brettworks

(Photo: Matt Seymour)

The sweet metaphor is not accidental: ear candy are little sounds added in and around a track to sweeten its listening experience, brief explosions of interestingness that bring sparkle, razzmatazz, magic affect and energetic pop to music’s edges. Ear candy are details finessed, differences that make a difference, light in praise of shadows. In a 2008 tutorial the producer Rusko called them incidentals. “Once we’ve got the snares and kicks in there, sounding nice and fresh, I put a few incidentals in—extra sound effects to give it that sort of shuffle. I’ve got a piece of filtered white noise for the start of the bar. It sort of thickens [the texture] up a little more, kind of fills around the top end.”

Produce your own ear candy to fill out a track from inside or out. Accentuate artifacts already in a sound: boost the noise with compression, highlight high frequencies with EQ. Or layer in samples from elsewhere to make a patchwork of timbre textures: a handclap to join the backbeat a smidge behind, buzzing transients hovering like kites high above a sub bass, a white noise riser cascading one section into another. Don’t doubt your music’s confection–we build to delight our ears.