“Keep your focus very narrow: just this and nothing more, and make that absolutely exquisite and don’t get sucked into distractions, don’t listen to the siren chorus singing across the waves about this keyboard that has a billion sounds in it. I couldn’t care less about things like that. They just get in the way. I’m not bragging, but the way I work is that I focus entirely on a small thing and try to milk that for all it’s worth, to find everything in it that makes musical sense.”
“Beauty is all around you. You open your eyes in the morning, the world is totally formed. You haven’t done anything other than be. It’s all around you. The whole idea is being able to recognize it, and pay attention to it, articulate it.”
“But we don’t necessarily want you to play things right, we want you to play things cool. You play over a groove until you have a good bar, and then we take that bar and loop it. I always say that our best music comes from mistakes that happen. You’re trying to do one thing, and then someone makes a mistake and that mistake ends up being the hook of the song, the coolest part of the song.”
“Having things so that they’re not in any way masked, so that they’re really crisp, clear images in sound. So that you can always identify the source of the sound. It’s like a really vivid version of the thing that you’re hearing.”
“I love recording synths or piano on it at a really slow speed. When the motor makes the tape just inch along in slow motion, it adds nice texture and unsteadiness to the signal which then I magnify by compressing and EQing it.”
“I have my own sample library which has a lot of my sound design experiments in it. Sometimes, I just create an interesting sounding thing and don’t know what to do with it yet. It goes into my library and when I’m working on a piece of music I can just go through my library and see what fits in.”
“People associate electronic sounds with shiny and sparkly colours, but I’m not interested in that. I built analogue keyboards as a kid, these synth kits that you could buy on mail order. Unfortunately I don’t have any of that stuff any more, but it obviously had a strong effect on me. I now tend to roll off a lot of the high end in the electronics in my music, and this makes them sound very vintage-like.”
“There’s so many different ways of generating and processing sounds that even if you had the same tools at your disposal as the person that made a piece of music, the relationship between the sound that comes out of their signal chain and the various parameters they have at their fingertips is so wildly unstable that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to try to recreate it.”
– Objekt
“One of the biggest problems these days is how easy it is to get caught up in the search for the perfect sound. You can scroll through literally hundreds and hundreds of different presets and drum samples, looking for something that the song doesn’t need. You’re looking out there in the big wide world or you’re looking inside the computer, but you really should be looking inside yourself. In your own head. Does it sound good to you? Do your ears like it?”
I might hear one chord that I like from a song I’m working on, take that, stretch it out to half a minute, re-pitch it. It all adds to the feel of a song. My studio isn’t a pristine environment creating highly polished products.”
– Chicane
“…It’s often these ones [tracks] where there’s really not a great deal going on, but somehow they’re still more than the sum of their actual parts.”
“I’m not a big fan of compression or limiting at all — I can’t emphasise that enough. On many of the recordings that you hear today, all the excitement and all the colour is gone because they’re so over‑compressed.”
“I know the anoraks will say that virtual analogue synths aren’t as good as the originals, that they don’t go out of tune as wonderfully as the originals, but the automation possibilities of effectively having eight pairs of hands on every oscillator, and moving them in a coordinated way, are radically new. You could never have done that on a Minimoog in 1973. I think the automation of plug‑ins, reverbs and things like that, is a fantastic possibility, because it gives us a chance to manipulate musical space in unprecedented ways. Again, it’s like having eight pairs of hands on the dial of a Lexicon or something.”
“One of my production idols is Arca. She occasionally does these live streams where she’s showing her process, and it’s very destructive. She’ll print the reverb onto the track, then chop that up. There’s no restraint, no thinking ‘I should plan for the future by bussing this thing out, or separating it.’ It’s very spur of the moment. That’s been super inspiring.”
“A lot of times I’ll throw a sound in and start processing and then I’ll change something earlier in the processing chain and that’s kind of how I sculpt my stuff.”
– Au5
“Music doesn’t progress in a linear fashion like a lot of people like to think. You get musical innovations, but there’s always a cyclical relationship to the past and a generational relationship—with each generation, the time cycle starts again. So you can’t just picture it as a straight line going forward. It’s always devouring its own past and upgrading itself with younger ears and younger dancing crowds, and most importantly with new technologies which help nudge things forward to the next phase.”
“I always think of myself as being on this producer’s end of listening: the way that a producer might listen to a recording, or might listen to an instrument, or a microphone or whatever. So usually the way I would want people to think about sound is trying to listen to these details. And listening to any kind of recording and trying to think about, you know, what are you actually hearing? And then when you go a step towards making it, think about how that would have been done and trying to go backwards from the sound and try to deconstruct it a little bit.
But even if you’re playing an instrument—if you have someone who has a basic oscillator or something–to just listen to it, to just listen to things. And to really take time and listen to them and not just move on to the next thing but really think about that sound quality. And you could try making minute changes to things and really try to absorb what that sound is like.”
“Long drones—different ways of framing what the person is saying. Generally with samples I’ll make like five or six drones that it can live in, and the harmonic landscape of those drones will affect the emotion of the song—that’s what they’re born out of.”
“The album would not exist, really, without convert to harmony. I’m too stupid to listen to somebody playing guitar and go like, what’s the chord? But this system lets you produce a kind of trace, and its unreliability gives you this funny little grit of chaos that you can use to grow something cool. I’m trimming this little bonsai tree of MIDI information, and getting it to grow in the right way.”
“I’m addicted to the idea that you put yourself in a place and surrender to it. It’s about making space for a kind of attention that you’re not normally offered by entertainment media.”
“Sometimes it’s as simple as just pressing record and wandering around amidst the tools and instruments you’ve accumulated, forcing interactions until something clicks and the brain takes notice.”
“Sometimes things have originated from a very simple synth but then there’s often a lot of layering, stretching and pitching within Ableton, which makes it sound gritty as well… and that’s all just from the DAW.”
“I tend to bounce effects channels into another track and treat them as other instruments, just so you can get their sound very specifically EQ’d, in quite a crazy way if necessary.”
“When I listen to musicians–when I see a cellist embodying a cello, I want to hear into their soul. I feel that’s fairly easy however good you are as a cellist because you’re connected to that object. But with a synthesizer it’s a lot harder because you’re behind all these circuits. So I long for electronic music where you hear beyond the instrument into the soul of the performer, and my entire search, my entire practice is that. So sure, I’ll dial in this sound, but you have to play with the modulation whilst you’re playing it to convey that soul of the instrument.”
– Sam Shephard (Floating Points)
“This kick resampling thing, where I’m taking a kick and turning off the grid in Ableton, shortening it, copying it a bunch so that you end up with a bunch of kick hits in a row. And then consolidating that and fading it out so you get this weird [sound], and I panned it in the track. Instead of doing the—[sings EDM drum build-up]—that drives everyone crazy, it’s just a slightly more interesting way of using kicks to build a bit of tension. It’s quite elastic sounding.”
“I try to control randomness. This is a big counterpoint, the encounter of randomness and control. The contrast is more interesting. If you really control a millisecond, there are other possibilities, even if they are microscopic. You can’t perceive the change directly, but if you pay very close attention, the entire composition changes. So, I try to add randomness, and I like to see the counterpoint, the counterbalance.”
“One of the best parts about being a computer musician is that you can really marinate in your own music. A lot of the music that I make is what I want to listen to. When I’m working on the computer, sometimes I’ll spend time crafting a palette of timbres and make a bunch of loops and then I’ll leave it on for hours, and go in the next room and read and hear it through the wall and I’ll just leave it on to get acquainted and deeply familiar with it. And then maybe the next morning I’ll add the next part. So it takes a lot of time, it doesn’t happen in real-time, and listening is the main part of the process and that can be done really directly, like just sitting and listening, but more often it’s oblique or with other activities.”
“But the actual composing, you don’t want to be thinking for that. You need to think to set things up then you want to channel whatever it is from wherever it’s coming from. If you can concentrate long enough and you get to the right place then hopefully you’ve stopped thinking completely.”
“I really recommend that people try to compress different sounds together; it’s really creative to feel how the sounds start to work together as one instead of dancing in separation.”
“You know, you cobble it together and you take designs that people have done, little structures, new ideas adapted and reconstructed from other ideas, little architectures that other people have built, and then you build your own thing with. No other art form/creative platform does that.”
“Don’t overwork things. When you work on things for too long, you lose perspective and objectivity, and will start focusing in on small, relatively insignificant details like ‘should the hi hats be 1 db quieter?’ Try and finish things relatively quickly to preserve the vibe that got you excited by the idea in the first place.”
“When I can’t think of something to write, I just tweak knobs and suddenly you can get something quite interesting, and I do like coming up with wild, weird and wonderful landscapes of sound. But what I like doing is mixing and matching, because if you only have the amazing, expensive high-quality sounds in there, occasionally you need a small Casio just for contrast. If you don’t have contrast, you don’t have anything.”
– Hans Zimmer
“The main thing is the jam format […] I’ll do sessions, say for one hour, and then I go through and look for interesting parts and think about where I could go from there. There might be a good idea for something, or a good line I can use.”
“Think about it. When you’re programming stuff into the computer, you are constantly assessing what it sounds like and whether this note needs to be changed. It’s a constant interruption because that’s how your brain works. But if you create a piece of music on an instrument and immediately record that, you are taking away your brain’s ability to doubt and question what it’s doing. Once it’s in the computer and you’ve moved on to the next bit of the song, that’s it… no more worrying if you’ve got the right hat sound. Timewise, it was a mindblower for me.”
“The most important things in my room are my autoloads. I have one for each type of production work I do… and it really speeds up the workflow immeasurably.”
– BT
“It was really fun for me to try and take an electronic music approach to string libraries: distorting, crunching, reversing, and warping them.
I was able to take a DJ’s approach to building tension using classical instruments. I would take sounds from trance music, like white noise risers, and throw them in, too.”
“What I needed was to create music from the ground up with nothing but sound, and have that music reflect ‘being’ rather than ‘doing.’”
“I don’t have a process.”
“If a single bell is struck, and we contemplate the nature of its sound– the Klang at impact, the spread of sound after this initial gesture, and then the lingering cloud of resonance–what we hear takes us to the heart of tintinnabuli. A finely wrought bell makes one of the most mysterious and creative sounds; a sound that certainly ‘rings out’ and reaches towards us, yet at the same time pulls us in towards it, so that soon we realize that we are on the inside of it, that its inside and outside are in fact one and the same” (20).
“building these patterns and loops and kind of re-listening over and over again, just this really repetitive – almost like sculpture or something, just adding and subtracting things.”
– Huerco S.
“…they just actually sound musically more interesting to me, those hiccups, those moments where something either is authentic or not, or electronic or acoustic, and you don’t know which. [When] people are using computers, I think that’s what inevitably happens, and what sounds really nice.”
