brettworks

While there are no hacks to quickly producing quality music, a strategy that rewards a degree of patience is to get each layer of the music right before moving on to the next. This post answers the questions, What is a musical layer in a track, and what does it mean to get it right?

What Is A Musical Layer?
Each component of a track constitutes a layer of the music’s total texture. Typically, we can break an instrumental track into at least a few key layers which might include some version of: beat/percussion, bass, chords/pads, lead, foley/field recordings, and effects. Of course, a track can have many, many more layers, and my six categories of layers can overlap and blur at their definitional edges. For example, a bass part could also double as the track’s percussive layer, and so on. Still these six categories are a useful starting point.

Beat/percussion. A beat can take many forms and be built out of any kind of sound, but the most common sound sources are recognizable drum and percussion instruments, as well as drum machine approximations of drum sounds. (Remember the Roland TR-808’s un-cowbell cowbell?) A beat will often include a low frequency bass drum-type sound, a bright, mid frequency snare drum-type sound, and very high frequency sounds, like hi hats. These percussion sounds usually have sharp attacks and short durations. But you can make drum sounds out of white noise, snippets of field recordings, or samples of beat boxing and voices. A beat, however it’s constructed and from whatever materials, is often a track’s anchor in that it articulates and embodies tempo, rhythmic patterns, and a feelingful groove all at once. (This is why drumming is so interesting.)

Bass. A bass part is the main provider of low frequencies in the music. Synthesized bass tones and samples of bass guitars are useful, but so is a simple sine tone pitched down into the sub region. Bass tones bring depth and richness to music. There is nothing more substantial than the sound of a sub bassline lurking several octaves below the music’s surface, doubling a mid range chord’s root note.

Chords/Pads. Chords are often a track’s glue, connecting the bass and lead melody parts. Chords tell a subliminal story over time through their progressions, suggesting to the listener whether this is an up or a down feeling, pointing us towards any of the many in-between it-feels-sort-of-like-this feelings. Chords can be played on keyboard or stringed instruments, or even programmed in. And the same chord sounds different when you change its sound, so choosing your timbres is as important as choosing your chords.

Lead. A lead is most often a track’s melody, played on a monophonic sound that sings like a voice or soars like a violin. A track doesn’t need a lead, but when it has one we tend to focus on its doings.

Foley/field recordings. Foley and field recordings, processed or not, can be added to tracks as samples that add the depth and realism of the acoustic world by capturing its tactile materiality. (There are even effects plug ins, such as Devious Machines’ Texture, that use field recordings as textural sources to add onto any incoming audio or MIDI.) And field recordings can also be a source of tonal material. For example, you could transform your audio recording of say, wind chimes into MIDI data and then use this as the part driving a chord layer that uses a non-wind chime sound.

Effects. Effects include effects like reverbs and granular manglers as well as signal processing like compressors and EQs that you can use to color and morph the sounds in a track. It’s worth pointing out that effects plug-ins circa 2023 are so powerful that you can begin with the plainest and conventional sound (eg a piano) and transform that into something unthinkably (and sometimes grotesquely) different. This fact gives the producer confidence that workflow is not so much where you begin with a sound but where you take it to.

These brief descriptions of the nature of different layers in an electronic music track, while grossly simplified, offer a glimpse of the kinds of sounds producers often layer to make music. Two important things to remember here: a very complex track may have just a few of these layers, and conversely, a very simple track may include all (or many more) of these six layers.

Getting The Layers Right
Now we turn to the idea of getting each layer right before moving on. This has two components. The first is creating a sound and a part that are enchanting on their own, and the second component is committing to both the sound and the part.

We can illustrate by way of making a beat. You might begin with a tempo, choose an initial sound set, and build a kick and snare pattern. Onto this you might layer hi hats or other high pitched percussion parts around the kick and snare. You might quantize what you’ve played, change the EQ on each sound to make it bespoke and interact better with the others, then double or triple the beat’s length to make a 24- or 36-bar pattern. Next you might apply individual effects like delays or compressors to individual drum sounds within the beat pattern, so that each sound ricochets around and wallops in a unique way. But because of the effects’ effects, now you might go back and mute hits here and there, to make more space to hear the delays. You stay on this stage, tweaking the delays, until your beat is moving, aloft on the energies of its groove, self-propelling around and around.

Once this is stage is done and feeling cohesive you might run the entire beat through a multi parameter effect that adds subtle LFOs, glitchy stutters, as well as hard to quantify “vibe” via the noise and hiss of tape, and so on. If this is producing enchanting results, you might double the effect just to hear what happens, running what was just processed through one more layer of uncertainty. The goal of this dual layer of processing—and it could be triple if you want it to be!—is to transform your beat into a one-off sonic object you could never have imagined before making it. With some trying out of effects and parameter settings (especially the wet/dry knob which allows you to use each effect in your chain as a tint) you might find yourself with a beat with just the right amount of strange in it.

If you find that your beat is sounding good at this point you might move on with chords. I use chords in a number of ways. One way is to sketch a tonal journey for the piece. This sounds poetic, but it’s really about devising a sequence of chords (repeating or not) that gives directionality to the beat layer. Another function of chords is to establish a key for the piece; I often use just a single chord or even a single sustained note as a placeholder for what I might build later. A third function of chords is to play with, and work against, the sense of time set up by the beat. One effect I enjoy trying to create is a very slow rate of change in the chords over a fast beat. I wonder: Can I have something glacial over something kinetic and create a meditative feel? But as mentioned earlier, the chords you choose are shaped by the sounds you use. Here it helps to have some go-to evocative timbres at the ready, such as atmospheric pads. The faster you can get playing with a sound over your beat the better, because often the first things you try not just clues as to where to go, but your best crack at going anywhere at all.

As with your beat, take time to craft a chord sequence that surprises and moves you. It could be something short and hypnotic, or it could be something quite long and meandering that never settles. (I prefer the latter.) Ideally, you want a sequence that would sound good on its own if you muted the beat (as you just might in the track’s final arrangement, who knows). Another reason to take your time is that it’s from the chords that you could derive bass and lead parts later on. Chords are music’s most generative component; in fact, a whole piece may reside in just a few notes.

Getting each layer right before moving to the next isn’t the only way to put together a track. You could, alternatively, get each layer sketched out in a quick burst of production, then slowly finesse all the parts later on. (I do that sometimes.) But an added benefit of getting each layer right before moving on to the next is that you stand a good chance of generating parts that work well both individually and together. This can be handy when you’re arranging your piece: if you mute five of your six tracks, you can be reassured that what’s left will still stand alone. In sum, consider taking on the challenge of getting one thing right before moving into the next. It focuses us on just this layer, on figuring out ways of working with what we have to make a sound that’s interesting as is, before any other layers join the mix.