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Music Production Mindsets: Using Ableton’s Capture
When I’m browsing and trying out synthesized sounds, wishing that I were doing something else (this happens about 30 seconds into the process—it is what it is), I inevitably end up playing a few chords or a scrap of melody to hear how they sound. I don’t consider this real music because I’m just throwing… Continue reading
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Second Hand Clock
The second hand of the clock at the dry cleaners is racing I notice it as she’s charging my card just over ten dollars the minimum fee most second hands go tick-tick even if the ticking is a silent measure you see its discrete steps a mechanical resistance against forward motion but this hand is liquid a Dali-esque melting… Continue reading
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Arrows Of Attention: Variations On Oblique Strategies
Take yourself out of the mix. Make it sound exquisite. Hide the production’s effects. Make it felt, but not quite audible. Derive everything from a single source. Get to know how the parameter can modulate the overall mood. Picture someone using this or the music being useful to them. Does it still work when… Continue reading
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On Automated Aesthetics For Opened-Up Impact: Jon Hopkins’ Music
“I like everything to evolve, I don’t like sounds to be static really… I like the idea of trying to create this musical world where everything is fluid and any sound can at any point just change.” -Jon Hopkins One of the most compelling qualities of Jon Hopkins’ music is how its elements shift, develop,… Continue reading
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Hardcore Ambient
I notice the ambient style at concerts and on recordings a layered thick dense and noisy sound a sound so deep I can’t see its bottom a processed sound it disguises the melodies disfigures the chords paints over the rhythms with smears of snap crackle and pop as if the musicians don’t want you know them or… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Tim Krabbé’s “The Rider” (1978)
“On a bike your consciousness is small. The harder you work, the smaller it gets. Every thought that arises is immediately and utterly true, every unexpected event is something you’d known all along but had only forgotten for a moment. A pounding riff from a song, a bit of long division that starts over and… Continue reading
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Notes On Notated Versus Produced Music
A percussionist recently got in touch to ask if he could buy a copy of one of my percussion scores, Zoom (1994) for some chamber performances this summer. (You can listen to me playing the music here, and my remix of it here.) I told him I’d check if I had a hard copy in… Continue reading
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