“In your production, think about ways to add interesting twists or surprises for the listener. Think about how they could be feeling with the track at each moment, and what you want them to feel at any given point in a way that satisfies the way you want the story of that track to unfold.”
–AIDA
“One of the most beautiful things we can do in music production is create spaces that are unreal–that are impossible in the real world.”
– Hainbach
“Those old samplers…the audio quality would be degraded through dithering of the audio in the sample, in the sampler, or there’s a natural built-in bit crushing element to a lot of those samplers. Those distortion elements are introduced by feeding audio into a new piece of kit.
So the next couple of [production] steps were decreasing the quality of this audio. So taking a bunch of information out using EQ, over compressing it using OTT (…)
So I was reading about the [1980s and 1990s] sampling and it was a case of trying to reverse engineer how sampling back then would sound in 2022—trying to replicate the shortcomings of those old samplers. The irony of it is that we have all this amazing equipment now and we spend a lot of time trying to make it sound shit again. Whether it’s the nostalgia or something about the audio that’s appealing to the human ear (…) It’s the same reason someone uses analog synthesizers or tape machines and stuff—there’s something about degrading the audio.”
– SG Lewis
“Usually since I’m using a limited amount of equipment with few options, the sound direction stays largely focused in the same direction, and strays from there. I don’t try to build pieces too often that have too many different types of sounds, or things that were made at different times overlapping simultaneously – usually what is together was all made around the same time, in one sitting.”
– Celer
“When I started to do electronic music I was obsessed — I more or less forgot that obsession along the way — about not having anything being repeated in exactly the same way. For me it was exactly the opposite attitude to that of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and all those electronic bands who were doing something more robotic. I considered electronic music in a much more sensual, organic way, where nothing should be repeated.”
– Jean-Michel Jarre, Sound On Sound (2008)
“[M]usic is not so fast that adequate control of movements is lost”[8], “music is not art”[9], “music is not appropriate for worship”[10], “music is not always entirely clear”[11], “music is not so likely to use the voice as a conveyor of subjective experience”[12], “music is not solely a twentieth-century phenomenon”[13]…
“I developed this system of taking samples of already existing components and extracting them from—putting them out of sync with the track and then doctoring them externally through other boxes, maybe changing them to slow them down, and if I hit on something special then I go back in and find a spot for that special sound back into the track. It won’t work for most of the songs. I just run it randomly.”
“When I make loops on a sequencer, I always try to play them all the way through, so I play the whole part, then I listen to it, and quite often I find a long section that I like. Loop that, cut it up so that the loop doesn’t recur regularly. The idea of always editing in straight vertical cuts is the most single annoying thing about most of that music. Because a whole part of my feeling has been to make music that is ‘unlocked.’ And all that stuff like Thursday Afternoon, Discreet Musicand so on, is very deliberately that: music where the elements float separately from one another.”
“When I was listening to this situation, it was as though there was another frequency which came through–that wasn’t done by that being played, it wasn’t being done by the combination of these things, but the combination of these things allowed this other frequency to come in.”
“A micro mastery has a structure that connects in a crucial way to important elements in the greater field it is a part of. It reveals relationships and balances in the elements of the task that mere words and explanation, textbook-style, cannot. Its repeatability and game ability…turn it into a self-teaching mechanism, where experimentation within certain defined limits greatly increases your learning.”
– Robert Twigger, Micromastery
“Over the past 5 years I have been sketching compositions on paper. Sometimes they are detailed, specific outlines of what I imagine for the music, sometimes they are how I would like a synth to sound, sometimes they are me thinking out loud about the structure of the music I am working on.
The main reason why I do this is because it is a way for me to problem solve away from the computer. I find the computer is so powerful at trying things quickly that it can get in the way and overpower some of my decisions.”
“With some of the instruments I’ve used, people would be surprised about some of the results I’ve got out of them because they’re not designed to do certain things and yet, if you put your mind to it and really get to grips with how it’s built and not the manufacturer’s intentions, any machine will do a number of things above and beyond what the manufacturer intended. It’s just looking at it with an open mind, then those things become apparent.”
– Tom Jenkinson (aka Squarepusher)
“The resulting flow is a complex pattern of tensions and relaxations which evolve as the musical material is worked out. The words ‘controlled’ and ‘worked out’ do not really convey what I mean. There seem to be no suitable English words. I am hunting for some word which brings a hint of the skillful yachtsman in fierce mid-Atlantic, guiding and controlling his craft and yet being taken along with it, sensing the best way to manage his vessel, freely changing his mind as unforeseen circumstances evolve, yet always applying the greatest discipline to himself and his seamanship…The composer has to guide and evolve his material in all its aspects.”
– Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1972, p. 27)
“It’s about getting to the molecular level of a particular sound — realizing what that sound actually is made of, and why it behaves a certain way when processed or cooked. Then you use those molecules to build new forms, mixing and reappropriating those raw materials, and of course, it should be bloody delicious.”
– Sophie
“Usually I try to find a balance between a rhythmic pattern and filter modulations which together articulate some interesting quality. For me, sketch is a strange word because it means something like trying to manifest an idea. Of course I have some kind of idea, but many times I just look at my idea as a starting point and then I let the technology change it. So basically my idea is an input for the environment in which I’m working, and then there is an output which carries out the idea and the properties of the technology itself. This way I think there is a better chance to end up at musical situations which are not predefined.”
“Today one can compose music with a computer, but the computer always existed in composers’ heads—if they had to, composers could write sonatas without a single original idea, just by ‘cybernetically’ expanding on the rules of composition. Janáček’s purpose was to destroy this computer … My purpose is like Janáček’s: to rid the novel of the automatism of novelistic technique, of novelistic word-spinning.”
“The electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and they you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to achieve magical results.”
– Aurelio de la Vega, “Regarding Electronic Music” (1965)
“I made most discoveries by exhaustive trial and error, over time gathering each lesson into a simple approach based on what I had learned. The approach was not rigidly scientific, but results were documented by concise shorthand notes and photos of the bread on days when something notable was achieved in crust or crumb.”
– Chad Robertson, Tartine Bread (2013)
“The real problem thus becomes therefore one of producing accidents with sufficiently enhanced probabilities for selection.”
– Niklas Luhmann, “Communicating with Slip Boxes”
“The moment we have two of a thing we create form and create an energy of relation.” (219)
“Style is analog. Style is a matter of perception.”
Kyle Beachy, The Most Fun Thing (2021)
“The biggest achievement for music is empathy. You can transform into someone else’s emotional state. And you can go into situations where it’s incredibly difficult to find the right words. Music in general is somewhere between words…Music morphs you into the one who created it.”
– Martin Stimming, Hanging Out With Audiophiles podcast, Episode 89
“The magic is that there is no magic. Start where you are. Don’t stop.”
– Seth Godin, The Practice
“In the last fifteen years, new noises have been uncovered by musicians that we have no set way of interpreting or wrapping our imaginations around. Sounds have been created that make no sense; they have no correlates in the wider culture so they just seem to be completely alien to our ears.”
– Kit Mackintosh, Neon Screams (2021)
“The artworks I’ve described so far could be thought of as training apparatuses for attention. By inviting us to perceive at different scales and tempos than we’re used to, they teach us not only how to sustain attention but how to move it back and forth between different registers.”
– Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing (2019)
“It’s noteworthy that the first action a computer program designed to detect patterns undertakes is not to analyze but to collect. Which is consistent with how many writers, musicians, and designers view themselves: not as master craftsmen but as collectors. They consume voraciously, pursue obsessively, and accumulate influences the way chefs hunt for ingredients.”
“The most effective practice regimens avoid extended repetition, even if that means spending less time working on a target skill. Instead they harness the power of novelty and shake things up by blending an assortment of tasks, which results in sharper learning and stronger performance.”
– Ron Friedman, Decoding Greatness (2021)
“The fancy music that is here synthesized is absolutely astonishing. Few of us would have imagined that so much progress had been made. But most listeners won’t be able to suppress a snicker or two, in the midst of their amazement—for this music, in all its variety, still has a grotesquely inhuman quality that comically defies the very meaning of music […]
The machine, having no composer-of-the-future and no new musical language to operate upon, is forced to use present stock and, absurdly, to go about imitating the very instruments and performers that it is supposed eventually to supersede. A fine contradiction!”
– Edward Tatnall Canby, “Synthesized Music”, Harper’s (September 1955)
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”
“Avoiding Squareness
[…] contrapuntal thinking encourages overlap. The habit of always keeping interest alive in at least one part, even when another cadences, makes for more interesting phrasing, and mitigates squareness of construction.”
– Alan Belkin, Principles of Counterpoint
“When you are close like this, nearing satisfaction on something that has taken a very long time do to, you don’t want to be tempted to decide too soon that you are done. You need to add time for a final assessment of the over-all form and structure before removing those bits of clay and polishing the detail.
In the effects of a change of scale…there is an artistic message that carries beyond sculpture and into other realms, like writing, and I’m still trying to figure out how best to summarize it, relating, as it does, to the idea that a piece of writing ought not to be planned for a given size but developed to the length most suitable to the material, and no farther.”
– John McPhee, Tabula Rasa
“Piano first, generally. Though maybe a small rhythm element may be put in place to spark the harmonic gateway that the piano provides. Then starts the long process of embellishing it, or orchestrating it. I say orchestrating, as I like to think of the synth elements that I add as orchestrations.”
Neil Cowley, Headphone Commute
“I want to promote a description of creativity as a process of attunement to the material environment, not an isolated or inward journey further into one’s thoughts or mind or soul. In this sense, the description I want to promote is one driven by a critical curiosity rather than a thing called inspiration…which I know nothing of.”
“When creative practice is understood as an attempt to explore how materials and processes interact under certain conditions, like some scientific activities, it becomes situated in something–materials, processes, conditions–rather than somehow impossibly floating outside the material world.”
Mark Fell, Structure and Synthesis: The Anatomy of Practice (2022), pp. 14, 21
“To not work in a linear way when making a track. It’s better to just start somewhere and explore from there, don’t try and write a song from start to finish, make it random. And also don’t be afraid to get theoretical when making music, especially electronic music. There is a lot to be found in classical theories for composing which can be inspirational, and also surprisingly fun.”
“I like styling with something that’s really intricate and complex, sound‑wise. Like dragging a whole finished song into a granular synth. So, you’re starting from a point of real intricacy and trying to find order in it, as opposed to coming from a pure sine wave and trying to add intricacies. I like going the other way around more.”
