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How I Use Brett’s Sound Picks
My Spotify playlist, Brett’s Sound Picks 2018, is an ever-growing collection of favorite pieces of music from the past year. Once a week I comb through new releases in search of good stuff—and I keep finding it. The playlist now has almost 80 tracks. I listen to it often to get ideas, pressing Shuffle to… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Curtis Roads’ “Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic” (2015)
“In the real world of acoustic instruments, every note and drum stroke is unique. Thus we seek to avoid the bland impression of repeated sounds that never change. It is worthwhile to take the trouble to articulate a unique identity for each object by creative editing and processing. This includes stamping each sound with a unique… Continue reading
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Flow Studies: On Sport’s Physical Music
(Excuse the terrible soundtrack to the swimming video.) Continue reading
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On The Editing Mindset
I spend more time editing music than I do recording it. As I’ve talked about this topic here and here on this blog, my typical workflow is to work up pieces over a few weeks and then put them aside for about a year. (Isn’t this the aging secret of cheese- and wine-making?) Eventually I… Continue reading
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Freestyle: On Musical Clichés
Make beat 1 or the downbeats obvious. There needs to be a hook. Write a great melody. Don’t repeat too much. Disguise your effects processing. Make it sound like music that is already out there. Make it danceable. Make the drums “punchy.” Make sure everything is in tune. There’s an achievable “pro sound.” Make it… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Mark Fisher’s “K-Punk” (2018)
“If the Nineties were defined by the loop (the ‘good’ infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s ‘Timeless’), then the twenty-first century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a timetrap. This frustrated, angular time–and the enjoyment of… Continue reading
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Make It Exquisite
exquisite—beautiful, lovely, elegant, fine, magnificent, superb, well-crafted Make it exquisite. This phrase pops up from time to time as an end-goal for whatever I’m working on, a reminder that the made thing should be as well-crafted as I can make it and have some kind of attractiveness (at least for me, and hopefully for you).… Continue reading
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