brettworks

There are two techniques of composing I use that generate very different results. The first is the goes along with technique. The idea here is build one part then build a second part by playing along with the first. Then play a third part along with parts 1 and 2, and so on, one layer at a time. If I’ve begun with a beat, I’ll play chords along with it, and once the beat and chords are gelling, I have a foundation for more parts. The goes along with technique works well, but it rarely surprises because it bears the traces of our trying to fit one thing to another. The problem with layering parts is that it leaves little room for serendipity to shape what happens and to which we can react. (You can read stories of musical serendipity in my Principles of Electronic Music Production.) 

A second composing technique is juxtaposition. This is similar to the goes along with technique in that I’m still coming up with parts. But there’s a difference in that I compose the parts separately, without knowing ahead of time whether or not they’ll work together. 

To take the beat and chords example, I’ll begin by improvising some chords. But this is not just playing a few chords over and over. I’m aiming for a performance that’s much longer and whose outcome is far from certain. I don’t play to a metronome click, so the timing is freeform. And the length is open too: maybe it’s one minute long, maybe it’s six minutes. We’ll see. There will be mistakes and hesitations in the improvisation, but hopefully there will also be unforeseen musical lines and moments of accidental discovery. I know I have something useful when what I’ve recorded feels less like a repeating sequence and more like a little journey. (Sequences are okay, I just think they should be very long.) 

Meanwhile, I’ve finessed a beat that’s interesting on its own. The beat might have just three sounds, but I process each of these differently to generate multiple layers of movement. A kick-snare-hi hat beat might have two to four layers of processing per sound, so all of a sudden a small kit blossoms into some twelve layers of hits, resonance, noise, and echoes. The processing changes the beat’s timbre and rhythms too. I keep adjusting until what began as an obvious beat is now a mysterious one. By which I mean: when I’m unsure of how the rhythm is repeating and varying, I probably have something useful.

If I’m working with vocal samples as my third part, I’ll listen through and select bits that sound interesting, especially ends of phrases and moments of consonance. I’ll tidy up these samples by adding fade ins and fade outs to their starts and ends. 

But the exciting part happens when I try juxtaposing my chords, beat, and samples. It’s exciting because I don’t control whether or not the juxtaposition will produce any synergy. Sometimes nothing works, or lots of little things are off. When I bring the chords and beat together, the chords–because I didn’t record them to a click–change at odd places relative to the beat’s measuredness. Or the beat is fast while the chords meander. In fact, accidents of phrasing and timing between the chords and the beat can reach a level of strange I would never have thought to finesse by editing. The vocal samples introduce yet another layer of strangeness. They’re often in an unrelated key, or many cents out of tune. Even so, all this strangeness is promising! I let the parts play together for a while to see if I notice any congruities among them. I think what I’m listening for is anything that sounds like it was meant to be. Here and there are moments of synergy, but it’s clear that the samples need to be re-pitched a few semitones, or the chords pitched up. A lot of the production craft is nudging materials into roughly compatible shapes. 

At this point the juxtaposition of the three parts starts offering me ideas. One route forward is to carefully move the samples around and edit them so they make sense with the chords. For example, I might stretch a melody from 2 beats to 5 to match a longer chord. Such sample editing may lead me to realize that only one section of the chord improvisation is actually useable given what the samples are doing, so I keep the samples where they are and edit the chords. Or I might build a new arrangement against the beat, editing both the chords and the samples so they appear in a regular way–changing at the beginning of each bar, say. But sometimes euphony and synchrony happen by themselves. Like assessing a cool career in retrospect, things work out that really shouldn’t have: the chords and the samples are magically in the same key, or the pitches of the drums match the chords. How did that happen? 

The juxtaposition technique almost aways generates surprising ideas. It works because it’s nonlinear in the sense that it sets conditions by which a musical output is not proportional to changes in the composer’s input. In other words, juxtaposed chords, beat, and samples suggest a sum more than their parts, hinting at a dynamical system that evolves over time. Juxtaposition’s power to generate surprising ideas then, is an alternative to conceiving of tracks in their entireties before the process of building them. Instead, work on parts separately, then bring them together to hear how it all sounds.