brettworks

(Photo: rolandus.com)

Effects chains are black boxes for processing sounds assembled without knowing their musical output until you hear it. Think of them as routes for sounds to travel, flowing from one effect to another and picking up distortions, resonances, artifacts, and colorations along the way. Effects chains allow the producer to think big by creating conditions for a sound to metamorphosize itself, starting as a linear thing and becoming a nonlinear something else. Effects chains embody an ideal production process free of preconceptions, yet full of curiosity’s affect, as if asking If we do this, how will the sound sound? Keep playing with the chain’s parameters—a little more of this, less of that— to find a point of balance, to find a composite timbre that sings the interesting.