brettworks

“Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its center and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognizable as your own.
The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.”

John Berger, About Looking (1980), 204-205.

There’s a type of being stuck that I quite like being in when I’m making music. This space–let’s call it a space of stuckness–can be described by what is lacks: nothing is working and nothing sounds good, no direction is clear, there’s no enchantment or mystery, no compelling focal point to focus on and pursue. It’s a musical standstill.

Being stuck can take a while to reveal itself. It takes me a few minutes, or sometimes much longer, to realize that yesterday’s methods aren’t working today and that something–Is it me or my techniques?–needs to evolve. And so the work begins. What do I do now?

A first step is to admit that, actually, I don’t like what I’m making. The music is cliché, too easy, predictable. This is often the case with the rhythms I make. After recording a pattern it’s clear that it’s lifeless. I delete it and try again. And again. And again.

The repetition of trying is important though, because it sets in motion a process in which uninteresting ideas are filtered out while focus sharpens. As focus sharpens the many sources of the rhythm’s lifelessness are clear: the drum sounds are obnoxious, the rhythm is too busy, the phrase length too short. The entire musical gesture is a square that boxes in the listener. As problem areas reveal themselves I play around with them: attenuating the sounds, muffling timbres, muting hits to open up space, elongating the pattern. I’m trying to make the rhythm interesting as a thing unto itself, as if it’s a complete piece of music–which it is. (This is a concept I call “Getting Each Layer Right” in my recent book.)

Playing around with a part’s parameters is a way to figure out—not in theory, but in practice—the kinds of sounds we like. Editing can turn an uninspired rhythm into one that’s quite alive, and effects treatments can be used to divine sounds we didn’t know were possible. To illustrate, I used these techniques to create the drum parts on my 2022 recording, Cadences II. For “Souls of the Just” for example, I played simple parts and then fed them through an effect chain of two delays, each with different settings. Why two effects devices? Because they increased the chances of something unusual happening. I wanted each device to shape and timbrally tint the rhythm and together create a composite effect. The track’s drum part only coalesced once I had effects-twisted it into a stranger form.

The point of this story about making rhythms is that being stuck happens at every stage of the music composition/production process. Beginning a work is one kind of stuck, and finessing parts or trying out effects or arrangements are other kinds of stuck. Come to think about it, I’m stuck all the time! But stuckness, and moving through its space, is the maker’s game. Creative work doesn’t require magical thinking, just persistent exploring of one’s options to inch a project forward. Keep going until you hear the music that you like–hold out for better.