creative strategies
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Arrows Of Attention: 100 Words As Creative Actions
1. Accept 2. Accumulate 3. Age 4. Animate 5. Articulate 6. Assign 7. Borrow 8. Brighten 9. Build 10. Channel 11. Chart 12. Compress 13. Complexify 14. Configure 15. Contour 16. Copy 17. Counterpoint 18. Darken 19. Decorate 20. Define 21. Delay 22. Delete 23. Detune 24. Diminish 25. Doubt 26. Drum 27. Duplicate 28. Continue reading
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On Conjuring And Capturing: The Jar Of Fireflies Concept
The cover for my most recent recording, Piano And Metals Music, is a composite of two images: a metallic surface, and fireflies. The metallic idea was mine–I was trying to represent the metal instruments in the music (gongs, kalimba, and finger cymbals, if you were wondering). The firefly idea was inspired by a comment made Continue reading
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Notes on Dennis DeSantis’s “Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies For Electronic Music Producers”
“Making Music is not a collection of vague aphorisms. Instead, it combines motivational ideas about the philosophy and psychology of music-making with hands-on tools and techniques that musicians of all kinds can use to really get work done.” – Dennis DeSantis, Making Music Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies For Electronic Music Producers (2015) by Dennis Continue reading
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On Editing Music While Listening And Looking At It
While working on a musical project recently I realized the value of editing while looking at the MIDI notes. Listening to the music while following along each part one at a time lets me see what’s sounding and then make the appropriate changes in dynamics and arrangement. For instance, I can hear that there’s a Continue reading
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On Endless Beginnings
Some twenty years ago the professor for my Psych 101 class once said “Never be afraid to be a beginner. Because you’re going to be a beginner over and over, all your life.” It was good advice, and it came to mind recently as I was browsing through old music files on my computer. In Continue reading
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Reflections On Several Musical Projects: Thinking About What Worked (For Now)
Reflecting on some recent musical projects of mine, I noticed a number of techniques and strategies I used to build them: I used my own (sampled) sounds. I’ve written here before about my frustrations with making electronic music. But using my own sounds makes the process personal and somehow more sensible. I improvised a performance Continue reading
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On The Music Making Of Jon Hopkins
“My general view is just to have absolutely no planning in place at all and just to let my instinct kind of run wild a bit.” – Jon Hopkins Lately I’ve been enjoying the music of English composer Jon Hopkins. His recording Immunity (2013), shortlisted for last year’s Mercury Prize, is a tour de force Continue reading
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On Four Tet Remixing “Thriller” In Ten Minutes
I recently watched and re-watched a wonderful video in which Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet) remixes Michael Jackson’s Thriller as part of the “Beat This” series. The challenge is to make a remix in ten minutes. The catch is that Hebden can only use sounds from Thriller. What makes the video wonderful–even a little thrilling–is Continue reading
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Notes On Another Kind of Wonder: A Phenomenology Of Remixing
“I confronted the tradition directly as a sound form and kinesthetic activity, and made it my own in an act of appropriation that transformed me, my self, into something I hadn’t been before, a person capable of playing in this tradition with at least minimal competence.” – Timothy Rice, “Toward a Mediation of Field Methods and Continue reading
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On Composing At 40,000 Feet: Afrojack And The Soaring Economics Of EDM
In a recent New Yorker article, Josh Eells describes the economics of the electronic dance music (EDM) scene in Las Vegas. Here, working at gambling resort clubs, marquee-name DJs (Armin van Buuren, Tiesto, David Guetta, Diplo, Deadmau5, Afrojack, and others) are paid mind-boggling sums to perform their sets for big spending and very drunk audiences. Increasingly, Continue reading
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