I placed an order for Quark XPress and Ableton Live at an online retailer for customers in academia. I figured all these night classes I'm taking ought to qualify me for some student discounts on software, right?
According to the site's order status page, my order is still being processed and hasn't been shipped. But when I came home from work this afternoon, I saw a UPS slip on my door. Oooh! Perhaps they managed to get my order to me after all! (That doesn't reflect too well on the accuracy of their online status page.)
So I called UPS to arrange a pick-up, and I headed over to the delivery center all the way across town to pick the package up.
After returning a call from my mom, I finally opened it up. I saw Quark XPress, but I didn't see Ableton Live.
Damnit!
I've been working on the Lite version of Live, and it's extremely limited in what it allows you to do. I think I finally hit on a way to perform Terry Riley's In C as a one-man performance. A bit of background: In C is considered the piece that ushered in the minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. It's essentially a big sheet of paper with 53 motifs. An ensemble of any size and instrumentation plays those 53 motifs in sequence, but each player can decide how many times to repeat, when to start playing and when not to play. The alleatoric nature of the piece yields some terrific textures.
As a way to get familiar with Ableton's session view, I programmed the maximum of tracks with the maximum number of scenes available in the Lite edition with the first few motifs from In C. Now if I only had the damn full version I order more than a week ago, I could get somewhere with it.
But at least I've got Quark with which to make my album covers. I didn't know the founder of Quark is gay.