“Well I’ll tell you very frankly that this whole ‘new age’ business is very distasteful to me. I don’t like being even considered in that category and I have almost no respect for it at all. To me it’s a kind of arrogant philosophical point of view where music has a metaphysical or biological function. I agree that music has a metaphysical function but when that’s your whole point of view, when it isn’t just a thing that happens out of the normal course of events, I think it becomes arrogant and rather precious. It smacks to me very much of science fiction religion and that’s not me. It’s very lightweight and very bothersome to me. ‘New age music’ is a marketing ploy and I don’t think it has anything to do with the actual truth about the meaning of the music. The only thing that rings my bell is serious music and music is that way when it’s impossible to analyse: ‘new age music’ is easily analysed.”
– Harold Budd, Sound On Sound (1986)
“The kind of signposts I’m thinking about are often little more than short phrases—or even single word neologisms—that, due to what ideas they have compressed within them, reorient how you see specific spheres of experience. These are ‘catchy’ concepts that often combine two or more words in unexpected ways, creating a mental hook for a vague penumbra of facts and experiences. […]
How to begin? Recognize patterns in the world and name them. Smash unexpected terms together and see if they sing. Realize when you are struggling to describe something and spend some time just sitting and figuring out how to compress that description down into a short pithy phrase.”
– Samuel Arbesman, Constructing Signposts in the Memescape
“We develop skill at the live edge.”
– Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
“Having things so that they’re not in any way masked, so that they’re really crisp, clear images in sound. So that you can always identify the source of the sound. It’s like a really vivid version of the thing that you’re hearing.”
“As John Cage discovered through his use of the I Ching, a complex dance of chance-driven and unexpected encounters was both the best way to approach the more-than-human world, and the best way of representing its heterogeneous, omnicentric reality. Cage’s realization prefigured that of evolutionary biologists, who in recent decades have started to acknowledge the crucial role that randomness plays in the creation of life itself. This has proven to be something of an uphill battle because the importance of randomness has been consistently undervalued in studies of evolution since its establishment, while the role of natural selection – competition – has been consistently overvalued.”
James Bridle, Ways of Being, pp. 178, 234
“The sequencer’s automatic sound sequences and the drum machine’s loops hypnotized me. These black boxes brought the trance quality of African, Indian and Asian musical cultures into pop music, a quality that had been the starting point for the minimalist concept.”
– Karl Bartos, The Sound of the Machine
“No machine can compare with a man’s hands. Machinery gives speed, power, complete uniformity, and precision, but it cannot give creativity, adaptability, freedom, heterogeneity. These the machine is incapable of, hence the superiority of the hand, which no amount of rationalism can negate. Man prefers the creative and the free to the fixed and standardized” (108).
“One may be able to turn intuition into knowledge, but one cannot produce intuition out of knowledge” (110).
“Freedom comes from infinite repetition of a technique” (175).
– Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman
“The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way.”
“The only style worth having is the one you can’t help.”
“Unseen details combine to produce something that’s just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.”
– Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters
“Presence died a million deaths in the seventies. In its place was the Edisonian dream: record the music, not the room. There was a cultural and geographic component to the dry-as-a-bone sound. It was especially prevalent in West Coast studios, and especially audible on the California-centric rock bands of the seventies—put on an Eagles record and you’ll hear it. Or better yet, listen to the early Steely Dan records, technological masterpieces made with the engineer Roger Nichols. But really, it was everywhere—rock, disco, funk—the sound of the age. It wasn’t necessarily bad from a listener’s perspective. Minimalist seventies classic-rock records—ZZ Top, Bad Company, AC/DC—do sound ‘live’ in an Edison-biting-into-wood sense. The music is intimate, unencumbered, right in front of you. But if you stop and think, they really don’t sound the way bands do when you hear them live, when ‘presence’ is blown up to mammoth proportions. Kick drums and snare drums, for example, end up sounding similar.”
Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever, p. 162
“I feel the important part of making a track is to recognize the point where you have to listen to what the track wants. This point comes in around 40 – 50% of the whole process, where it’s not so much about what you want with the track anymore, but what the track wants you to do with it. To figure out this change of perspective is the only way to successfully finish a track. Of course it’s intuition, but at a certain point the music is the boss. And you always recognize it when you want to finish a very fancy idea for example and it doesn’t work. You build the arrangement and it doesn’t work, you try something else and it doesn’t work. If you just listen to what the track wants, it’s much easier.”
– Stimming
“We also work with a lot of audio files, so we’re continually flattening and rendering stuff out, whether they’re stems, loops of an entire idea or some kind of sound bed or texture we’ve been working on. So we’re throwing these audio files backwards and forwards all the time, which plays into how you generally use Ableton really well.”
“When I first started using Max it was a bit intimidating, you’d get blank canvas syndrome, that moment of “what should I do? I could do anything!” Once I started to build stuff, narrow it down, reduce the capabilities, you start to get more ideas. It’s all about narrowing down for me. There has to be a seed.”
– Sean Booth, Autechre
“Almost every sound is decayed, or shadowed, or manipulated in some way. I’ve been interested in injecting noise into my productions lately; using a lot of tape noise samples, distortion, old spring reverbs, bits of vinyl crackle, and the noise floor that my synths generate to create this softly breathing field of noise.”
– EPROM
“I’ve created a mixture by accessing any number of abstract sources of unknown origins and auras, which I then modified and blended like a painter who mixes his colors before he paints the painting.”
“There were so many times I had the Ableton quantization grid turned off and was arranging sounds grain by grain, millisecond by millisecond. It was draining, but tenfold rewarding.”
“‘Why do I want to play much slower than before?’ Because I wanted to hear the resonance. I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing, then the next sound, and the next note or harmony can come. That’s exactly what I want.”
“Many of my sounds are based on short samples of classical, acoustic instruments. Preferably from the quiet parts of symphonies where the musicians play carefully and where you can often hear the chairs creaking. When I amplify these sounds and run them through various filters and envelopes, I often get sounds that are almost impossible to make on a synthesizer. So the sampler has been my most important tool all along. I often start a composition by creating a theme with an acoustic-digital filtered sound. Over this, I often try to integrate pure synthetic sounds from a synthesizer. This makes the music sound a little more organic than if I just used synthesizers.”
“The best compositions often have no revisions.”
“It’s ideas about new ways to synthesise patterns that don’t sound like they came out of other synths; looking for ways to make sounds that don’t sound like they came out of the Prophet; looking for ways to make arpeggios that don’t sound like they came out of a simple arpeggiator – things with that level of movement and complexity and expression but not as predictable, not as linear.”
“There aren’t necessarily things happening in my music all the time, and it’s always interesting to hear how people experience it in a totally different way from me. I created it, but they can hear something totally different. Maybe it’s just out of boredom that the brain can make a loop exciting.”
“If you sit and listen to a sound for a long time you don’t need anything else to transpose it or change it, you just alter the experience slightly with your mind.”
“I sort of play YouTube like an instrument and put things straight into Audacity. If you play something on YouTube, you can hit the number key….4…7…2 or whatever and it skips the video so you get a sort of random sample allocation. So, four or five of the tracks came about just by doing that and mashing the random start-points in a video.”
“In terms of track arrangement I tended to favour A, B, A, you know? You start with something, you go into something, then you come back to what you started with, but make it a bigger version. Yeah. Or, I quite like the Part Two where you do something, and then do a kind of moodier second part…”
“The simple pursuit of fidelity and editability in DAWs is all but over. Today, developers must think laterally and embrace the sonic character of analogue warmth, lossy digital formats and hybrid synthetic sounds as creative tools.”
“The musical idea is worth more than how it sounds.”
– HOSH
“We must never lose sight of the fact that the most intelligently designed, the most versatile and the most complex piece of kit we have at our disposal is our own body.”
– Deckle Edge, Cræft (2018), p. 24.
“The essential thing is the contrast between a little and a lot. It works every time. Your brain is eager to tune in when the music is in a borderland where it can fluctuate—suddenly it’s quiet, a sound follows a soundless pause, or else you dance and wait for the tone to shift or the volume to change. It feels like your brain is expanding outwards.”
– Erling Kagge, Silence (2017), p. 109
“We may find it not so interesting to cook the same thing over and over again every day. It is rather tedious, you may say. If you lose the spirit of repetition it will become quite difficult…Anyway, we cannot keep still: we have to do something. So if you do something, you should be very observant, and careful, and alert. Our way is to put the dough in the oven and watch it carefully…Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread.”
– Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970).
“You can drown in the sewage water of our time’s creativity. The capability to select is important, and the urge for it. The reduction to a minimum, the ability to reduce fractions–that was the strength of all great composers” (114).
“Reduction certainly doesn’t mean simplification, but it is the way–at least in an ideal scenario–to the most intense concentration on the essence of things. In the compositional process I have always to find this nucleus first from which the work will eventually emerge” (116-117).
“The compositional task is to find the appropriate system for the gesture” (117).
– Arvo Pärt, The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (2012, Andrew Shenton, ed.)
“Although there is much in this world that is incomprehensible, you can nevertheless discover a meaning as long as you have managed to limit your field of search.”
-Fredrik Sjöberg, The Art of Flight
“In music we start with the parts and adduce the whole.”
– Dave Hickey, Pirates and Farmers (2022), p. 87
“My compositional process can be broken down into two steps. The first is processing the source material. The second is determining what to do with the prepared material. Using computers and outboard gear, it is possible to process material in an infinite number of ways, so you could say that processing could go on forever. In fact, processing continues until the composers makes the conscious decision to stop and move on. As such, I feel that nothing in the digital domain is absolute or definite.”
“Improbable arrangements of the world, crystallized consequences of energy generation, are what both life and technology are all about.”
“Innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance—and that happen to be useful.”
“Techniques and processes are developed that work, but understanding of them comes later.”
Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works (2021)
“I feel like I’ve woken up somehow to focusing on the big ideas and realizing the rules that I keep thinking apply, just don’t really exist.”
– Four Tet
“At the end of the day it’s not so much the editing style that matters, it’s more about having a real cool, concrete idea. Even if it’s a whole line of bits and crazy parts, it still has to stick with you and have… almost like a phrase.”
– Skrillex
“One of the techniques that has appeared in the studio is if we’re looking for a very, very quiet, delicate performance making the headphones that the musicians are hearing very loud. So loud that if they play at normal level it’s deafening. It forces everyone to play so delicately that it’s almost as if just touching a guitar string—and it’s really loud—it creates a whole different feeling…When someone’s playing very, very delicately and you mix it well, and you can hear it loud, you can feel the touch being so careful, it creates an energy that’s really beautiful to hear.”
– Rick Rubin, Ezra Klein podcast
“It’s like a process of incremental discovery everyday.”
– Clark
“My workflow is to do a lot of pre-production.”
– Philth
“We must never lose sight of the fact that the most intelligently designed, the most versatile and the most complex piece of kit we have at our disposal is our own body.”
