brettworks

thinking through music

October 1, 2018

Production Stories: Working On Minutiae

Composing is often a labor of working on minutiae that or may not ever be noticed, but certainly felt. When listeners listen to music, they notice everything, even if they don’t realize they’re noticing it and instead just feel it. Listeners take in tempo, instrumentation, grooves and repetition, themes and variations, singing and lyrics, stasis… Continue reading

Production Stories, Uncategorized
September 28, 2018

Searches That Brought You Here: Nassim Taleb, David Abram, Walter Percy

• Thomas, I’m curious what your take is on Taleb. This search brought you to my post on the musical applications of some of the ideas from Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile. I wrote: “Tinkering is a process of trial and error that allows one to make many small mistakes or incur small losses. The mistakes… Continue reading

searches that brought you here, Uncategorized
September 27, 2018

Subway Band

The cover band in Times Square that only plays Beatles songs sounds broken their songs lurch along unsteady and strum heavy rushing beats and pitchy vocals just holding together but the tunes still travel memory maps of the early days singing a hard days night at a pub in Hamburg because even ragged music doesn’t feel sorry… Continue reading

poetry, Uncategorized
September 26, 2018

Brett’s Sound Picks: Dmitry Evgrafov’s “Unity” (2018)

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Brett’s Sound Picks, Uncategorized
September 25, 2018

Art About Music: Richard Caton Woodville’s “The Italian Boy with Hurdy-Gurdy” (c. 1853)

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art about music, Uncategorized
September 24, 2018

Production Mindsets: Volume

“Can I have everything louder than everything else?”— Ritchie Blackmore Trying to get just the right volume for every element in the mix is frustrating, because there are so many factors contributing to how we perceive a sound. There is the timbre of the sound, the register it’s playing in, the part it’s playing, as well… Continue reading

mixing, perception, Production Stories, Uncategorized, volume
September 21, 2018

Being In It: Thoughts Whilst Editing Music To Make It Better

Let me open up the first piece again. (Double click.) Okay I’ll listen from the top. Oh, I was going to EQ the piano. (Search for EQ, click and drag.) I had a preset I saved. (Piano is playing. Load EQ.) It sounds a little boxy on this piece though. (Move the EQ bump to… Continue reading

Production Stories, Uncategorized
September 20, 2018

Resonant Thoughts: Nick Papadimitriou’s “Scarp” (2012)

“This book is…an inquiry undertaken in order to systematically ‘feel out’ the presence of my subject matter as it brushes against the consciousness…I will reconstruct the ghostly voices I hear while walking on Scarp in an attempt to relate my own story to theirs, to locate my own voice and sensations in the ones that… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts, Uncategorized
September 19, 2018

Brett’s Sound Picks: Biosphere’s “Rovertse Heide” (2018)

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Brett’s Sound Picks, Uncategorized
September 18, 2018

Art About Music: Frans Hals’s “The Rommel-Pot Player” (c.1618–1622)

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art about music, Uncategorized

Thomas Brett is a musician and writer who holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from New York University. He is the author of Principles of Electronic Music Production and The Creative Electronic Music Producer, a book described by Sound On Sound magazine as “a deep philosophical analysis of the various creative inspirations, ideas and processes involved in producing electronic music.” His essays have appeared in the journals Popular Music and Popular Music and Society, as well as edited collections by Routledge, Oxford, and Cambridge University presses. Thomas has played percussion on Broadway since 1997 and writes about music at brettworks.com.