brettworks

“I don’t believe in influence
unless it’s you, yourself following your own track.”

Agnes Martin

On Reddit, a young electronic music producer is looking for help, asking for advice about where to find his sound. “I do not know” he writes, “where to get the sounds that I hear in songs or how to create them.”

By “sound” the musician means the style of production and signature techniques by which one’s music can be recognized by others. The musician’s question is simple, but its answer complex. As I read the replies (“Find sounds you love and tweak them”, “Really try and master your synth and DAW”, “Build up a folder of sounds you either love to re-use, or unique sounds you’ve made”) I thought about how I would respond.

Your sound has many sources, some of them specific, others vague. If the producer were an acoustic instrumentalist, his sound would primarily be in his touch, meaning: the way in which he approaches and plays his instrument. Musical touch is its own rabbit hole, but at minimum it refers to how and what a musician plays. Consider the example of the virtuoso pianist Glenn Gould, who had a hyper-articulated touch he used to great effect on his interpretations of Bach. When Gould played Bach, each line of the Baroque composer’s counterpoint had its own life, singing simultaneously with the other lines. Gould’s touch was also shaped by his sense of rhythm, which had a forward-moving urgency to it, and his sense of emphasis. On a recording of Bach’s “Prelude in C-Minor” for instance, Gould imbues each 16th-note in the flowing note stream with a different weight. This sense of deliberate measure is a part of touch too. Gould brought his precise sound to every piece he interpreted.

In contrast to the musician whose attention is focused on a single instrument, the touch of music producers is diffused through many parts of their musical systems (which sometimes include acoustic instruments). What this means is that their sound is not a function of how they play say, a keyboard as much as how they design, configure, and juxtapose sounds (with or without a keyboard) and use them. Producers’ touch then, is a function of many choices they make over a music-making workflow. What most producers play is not a single instrument but a musical system–today most often DAW software–as a kind of meta-instrument. Rather than use the DAW as mere multitrack recorder, adventurous producers play it as a multifold, ever-mutable sound-making environment without the single-timbre constraints of acoustic instruments. For these reasons, the sound of a producer, unlike that of an acoustic instrumentalist, is difficult to trace to a single source. Electronic music production practice is omnimusical in that producers’ musicianship resides in many places at once (e.g. improvising, composing, sound designing, arranging, orchestrating, recording, and engineering) as they make sounds by many means.

Returning to the producer who asked where to find his sound, here are some ideas. You find your sound as you learn to play your DAW as an instrument capable of making sounds you couldn’t have imagined until you heard them. You find your sound as you figure out how to (imperfectly) replicate sounds you heard elsewhere. You find your sound as you (accidentally) happen upon sounds and make pieces with them. You find your sound as you build a muscle memory for, and tacit knowledge about making sounds. You find your sound as you think about possible processes you’d like to try, then try them. You find your sound as you accelerate your workflow by recognizing what’s good enough to build upon. You find your sound as you trust your sense of which sounds are attractive and interesting and which ones aren’t. You find your sound as you feel your way into knowing why this sound is right, and that one isn’t. You find your sound as you choose to reject most sounds. And you find your own sound when you follow your own track to develop an aesthetic that is yours alone.