True facts of music making

Mixing and arranging tracks is an absolute ball ache. Keep things very very simple.

 

 

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Even if you spend days figuring out the one perfect way to set up your expensive audiophile gear, you can also find absolute musical bliss by plugging some cheap clunky junk into other cheap clunky junk and monitor through your laptop's built-in speakers. Record a Stone In Focus cover using your cereal bowl and a pitch shifter.

I would love to hear what a cereal bowl through a pitch shifter watmm style actually sounds like. I do agree with your sentiment though.

 

 

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  On 1/15/2018 at 3:07 PM, Polytrix said:

I would love to hear what a cereal bowl through a pitch shifter watmm style actually sounds like. I do agree with your sentiment though.

 

 

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Already nominated for 2018 WATMM's Most IDM

Don't ever actually look at the list of people who downloaded your music on Bandcamp, you're better off not knowing it's full of people with Pepe avatars.

  On 1/17/2018 at 1:53 AM, RSP said:

Don't ever actually look at the list of people who downloaded your music on Bandcamp, you're better off not knowing it's full of people with Pepe avatars.

 

Joke's on them, Soros pays me handsomely for streams and downloads. I have invested all these proceeds in Bitcoin, I should be able to retire in precisely 12,3333337 days.

I just realized I don't give a shit about learning more IDM synth/processing trix and I just wanna figure how to make decent melodies, chords, and song structures. God help me, I'm watching YouTube videos about Max Martin's songwriting philosophy. I don't have time to stumble and wank my way into a half-decent track anymore.

  On 1/17/2018 at 6:04 AM, sweepstakes said:

I just realized I don't give a shit about learning more IDM synth/processing trix and I just wanna figure how to make decent melodies, chords, and song structures. God help me, I'm watching YouTube videos about Max Martin's songwriting philosophy. I don't have time to stumble and wank my way into a half-decent track anymore.

 

This may be dumb but there was a TED talk about how to listen to classical music that I found really insightful. The basic point was that you should just abstract the whole thing into a story, composed of sentences and phrases and replies. I have found this kind of viewpoint useful, it sort of helps me to imagine different kinds of instruments as actors in a play and when I try and re-create some sound or fragment, I am like re-telling someone else's story with my own twist.

 

I guess what I wanted to say is if I were you, I would start with noodling around with some piece of kit as intimately as possible (i.e. don't think too much, try to get the thing to be the extension of your hand/mind etc.) and learn how to "say" something with it. Maybe thinking like this is more natural for me because I come from a really tactile background - I have played piano and drums for years now.

 

Here's the vid if you're interested:

  On 1/17/2018 at 7:03 AM, thawkins said:

 

  On 1/17/2018 at 6:04 AM, sweepstakes said:

I just realized I don't give a shit about learning more IDM synth/processing trix and I just wanna figure how to make decent melodies, chords, and song structures. God help me, I'm watching YouTube videos about Max Martin's songwriting philosophy. I don't have time to stumble and wank my way into a half-decent track anymore.

 

This may be dumb but there was a TED talk about how to listen to classical music that I found really insightful. The basic point was that you should just abstract the whole thing into a story, composed of sentences and phrases and replies. I have found this kind of viewpoint useful, it sort of helps me to imagine different kinds of instruments as actors in a play and when I try and re-create some sound or fragment, I am like re-telling someone else's story with my own twist.

 

I guess what I wanted to say is if I were you, I would start with noodling around with some piece of kit as intimately as possible (i.e. don't think too much, try to get the thing to be the extension of your hand/mind etc.) and learn how to "say" something with it. Maybe thinking like this is more natural for me because I come from a really tactile background - I have played piano and drums for years now.

 

Here's the vid if you're interested:

 

I appreciate your thoughts. I'm about to hit the hay but I'll watch the video in the morning.

 

I agree about focusing on one piece of kit. I did that in 2016 with the Monomachine and at this point I can pretty much make a (crappy) track on it in my sleep. I'm trying to do that with the Octatrack now, which I've had forever but have mostly made wanky little loops and now I'm trying to actually make decent tracks on it.

 

I guess it is a weird one because samplers kind of don't have their own voices and it's pretty robotic and surgical as far as samplers go. But it also lets me sketch stuff fairly easily and work with structural ideas at a level that's neither too atomic nor monolithic and doesn't require a computer. At any rate, I do want to get better at it because I think it has the most potential of all my tools, and after having it for years I feel like I've still barely scratched the surface.

