Breaking Free From A Modus Operandi Towards Enchantment

This happens to me all the time: 

I’m building up the music, fixing and adjusting things, calibrating and measuring, evening out and making everything balanced then I realize, crap, I don’t like it. 

The problem is that I’ve lost touch—temporarily, I hope—of what I would like to listen to. My busyness has assumed an outsized life of its own, forgetting that the point of this work is to make the music better, not worse to listen to. Why do I let this happen?

When you’re producing music you’re simultaneously a composer, arranger, engineer, producer, and listener tracking a huge number of variables as you go along. At any given moment, you might be doing one small thing while noticing many other small (and not so small things) in need of help next. Your attention is bouncing all over the place and you’re problem-solving on theoretical and physical planes at the same time. Not only that, you keep thinking about the music even when you’re not doing it, so that a run or a bike ride becomes a mental playback in which you revisit what you did or didn’t do or want to do as soon as you get home.

• 

I’m editing a drum part, zooming in onto its granular details, adjusting the volumes of things, then moving to effecting it here and there so that it has a reversing, inhaling sound. I’m not entirely sure what I’m aiming for, but I trust that I’ll know it when I hear it. I’m listening to a small snippet of the music over and over as I work, but my ears are always considering other things. (This is a useful modus operandi—to always be considering other things.) I’m fixing the drum part but still not convinced by how it’s sounding. It’s either too bright or too dark, too sharp or blunted, too static or too eventful, and most of all, it still isn’t moving me, perhaps because it doesn’t move enough itself. (Impress me!) So as I edit I’m even considering abandoning it altogether. (I may be the music’s shepherd, but I’m not overly attached to its components.)

Out of curiosity and a bit of desperation, I begin muting other parts because my attention can’t keep up with the music: the music has got out of control by prioritizing impressing me over enchanting me. I mute more parts and keep listening.Then I solo a few tracks in a novel combination that I haven’t yet tried: the lead marimba chords supported by some resampled marimba underneath them. I loop a section about three quarters through the piece and let it cycle. The marimba chords are right but in the wrong order (the lower-pitched one should come second) so I reverse them. The resampled marimba is a tad too quiet so I boost it. Then I look at the screen and listen. 

Hmm. 

I get up and walk around the room and listen. 

Not bad. 

I leave the room and keep listening and I realize that I like the sound more than the rest of the piece combined. Is the entire piece just preamble for this discovery? I copy the section over to the left so I can work on it some more. 

Is this sound I like the piece’s new beginning, or its culmination? Is it the music’s climactic point, or its undertow? A new direction, a variation, a coda? I don’t know.

But this experience offers lessons. First, approach the music, as much as possible, as a listener wanting to hear something enchanting. If the music doesn’t sound this way, something’s wrong—not with the listener (you) but with the music. Remember that music’s most meaningful metric is whether its sounds make you feel something. The second lesson is it doesn’t matter how you arrive at enchantment—you can use maximal or minimal means, one sound or a hundred to get there. Lastly, the graphic representation of the music’s parts on the computer screen only tells part of the story about where you might want to go with the sounds.

Let your ears guide you.