– Deckle Edge, Cræft (2018)
“The essential thing is the contrast between a little and a lot. It works every time. Your brain is eager to tune in when the music is in a borderland where it can fluctuate—suddenly it’s quiet, a sound follows a soundless pause, or else you dance and wait for the tone to shift or the volume to change. It feels like your brain is expanding outwards.”
– Erling Kagge, Silence (2017)
“I feel the important part of making a track is to recognize the point where you have to listen to what the track wants. This point comes in around 40–50% of the whole process, where it’s not so much about what you want with the track anymore, but what the track wants you to do with it. To figure out this change of perspective is the only way to successfully finish a track. Of course it’s intuition, but at a certain point the music is the boss. And you always recognize it when you want to finish a very fancy idea for example and it doesn’t work. You build the arrangement and it doesn’t work, you try something else and it doesn’t work. If you just listen to what the track wants, it’s much easier.”
“Some of the most gorgeous grooves are wonky, and so I’ve just become obsessed with moving things so that they have exactly the right amount of wonk. I want to lean towards this beat, and the computer won’t help you there, ’cause a computer is so rigid. So, I have to bring the human element to that process by allowing the thing to be wonky.”
“Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is waving, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community.”
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar
“With my music I am trying to construct a space that is as open and wide as possible without collapsing back upon itself; hardly any support columns or visible framework. There is a sense of emptiness, of lines that have been drawn but not completed.”
“Since all the tracks were based on this broken filter that just crackles and hisses randomly this was very often the beginning of the recording of a track – that gave the rhythm structure, the main part. And then I simply started with some basslines or some atmospheres. In general, I’m really working more in atmospheres than in song structures.”
Pole
“The way we used to compose was sort of like filling a 24-track tape full of loops, basically. Some of them will be 8-bar loops, some of them will be 2-bar loops, some of them will be 6-bar loops. So they’d all spiral ‘round each other while you composed on the Mute buttons. And one of the aspects of there being four of us in the band—is eights hands operating the mixing desk. Because we didn’t use automated mixing back then.”
Graham Massey, 808 State
“There are definitely other producers who are more technically educated. But I was technically adventurous. And I was very diligent and relentless in putting in the time in the studio and trying different things. Just trial and error. Relentlessly putting the time in.”
“The way I chose to define [drum and bass] to them was as a style of programming, a style of using sonics to make music, as opposed to using instruments to make music. This was music purely about soundscapes, space, bass.”
“I pick sounds for the texture in them.”
“I think a lot of people have a problem getting from a basic loop to a finished track. I think most of that is a case of getting a basic, rough idea of how you want your track to sound and just going for it. Not focusing too much and trying to hone every sound to perfection before you start arranging a track—because by the time you get around to doing that you’ll be totally bored of everything.
So it’s best to get something in the ballpark and then start spanning it out as quickly as possible…Then you start picking away at various bits and say, ‘I’m going to process this bit because this feels exciting at the moment.’ I suppose the whole thing is about keeping the excitement alive for you as an artist while you’re being creative, so by the time you finish the track and people are listening to it, it sounds exciting to them as well.”
“Usually since I’m using a limited amount of equipment with few options, the sound direction stays largely focused in the same direction, and strays from there. I don’t try to build pieces too often that have too many different types of sounds, or things that were made at different times overlapping simultaneously – usually what is together was all made around the same time, in one sitting.”
“Finding a sound that works is half the battle. I am not one of those producers that considers themselves a ‘sound designer’. I hate the term, actually. It makes me think of cinematic rumblings, car park door slams, and Hans Zimmer – all that does nothing for me. I am a musician. I like to use what’s at hand to create music. Using a preset in a more creative way can do more to advance music scenes sometimes.”
“It’s really hard to have a functional, simple drum loop that fascinates or inspires you.”
“It doesn’t matter what [equipment] you’ve got.
As long as you have the patience to sit down and do it, I suppose, the dogged determination.”
“With electronic music […] you get a feedback system, and get drawn in to areas of experimentation that you just would not discover. I think that’s a lot harder to realise than with a traditional approach of sitting at a piano and orchestrating. You don’t get that immediate feedback of what it does when you bend it and shape it. That’s relinquishing to the machine, but it is part of the process as well.”
“When I work as a producer, I do a lot of reamping and reworking of sounds. Then in the edit, it’s very much about automating between those different choices. I do the same with reverbs: rather than just sticking to one I like to be able to dip into different sound worlds and different physical spaces. Sometimes that’s a seamless transition from a really intimate sound into a really expansive sound, and sometimes it’s a very hard cut.”
“Once we’ve got the snares and kicks in there, sounding nice and fresh, I put a few incidentals in—extra sound effects to give it that sort of shuffle. I’ve got a piece of filtered white noise for the start of the bar […] It sort of thickens [the texture] up a little more, kind of fills around the top end. Especially if you don’t have a lot of rolling hi hats, it’s good to have some top-ish, white-noisy to fill it out. In drum and bass you’ve got airy, natural breaks with all the top end fussing around. So little bits of white noise and stuff like that can be used to fill in the gaps between the individual drum hits to make it sound full […] It almost ties it together as the whole drum beat as one.
“If you can make it interesting when there’s no melody in there, it’s a good start.”
“I try to process as little as possible. The most simple ways of audio editing are naturally the most effective ones: deceleration and acceleration. Especially deceleration is a wonderful way of microscoping analysis. It exposes rich and abstract textures full of former hidden information.”
“I don’t use synthesis, but I use Logic like my own synth. I add distortion, I add filters, bounce things, change the pitch. Put it back in a sampler—just resample and resample until I’ve got something that I’m happy with. I can sometimes spend three days working on one bass sound, getting it exactly as I like it.”
“I think it’s really essential to explore tone—the tone of synths and drums and how bright or dark they are and to listen carefully to how they behave alongside other sounds, exploring tiny amounts of distortion, delay, filtering and compression. But also, don’t be scared to destroy sounds. Sometimes, chaos is needed in electronic music more than acoustic music, because, by its very nature, it’s quite rigid rhythmically and clean-sounding. I would also add that to generate more interesting melodies and chord progressions, you should regularly approach this without a beat or grid. Simply record long passages of improvisation with a synth sound that you enjoy, and then later you’ll be more inspired to make it work with rhythmic samples, because grids often restrict some amazing yet simple possibilities.”
“Let’s say you have a bunch of hot AF signals that hit a limiter and now, suddenly, these waveforms have gone from being big and round and way over zero to being square and sitting right at zero. Anytime you have square wave forms on the sides of those squares–as the wave transitions from the peak moment to any of its preceding to the peak, or post-peak receding back to zero– you get what we call side band harmonics. And those side band harmonics are oftentimes things that we find as pleasurable.
When you saturate a bass and suddenly you take this pure tone and it turns into all these upper band harmonics–we like the sound of those things. That is distortion and it’s adding harmonic content that wasn’t present at the beginning of this path. So no matter what you do–whatever system you pick–if you’re squaring your waveforms in your master you’re ending up with artifacts. Doesn’t matter if you can say, ‘they’re bad’; by definition they are square and you now have side band harmonics. It is by definition distorted and you are by definition adding artifacts.
That piece for me matters because we have all this dogma around clipping and distortion […] You can get this saturation, this harmonic coloring out of the clipping, which gives you these side band harmonics, which gives you this richer, fuller sound that doesn’t have a tiny profile associated with it.
These processes…have been part of the mastering process, and it’s just been something that they’ve kept aside.”
“I usually sneak it up on myself, like I start designing an instrument and then the songs come out by accident as a result. It’s weird–sometimes I’ll go in the studio and something will come out by itself, but the process and the method of it is really important to me. I have to have some idea of like… what am I trying to do with the sounds today? That really gets me over the hump of starting.”
“If you do things the way everyone else does, you’re gonna get the same results everyone else does. It’s really, really good to mess with your process.”
“The way I make music is to try and set it up as a living system where everything’s moving by itself a little bit, and interacting with each other, but I can steer it.”
“Electronic music exists in this flat, digital, virtual space behind the speakers. It’s not like when you listen to an amazing recording of a jazz band on a great hi-fi, and you can hear that goes there, the bass is at the back, the drums are over in that corner…you can hear the room around you. But in electronic music, the only room you hear in it is very often your own. It’s all just pushed to the front of the speakers. It’s nice to flip that idea around.”
“I guess most of the important stuff is my sequencers. I try to program sequencers that are separate from the scale…so the sequence has a shape and a rhythm in a scale, and then you manipulate those things separately. So you can transpose it, but in the scale, or change the shape or add ornaments and stuff to it.”
“What I try to do with electronic music is try to sound as good and free and as spacey as an acoustic recording. This is the big reference for me, but it’s nearly impossible. Because the electronic frequencies are more defined and the rooms, you have to create rooms with spaces and reverbs. All the other effects you can use as something abstract, but the reverbs… Humans are experts in reverbs, it is the one thing we are really experts in; we know if we’re in a kitchen, an elevator, a big hall. Microphone recording lets in this space where the sound was recorded, but with electronic music, it is an effect that is light years behind. You can’t betray the human ear, which is why dry recordings can be timeless and reverb recordings are always fixed to the time of a technology. It’s impossible to bring into electronic music the space existing in acoustic recording, but we can make field recordings and mix electronic and acoustic music. This is what I try to do constantly.”
“When you use all this technology, and put the dynamics and space and try and make something alien, that feels something more like a creation.”
“For me it usually starts off with either coming up with a chord progression I haven’t quite heard before, a beat I haven’t heard before, a new type of sample. I’m always just trying out new things – Hour Logic is quite different from King Felix, which is quite different from the things I’ve done earlier. I think it’s always going to be like that, because I feel that if you can keep your [own] sound at the core, it doesn’t really matter, ultimately, what form it takes. With everybody being so connected and having access to everything, everybody is in this sort of shuffle mode – and if you can make music that sounds like you, people will be able to hear that, no matter what the context.”
“[Sampling] was about capturing the energy the recording like a photograph. If you look at sports photographs–someone in mid-air jumping. You can tell what happened before and what’s going to happen after, but in that frozen moment you have all the energy of both things encapsulated. And that’s more or less how I viewed sampling: it managed to trap the energy of something much bigger than its little components. Then when you recontextualize that and you put it amongst lots of other things that are pulling in lots of other directions you end up with a really dynamic and interesting sound. And I what found is that you can do that with smaller and smaller and smaller particles and they’ll still retain some energy of something before.”
“There’s no such thing as wasted time making things—you always pick up something, you can always bounce out some samples that you can use later. It’s not often that I already have a song in my head. It’s just messing around…Sometimes there’s a genre I want to make, but then usually I fail and it goes somewhere else. And then a couple days later I go, Oh maybe I could combine it with this? and all of a sudden there is some life to it.”