 

I do want to get into keyboard more too. I used to noodle on the keys more often and I think getting a better understanding of the relationship between intervals and chords could only help. I've been thinking about just analyzing or "covering" music I like and trying to figure out how it works. That seems like a good approach for me since pretty much all the stuff I like is sequencer music that you can't really find sheet music for, but it has enough traditional musical elements that it can be broken down this way for the most part.

I don't know where you come from in terms of skill and education background, but I definitely would suggest learning keys and getting a feel of what's going on, but that's maybe easier said than done.

 

My intuition is that trying to play and understand others' songs on keys is similar to learning a foreign language by watching a movie with subtitles in your language. I think in both cases you kind of get an immediate feedback loop established and then your brain kicks in and tries to make sense of what is happening and when you finally manage to shakily play the same melody progression as your favorite track it feels really good, like a level up or something.

And another thing which I think is kind of useful in learning keyboards is to try and keep it as simple as possible. Like if you don't have access to a real piano, just load up some simple rompler patch or something, but instead of messing with oscillator parameters or any knobs, just try to play the instrument itself and make things interesting the "old way", by dynamics, harmonics, sustain pedal, ditch the grid & metronome, etc.

 

 

  On 1/17/2018 at 8:19 AM, thawkins said:

My intuition is that trying to play and understand others' songs on keys is similar to learning a foreign language by watching a movie with subtitles in your language. I think in both cases you kind of get an immediate feedback loop established and then your brain kicks in and tries to make sense of what is happening and when you finally manage to shakily play the same melody progression as your favorite track it feels really good, like a level up or something.

Interesting, I had very similar thoughts while I was writing this as I'm hoping to use similar methods to improve my Japanese skills.

  On 1/17/2018 at 7:03 AM, thawkins said:

This may be dumb but there was a TED talk about how to listen to classical music that I found really insightful. The basic point was that you should just abstract the whole thing into a story, composed of sentences and phrases and replies. I have found this kind of viewpoint useful, it sort of helps me to imagine different kinds of instruments as actors in a play and when I try and re-create some sound or fragment, I am like re-telling someone else's story with my own twist.

 

 

 

 

That reminds me of a quote from Frank Zappa I read a long time ago where he talks about his melodic phrasing being based on speech patterns he would hear in conversations. I don't remember the exact wording of it or where I read it, though.

 

That, his passage in his book about approaching structure in music as if it was a Calder sculpture and the other part in the same book where he talks about the role of "the frame" in art had a pretty big impact on me as a kid.

:

 

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In my compositions, I employ a system of weights, balances, measured tensions and releases – in some ways similar to Varèse's aesthetic. The similarities are best illustrated by comparison to a Calder mobile: a multicolored whatchamacallit, dangling in space, that has big blobs of metal connected to pieces of wire, balanced ingeniously against little metal dingleberries on the other end. Varèse knew Calder, and was fascinated by these creations.

 

 

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The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively-- because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a 'box' around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?

  On 1/17/2018 at 6:42 PM, RSP said:

 

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The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively-- because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a 'box' around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?

 

 

 

 

iirc, one of the ae brothers said something similar in one of interviews from 2008, i think

  On 1/17/2018 at 4:32 PM, sweepstakes said:

 

  On 1/17/2018 at 8:19 AM, thawkins said:

My intuition is that trying to play and understand others' songs on keys is similar to learning a foreign language by watching a movie with subtitles in your language. I think in both cases you kind of get an immediate feedback loop established and then your brain kicks in and tries to make sense of what is happening and when you finally manage to shakily play the same melody progression as your favorite track it feels really good, like a level up or something.

Interesting, I had very similar thoughts while I was writing this as I'm hoping to use similar methods to improve my Japanese skills.

 

 

I can 100% vouch for movies with subtitles helping to make sense of French. I did it in parallel with actual language classes and it is a huge help in training your ear to understand spoken language, because it would otherwise take ages in actual real life face to face conversations which don't have subs. I realllly should start doing this for Japanese too because I have now lived in Tokyo for 2 years and it is sorely missing from my language learning effort.

