brettworks

My hope for every music production session is for something unexpected to catch my attention and open a new perceptual world. But such worlds almost never open right off the bat. Like anything aesthetically significant, they tend to require time and attention–you have to work into them. How does one do that?

It helps to begin a project as simply as possible. I work with a single sound and a single part: hear what this sound can do, listen to what its part might bloom. But even a simple idea can quickly become cluttered. With too many notes and too many parts, suddenly the music–like a bad film soundtrack–lacks self-created space to resonate in. The piece feels stifled, and I do too. When this happens I again simplify, this time by removing material. Via negativa: the negative way of subtracting from something to understand and reveal its essence.

Consider an important point: every time we remove something from music in progress, unexpected worlds reveal themselves. Trust your ears. Is a part is too dense? Then mute some of its notes. Are sounds too long? Shorten them. Does a section appears too often? Delete.

In general, fewer parts and a lower density of sounds within each part allow more space for magic to transpire among the music’s elements. This even applies to chord size. When I’m figuring out a chord progression, limiting myself to triads gets a mood (or harmonic geist) across without the complexity (interference) of four- or five-note chords. For me, triadic emotion is clearer to work with because 3-note chords offer my hands fewer permutation options. Triads distill harmony to its simplest formulation.

One can even apply a via negativa approach to a sound’s timbre. For example, filtering out high or low frequencies makes a sound more murky and mysterious, or so thin you can hear beyond it. It’s as if a filtered sound’s missing frequency content asks our ears to fill in the difference left behind. This leads us to discern enchanting and hitherto hidden phantom artifacts that were there the whole time. (Or were they?) Or consider how a long reverb restricted to a very narrow (mono) center of the stereo field becomes a tonal tunnel for everything fed through it. Such timbre processing techniques are basic, yet perennially powerful ways of reducing material to enlarge its perceptual impact.

Finally, the most surprising production moments happen when I juxtapose unrelated, or partially related, contrasting parts just to hear what happens. For example, vocal samples set against already recorded chords creates unexpected euphony and harmonies I could never have finessed. Or an effect rack once used to disguise a piano is now reused on the vocal samples and creates a beautiful atmosphere. Our sense of Wow, I wasn’t expecting that is confirmation that perhaps we’ve worked our way into something significant. It’s in cases like these, when one re-uses what one already has, that serendipities sing (the topic of Chapter 1 of Principles of Electronic Music Production). In sum, a general lesson of the less leads to more concept is that finding frugal ways of making a minimum number of elements get along often reveals a music you didn’t know you were searching for.