“I don’t know many people who have an endless stream of song ideas in their head.
I think to be truly reliably creative you need to basically be able to generate some sort of stimulus for yourself to react to that is unexpected.”
“When I start a new track, I sit in my Studio and just jam around. If a nice idea pops up, I try to finish the idea in at least one or two days. If not, I delete this whole project and start something new. This keeps my mind free.”
“The music now is growing so fast with the technical base of the pc, software programs, and plugins. This makes it really interesting as producing music is a never-ending story, you can do everything that comes to your mind, there is no limit at all.”
“You can bathe everything in this synthetic gauze of distortion and disfiguration, but at some point I decided to just relax and let an instrument breathe, and realized that that is as interesting as burying it in four iterations of distortion and wet hall reverbs and recording things in acoustic space or whatever. There is a certain potency to having an instrument sit against something that’s de-natured also, so that the two function in a kind of ghostly dance or something that doesn’t make sense.”
“There is enough music out there that follows the rules. I chose my own way of working and this gives me my unique sound. You can have your own unique sound too.”
“Ableton’s LFOs are all over the place when I am working. I love their ability to bring an atmosphere or a space to life by adding some movement and variation. I’ll have dedicated sessions where I’ll just see what I can assign them to and see what kind of interesting sounds I can create.”
“Getting a big sound is a lot to do with sound selection.”
“Art is itself a research practice, a way of investigating the world and ourselves.”
“Usually I’m creating repetitive loops which stream sound in a continuous mode. If it is successful, it reaches a state of limbo: you rather don’t notice the music anymore, and at the same time, it expands the room with an acoustic, becomes a part of the environment. You can call it a neutralization: It is the point where music shifts into function.
I try to process as little as possible. The most simple ways of audio editing are naturally the most effective ones: deceleration and acceleration. Especially deceleration is a wonderful way of microscoping analysis. It exposes rich and abstract textures full of former hidden information.
Creating loops is based on synergy, like a chemical reaction. It can happen that two rather uninteresting audio samples start shining only in combination. A beautiful loop is mostly based on cooperation of different sound sources. That’s why such work is still exciting, even after such a long time. I never know how the particular components will react in advance.”
“If you’re setting up a track, give it some time. Listen to it over and over; that’s the best thing to do. If you get tired of it, change it. If it’s keeping you smiling and alive, then continue.
I think one good possibility to capture different versions of one track is to make versions and to make dubs, go into the instrumentals and develop a track from another track, so you get something going, maybe with vocals, whatever, and you develop it. You do mixes, you change the mixes and get into different levels of what you’ve done before. You change it over and another thing will come out of it. That’s a good thing to do.”
“So we’ll maybe spend days just playing various things, wind instruments, strings, guitars, bass, synths, for hours into the samplers and then feeding those sounds through stacks of destructive hardware and resampling them to make unrecognisable new sounds. This is all before we even begin writing any tunes.”
Mike Sandison, Boards of Canada
“Sound truly gets me inspired. It’s what I react to. A patch I created, then sent through this FX chain, then sampled and put into simpler and back out through another FX chain. That method of experimenting inspires me constantly.”
“With electronic music, it can get really technical, but I’ve learned that once you have a setup that you’re really familiar and comfortable with, whether it’s software, a plugin or a specific synthesizer, to me the goal is to be able to output your ideas without thinking at all.”
“I’ll start with either a melodic or polyphonic sound or texture and try to apply drums by pulling a rhythm out of those abstract shapes and seeing what they might suggest to me.”
“I try to see (inspiration) as a muscle I flex.”
“The way I work is to create a huge amount of content/versions/takes whatever you want to call it and then hone it down over and over. I’ll get inspired by some happy accident when I unplugged a guitar and it made a weird thud through the fx chain, then turn that into a percussive patch in Ableton.”
“For me, one of my main tools now is editing. I’ve become a very fast sound editor. When trying to solve a problem, I will always think about editing a sound rather than trying to recreate it.”
“I have loads of saved effects chains that I use constantly, created by myself, so I always think about these like my main plugins in a way. I have one called Tom-Filter-1 which is a high-pass filter, a delay (with low delay times on the left and right), and a short decay reverb.
“I often use this on breakdowns on loads of tracks at once. It almost sounds like the song is playing in a hallway or something. Like you briefly get a view from outside the universe of the song and you’re listening to it as an outsider for a few seconds. I like that a lot, it changes your perspective and always works to create tension in my opinion.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing. I just explored until I found something I liked and bounced it straight away.”
“I try and make recordings in a way that I have to do as little editing as possible afterwards.”
“Don’t copy, just recreate.”
“I think one of the key things i think about when writing music is about creating something that doesn’t particularly have a start or an end. A piece of music that just exists in time.”
“I’ll make two or three 30-second long loops and they just accumulate – every day I make a couple of ideas and then they pile up, and I kind of sieve through them to find the ones that turn into tracks.”
“I think in the distant future, everything will get more and more grey. Music styles will get more and more mixed and merged.”
“A composition is not complete until it is heard”.
“It is an interesting phenomenon that you can listen to some loops for hours, but when you start arranging them into a time-frame, they will crumble and run through your fingers like sand. On Decay, there are various examples where it was simply more effective to present an almost static arrangement and allow developments to take place on a micro-level and within the sounds.”
“I very rarely go back or delete. I add one eq after the other and each one of them is like a step of correction or enhancement of the previous one. Of course it is maybe the worst thing you could do, but it makes the sound more yours, or better: it crystallizes what your relationship actually is. That’s what I like about electronic music production – it isn’t said that in the end the trumpet-sound must resemble the original trumpet. After everything it could sound more like drums or like a piano.”
“I’m trying not to constantly worry about how it sounds. The question is, ‘What am I feeling?’”
“It was just one of the first experiments of how the people could react to […] this like 45, 50 minutes of build-ups taken from trance tracks just looped very precisely that sounds like it’s coming, but it’s always the same loop. After a while you realize that the filter is not opening, the delay is not coming. It’s not growing.
The build-up is just a breakdown, everything falls apart a bit. Then they have to take you back to the kick. I realized that it was the most interesting part in this genre with these sounds because the other parts with the kick and the drum, it’s what defines the genre. But it’s closed, the genre is defined by that so it needs to be locked in a very closed formula. But the build-up was the only part where the musician could express himself, let’s say.”
“There are different feelings in those different moments, and they each have their own ecosystem. I’m using 24 channels of bleeding, contaminated, overloaded, feedbacking pieces that link to all the others. I don’t want a straightforward emotion — the best things for me are the ones that are confusing as to how I feel.”
“I find a mixture of real acoustic/recorded sound sources mixed or processed with electronic ways gives most interesting results these days.”
“When you’re working with sounds you can make them quite explicit or mutate them, but you have to be careful not to disguise them too much otherwise there’s no point using them texturally.”
“I really like that I can listen to something over and over again. I think that’s my favorite part of working alone or producing myself. I can loop something and listen for an hour in the background.”
Mark Nelson (aka Pan-American)
“I like to have a daily practice playing or interacting with a synthesizer, piano or just something musical to always keep it flowing.”
“Approach sound engineering phenomenologically. Sound, after all, is a phenomenon. Don’t analyze the effect, experience the phenomenon. And play(italics) with the experience. Learn to play(italics) the mixing desk as though it is a musical instrument. You are there to paint with the air. To build, to carve air and manicure sound waves of it, for an audience; a listening, feeling audience.”
wt Robina, Technical Manifesto For The Deviant Sound Engineer
“It is not the work itself, it is to keep oneself in condition to do it, that is difficult.”
Constantin Brâncuși
“This tends to be something I start with a lot: I make drones in the key of the song that I’m working in. The way I normally do them is that I record a long pass of me playing an instrument. There’s one I made from a bleepy square wave patch in Serum which is put though Valhalla Shimmer, so it’s got a long reverb on it. There’s another one I’ve done with a string [patch]: I’ll record a long pass of overlapping notes and then I put that into some software called PaulStretch.
It’s been a nice technique I’ve used early on in projects, because it’s nice not making music from complete silence. Normally the next step of my writing process is to write a bass line or figure out what the root notes of the chords should be. It’s good to have something to do that to, otherwise you’re just doing it in isolation. So I quite often have these [ambient] beds, and also quite often re-use them from other songs.”
Sub Focus, Tape Notes podcast
“I’m very fond of getting stuff down really quickly and rendering to groups and just condensing mass of recordings and then letting stuff fall away that isn’t hitting me.”
“I find that abstract realm of experimentation—it’s such a great place to start to just experience ultimate freedom. You’re not thinking about making a hit; you’re just in this zone of just dabbling. And that for me…I just start there. And then the songs come out of that.”
“I put a bunch of elements together, and if I hear something emerging out of those combinations of elements, that’s where I try and investigate further. Instead of getting an idea and thinking, ‘I want to make something that sounds like this’ and then figuring out how to make it, I’m putting a bunch of things in a pot and looking for some weird chemical reaction to follow. I’ll use that as a guide for what I want to do with the sound rather than deciding where it should go from the beginning.”
“The narrow field is putting sound first. Then there’s the thing I talked about before about creating music that is its own entity, that exists outside of myself to some extent. It’s like putting a chemical reaction in motion and watching what takes place. So the approach changed from putting personal expression first to discovering things about sound. Now I consciously work with very basic building blocks of sound.”
“If I’m working with a synthesiser, for example, the sort of thing I do now is turn up an oscillator and listen to it and then do something really simple or subtle to it. I try to avoid building complex systems and instead try and get complex results from simple systems.”
Rrose
“The speed of access is now a problem over everything. You know, quick decisions, throw away, modify, constant automation on your DAW. That stuff is all well and good, but the reason people are going back to previous stuff is that everyone is looking for forms of restriction, I think. (…)
You throw something in [Elektron hardware], and you’re fighting with it, you’re fighting, and then at some point you’re like: oh my God! That’s crazy. What is that? You’re putting a sample in, and you’re giving it something that’s got nothing to do with that sample, creating something brand new out of it. That’s the core of it. That weird fight between, you know, something to do with the interface of an Elektron machine and the way the guy using it has to find their way through that.”
Some of the bits they probably won’t like, other bits they’ll really like, and there’s a fight between the two, or collaboration, depending on how you look at it. That’s weird.”
“I will use objects, like cymbals, mallets, rhythmic pulses, or granular textures and then use the impulse file to impose the amplitude and frequency of that sound and convole it to the incoming audio. I have discovered so many interesting sounds with this process.
