brettworks

(Photo: Markus Spiske)

One of the aims of music production is making sounds that are emotionally moving in subtle, complex, and enchanting ways. A process for achieving such sounds is to stack simple signal processing plug-ins and running your sounds through them. Stacking means to connect serially (one after another), and simple tools are conventional effects and processors such as reverbs, delays, eqs, bit crushers, and compressors, not to mention the dozens of other devices in your DAW software you have yet to use.

Stacking simple tools is a non-technical and therefore elegant and artful way to produce intricate sonics. Try different processing combinations and follow your ears as to what sounds good. Stacking’s magic happens when multiple plug-ins interact in unforeseen ways to generate cascading, composite effects. Unforeseen interaction is our goal: in fact, it’s the surprises of the musically not-yet-heard that stacking enables us to pursue.

One way to practice stacking simple tools is to sequence a drum pattern and then process its component sounds one at a time. With a beat in hand, experiment with processing its individual percussive voices with delays, LFOs, and filters to alter their rhythms and timbres. Maybe the snare gets echo and a moving filter, while the kick glitches and re-pitches here and there. Once the individual drum sounds are processed, process the beat’s entire soundset in a similar way. Maybe compress and expand it and then cut out the highs? The result of multiple rounds of sound-shaping may produce a result so unlike what you began with as to render where you began unimportant. (Recall John Cage’s advice: Begin anywhere.) Unsure as to where to begin? Start with the most generic kit and then process your way forward, optimizing for interestingness. In sum, stacking simple tools allows us to start with one kind of idea and transform it until it’s altogether different. So keep going, keep stacking, and keep processing until it sounds like you’re in a place you don’t recognize but want to stay in for a while.