brettworks

In music production you find yourself in situations that frame the music-in-progress in one way or another. Some of these situations you want to resist and some you want to amplify. You resist a situation when it constrains how the music could develop, and you amplify a situation when it encourages the music to go in interesting directions. Here are four resist & amplify examples.

Noise & Signal
What you ignore and pay attention to in your work defines the fundamental skill of noticing. Noticing is the first step towards learning and knowing. There’s so much to notice in production that informs one’s omnimusical composing: the grain of the sounds, the relationships among sounds and their composite textures, the flow of rhythms, the arc of structure. Noticing is intuiting what is central in the music and what is peripheral. For the producer, noise is a sound that’s low in information, while signal is rich in information–it contains what Gregory Bateson called the difference that make a difference. When you’re producing you’re aiming to amplify everything in the music that’s signal-rich. As you listen, ask whether each sound needs to be in the track. If it’s part of the signal, it has a reason to be there. Everything else is noise.

Confusion & Clarity
When noises outweighs signals in the music it sounds like confusion instead of clarity. For example, when there are too many parts, when parts are wrong, when parts don’t fit with one another timbre-wise, or when the frequencies of parts clash and mask one another, the result sounds confusing. As you listen, ask What is not clear and how can I make it clearer? Maybe parts can edited or removed, maybe sounds can be altered? When the music’s parts and sounds fit together, the total sound has clarity.

Repetition & Variation
Repetition is stasis, variation is change. Repetition is a powerful engine, but its relentlessness benefits from small changes or variations to keep it aloft on its energies. Think of an analogy to running: the repetition is daily, but the running routes and tempos change constantly, making the experience the same but always new. As you listen, figure out where in the music repetition is effective (i.e. hypnotic and entrancing) and where variation might generate stimulation.

Immediate & Slow Release
Some techniques of music provide immediate gratification while others work through slow release. Immediate gratification production moves are lazy, predictable, cliché, and easy: the 4-bar loop, the percussion fill into the cymbal crash, the riser falling into a drop, the quick cadence. A slow release approach shows the producer trusting listeners’ skill to notice details by, for example, avoiding short loops, holding off on percussion fills (maybe forever), finding riser alternatives, and extending chord sequences so that they (ideally) never resolve. As you listen, figure out which parts of the music are painting it–and you, and the listener–into a corner and then find a way to slow down their trajectories.