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No Direction/Direction
The most discombobulating, yet thrilling part of composing is being without a plan of action for a session. Load an instrument, or noodle on a sound? Improvise some chords? Build a beat? Experiment with effects? Revisit an old project? This considering of options and trying out little things puts us in a space for something Continue reading
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Keywords: Small Structures
Agnes Martin, “Untitled” (1961) Ambitious ideas imagine grand designs, but we achieve them through building small structures: one sentence then another, connected, a few considered sounds working in concert, counterpointed. Small structures is the principle of finding the most minimalist expression of a music’s idea, doing the least to achieve a maximum effect. A minimalist Continue reading
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Keywords: Musical Idea Curating
If you compose music with a computer, eventually you’ll face the accumulation of what you’ve been doing over the years. Digital files, while invisible, add up, with only their names and dates as clues to how they might sound; you can’t be sure until you double-click, load, and play. Musical idea curating is periodically listening Continue reading
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Keywords: Musical Spells, Musical Clichés
Along the spectrum of possible musics the musician-composer-producer can make, two types are most important: that which casts a spell, and that which sounds cliché. Music that casts a spell has power: it creates a state of enchantment through its sounds and what they do. Enchanting music enchants by many means: through orchestration and timbre-textures, Continue reading
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Keywords: No Expectations
No expectations is an approach to workflow as open-ended and non-determined. The mindset celebrates continual play on your musical system’s edges: exploring tools, trying things out, noticing how the sounds feel and work on you rather than having preset, a priori ideas of how you should use them. Play a few chords, turn a few Continue reading
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Keywords: Genre & Style Thinking
Genre & style thinking is reflecting on the kind of music you could be making. You may find inspiration in what you listen to, but the music you could be making is more than the sum of your fandoms. In fact, it probably isn’t like anything you already know. Try to imagine its sound— its Continue reading
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Keywords: Get The Volume Right
(Photo: Speaker array for Janet Cardiff’s “Forty-Part Motet”) Getting the volume right is adjusting your monitors or headphones so the music sounds lifelike, realistically filling the room or headspace in which you’re working. Dialing in this sound level suspends your disbelief about the virtual nature of your musical tools and loudspeakers’ mediations. Not too loud, Continue reading
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Keywords: Grid Musical Thinking
Sol LeWitt, “Color Grids” (1980) Novation Launchpad Pro (2024) The 64-pad matrix grid MIDI controller is contemporary electronic music’s preeminent symbol. The grid represents square 4/4 time, quantized notes, auto-tuned pitch, 4-bar drum loops, and the triggered clips method of recombinant/modular composing. For a hundred years, grid forms were an emblem of modernist visual art, Continue reading
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Keywords: Maybe Rationales
(Photo: J.S. Bach, “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Prelude in C Major”) Maybe the parts will eventually add up to something. Maybe the perfect sound will present itself. Maybe the track is good enough as is. A maybe rationale is a speculative rationalization we offer ourselves as to why it’s acceptable that the music in its present Continue reading
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Keywords: Music’s Lacunae
Consider the unfilled spaces of musical practice, its lacunae. Like the speech balloon emoji, which symbolizes someone speaking, music’s lacunae evoke the not-yet-said, its three dots proxies for in-progress, anticipation and mystery, and the spaces in which the musician/composer/producer works something out through sound, represents the ineffable,make sense out of style and style out of Continue reading
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