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brettworks

thinking through music


  • October 4, 2018

    Music Listening 2

    Music sounds different in the morning or late at night when you’re impatient or even-tempered when it’s your own or a stranger’s when you imagine her listening when it’s bonafide like Bach or played by the guy on the train who sings Neil Young badly when you’re wishing you were more skilled at listening when… Continue reading

    poetry, Uncategorized
  • October 3, 2018

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Nils Frahm’s “Harmonium in the Well” (2018)

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    Brett’s Sound Picks, chords, harmoniums
  • October 2, 2018

    Art About Music: Liu Kang’s “Indian Musicians” (1972)

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    art about 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
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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.

Recent Posts

  • Musical Ideas
  • 2 September
  • Curating the Week: Juggling, Music Teachers, Writing, Tacit Knowledge in Research
  • 8000 Studies
  • 7 August

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