Month: November 2019

interesting – holding or catching your attention;
from Latin interesse ‘differ, be important’

A surprising percentage of my production tinkering involves trying to get a part to sound more interesting. Recently I was adjusting piece no. 6, which had never been among my favorite tracks, but I had committed to making it better by increments. The track was coming along, but didn’t become compelling music that I looked forward to returning to until I made some changes to the bass near the end of the piece. 

Because of the repetitious listening involved in music production, you get to know the parts of your tracks to a degree that you hear them even when you’re away from the mix. But remember: this familiarity doesn’t mean the parts are forever fixed (yet). It often happens that as you listen to a track you hear a part doing something familiar, yet wish it were doing something (or the same thing) different. As I was listening to no. 6, I wanted the bass to do more than it was doing. The part was providing a foundation for track by hitting low tonic notes every few beats. The problem was that the bass wasn’t going anywhere, and as I listened I wished it were. 

I tried out alternate pitches for the bass, changing some of the notes so that now the bass it had its own motion, and even better, now created some new harmonies in combination with the other pitched parts. Some of the new bass pitches were lower and some higher, each of which required additional volume boosts and cuts so that the notes sounded in line dynamics-wise with the rest of the music. Overall, this after-the-fact playing-with-a-part’s-pitches-to-create-new-harmonies is one of my favorite techniques, simply because it achieves sounds I would never have arrived at when I recorded the initial part. 

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My alterations to the no. 6 bass part got me thinking about what else I could do to help the track. I turned my attention next to the timeline, which is a pitched, harp-like-but-not- harp sound that pings in a fixed rhythm through sections of the track. When I recorded the part, I liked its steady rhythm or groove—it was like a bell that linked the other parts together. But now, encouraged by what I did with the bass, I wanted the timeline to do more. I wanted the part to telegraph a sense of musical line and to have more presence. 

Speaking of presence: one audible fact of some electronic dance music is that a majority of its elements sound as if on sequenced auto-pilot, serving groove ends at the expense of other musical qualities. Perhaps the problem is not the use of digital tools or DAW sequencing per se, but rather the producer’s lack of attention to altering the details within patterns to keep them interesting. That four-on-the-floor kick drum can be programmed in a minute, but it may take significantly more time to transform it into a compelling musical line of its own. 

So I changed the pitch of a few notes of the timeline, listening now to the altered bass part below for hints on how to proceed (contrary motion always works well). It was a start, and soon the timeline sounded more supple.

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After I made small alterations to no. 6’s bass and timeline parts I pondered a foolproof music production hack: 

make it more interesting. 

The reason no. 6 hadn’t been among my favorites is that it lacked interest and failed to hold my attention. The track didn’t have enough differ, be important moments among its parts to compel me. Changing bits of the bass and timeline parts helped, and also sparked ideas for more elaborate musical transformations which I’ll keep trying to implement until the track sounds like it has everything it needs.

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Coda: I think about musical interestingness as I listen to other musics too. In pop/hip hop I sometimes hear interesting sound design (e.g. a synth pad), but alas, the instrumental tracks are designed to be insistently catchy, rather than interesting. In some experimental electronic music I hear interestingness that flirts with being difficult and/or hard to interpret—as if to be interesting one needs to be difficult. Blanketing sounds in noise and distortion, for example, is interesting to a point, beyond which it’s difficult to interpret because the signal to noise ratio is literally out of balance. Another frame for thinking about musical interestingness is TV ads, which overlay visual narratives onto (often familiar) music to heighten the narratives’ emotional impact. We hear 80s pop in an investment ad, jazz in a hotel ad, country music in a truck ad, and hip hop recast as comedy in a soda ad. I often have the feeling that musical interestingness is rarely for its own enchanting sake, but instead subservient to being catchy, being difficult, or selling a feeling.