Segwist

If you are even a casual user of Twitter, you might start to wonder where your favourite applications and tools are in the Tweetosphere. While some claim the Twitter service is annoying, and degrading the quality of web publishing, there is a certain potential usefulness to a mere 140 keystrokes of information. That may seem small, but 140 characters are certainly enough for a quick bit of knowledge in music production land. Music production, like in Ableton Live. It’s definitely time that Ableton joined the Twitter party.

There is an official Ableton Twitter account, which perhaps takes the notion of German minimalism to a far extreme. Or they simply haven’t bothered to post anything yet. I would be surprised if this remained the case in coming months as Live 8 and even the Akai APC40 roll out into the retail world. For the time being, one of the better emergent Ableton Live related Twitter accounts appears to be the recently created AbletonTweets. If they can keep up the daily tips, they will be garnering thousands of followers within a dizzyingly short amount of time. Like, well, Ableton should be. This is of course simply using Twitter for something it’s good at. It is an externalised “Daily Startup Tip”, like the ones we all got used to disabling in most programs in the 1990’s. Here’s a recent one from AbletonTweets:

“Daily Tip: After pausing a clip in Ableton, you press play again and it starts over. Use the combo shift-spacebar to start where you stopped”

Sometimes the simplest tips are the useful stuff, as everyone is bound to interact with their software slightly different. How many people are manually renaming tracks or simply using their mouse to open the GUI of plugins? While these examples focus only on keyboard shortcuts, there is a lot that someone can say in 140 keystrokes, so we’ll be watching AbletonTweets with interest. As for Abelton themselves, they can be forgiven for simply securing their namesake on what is to some just another social media tool. It is perhaps better for a creative arts software company to simply stake out their land than make token efforts and seemingly give up. The Twitter account for VJ software Resolume seems a bit like this. Many software companies don’t seem to even bother, including Adobe, so the enthyusiasts are filling the gap. Adobe Lightroom enthusiast Scott Rouse for instance manages at the time of writing, a sizable 1232 followers for his TheLightroomLab tweets.

Imogen Heap - Photographed live by Eugene

Whilst a corporate monster like Adobe could easily get a third party agency in to do their social networking, or hand an internal a release schedule from the PR division, it is perhaps best when enthusiasts fill the gap of this kind of genuine engagement. Certainly music technology sites like Create Digital Music maintain a unique CDM feed that adds a little extra flavour to an already vibrant music production community. Many musicians make good use of Twitter of course, including the wonderfully eclectic Imogen Heap, with an insight into her studio and creative process. This has certainly inspired tweets from Segue, on the progressive house live act angle.

The list could go on, but the ever changing face of social media tools and their relevance to established products is an issue for the self appointed experts. For the time being, services like Twitter and participants like AbletonTweets do bring a useful sliver of information and inspiration to the digital artist. Certainly a little more useful than various Vladimir Putin imposters.

Tags: Ableton, AbletonTweets, Adobe, Imogen Heap, Lightroom, Media, Networking, Putin, Segue, Social, Tweet, Twitter, Vladimir

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 1st, 2009 at 8:06 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.