Thomas Brett
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Keywords: Instrument Agnosticism
Pompeo Massani, The Itinerant Musicians (1880-1889) If you’re a musician, you’re devoted to a single instrument you’ve learned to a depth that it feels expressive. But a music producer’s devotion is diffuse–it has more than one object. It’s in this way that musicians who compose by producing are instrument agnostic. Agnostic not in the sense… Continue reading
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Musical System Lessons
“The album would not exist, really, without convert to harmony […] This system lets you produce a kind of trace, and its unreliability gives you this funny little grit of chaos that you can use to grow something cool.” Drew Daniel “I developed this system of taking samples of already existing components and extracting them… Continue reading
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Art About Music: Thomas Hart Benton’s “Evening Concert” (1952-1963) & “Sources of Country Music” (1973)
Thomas Hart Benton, Evening Concert (1952-1963) Thomas Hart Benton, Sources of Country Music (1973) Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music: Photek’s “The Hidden Camera” (1996)
Photek, “The Hidden Camera” (1996). This track is classic drum and bass that exemplifies the genre’s rhythmic inventiveness and orchestrational-arrangement resourcefulness. Photek (Rupert Parkes) builds seven minutes of music around eight or so parts that enter and exit the mix at 8- and 16-bar intervals. The through line is a skittish breakbeat (kick and snare… Continue reading
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Keywords: Quick Mixes
(Image: Fons Heijnsbroek) Quick mixes are brief sessions devoted to getting a track’s parts into a rough balance of volume, frequency, panning, texture-tone color, and presence. The track has been finished for a while and now you return to it with fresh ears to notice all that’s wrong. The voices sound dull and need a… Continue reading
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