Thomas Brett
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A Tenuous Grip: Notes On Finding Sounds, Listening, The Arbitrary, And The Infinite
I’ve become faster navigating around the DAW—finding sounds, recording and adding parts, creating effects chains, and working with automation. But slower to develop is my sense of what a track needs. This sense depends on two skills. The first is discerning how the music—its structure, parts, and textures—might be made more affecting and enchanting. My… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Nicholas Cook’s “Music” (2021)
“The knowledge in terms of which universities operate is based on observation, systematized into generally applicable principles, documented and archived. It is knowledge laid down for the future, a kind of cognitive capital (hence the term ‘knowledge economy’). It is what performance students are taught under the title of ‘theory’, which suggests you become a… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Robert Twigger’s “Micromastery” (2018)
“Every micromastery is there to be twisted, turned, done back to front, messed up, and generally had fun with. It’s the way you learn the variables—how far they can be pushed and how they affect each other. One of the grave errors of learning-outcome-type teaching is that it moves too swiftly for endless experimenting and… Continue reading
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Art About Music: Vincent van Gogh’s “Marguerite Gachet at the piano” (1890, 1928)
“The wall in the background green with orange spots, the carpet red with green spots, the piano dark violet. It’s 1 metre high and 50 wide. It’s a figure I enjoyed painting – but it’s difficult. [Dr. Gachet]’s promised to get her to pose for me another time with a little organ. I’ll do one… Continue reading
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Notes On Analog
From around the 1950s to the 1990s, when most music was recorded either in studios or concert halls, its continuous waves of sound were mostly captured by microphones, sent into a mixing console, and printed onto magnetic tape. While the sources being recorded might be acoustic (e.g. an orchestra) or electronic (e.g. a synthesizer), the… Continue reading
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