(Photo: rolandus.com) Effects chains are black boxes for processing sounds assembled without knowing their musical output until you hear it. Think of them as routes for sounds to travel, flowing from one effect to another and picking up distortions, resonances, artifacts, and colorations along the way. Effects chains allow the producer to think big by Continue reading

The breakbeat, the round, the sequence, the riff, the inherent rhythm, the timeline, the tala–a loop is a groove propeller, a repeating bit that captures a feeling and spins it around and around until its sound feeling is airborne, aloft on its own motion, soaring over time. A loop proposes being circular for a while, Continue reading

One Instrument is a constraint in the form of a pact with yourself to use just a single source for sounds in a track. I’ll make do with this you think, using the thought as incantation, and off you go exploring what you might do with the instrument. The One Instrument principle goes against the Continue reading

Field recordings are audio files the producer captures outside the airless space of the computer to bring the real world into a track. The practice soars beyond samples (e.g. stolen snare hits, pilfered vintage Fender Rhodes chords) towards film’s foley sound effect tracks (e.g. mysterious footsteps, whispering), seeking the cinematic feeling of being immersed within Continue reading

Filter Sweeps move a sound from light to dark or dark to light, crisp to muted and back again. They’re a producer’s mixing move (borrowed from DJs) to build drama, to fade in/out with frequencies instead of volume. Filter Sweeps are always going somewhere, a process in process adding a dramatic What’s Next? sense to Continue reading

Automation is a technique of controlling parameters within the DAW ecosystem over time, so that the waveforms morph, the reverbs open up, the EQs sweep, the pitches bend, the transitions blossom, and any other value you can identify shifts and evolves, as if it has a mind of its own. When you automate you multiply Continue reading

Arrangement is the layout of the music over time, a sonic schematic (like the architect’s drawings) that specifies form: what goes where, entrances and exits, what happens now or later, transitional-liminal spaces, which ever-changing juxtaposition of parts best hold our attention. Arrangement decisions are guided by the reality that in music, everything can’t all happen Continue reading

Artifacts are details, the hidden gems of a sound hidden within another you don’t truly hear until you excavate them. Artifacts are by-products of processes applied to sounds—where a distortion or a reverb leaves traces of its micro-textured grit or subliminal hum. Dig and dig deeper for artifacts by zooming in on them, amplifying them, Continue reading