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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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Sounding Like A Pro
I run into versions of this phrase a lot as I coast over music websites and catalogs, surveying the gear. Ads for equipment and instruction promise that if you have this or that piece of pro gear or if you play this or that way you’ll be one step closer to sounding like a pro. Sounding… Continue reading
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Timing Techniques: Listening Over People, Rhythmically Resisting, And Super Rhythm
There’s a spot in the show where I have a solo—a moment to set the time for everyone else. The conductor thinks he’s in charge, but no, he’s actually following me in my moment of laying it down, which is simultaneously my moment to test a hypotheses. The hypothesis is this: at some point in… Continue reading
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Breakbeat Thinking
Back in the early 80s the turntablists found the breakdowns the funky bits where the band stops and the rhythms keep running soon the samplers were grabbing hook-textures from old records reinflating the past to pop it in the present it was about finding the rhythm in things the grooves of juxtaposition a well-timed turnaround an accidental… Continue reading
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