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Database: Max Cooper On Parameter Spaces
“The Prophet-6 is my most used synth. It’s just got a nice balance of not trying to do too much, but doing enough to be flexible. The parameter space it covers is high proportion beautiful. Any synth, you’ve got a bunch of parameters with continuous values. If you’ve got 50 parameters, you’ve got a 50 Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Robert M. Persig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (1974)
“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.” “The craftsman isn’t Continue reading
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Keywords: Trust The Hands
If you’re a musician of some experience you know things about music not from the outside, as a listener, but from your body, as a practitioner. Trust the hands is the heuristic of letting your understanding unfold through your playing. Whether at a keyboard, fretboard, or computer, your hands come to know a musical-instrumental terrain Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Ben Murphy’s “Ears To The Ground” (2024)
“There seems to be a trend of placing field recordings into electronic music, presumably to portray some sort of connection between organic and electronic worlds […] For me, this sort of approach has become a bit of a trope, and I think there are much more interesting ways of including field recordings. The thing I Continue reading
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Notes On Virtual Instruments
If you played a musical instrument when you were growing up you spent years getting to know how the instrument worked and how to work with it. It took time—concentrated lesson time with teachers and diffuse time alone, practicing for thousands of hours. You learned good tone, technique, repertoire, and how to play this repertoire Continue reading
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Database: Ólafur Arnalds On Using EQ
“My usual way of approaching it is like: don’t be afraid of the EQ. Because essentially it doesn’t matter if the orchestra sounds natural or not when it’s in a full electronic mix. What matters is that there’s no frequencies or notes resonating in an unnatural way next to the electronics. So you just surgically Continue reading
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Keywords: Play With Parameters
When we work with a virtual instrument such as a synthesizer or sampler, our attention tends to be on the sound at hand that we crafted or discovered. But in music production, a sound at hand is always more than one sound—its identity is not fixed but polyphonic—because variations of it are always close by. Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Glenn McDonald’s “You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music” (2024)
“Not only do listeners not want music to become undifferentiated ooze, but no other part of the music economy wants it, either. Artists don’t want to have to make music that can’t be told apart, labels have no way to manipulate an attention economy around noises that resist attention, and streaming services can’t convince you Continue reading
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Keywords: Stacking Simple Tools
(Photo: Markus Spiske) One of the aims of music production is making sounds that are emotionally moving in subtle, complex, and enchanting ways. A process for achieving such sounds is to stack simple signal processing plug-ins and running your sounds through them. Stacking means to connect serially (one after another), and simple tools are conventional Continue reading
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