 

  On 1/17/2018 at 6:42 PM, RSP said:

 

  On 1/17/2018 at 7:03 AM, thawkins said:

This may be dumb but there was a TED talk about how to listen to classical music that I found really insightful. The basic point was that you should just abstract the whole thing into a story, composed of sentences and phrases and replies. I have found this kind of viewpoint useful, it sort of helps me to imagine different kinds of instruments as actors in a play and when I try and re-create some sound or fragment, I am like re-telling someone else's story with my own twist.

 

 

That reminds me of a quote from Frank Zappa I read a long time ago where he talks about his melodic phrasing being based on speech patterns he would hear in conversations. I don't remember the exact wording of it or where I read it, though.

 

That, his passage in his book about approaching structure in music as if it was a Calder sculpture and the other part in the same book where he talks about the role of "the frame" in art had a pretty big impact on me as a kid.

:

 

  Quote

 

In my compositions, I employ a system of weights, balances, measured tensions and releases – in some ways similar to Varèse's aesthetic. The similarities are best illustrated by comparison to a Calder mobile: a multicolored whatchamacallit, dangling in space, that has big blobs of metal connected to pieces of wire, balanced ingeniously against little metal dingleberries on the other end. Varèse knew Calder, and was fascinated by these creations.

 

 

  Quote

 

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively-- because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a 'box' around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?

 

 

I did not know Zappa had a book, I got to keep this in mind and get it sometime.

 

This stuff resonates pretty well with me, because I find that kind of telling stories or choreographing sounds is what makes sense to me in music as an abstraction. I like to think that it is possible to evoke and recall specific emotions that people associate with specific sounds, and this knowledge is useful when trying to nail down how to express the story in your head in a musical way. For example, I think really distinct sounds/elements like acid bassline, dub stab or 4-on-the-floor bassdrum beat - if you put any of those in your song, they instantly define it somehow for any listener that has experience with them. It's what establishes the Frame really well (maybe even too well in some cases) and sort of gives a hint as to how to understand the music.

 

I think it is a very useful skill to have if you can practice and train your head to listen for these elements or phrases or sounds and get to the point where it's no longer really conscious, but rather when your subconscious hears some melody, it goes through your "inner library" and brings you some idea that you can then play and add to the original melody. At first it's like this dumb mimicry where you just try to play and replicate something with your clumsy fingers but since your brain is wired to make you better at it, it gets easier and at some point it's basically innate already.

 

And I think the way it works is that you do not even need to go crazy with this effort, because even if you consciously and physically practice this only for half an hour, your brain will keep chugging along trying to make sense of what just happened when you sleep or when you just sit on a bus or something. It's the same thing like if you try to remember something and it doesn't come to you until suddenly hours later. And how after you read a book, your brain will show increased activity for weeks after you have actually finished.

I finally watched that video - great thoughts there. I'm fortunate enough to have a fair amount of classical musicians in my life and I definitely take it for granted.

 

I really appreciate your posts here, I feel like you are getting to the meat of what's really great about music, that it's a language that you can become more fluent in until there's no latency between what you think or perceive and what you express.

Thanks. Having these kind of discussions is why I like this forum enough to keep lurking here for a long time before finally getting an account.

http://www.oneonta.edu/faculty/legnamo/theorist/density/density.html

 

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Analyzing the results from both sets of waveforms, we see that: the level of graphic complexity coincides with the interval density degree. Comparing the perfect fifth graphs with those of the minor second, for instance, we note that the latter graphs are more complex; their aspects are denser.

​. . . .

  Quote

The analyses above show the applicability of the density-degree procedure to a greater understanding of a musical work. With this study, characteristics of a work's structure are revealed that are not transparent in formal harmonic analysis.

 

I know just enough theory that I sorta (kinda) understood most of this, but I think the general idea should be apparent to most, particularly if you're able to craft the chords as examples and/or listen to the examples listed as a bit of help. The basic idea is something I've always always always kept in mind when writing music, but never knew was anything you could quantize as they're trying to do in this. Trying to explore chord shapes (wrong term? I dunno) was always more difficult and less rewarding on guitar and something I often gravitated to trying to replicate when writing electronic music. It's something I often utilize (not as expertly as someone who fully grasped everything in theory or this paper could) now when writing using Ableton Push: having the scales lit up for me over a span of a few octaves on the Push is really useful when doing this.

 

Is this something everyone sorta does naturally?

 

 

  On 1/20/2018 at 6:51 PM, auxien said:

http://www.oneonta.edu/faculty/legnamo/theorist/density/density.html

 

  Quote

Analyzing the results from both sets of waveforms, we see that:

the level of graphic complexity coincides with the interval density degree.

