brettworks

Paul Klee, Ancient Sound (1925)

“The key about a process is that it has time in it.”
– Nassim Taleb, Fooled By Randomness

When I’m writing new music I sometimes preserve one thing from a previous project, but change it slightly. Let’s say I’ve just finished a work for solo keyboard. Usually what happens is that I would have settled on a sound I liked–here, a pad–and then built a piece around that sound’s characteristics. This production-based composing proceeds by getting to know what a sound can do by figuring out things to do with it. In the case of this pad, it was little more than a saw tooth wave with its edges softened. But the little more part is important. As I played with the sound I noticed that my keyboard’s Mod Wheel controls the depth of an LFO pulsation built into the patch. I moved the wheel up and down to find a subtle setting where the pulsation is just barely audible. This faintly pulsating pad shaped the music I wrote with it.

Once a piece is finished, I think about how to do another one sort of similar to it. Why? Partly to build upon what has already worked, and also because doing a series of related works by keeping one variable constant and changing some other things brings a longer time perspective into one’s process. (Could I do a hundred of these?) Musical similarity can take many forms. The next piece might use the same sounds as the first. Or it could proceed in a similar way–harmonically, say. Or it could sound different, but have a similar mood. 

For the new keyboard work, I loaded the same pad and looked for parameters to change. The most obvious candidate is the waveform, which I change from saw tooth to triangle. What else? The reverb isn’t adding much so I remove it. The frequency cut-off filter is another obvious parameter to dial in, so I try different levels to hear if anything hits. What I’m adjusting for depends on the sound and the tenor of today’s encounter with it. In general, seek timbres that compel you and open fresh psychic places. Finally, there comes a point where I’m clearly spending more time developing a part than tweaking its sound, having preserved one element and recalibrated a few of its parameters. Now another improvisation adventure begins.