Ambience is bonus resonance, a reverb that softens sound’s blow. To add ambience is to place a sound in a space whose dimensions and materials color how we hear. Tones now dissolve at their edges, like candle wax around the flame. Quick sounds get hang time, long sounds linger, beginnings and ends become one. Ambience Continue reading

To amplify is to turn a quiet sound into a louder sound, making the small gargantuan, putting sound details under an audio microscope to hear them better. Amplify is boosted signal and boosted signal is now up close, foregrounded, the center of your attention. When we amplify a sound we solo its details, boost its Continue reading

Making music alive on many levels at once is the point of both producing music and a necessary tool for suspending the listener’a disbelief in music’s fiction. Music alive on many levels at once hinges on presence, variation, interaction, responsiveness, suggestion, hidden depths, and arranging multiple elements to function as a whole in easy synergy. Continue reading

And Then… is a technique of stepwise progression, a way of moving from, and building upon, where you are to where you’ll be next. It requires only what you currently have to get going—a sound, a few chords, a tempo. This is flaneur music production—wandering by ear towards the interesting sounds, moving in a direction Continue reading

Feedback not in the sense of a microphone in front of a speaker, shrieking frequencies, but as one track plugged into another, connected, folding the music upon itself like a mixing board bent into origami. Feedback as returning this sound upon that sound, output becoming input becoming output again, in an infinite loop. Try to Continue reading