brettworks

(Photo: Adarsh Kummur)

“We improved our demos in incremental steps.
We evolved our work by slowly converging on better versions of the vision.”

Ken Kocienda, Creative Selection, p. 221

“While engaged in tinkering, you incur a lot of small losses,
then once in a while you find something rather significant.”

Nassim Taleb, Antifragile, p. 236

“Knowledge grows fractally.”

Paul Graham

The word iteration comes the Latin verb iterum or “again” and so to iterate is to repeat a process, to do something again and again with the goal of refining it or bringing it ever closer to a desired result. In computer programming contexts, iteration refers to a series of instructions (i.e. an algorithm) that is repeated until a certain condition is met. But iteration is everywhere we make things–from thoughtful practice to careful editing–because it’s the most reliable way to better understand what it is we’re trying to accomplish. Iteration reminds us that we don’t grasp the horizons of our actions until we’ve repeated them many, many times.

Iterating involves lots of trial-and-error experimenting, and more specifically, tinkering which means trying to improve something in a casual, playful way. Picture a sculptor chipping away at a form, an architect working up a blueprint, a cook altering a recipe, or a writer swapping out words and moving sentences around. Experimental tinkering often involves playing with different versions or formulations of an object or idea, different methods of production or arrangement, and different types of elements.

In music production, the horizon of possibilities expands in proportion to the producer’s practice of iteration. Put simply, the musician can’t know what’s possible unless they play around with hundreds and thousands of options to hear how they sound. This takes a lot of time, but results are guaranteed. One way to start is by changing a single sound repeatedly until it becomes a compelling presence you would never have imagined had you not created it. A more involved process is building up and stripping down a piece of music through an improvised system of arrangement and effects processing moves that you will never replicate. I do this a lot, and each time around a few more possibilities reveal themselves as a by-product of moves I (randomly) tried, as if the adjacent possible is whispering And have you thought about this?

Even if you never repeat the same sound design experiments, over time the iteration begins to imprint itself on you. I notice that I’ve developed the equivalent of a muscle memory for knowing how to activate creative cascades within my DAW. For example, I know that I can use this reverb to create a pitched-down, oceanic-like space around a sound. I’ve made enough versions of this space to understand that it’s a tool–a tool of affect–I can re-use when needed. Iteration has also inspired other ideas about how to make an oceanic effects chain, but by different means, how to narrow or widen a space, how to make it more noisy, and so on. Any production iteration becomes like a branch of an idea tree, off of which new discovery branches keep growing.

Another characteristic of iteration is that it amplifies an important general compositional concept, which is that starting points matter, but only to a point. Sometimes my beginning is a quick improvisation, while other times it’s a worked out sequence or rhythm. If I like how this starting point sounds I know that iterating in, around, and through it will probably lead me to discovery branches. There’s something freeing about finishing a track’s starting point and knowing that the next steps and beyond will be all iterative play upon what I have.

For these reasons, the most important music production move to perpetually evolve one’s workflow and skills is simply to keep iterating. The more you re-make the music from what it already is, the better you become at making something genuinely new come to be.