Chair Dan Mortensen began the meeting with greetings and general business, including upcoming meetings and elections. He passed the mike and had all attendees briefly introduce themselves, and state whether they had done any analog recording. Some had, while many had never recorded anything but digital. Next, PNW Committeeman and meeting organizer Steve Turnidge related how impressed he had been when shown the capabilities of this software. He felt that this evolution of music software was now blurring former boundaries of software use - and to those not familiar with this evolution, may seem a bit "magical." He introduced the presenter, Matt Frazier of M-Audio.

Matt is a new regional rep for M-Audio in the Pacific Northwest, having been a musician in LA in a previous life. M-Audio (formerly Midiman) produces a wide variety of music recording and production equipment and is a division of Avid. They distribute Ableton Live from Ableton AG in Germany.

He showed a short video clip of San Francisco "Beatbox" artist Kid Beyond, demonstrating using Ableton Live to create richly textured multilayered performance pieces in live performance with nothing but his voice, some floor pedals, and his laptop with this software.

Matt then went on to show a more typical introduction to the program, showing the user interface and layout. His setup ran from a laptop, with accessory keyboard/control surface/MIDI unit, a trigger pad, microphone, and his guitar. The software runs on either PC or Mac platforms.

In brief, it may be said that Ableton Live is software for music production that no longer adheres to the previous software paradigm of imitating traditional analog production processes. Instead of being limited to perhaps just recording/editing or tracking, a complete world of music manipulation is available, even suitable for live performing.

Matt demonstrated creating some music by taking some musical samples and phrases, and manipulating the timing, pitches, and beats to make it all come together.

After a break for refreshments, the famous door prize drawing was held. 9 persons received M-Audio CD folios and 20 received M-Audio T-shirts. Steve Turnidge donated a "Weed File Sharing" T shirt, won by Devan Stovall, and a "Guitarmegeddon" T shirt, won by Seann Maria.

Continuing after the break, Matt continued with some explanation of preset capabilities, and adding his live guitar and vocals.

A discussion centered on the cloudy legal issues of using samples. Although one criterion might be, "Can you recognize the sample?", this is not legally uniform. Something else along the legal issue: "mashups" (pieces with recognizable phrases interspersed) - which it was pointed out, was not unlike DJing.

Thanks to Matt Fordham and Shoreline Community College for hosting the meeting.