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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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Keywords: Working Directly With Waveforms
If you compose with MIDI (as almost all producers do), it can be beneficial to bounce MIDI tracks to audio sooner rather than later to open production possibilities. Since audio is captured sound rather than MIDI instructions for triggering it, working directly with audio waveforms is the closest the composer gets to touching sound as… Continue reading
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Database: John Foxx On Combining Possibilities In A Unique Way
“You soon find out what the emotional range of an effect is. By that, I mean how it is applicable to the sort of material you wish to write, how it affects what you do and gives you further ideas.” “It’s the only way to do it when everybody’s got virtually the same equipment. In… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Richard W. Hamming’s ” The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn” (1997)
“How are you to recognize ‘fundamentals’? One test is they have lasted a long time. Another test is from the fundamentals all the rest of the field can be derived by using the standard methods in the field” (p.9). “Creativity seems, among other things, to be ‘usefully’ putting together things which were not perceived to… Continue reading
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Keywords: Work Fast, Work Slow
To enrich our music production we can work at two distinct paces: fast and slow. The initial moment of making is quick and intuitive as we run with what catches our attention—noticing a sound, improvising a part, tweaking a patch, drumming a loop, trying out an idea and recording it, capturing an evocative musical gesture.… Continue reading
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