or on DVD-ROM; it contains 18 QuickTime movies (17 chapters of roughly 3 to 15 minutes in length apiece, plus a short introduction, all in HD) and a set of Source Files, five self-contained Live Projects that you can launch and play with on your own computer to see and try out what’s being discussed in the movies. As is common with these tutorial software projects, the full version of Live 8 is required to access all of the features. In the first video, we’re introduced to Ivan Corraliza, also known as iLL Factor. He’s a producer who’s worked with artists from Lil’ Wayne to Matisyahu to Justin Timberlake, an impressive roster that’s given a mercifully short few seconds of shout-out time before we get to the meat of the series. More importantly for our purposes, Mr. Corraliza is friendly without being smarmy, an honest and rather engaging speaker with only the occasional “um”, and is obviously working from a carefully-prepared, well-rehearsed, teleprompted script with very neat editing for a smooth flow of speech and ideas. The tutorials are filmed in The Mix Room in Miami. After a tantalizing look at the gear-crammed Studio A, complete with Neve console and rack after rack of vintage
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Look over a pro’s shoulder—and play with his tracks
The videos switch back and forth (or splitscreen) between actual footage shot in the studio and nicely-captured screen video of Live in action, with the cursor highlighted at all times by a red circle and judicious video zooms to focus the user’s attention on the right part of Live’s screen without distractions. Mr. Corraliza encourages the user to pause frequently, take notes, and review as needed to be sure everything is clear, and while there’s a lot of information being imparted, it never feels rushed or overly compressed timewise. The flow of the course There are many different ways to approach song creation, even among many users of the same software, and this tutorial points that up very strongly. Rather than offering a variety of approaches with equal merit, it unashamedly says, “This is how one person who’s good with Live does it; you can try your own methods and workflow later, based on what you’ve learned, but for now, you’re going to do it his way.” If you’re not the sort who’s fussy about being ordered around... or if you’re a novice who’s terrified by a blank Project daring you to do something with it... then you’ll have no trouble sitting back and letting Mr. Corraliza walk you though how he puts a song together. Because of this focus, there’s only a little bit of digression to point out Live’s features as you work; the “introduction to Live” in the first chapter covers little more than the Session View, the Browser, where to find your plug-ins, and how the mixer channels work, because our teacher is eager to get composing and that’s all he needs to get started. And get started he does: we’re immediately dropped into building a beat with Impulse and Drum Rack virtual instruments, recording and quantizing MIDI, adding loops and recording your own while messing with Warp markers to control the groove, experimenting with sounds to search for inspiration, using Simpler to turn sounds

signal processors, Mr. Corraliza takes us to the smaller and much less distracting Studio B, where he lays out the much more approachable gear he’ll be using for the tutorials—a Mac with a small audio interface, a control surface/MIDI keyboard, and of course Live 8.

Recording - August 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2011