Thomas Brett
-
Perspective Lessons
(Photo: David Hockney) “I feel the important part of making a track is to recognize the point where you have to listen to what the track wants. This point comes in around 40 – 50% of the whole process, where it’s not so much about what you want with the track anymore, but what the Continue reading
-
Keywords: Closest At Hand Sound
Closest at hand sound is the principle of using the instrument, device, sound, sample, or effect that is easiest to play or manipulate right here, right now. The closest at hand sound trades vagueness for specificity, grand plans for small actions, possibility for commitment. The principle was explained by pianist and composer Harold Budd as Continue reading
-
Same Walk, Different Music
Benge, Twenty Systems, “1981 Yamaha CS70M.” Benge (Ben Edwards) is an English musician with a longtime interest in analog synthesis. His 2008 recording Twenty Systems is an archeology of iconic synthesizers that traces a history of selected models from the late 1960s to the late 80s. Each track features a single instrument recorded without effects, Continue reading
-
Keywords: Listen More
To Listen More is to understand better what’s missing from your music. To figure out how to improve it—finesse its details, make its rhythms move, its melodies conjure, its ambiances enchanting, its arrangements tight, its mixes cohesive—listen to how other musicians have approached these problems of tone, texture, time, impact, and form. Their music is Continue reading
-
Performance Lessons
“The performer necessarily comes at the music from within […] Most often the performance situation catapults a musician into a rare and unusual condition, one that reveals the basic features of experience with eloquent directness, free, at least to some extent, from the usual overlay of cultural and philosophical presuppositions that nearly always obstruct our Continue reading
-
Database: Leafcutter John On Sound Sources
“The rule is anything can be a sound source as long as it’s right.” Leafcutter John database Continue reading
-
Resonant Thoughts: W.G. Sebald’s ” A Place In The Country” (1998)
“What may be true of photography, though, is not necessarily applicable to art. The latter depends on ambiguity, polyvalence, resonance, obfuscation, and illumination […]” “Jan Peter Tripp’s paintings, too, have a consistently analytic quality rather than a synthesizing one. The photographic raw material which they take as their starting point is painstakingly modified. Artificial distinctions Continue reading
brettworks 