brettworks

A workflow adjustment I’ve made in recent months is using a DAW template with most of the instruments I like working with. Prior to doing this, I would begin a piece with a piano sound. I still often begin with piano, but the problem with beginning with only a single (and familiar) sound, I realized, is that I forget about all the instruments at my disposal because I don’t see them in front of me. Maybe if they were in front of me it would occur to me to use them? So I set up a template with twenty different VST synthesizers and samplers (including mainstays like Serum and Zebra, as well as more offbeat freebies), each loaded onto its own track, ready to go, ready to be noticed. Inside each of these instruments are my own sounds, but more than that: each one I think of as a yet-to-be-explored universe where almost anything is possible. The prospect of getting to know these possibilities is both exciting and daunting. 

I’ve found that seeing the instruments in my template does shape how I work, mainly by spurring me into fresh directions. For example, Serum is where I’ve made many slow moving pad sounds (two of which I used in Slowdown). When I see Serum in my template now, those pads come to mind and I turn to them as starting points. I might mangle one of them some more, re-save it, and add to Serum’s library. But things get more interesting when I combine template instruments in new ways. The pad may come from Serum, but bass tones may come from an Arturia instrument, and a sample (or the whole track in progress) might be dropped into one of Native Instruments’ interesting granular tools whose potentials I only faintly understand. As the piece builds I may remember something about an instrument not apparent until now: Didn’t I use some static sounds in from there to make percussion? Didn’t I save a sine tone bowed sound in that library? A good chunk of the producing-composing process is letting one’s faint intuitions about what to do next come to the foreground of one’s consciousness and rolling with them as you put together disparate sounds and textures for the first time. Editing and finer judgments can come later.

As our templates facilitate the play of our faint intuitions, it’s also worth noting that we have no surefire templates for how to work. But maybe that’s a good thing, for if there were a script for how to assemble a piece of music, both the script and the music made with it would soon grow stale. In sum, setting up a template sets parameters for our creative play—parameters within which we seek a balance between, on the one hand, doing compositionally sensible things and, on the other, genuinely surprising ourselves by trying something that shouldn’t work, but somehow does. Templates, no template: each time we sit down to make music we’ll figure out anew a balance between adhering to constraints and going for it.