I also have been playing around a lot lately with IZotope’s RX3 advance software. I love the spectral repair function in this. One thing I have been doing lately is taking tons of unrelated field recordings into a single audio file, then taking the audio before then after it and doing a spectral repair process. What is interesting is that it tries to analyze the audio before the file then after it. If you use two sources that are completely unrelated it will try to correct the sounds and give you the sum of them and add them into the beginning and the end. It’s also interesting using this same function but then inserting silence into an audio file then repairing the parts that have silence in which it will try to spectrally repair and glue those sections back together.”
“Much of the overall sound comes from the use of microcassette tapes and reel-to-reel tape, that round-edged warmth and softness… But I try not to rely on that completely, so when arranging things on the computer through GarageBand I try to incorporate as many complementary textures as possible, creating a kind of weaving of hi- and lo-fi that makes sense to me…”
“I find much of my work is process driven, it can start with something very far removed from music, in the instance of the new LP Wilderness Of Mirrors, with me reading around the history of that phrase. From that, an entire process was born, which led to the record. I do of course find myself just experimenting and often come across elements or sounds that spark entire chains of events, but ultimately I find that process of dwelling deeply on an idea something pretty powerful to work from.”
“I just sampled stuff, but I was using this program, Argeïphontes Lyre, [where] if I sampled something, what came out was completely different from the original sample or recording.
“The software was really totally abstract, because you don’t have things like LFO or frequency knobs. It’s just these very abstract names for different buttons – ‘Do you want the turtle to crawl faster?’ for example – so you don’t know what you’re actually doing, you just have to experiment with it. You never know what comes out – I can load a sound and five minutes later I can listen to the result and it’s always a big surprise. For example, I uploaded a track of an old Ukrainian woman, she was perhaps 80 years old, and what comes out of the software is almost Auto-Tuned. So I took the best parts of this and sampled it again and started to work from those snippets.”
“I often feel that even having a really low field recording under the track made in the studio changes the atmosphere completely, you know?”
“I work a lot on the fragment. Even when I am in the studio, I think it is the unit of language which then develops the rest. Even in the approach to Monteverdi, I worked on the fragment, I would say even on the fragmented nature of the creative process: I worked on sound tissue sampling and processing an enormous amount of material taken from all releases, on vinyl and tape, of ‘Poppea’ that I found on e-bay and other e-commerce sites, and that I bought from consumers around the world, especially Italian. These old records, many of them damaged by time, have provided sound materials of great interest, such as glitch, skratch, krakle, on which I built the weaving of sound performance.”
“The idea is to create a rhythmical structure with chords, bass, little sound snippets and delays that combine to create melodies by themselves.
For example, if you repeat a single note in a delay and put it into a room, it starts resonating and builds a melody on top of the basic chord. You never really hear a big tonal change because I’m not going from C major to A major, for example, but melodies seem to appear from the playing of all of those single elements together. Even a resonating snare sound can create a melody.”
“I don’t think technology should always be the main motivator behind your artistic output, or that we should become too reliant on technology to ‘do the work for you’. The ideas behind the work should be at the forefront, with technology as simply a vessel or tool to assist in modes of expression.”
“I try to make everything myself. Even when I just sample, I really try to program with the sample so that I’m not just reveling in the sound of the sample so that it doesn’t sound at all the way that it did before rhythmically. I try to somehow breathe new life into it from my end so that it really does become like my instrument as soon as I put certain effects on top of it or when I run it through my effects units.”
“I just don’t really want to understand a device completely, because I’m afraid it might take away too much of my natural enthusiasm for experimenting.”
“The key to my beat making is that there isn’t really one place where all the drums are coming from and the lines become blurred between a percussive sound and one that’s based on abstract sounds and textures.”
“Electronic music has long entered a “hyperreal” phase where distinctions like electronic vs. acoustic or programmed vs. played are no longer meaningful.”
“When I first started, I used to think sampling was cheating, and I used to think presets were cheating. Then I watched that famous video of Legowelt, where he goes around his apartment showing his collection of synths. Then, once he started to give out these sample packs of presets from those synths…I heard all those samples in Four Tet songs, I was like…it’s not cheating at all! Nobody cares.
I’ll take a preset from Diva and I’ll usually process it or I’ll make some chain. I like building chains from the ground up, I don’t like building sounds from the ground up. Although I guess you could argue that a chain creates a new sound anyway. I don’t have time to build a sound within the synth, I like to just go through the presets, then I’ll find something and then be like, that’s cool.”
“My [Logic] projects are a mess and cannot be deciphered by any engineer. But they make sense to me. I’m building slowly on top of thing, accumulating parts and tracks over time. And I never label anything, and I never stack anything, and I never have colors to coordinate things, and I don’t name things, because it’s just for me.”
“To get strange sounds means you sometimes have to use technology in the way that it’s not supposed to be used. That requires a lot of experimentation and searching for weird plug-ins.”
“This is how I master everything: I have this [FL limiter] Maximus on the reverb..But there’s this preset I’ve made over the years that just compresses the low, mid, and the high–I’ve got that up really high. To mixers and engineers: they’ll probably look at that and get disgusted. Because this is like rural behavior: I’ve got like 15db gain on a limiter. And basically when it comes in it’s cutting off a lot of stuff [off the waveform]. But I don’t look at it, I just listen to it.
But every project has this on it. So if I have a sound and it doesn’t sound good, that’s not hitting–it’s the sound’s fault, essentially. It saves time having something that basically puts [volume]…It’s like mastering backwards, which probably isn’t a good idea but it works for me in terms of having it sound thick and loud.”
“Using field recordings as own compositions (performing sounds). Using field recordings as samples, instrument (resampling and editing sounds). Using field recordings as textures for sound synthesis […] Once I open Ableton Live, I will go through different banks of the field recordings, I look for sounds/ patterns that can be building blocks for a full piece and build off with that. Other instances, I will drop a long piece of recording and improvise and layer on top of another. When I have a track, improvisation of 4-10 minutes, then I proceed adding more sounds onto this, and using repetitive sounds. I enjoy this a lot.”
“I had found a sweet spot in terms of making albums that were voluntarily restricted in terms of gear, but didn’t feel restrictive at all in terms of musical and sound possibilities…”
“It’s important to experiment with new sounds / techniques and continuously learn. But it’s also important to vision your own style and to do what you’re best at and get better at it.”
“For a long time I’ve got in the habit of just making-even when I’m not in the mood almost–just making. And it can be anything. It can be fleshing out a composition in a half an hour or an hour, concentrating on an effect, concentrating on a melody–all the different aspects of making music.
And then maybe that can be re-used a month later, or a year later, or never. It’s almost like research for me, really: I’m constantly exploring stuff on different scales and then the stuff that interests me ends up on different compositions, potentially. But even if things don’t get used, often you learn from them, or you learn what you like or don’t like, the process.”
“The actual aesthetic of insane digital sound processing is not really where I’m coming from, I’m much more interested in textures and how sounds which probably shouldn’t work together are able to bend and cooperate. How sounds, once you’ve built some rudimentary programming blocks, just get let go and form the genesis of how ideas can form. You could say it’s more sound discovery than sound design for me.”
“And it just seemed like the more I did to them—the more I tried things with them—the more ideas seemed to come out of them. To me, that’s the really interesting part of making music. The mixing part and finishing tracks…that’s not the interesting part. It’s finding details in things: that’s what really interests me. And I still do that.”
“You have to understand that the breaking point of some of the equipment, and the breaking point of some of the ideas, they are very close to each other.”
“…If I record something, I still do it very freely. I’m not into going too much into detail. For me, the overall expression is more important than little details.”
“I’m kind of more into old reverbs, especially 12-bit reverbs that don’t sound too realistic. Modern reverbs that are too realistic are a little bit scary for me because you have a kind of uncanny valley that sounds so realistic it feels uncomfortable. It’s nice when the reverb is a bit crappy—it’s more relaxing for the brain.”
“The process starts at this moment when I hear there’s a song a want to make something else. And I sample it, looking for bits and pieces in it that I really like and I’m trying to rearrange it. It could go backwards, forwards, sideways, everywhere, you know? Double it, loop some new things, new instruments, like the guitar in the software. And of course the beat. That’s probably the whole thing. Then I mix it live. Always.”
The more you f–k around and try new things that seem like they won’t work, the more likely you are to discover some magical combination of sounds or effects or whatever that you would not have discovered if you were trying to achieve a specific sound as opposed to having an exploratory approach.
“We have parts played by a string quartet and overdubbed with four different synth voices; you can double it and have them weave in and out of each other so you don’t really know if it is the real instrument or if it is something else. People are unable to put their finger on what the sound is coming from, which is also something that’s very interesting to me — you can create something that maybe sounds familiar, but there’s something different about it, and it sounds new.”
“I’ve read a bit about how other people produce. They generally start off with drums, then put the other stuff in, whereas generally, I’m the other way around. I’m more interested in the fabric of the track. I don’t know whether it’s the way my brain is wired or whether it’s the fact that I’m interested in it, but I always think of these things very sculpturally. For me, it’s as much as a sculptural object as it is a piece of sound.”
“If I’m making a song and I need a kick drum, well, I could sample a kick drum, I could use a vintage drum machine emulator, I could mic up a drum kit and record a kick drum…At a certain point sound is just sound. It really just comes down to what qualities you are looking for from the sound. That’s really the way I think about music at this point.”
“After a while I kind of liked the way that they were sounding. I ended up feeding them into Ableton Live’s audio-to-MIDI converter. That’s where everything sort of clicked. I’d never used MIDI aside from the odd track here and there. This was the first time that I really utilised MIDI data, the whole album became built around it.
“Aside from converting the sequences to MIDI, I was also feeding stuff that you probably aren’t supposed to feed into the MIDI converter. That’s always been part of my technique – utilising software in ways that it wasn’t necessarily created to do. I would feed it a Juno 106 drone pad, whereas typically you’d feed in something more distinct like a bass line. It just spat out a confusion of MIDI data that I ended up working with.”
“I used Arturia’s DX7 V soft synth to play back the data and it actually sounded really cool. That’s basically where it started. Then the fun was figuring out which patch on the DX7 to use. The really fun part was feeding all kinds of weird stuff into the audio-to-MIDI converter and seeing what it came up with. This process organically happened and presented a new way to create.
Sometimes the MIDI data would have to be edited because it would spit out a wrong note here and there. I would have to figure out where the little wrong note is, amongst thousands of MIDI notes. Then I started enjoying finding the rogue notes by ear. It was a very rewarding process in the end that just sort of happened by accident.”
“I have lots of different analog machines in my studio, including Eurorack modules and oscillator-based synthesizers, and I like to collect sounds from all of these disparate sources and put them into a system that I’ve developed in Ableton. That involves making my own instrument racks and inputs and processing sound sources through them to develop textures that can be recognized as my signature sound. I’ll also use software to create various soundscapes, but I resample everything in audio because I like to have the freedom to edit, chop and automate sounds wherever they come from.”
