As part of Australian Music Vault’s education program, women, trans and gender non-conforming individuals can hone their skills as electronic music producers with Operator, a six-week workshop using Ableton Live at Arts Centre Melbourne’s The Channel, from Thursday October 4 to Thursday November 8.
The mentors are Zoe Rinkel, Kids at Midnight, Bek Varcoe and Alice Ivy. The sessions cover introduction to Ableton Live including setup, navigation and creating drum tracks, sound engineering and mixing, recording and audio effects. In the final week, Ivy teaches sampling and, with Varcoe, punters will learn about live performances with Ableton.
“I’ve been doing these workshops for two years now,” Ivy says. “Whenever I’m in Melbourne and they offer me a spot I always grab it because it’s really, really rewarding to do.” To prepare, she has to “dust the cobwebs out of my production theory. A group of usually 20 female and non-binary people in the same space creating music is an amazing thing. They’re enthusiastic and keen, and it gets exciting when we create samples from a bunch of vinyl. It’s awesome and it’s r
eally inspiring.”
She has certain premises for the way she creates her music that she introduces to her students.
1. Minimal preparation, just experiment: Despite the impression you might gain from listening to her singles such as ‘Touch’ and ‘Almost Here’, she goes into a recording session with virtually no preparation. At the most, she might go into Spotify and find tracks whose sound she likes, and puts them in a file to refer to. “I go in with an open mind and I create something that excites me.
“That’s the vibe I create when I’m in the class too. As in, there are no rules, don’t feel there are boundaries. If you feel it’s right, just do it. These classes create a safe space for people to experiment. It’s their journey, after all, and each phase of skill development is different for everyone.”
2. Collaboration: “By working with other people, you get better at what you do. You bring your best songwriting skills and they bring their best songwriting skills to the table, and it’s amazing. Essentially you’re ‘stealing’ someone else’s songwriting and that’s totally cool.”
3. Never rush art: “It’s the best advice I’ve got [from Camp Cope]. When you start to have a team around you – management, labels, booking agents – you’re being told you have to rush something to coincide with something else. It’s not a healthy thing. If it feels right, it feels right. Because you need to put yourself as an artist first.”
Alice swears that Ableton made all the difference to being a producer. She’d started out playing guitar in a Motown-inspired band and had no input in the mixing of their records. “Then doing it solo in my bedroom, I didn’t need ten other people to create it. I started using it three years ago, and it completely changed my life.”
