music production
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Notes On Anti-Automated Music
“The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs.” – Naval Ravikant No one, especially me, wants to listen to automated music—music, acoustic or electronic, that’s on auto-pilot, that just unfolds without responding to its environment or to the subtleties of its own exigencies. (I Continue reading
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Notes On Finding Real Musical Beginnings
It was bothering me how so many of the pieces simply began with a marimba part theme—which really wasn’t a theme, but rather a place where, many months ago, I happened to have begun the music. The marimba themes were placeholders, not real beginnings, and it was bothering me that the pieces began without real Continue reading
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On Musical Shepherding
The figure of the shepherd came to mind recently as I was working on music. At first I pictured literally a shepherd—a guy in galoshes shepherding sheep in the countryside somewhere, gently prodding the furry fellows up and over hillsides. Let’s go guys! (Which reminds me of an excellent book about the subject, James Rebanks’ Continue reading
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From Obvious To More Subtle Music
When the music is obvious it what’s it’s trying to do, I lose interest in it because I’m not pushed to try to figure it out or track its changes through a thicket of subtleties. This applies to stuff I listen to as well as my own productions. I spend more than half of my Continue reading
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On Copying, Manipulating, and Pasting Musical Parts
One of the few rules of composing music I almost always adhere to is to play every single part myself in real-time. Based on the kind of music I like to listen to, I’m convinced—or I’ve convinced myself—that this approach produces the most reliably interesting results in the shortest amount of time. If I want Continue reading
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Production Moves: Merging Sounds And Processes Through Tiny Cumulative Changes
Much of my music production time is spent making tiny changes, often because I can’t figure what more significant thing I need to do. So I go small. Here’s the scene: the piece is just okay, and progress on it is just okay, and the finished thing may too be destined to be just okay. Continue reading
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On Clearly Articulating
articulate—express an idea or feeling fluently or coherently (from Latin articulare ‘divide into joints’) Well-articulated music has amazing communicative power, and when I listen to other musicians play the first thing I notice is how it articulates (or not). For drummers and percussionists, it’s impossible to hide behind sloppy articulation because the sounds we make Continue reading
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Frames Of Attention: Deciding On Musical Materials
One of the primary tasks involved in building a piece of music, a piece of writing, and I imagine a piece of visual art, is figuring out as early as possible in the process what materials you’ll be working with. For most of us, our process won’t reveal itself until we’re further along it, so Continue reading
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On Being Comprehensive (And Coming Up Short)
One evening I was going through sounds on the computer, listening through effects, trying out combinations, and realizing how faint a grasp I had on the production process. I was both excited and frustrated as I felt my way through a sonic darkness. At the end of the session I scribbled a single phrase in Continue reading
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Notes On A Music Production Workflow
I know some ways to work, but there are so many routes to get musical things done that each session is a re-thinking of how to work. (Begin anywhere Cage said.) • I began with marimba chord samples that I had recorded a few months back. I played between 20 and 30 different chord rolls—plenty to Continue reading
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