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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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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
