brettworks

thinking through music

keywords

  • 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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  • 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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  • Keywords: Artistic North Stars

    (Photo: NASA/Preston Dyches) Influence is everywhere and diffuse, but we know people whose work and life we turn to for concentrated inspiration, sympathetic vibration, and to re-orient ourselves on our own adventure. These people are our artistic North Stars. They’re our teachers, contemporaries, or figures distant in time and place who inspire us with how Continue reading

  • Keywords: Version 1.0

    (Photo: J.S. Bach’s sketch for the first prelude of The Well-Tempered Clavier) Version 1.0 of a track feels the most unsettled because you don’t know where you’re going with it yet; it’s still too new. What is this musical thing? This state of feeling is exemplified by improvising. When you improvise you’re making it up Continue reading

  • Keywords: Vibe

    (Photo: Khashayar Kouchpeydeh) Short for vibration, vibe poetically describes music’s most intangible yet palpable quality: its feeling. Vibe is how music feels over time, how its vibrations sustain a mood, conjure an aura, and keep an affect aloft like smoke billowing on a windless day. Describing a music’s vibe is difficult and requires assigning a Continue reading

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  • Keywords: Trust The Hands

    If you’re a musician of some experience you know things about music not from the outside, as a listener, but from your body, as a practitioner. Trust the hands is the heuristic of letting your understanding unfold through your playing. Whether at a keyboard, fretboard, or computer, your hands come to know a musical-instrumental terrain Continue reading

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  • Keywords: Play With Parameters

    When we work with a virtual instrument such as a synthesizer or sampler, our attention tends to be on the sound at hand that we crafted or discovered. But in music production, a sound at hand is always more than one sound—its identity is not fixed but polyphonic—because variations of it are always close by. Continue reading

  • Keywords: Stacking Simple Tools

    (Photo: Markus Spiske) One of the aims of music production is making sounds that are emotionally moving in subtle, complex, and enchanting ways. A process for achieving such sounds is to stack simple signal processing plug-ins and running your sounds through them. Stacking means to connect serially (one after another), and simple tools are conventional Continue reading

  • Keywords: Working Directly With Waveforms

    If you compose with MIDI (as almost all producers do), it can be beneficial to bounce MIDI tracks to audio sooner rather than later to open production possibilities. Since audio is captured sound rather than MIDI instructions for triggering it, working directly with audio waveforms is the closest the composer gets to touching sound as Continue reading

  • Keywords: Work Fast, Work Slow

    To enrich our music production we can work at two distinct paces: fast and slow. The initial moment of making is quick and intuitive as we run with what catches our attention—noticing a sound, improvising a part, tweaking a patch, drumming a loop, trying out an idea and recording it, capturing an evocative musical gesture. Continue reading