“The performer necessarily comes at the music from within […] Most often the performance situation catapults a musician into a rare and unusual condition, one that reveals the basic features of experience with eloquent directness, free, at least to some extent, from the usual overlay of cultural and philosophical presuppositions that nearly always obstruct our awareness. What is this perceptual condition like?”
Arnold Berleant, “Notes For A Phenomenology Of Musical Performance”,
Philosophy of Music Education Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall, 1999), p. 75.
“One of the techniques that has appeared in the studio is if we’re looking for a very, very quiet, delicate performance making the headphones that the musicians are hearing very loud. So loud that if they play at normal level it’s deafening. It forces everyone to play so delicately that it’s almost as if just touching a guitar string—and it’s really loud—it creates a whole different feeling […] When someone’s playing very, very delicately and you mix it well, and you can hear it loud, you can feel the touch being so careful, it creates an energy that’s really beautiful to hear.”
Rick Rubin
“Flow sounds appealing, and it seems to frequently coincide with some of our most pleasurable pinnacles of human experience, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into optimal performance. In great athletes, performing artists, writers, chess-players, doctors, nurses, air-force pilots and others, beneath the surface of effortless flow is unrelenting determination. And if developing one’s potential is key to a meaningful life—developing what Immanuel Kant speaks of in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals as our duty to cultivate our ‘predispositions to greater perfection’—then flow, while bringing momentary happiness, might impede the attainment of that loftier value.”
“I worked on sound tissue sampling and processing an enormous amount of material taken from all releases, on vinyl and tape, of ‘Poppea’ that I found on e-bay and other e-commerce sites, and that I bought from consumers around the world, especially Italian. These old records, many of them damaged by time, have provided sound materials of great interest, such as glitch, skratch, krakle, on which I built the weaving of sound performance.”
“The most effective practice regimens avoid extended repetition, even if that means spending less time working on a target skill. Instead they harness the power of novelty and shake things up by blending an assortment of tasks, which results in sharper learning and stronger performance.”
Ron Friedman, Decoding Greatness
“Even if you don’t enjoy dealing with the complexities of a synthesis engine, you can still bend the sounds in other ways. Apart from standard MIDI articulation such as velocity, aftertouch and the modulation wheel, macros can be controlled from knobs and sliders on your MIDI keyboard. As the sounds can be played with dynamically changing colors, anyone can get creative—not only by choosing or crafting the ‘perfect’ sound but through intuitive performance.”
brettworks 
Leave a comment