brettworks

Music production involves a computer trackpad and screen. Figure out how to transcend them.

The music’s goal state is a recording that isn’t a performance, but an evocation of one, a simulation of music-making that never transpired in real time. But are there other ways the music can perform?

New instruments are developed at a faster rate than they can be learned to be played. Slow down by doing everything with just one instrument at a time.

Music production stiffens rhythms. Quantized, gridded, frozen-in-place beat-making is prioritized over flowing, off-the-grid, ambiguous pulse-making. Rhythms regress towards a 4/4, the beat is right here average, imprisoning the music’s other parts. The most interesting musical patterns—like the most interesting people—live in meaningful deviations from the mean.

Repetitive and predictable arrangements come at the expense of subtler and unexpected forms. A musical line has a life: instead of looping parts, always develop them.

Music software’s possibilities for novel sounds and unlimited instruments distract from more elegant compositional solutions. Remember: once you have a sound or a part, you potentially have a piece. Begin with interesting fragments and then find ways to develop them fractally.

We can’t touch software, yet we seek music that touches. Trust how the thing—the sound, the part, the simulated performance, the flowing rhythm, the unexpected form, the fragment, the mistake—makes you feel and build on it.

(If you’d like to learn more about these topics, you can read my Principles of Electronic Music Production).