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The young men — and they are almost all men, dressed in dark colours — file in one by one. The room's lit like a nightclub, but some still double-check to make sure they're in the right place.
"Is this the Ableton group," asks a newcomer.
One of the night's organisers, Melbourne musician Tom Spencer, confirms it is.
"You look like a music producer."
Tonight's attendees, at the Arts Centre in central Melbourne, are here to talk about the ins and outs of Ableton Live, a kind of cultish piece of German computer software.
In the '90s and early 2000s, guitar bands dominated the airwaves. In the past decade, however, acts like Sydney's Flume (Hottest 100 winner, 2016), Chet Faker (Hottest 100 winner, 2014) and others — proponents of what has been called the "Australian sound" — have found fame in Australia and overseas. Their brand of sparse, deceptively complex electronic music is what Ableton Live is all about.
Created nearly two decades ago as a comprehensive way to produce and perform music on a single computer screen, Ableton is the modern-day producer's weapon of choice. The genre was once dominated by DJs with turntables and trucks full of vinyl. Now, all you need is a laptop.
"It's funny you mention Flume," Spencer, who has been helping organise these monthly Ableton User Group Melbourne meet-ups for five years, says. "He taught, very briefly, how to produce with Ableton in Sydney. He comes from this scene."
Ableton Live is as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Choose a drum beat from a seemingly limitless bank of sounds, and leave it at that, or create your own beat, tweaking every frequency in every conceivable way. Pick any other instrument — real or synthetic — and repeat.
"The reality is, if you want to, you can get your hands on tools that enable you to produce music that is at a quality that it can be released from your laptop — and, increasingly, from your phone," Spencer says. "And Ableton is really playing into that space."
It's designed to be easy to use. "Which is also its criticism sometimes," Spencer says. "That it's like toy music."
Tonight's event — the largest meet-up of Ableton enthusiasts of its kind in the world, Spencer says — is for beginners and experts alike. He takes the group through a few "basic" ways to use the software — "when the velocity goes up, I want the envelope filter to go up. Sounds pretty simple?" — then it's time for a meet-and-greet, followed by a presentation from Melbourne producer Martin King, who unpacks one of his latest tracks and talks through his approach.
"I came here to get some tips and to meet people," says another local musician, Rosaline Yuen. "It's a really nice and supportive vibe." Like Spencer, Yuen comes from a more traditional musical background: singing, guitar, piano. "I moved to London, and that's where I really got involved in electronic music, and since then I really haven't looked back. So my workspace now is pretty much with digital instruments."
The guitar v the laptop
"I definitely would call it the gold rush of beat-making at the moment," says Dave Ruby Howe. As music director of triple j Unearthed, he sees a lot of young artists coming through whose output is electronic.
"I think it probably started a few years back, after that first Flume record, and the effect that Sleepless and a few of those other songs had on people. There was just this massive rush of what, for that time, was being called the Australian sound."
That influence, Howe says, flowed on to acts like LDRU and Yahtzel, and coalesced around the Sydney record label Future Classic, who were putting out records by Flume and Chet Faker but also Flight Facilities and Seekae.
"It sort of splintered off from there — you've got some more introspective stuff, from an artist like Taku, to more big-room stuff like from Peking Duk."
You can see it coming through, still, in the emerging acts that submit to Unearthed High, the station's school-level competition, he says.
"Maybe 10 years ago you would have got a majority of bands, or artists, making guitar music in their garage," he says. "At the moment, you do see a lot of artists who are influenced by artists like Flume and they're starting out. They are not picking up a guitar first, they are picking up a laptop, and whatever software they can get their hands on."
Tim Shiel, a musician who for years has co-ordinated the Ableton component of Gotye's live show, says electronic music is definitely having a mainstream moment.
"I started making electronic music a little bit over 10 years ago. Even then, there weren't that many artists around exploring electronic music, and you wouldn't often hear it on the radio."
That has changed in the past few years, he says, particularly for EDM, the rave-friendly sub-genre most associated with acts like Skrillex, David Guetta and Diplo.
"It's so easy now to learn how to use a program like [Ableton Live]; it's so easy to have access to all of the sounds, and all of the software, that you need to create high-quality music — a lot of it for free.
"There has been this rapid democratisation of the tools in terms of creating music — and that's not just electronic music, but it's especially electronic music. That's why now you have, more than ever, young kids picking up Ableton rather than picking up guitars, because the barrier for entry is so low."
Putting the human back in electronic music
For all the focus at the Ableton Live meet-up on technical wizardry — how not to cancel out frequencies in your "lower end", for example — there's a through-line, and it's a pretty obvious one: what about just writing good songs?
"Just because you get it [Ableton], doesn't make you a great producer," Spencer says. "You've got to be able to write a song that works — whether it's for the dance floor or for the radio."
Those things that make a Flume or Chet Faker tune really stick — melody, harmony, an emotional gut-punch — are still important in electronic music, he says. Maybe more so.
"Because there's an expressive, natural humanness about most traditional instruments that is almost stripped away when you put them into an electronic context.
"If you want to make it great, you need to be able to just jam in that real emotional songwriting capability, and that comes from a command of the basics of music like harmony, melody, dissonance-versus-harmony, balance — all of that essential songwriting stuff that you can't learn just by whacking away at your computer."
Topics: electronic, internet-technology, melbourne-3000
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