“I think filters are one way of cutting frequencies… Nothing above this frequency can come through, but noise reduction stuff works with what’s called an FFT, and so you split the audio bands into, say, 1,024 bands, and you control each one… It’s like a different way of controlling the frequency response using PCAs per band.
And it’s just another way of doing it and to me it’s a bit more bit more interesting, a little softer, and more fizzy, sometimes… I think my process is to add a lot of distortion and add a lot of harmonic information and then try and find ways of taking it out again to get further away from the original point. You can do that with filters, but PCA, FFT stuff is like another way of filtering and it’s just a way of making something messy, cleaning it up, making it messy again. You kind of kind of go through that a few times and then you end up somewhere else, which is nice […]
I mean, sometimes it sounds totally different, but then I love committing that to an audio file and then you forget about that history and it just becomes this thing. And then it’s like you kind of start again with that. That’s what I really like about making music, it’s that kind of constant renewal of sounds.”
“Sometimes if what you’re working with is already quite abstract, it can be really useful to just try and force it into a very conventional structure, either within it, within a track, or within a whole album or something. It can be a nice way of making abstract stuff make sense – to force it into a very rigid and straightforward structure.”
“It is not always the right decision to be just adding and adding things when making for the sake of it and because it’s easy because of technology. The foundation has to be there of the message, and that can actually be presented minimally.
“You don’t need something to get something, you can get there some other way. You just have to look.”
“I always think that synthesizers have no business being touch sensitive, actually. A piano is a piano and the touch sensitivity on a synthesizer is always going to be artificial. It’s the physical thing of a piano and it’s going to be somebody’s interpretation of it on a synthesizer — and different on every synthesizer — which may not suit you. My Wave and my Minimoog have no touch sensitivity and it’s almost like they’re more real that way. Synthesizers are great but it’s no good using them as pianos — they’re a thing apart, different.”
“It’s all about the ears and imagination and the process. It’s a thinking process, almost. Ideas come from various members, and then it’s survival of the fittest ideas. A lot of stuff is improvised, and then 6 months later you notice that an idea that happened there is still attached to the music.”
“What created part of the original sound of The Art of Noise were the limitations of the technology. The early sampler, The Fairlight, had like a 2 second sampling window and you put in a nice bright sound it and it came back all dull and horrible. That forced you to do interesting and creative things with it. It had a certain sound, and if you listen to those early Art Of Noise albums they have a certain sound and that is determined by the limitations of the technology. Once the technology ceases to have limits, it’s almost like having too much freedom. It’s difficult to work, really.”
“For me, ambient music is drawing out the details in the small sounds. Whether that’s a piano, a synth, orchestral textures or a pattern, its about bringing those elements to the forefront of the sonic space. Making this kind of music requires an intuitive slowness and attention to detail. For example, you could gain up the mics on a felted upright quite a bit to hear the mechanics, the actual notes being played, the room, the piano stool, the player and really draw the listener in as if they are sat next to you at the piano. It’s just one instrument, but that’s sometimes enough in ambient music.”
“Maybe its a nostalgic or romantic approach because I find tape noise beautiful and it reminds me of my childhood or old movies and things from the past we don’t face anymore in our sterile, digital, crisp and clean world. But we can use artefacts and distortion in a more artistic way as something which is on the other side of the middle. We can now choose if we want to have a crystal clear super objective recording or if we want a more distorted subjective recording of things. Now that we can record sounds that are clean, perfect and absolutely in sync, we should think about imbibing the failures and imperfections in the same way people have rediscovered Polaroid or film.”
“Consider making music, in this case as an improviser and producer, as a type of temporal/sonic alchemy. The improvising happens in real time, existing like an ephemeral vapor, the recordings are fixed, like frozen ice, and then dropping those recordings into Ableton dethaws and liquifies them, like water.
“Each of these forms has a different relationship with time. Improvising happens within the present moment, experiencing real time. How you feel or what you think affects how or what you play, and what you play gets absorbed back into you as you listen, which then affects how you feel and what you think all over again! A musical instrument is a tool to manipulate your sense of present, flowing time in this feedback loop. The recording is fixed, capturing a time from the past, and then processing it in Ableton opens up a multitude of possibilities, into the future.”
“Working with software, I record everything; wholly archiving every idea, improvisation or sample. My relationship with creating music seldom unfolds in ‘real time.’ I consider working with digital audio as a type of time travel, a way of capturing time and alchemically processing it between and through different states of air/vapor (the real, acoustic signal), liquid (digital audio files in the reversible processes of editing, sequencing and arranging) and ice (the final, frozen, product or song).”
“I think jamming in Ableton or on hardware or whatever and just recording it, whatever happens. That’s a good way to come up with weird ideas or things that you wouldn’t come up with otherwise.”
“Everything was really organic. There were no turntables involved, there was no DJ’ing involved. It was all synthesis and drum machines and no loops. I’m not saying loops are a bad thing. But I think what’s kind of happened now is that people are forgetting the actual skills of synthesis and programming, by getting really lazy and just grabbing.
“You had one snare on the drum machine but you could make that snare sound like nearly anything you wanted. If I wanted a lower snare, I’d pitch the tape machine up a couple of ips and then when I’d put it back down to the normal speed it was like another snare. Then you’d put a reverb on it or something. So there were all these things that you could do. I used to love spending time treating every single instrument. At one point, I created a diagram of a perfect system, which was a grid-like snare, bass drum, hi–hat on one side and then on the other side I would have reverb, flange, delay, compression and then I would put one to the other.”
“I like to sample a lot of random stuff from old vinyl, then put it through plug-ins and re-pitch, stretch, or just somehow warp to make these nice textures. You don’t necessarily listen to it and think, ‘Oh, that’s sampled’, but that graininess and warmth comes through in the music. Then that’s balanced with very carefully sculpted synth sounds and other textures that I’ve made from scratch in the studio.”
“The reduction to a minimum, the ability to reduce fractions–that was the strength of all great composers.”
“Steady state. Something which is not really standing, but standing and moving at the same time. Then it leads to a really deep state.”
“Experimentation, exploring, sound, and listening. To listen to backgrounds. You should always be listening to what is in the background, of whatever it is…I’m trying to round up the capacity of what the ear can perceive.”
“The funniest problem in music production is, What is my sound? Just do some shit–that’s your sound. So many people make decisions that have been assembled for them by other people that just sounds like some sum of tutorials instead of decisions they found on their own.”
“Templates and presets don’t force you to think. And the less you think about what you’re doing the more you end up in the same spot…For me it’s like, force yourself to find a new way every time. It’s such a waste of time in a lot of ways, but I never feel like I’m making the same song twice, ever, because I have to do every bit of it manually.”
“Just make a giant [effects] chain. A lot of times people ask me how I make a sound, and it’s like, I just didn’t stop where you would have stopped twenty effects ago. There’s no secret thing: you just keep doing shit and eventually you’ll get something interesting. And that’s the non-technical aspect of it: there is no right or wrong way to do anything. People are just very careful about [sound design] and don’t want to ruin it. And I’m just like, I need it to be ruined to be interesting because I’ve heard every sound up until that point, so I’ve got to add another thing and then another thing and then suddenly you get something novel. But it’s not out of you being smart. It’s just because you’ve made so many arbitrary decisions that you’re suddenly in a new place.”
“Even if you don’t enjoy dealing with the complexities of a synthesis engine, you can still bend the sounds in other ways. Apart from standard MIDI articulation such as velocity, aftertouch and the modulation wheel, macros can be controlled from knobs and sliders on your MIDI keyboard. As the sounds can be played with dynamically changing colours, anyone can get creative – not only by choosing or crafting the ‘perfect’ sound but through intuitive performance.”
“I’m a miracle man – things happen which I don’t plan, I’ve never planned anything…Whatsoever I do, I want it to be an instant action object, instant reaction subject. Instant input, instant output.”
“I’m not into multitracking, I like things to be live. I record everything live, and I’m not bothered about saving sounds. In fact, I erase them on purpose. I have a library of stuff, but it’s stuff I haven’t used yet. And also I don’t want to use a sound I’ve used before. There’s an infinite number of sounds in the world, and it’s a waste to use the same sound twice.”
“My biggest buzz is taking a sound and turning it into something new. Or taking anything and making it into something specific […] So if I get a 9lb sledgehammer and smash it into a galvanized plate, I can make a string sound from it, rather than a snare. I like not to do the obvious.”
“When I started analysing sounds, I was kind of disappointed. I always thought a bird was a bird, and a car was a car, and these were sounds to be explored. But you can reduce a bird to a sine wave when you sample it, and to me that was a shock. All sounds break down into really simple things. You’d think a sine wave is a sine wave, and a bird is a bird, but they’re not: they’re the same sound, but controlled differently. Once I’d got that idea into my head, that a lot of sounds are pretty fundamental, I could concentrate on the subtle differences.”
“If you’ve got a feel for music and you know what you’re trying to achieve, it doesn’t matter what equipment you use, you can near enough get away with using anything. People tend to crave after better equipment when they don’t know what they want from their music.”
“If I can’t create a sound that I like, I find it very hard to create a song. I get inspired by a good sound. It’s like a message to me, it gives me a feeling for a rhythm or a melody. The sound’s the most important thing.
“Usually I start by trying to program a bass sound, ‘cos that’s what the music needs. I’ll use any of my keyboards. I sit around for hours trying to program sounds that no-one else has come up with before, sounds that are going to have a lot of energy. If you use presets you just end up sounding like everybody else.”
“…a lot of the working phases involve experimenting with the material, allowing myself to have long thought processes and taking lots of little detours and tangents.”
“With Massive, before Serum, there were no tutorials. And I was just turning every knob and imagining what that might mean what I’m doing right there […] I was like, Just turn every knob, remember what it does and start to build in your mind a sort of map of, Okay, this does this, this does that, now I’m hearing this sound which has this sort of characteristic, and if I put this knob here it would get something like that… So that’s what I did for years, and many times I wouldn’t get to the result I wanted, but I would find something else in the process and then you just store that [in your mind]. And eventually you figure out, Okay now I know what wavetables are and what is actually happening here. And sometimes that can be a blessing and a curse because if you want to make something new you might get stuck in your patterns of how to make a sound.”
“I’ve notice that there’s an ethos in England that’s more like, ‘I’m only using like 7 unbelievable sounds’, while over here [in the United States] it’s, ‘I’m using everything I can.’ When you only use seven sounds and they’re all unbelievable, and you spend a lot of time on each one of those sounds, it’s minimal but it’s really good.”
