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The Alchemy Of Imperfection
(Photo: Drazen Nesic) Many music production tools steer us towards perfection. With a click we load a sample with immaculate verisimilitude to a real instrument, auto tune errant vocal pitches by cents or semitones, quantize a shaky drum hit to the nearest sixteenth note or downbeat safe haven, loop a phrase to exactly four measures,… Continue reading
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Database: Trent Reznor On Liking The Way The Other One Sounded
“We’ve been having that happen a little bit with orchestral stuff, too, a couple scores we recently did. The intention was just dropping some Spitfire strings to mock-up something and then when it’s time to do it for real, after you’ve spent a fuck-load of money and add 1,000 people in and an orchestrator and… Continue reading
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Musical Prompts: Four Rooms
In a large gallery with white walls and hardwood floors, heard from the end of the room. A pad sound plays loud and long chord washes, while the sub bass underneath moves away from root notes. The sound overwhelms the room and you. It’s hard to tell if the music is repeating or not. In… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Philip Guston’s “I Paint What I Want To See” (2022)
“Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or… Continue reading
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Database: Jan Jelinek On Risking Breaks In Style And Open-Ended Results
“I was never interested in repeating, extending or improving one certain production methods. Even though I value artists who follow this strategy, it never became a perspective for myself. The concept of a rapid, erratic and jumpy biography attracts me much more. You should risk breaks in style–especially as an already established artist.” “Mostly it’s… Continue reading
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Keywords: Serendipity
(Photo: Jonathan Greenaway) Serendipity is fortune’s role in artistic and scientific practice via accidental discoveries and discerning their value. The term was coined by writer Horace Walpole in 1754 with reference to an old Persian fairy tale (“The Three Princes Of Serendip”) in which three perceptive princes notice clues to insightfully describe a lost camel… Continue reading
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Keywords: Use Your Ears
Something in the track doesn’t sound right: a rhythm is off, it’s boring, there’s timbres clashing, too many sounds, a cliché chord, a predictable structure, the intro isn’t long enough, the mix is murky, and the fade out should be the only part. When something doesn’t sound right we know it. Our knowing is not… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Alan Douglas’s “Electronic Music Production” (1974)
“…we are able to vastly increase the power and pitch range; obtain crescendos and diminuendos impossible with conventional instruments; divide the scaling into an infinite number of parts; obtain any degree of glissando or sliding scale; form completely new tone colors; supply echo or reverberation to any required extent and vary this at any instant… Continue reading
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