Barclay Crenshaw (aka Claude von Stroke)
“Sound is one of the most abundant forms of free energy.”
“Try not to be focused on type of process of making music.”
“Making field recordings is just trying to capture a certain mood. A lot of the sound that you hear–drums, percussion–I would like to capture certain vibe from nature by just going out with a drumstick and trying to find a kick drum in the stones, or trying to find the kick drum in the sand or lava rocks.”
“I didn’t want to do a nostalgic thing but those sorts of sounds, I really love them, I really love a bad accordion synth, it sounds really beautiful in a way, or a really shitty choir preset can sound lovely.”
“I wanted to use these sounds in a way that wasn’t nostalgic. But they have a history, they evoke a certain thing and then you do something different with them and it makes your brain go Bleaugh!”
“I would split his piano signal into four or five different frequency bands, so everything equivalent to the lower string of a bass guitar would be put onto one track of the tape, then the next frequency band that is equal to the human voice range would be put onto another. I would make up four or five tracks like this, so I could split the sound spectrum up into different regions, and then I would work separately with these regions. Instead of putting echo on the piano as one might normally do, I’d say: ‘OK, on the bottom end of the piano, I’m going to spread that sound out, flange it or put it out of phase, or something. Then with the next band of sound, I’m going to just leave it out completely or put it far back in the mix and over on the righthand side’. I could then maybe put a repeat echo on the third band, and so on.”
“I started to get really atomic about sound and analyse it carefully to see what could be sucked out of it, what could be found within an existing sound and made more of. I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do.”
“I started implementing AI in my sequencing aspect of the sound because I found it fascinating that with techno we have both very primitive-sounding results where it’s really drum-driven, loopy, and tends to trigger a primitive aspect of our human condition. But at the same time it’s exploring technology to a very extreme extent. The concept of techno is first to explore what we have available in terms of technology. So I’m trying to use AI for sequencing my sound, in both ways. In the sense of AI is the top of technology nowadays, but also to stimulate ideas at a rudimental level where I’m just randomizing what the AI is basically understanding. And working with this randomness and then getting inspiration through this.”
“The key is not having the ideas but having the recipe to deal with your ideas.”
“Add the tools you develop while solving each problem to your toolbox, to use on future problems. More important, add to your toolbox the methods by which you discovered the new tools.”
John Kuprenas, Matthew Frederick
“Some of the things I love most about grime – like eight bar structures, big low frequencies, very sparse arrangements – I’ll make an eight bar ambient tune and try to channel that energy into a tune that you could listen to while doing yoga. It still feels earnest. It’s just translating my love of grime, eight bar or whatever, into a context that I feel quite comfortable working in.”
“Now that we have enough computer power, we can imitate nature’s method as well as its results. Generic algorithms may let us create things too complex to design in the ordinary sense.”
“Music can teach you … things not to do. Most of the music today is telling you bad things to do.”
“I tried to mix them in a balanced and, at the same time, experimental way. It is an important part of my creative process and takes time to figure out each composition’s sound palette, but it is worth it when you achieve the result you were imagining!”
“I kind of see [arrangement] as a bit of a story with repeating phrases. And every time you tell the phrase again you’re telling it in a slightly different way so it feels like you’re getting to know the story deeper and deeper and deeper. I like to do that by repeating sections but when you repeat you change them slightly, or add in some new layers.
Another way I like to do that is […] make different parameters on plug-ins, or using returns, so that repeated sounds feel like they’re evolving. It’s very subtle. But you can feel when all the sounds are changing and evolving and moving: it feels like they’re alive. And I’m more wanting the music to sound like it’s evolving. And so automating a lot of parameters on plug-ins, the track volumes, using a lot of [effect] returns[…] These are all going down to different delays, different reverbs that are EQ’d differently–all the kinds of different sounds that can make sounds sound like they’re in different spaces. And then, how do I make an arrangement feel like it’s telling a deeper and deeper and deeper story? How does it feel like a journey?”
“Sometimes I don’t like thinking, this part has to be exactly four bars, and so forth. Sometimes I’ll hit the record button and just go, ignoring the metronome and just doing whatever. I’ll improvise for five minutes and condense that into a song.”
“Our goal wasn’t, oh, we’re going to make a collage of Ronald Reagan so you think he sucks: we thought, let’s make an entire album out of just our washing machine because it’s a gamble, and what if you can create a beautiful, psychedelic world from an everyday object that you might think is drab, boring and oppressive? To me, that can vindicate whole other ways of thinking about sampling – it doesn’t have to be about increasingly finely sliced variations of a dance music genre.”
I’m heavily indebted to Kentaro Suzuki’s LFO-Cluster VST, and used that extensively. It’s a solar system of cascading LFOs that are related but distinct to each other, and you can map them to parameters. I’ll fill up Sampler or Simpler in Ableton, put some EQs and filters on, and then flood every single parameter with different LFOs chained to other LFOs using the LFO-Cluster technique.
We’re not genius songwriters or attuned to transposing our emotions; we’re more interested in stroking an object to see whether it seems to want to hang out at a certain pitch or tempo. It’s an encounter with the otherness of an object, or the whole world, rather than us looking inward.”
Drew Daniels, Matmos
“I feel more of a connection to a track I’m building if the samples or sounds are personal to me. For example, when a fragment of vocal comes in, it appears with the memories and connotations I had with the original track, which draws me into the idea more and influences the sounds I layer it with, whether that’s a specific synth, chords or drum sounds. When I’m connected to the sounds that are being organized, it just makes me care more and feel more.”
“I like to react as a player to complex sound that you’re not in full control of, so I always try and get the sound first.”
“Actually I always thought if you love techno and you don’t at least appreciate dub or other music that is based on reduction and repetition there’s something wrong. There’s not supposed to be a divide there. I have always been interested in music reduced to its essence. That’s what drew me to dub and then house and techno in the first place. I think house and techno were so liberating in the beginning because it radically focused and relied on the functionality of the rhythm.”
“I was never interested in repeating, extending or improving one certain production methods. Even though I value artists, who follow this strategy, it never became a perspective for myself. The concept of a rapid, erratic and jumpy biography attracts me much more. You should risk breaks in style – especially as an already established artist.”
“Not all loops were synchronised, which caused an ‘acoustical glimmer’, that explains some of the titles (Moiré).”
“Mostly it’s an ‘interaction‘ with the machines. Long and time consuming seances with a technical apparatus where the result is open-ended. I’m not really an engineer – which effects positively my working process: the better you understand your working system, the smaller is the chance for surprises.”
“There is an expression I love from Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘Nature talks, experience translates it.’ All the aesthetics of my plates, I picked up from nature. There is an aestheticization of cooking for me that came from my relationship with nature. And there is another expression I adore from [artist Pierre] Soulages which says: ‘Plus les moyens sont limités, plus l’expression est forte.’ The more limited the means, the more powerful the expression.”
“Often bridging the real with the unreal you end up with the kind of ultra human…it’s a funky old hybrid of materials.”
“I listen to something and think, ‘there’s more dimension in here than I can capture in one go through.’ So when I create music I enjoy to hide all sorts of elements in and then to make sure that each thing has its purpose.
“[Mixing] is a constant prioritization about what should be in the background, what should be in the foreground, how do you carve a satisfying set of journeys where everything goes on a little path and paths connect. I think it’s just a matter of listening very carefully to what’s there and not being afraid to remove things if they’re not right. But there’s always a way you can make things work. Even though there’s just two speakers there’s always space, and sometimes you just need to sculpt the right EQ out of one thing so another thing can live there.”
“Most of the ‘strange noises’ are just guitars, strings and horns recorded in different ways. I have a tendency to record a bunch and then just sample parts of what I’ve done. It’s all about laying instruments and making new instruments out of the combination of different instruments’ decay and timbre. But the important part for me is that everything is real. I don’t use any sound banks or keyboards. I do have a midi keyboard but it’s just for playing my own sounds.”
Brian McBride, Stars Of The Lid
“Because it’s a cut-and-paste process, and in general it’s loop-based music, electronic music, in a way, is always pattern-based. You need to give a certain diversity to it by changing small details. This can be done, not just by changing the chord, but sound-wise if you have a pattern that’s eight bars long and you repeat it four times, you just want to make sure that on the fourth time of the repetition something else is happening.”
“[Paul Stretch software] extends sounds. So, if you put a 30-second recording of a harp in there, it will extend it for an hour. It won’t mess with any of the transients within it, so it doesn’t sound terrible, it sounds like a really beautiful, long piece of drone. Sometimes I’ll put something into that, then put it back into Logic and go through it and find little bits that work. Elements where the harmony becomes interesting.”
“With my Zoom recorder I recorded some field recordings and percussive sounds, connecting the music to the visual ideas. I wanted to look for contrasts sound wise, make it sound organic yet digital. Using soft melodies but more bright and icy percussion for example. The act of ‘zooming in’ was a way of working throughout the whole process: looking for details in sound and researching my surroundings closely to find those sounds and moods.”
“The interesting thing about electronic music is that you can really think about your method of producing. It’s not as simple as ‘I play a drum’, then ‘I add a bassline.’ It can be a lot more deconstructed in a way. I often just start with a sound, then I try shaping it and making it more human or something.”
“Usually I’ll start by looking for a sound that intrigues me in some way, and then I’ll play a melody or rhythm with it. From there I start building. Recently I’ve also started making my own drums samples using my modular synthesizer.”
“I never used the studio for its technological side since I only utilise a fraction of its capabilities to produce my music. That’s a philosophical point with me. An awful lot of music justifies itself on how sophisticated the technology is, but me, I don’t give a damn about the sophistication of the technology. I care about the music and the only way I can get to the music is to be responsible for every sound that’s there – and that means it has to be me doing it in real time.”
Harold Budd
“I just go in there and try to find something that sounds good, and if changing the sound parameters in the keyboard isn’t too offensive, I’ll deal with it. But I never think about how I do it. All the hard work goes into simply doing it and making sure it comes out alright, and I couldn’t care less about what the actual parameters of the instrument I’m using are, or whether I’m using it correctly. For example, on the piece called ‘Chet’ — which is a reference to Chet Baker — there’s a sound like someone slamming a door way off in the distance. It’s a sound that happens on one of the Ensoniq Mirage’s presets. I found that when I pushed one of the notes down really carefully and slowly, the first sound that came out was this splash sound. No actual musical sound came because I hadn’t pressed the key hard enough. So I used that sound only, maybe four or five times in a seven‑minute piece. It’s this kind of use of keyboards that interests me.”
“The thing is that I just work within a language; I’m speaking a musical language with a modular synthesizer as the pen. I don’t have any other language and I don’t have any other pen. So, it’s not Indian classical music, it’s just a way of understanding sound. It’s a framework within which to make sense of frequencies.”
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