Comparing the perfect fifth graphs with those of the minor second, for instance, we note that the latter graphs are more complex; their aspects are denser.

​. . . .

  Quote

The analyses above show the applicability of the density-degree procedure to a greater understanding of a musical work. With this study, characteristics of a work's structure are revealed that are not transparent in formal harmonic analysis.

I know just enough theory that I sorta (kinda) understood most of this, but I think the general idea should be apparent to most, particularly if you're able to craft the chords as examples and/or listen to the examples listed as a bit of help. The basic idea is something I've always always always kept in mind when writing music, but never knew was anything you could quantize as they're trying to do in this. Trying to explore chord shapes (wrong term? I dunno) was always more difficult and less rewarding on guitar and something I often gravitated to trying to replicate when writing electronic music. It's something I often utilize (not as expertly as someone who fully grasped everything in theory or this paper could) now when writing using Ableton Push: having the scales lit up for me over a span of a few octaves on the Push is really useful when doing this.

 

Is this something everyone sorta does naturally?

I know super basic theory which I learned from my friends, basically the names of the intervals (which I natively think of in terms of semitones). I also messed around a fair amount with harmonics and tunings and tend to think of harmonies and intervals in those terms, like how a perfect fifth is 3/2, a major third is 5/4, etc. Just skimming the article, it seems to jibe with that - less related harmonics means more complexity/dissonance.

 

But at the end of the day there's hardly a method for me, I just fart around until something sounds good. I tend to do "counterpoint" (like a super primitive version of it) rather than big dense chords. I would like to use tools for this more, not only to jam more intelligently and efficiently, but to train my ears and fingers and to improve my understanding. I'm not really interested in the Push, though - I want to roll my own, actually.

  On 1/20/2018 at 2:20 PM, thawkins said:

Thanks. Having these kind of discussions is why I like this forum enough to keep lurking here for a long time before finally getting an account.

 

 

Same.  That and the thread full of intentionally bad production advice (I forget what it's called but it's the thing that finally made me register).

  On 1/20/2018 at 6:51 PM, auxien said:

http://www.oneonta.edu/faculty/legnamo/theorist/density/density.html

 

  Quote

 

Analyzing the results from both sets of waveforms, we see that: the level of graphic complexity coincides with the interval density degree. Comparing the perfect fifth graphs with those of the minor second, for instance, we note that the latter graphs are more complex; their aspects are denser.

​. . . .

  Quote

The analyses above show the applicability of the density-degree procedure to a greater understanding of a musical work. With this study, characteristics of a work's structure are revealed that are not transparent in formal harmonic analysis.

 

I know just enough theory that I sorta (kinda) understood most of this, but I think the general idea should be apparent to most, particularly if you're able to craft the chords as examples and/or listen to the examples listed as a bit of help. The basic idea is something I've always always always kept in mind when writing music, but never knew was anything you could quantize as they're trying to do in this. Trying to explore chord shapes (wrong term? I dunno) was always more difficult and less rewarding on guitar and something I often gravitated to trying to replicate when writing electronic music. It's something I often utilize (not as expertly as someone who fully grasped everything in theory or this paper could) now when writing using Ableton Push: having the scales lit up for me over a span of a few octaves on the Push is really useful when doing this.

 

Is this something everyone sorta does naturally?

 

I went through the article yesterday and my impression is that while the logic is interesting, it is kind of circular and I am not sure how useful the idea of density is when dealing with something more complex than sine waves (which is 99% of the time).

 

The circular logic argument comes from this: the guy is taking the regular overtone series, the standard equal temperament scale and visualizing the sine waves of different intervals and chords. But if I understand correctly, the equal temperament scale is inspired by the overtone series - i.e. the octave is defined so that the fundamental frequency of C2 matches the 1st overtone of C1 (octave below). This is really clear-cut with sine waves: playing the C1-C2 octave you get minimal harmonic interference because the periods of the two sine waves are in sync and therefore the Lissajous graph is also not so "dense".

 

The whole idea seems to fall further apart if you think about analyzing anything beyond the sine wave and especially waveforms which change significantly over time, either due to natural attack-decay-sustain-release or LFOs. Maybe this thing is useful if you look at music in classical notation, but for all the modern cases you should also somehow take into account filters, LFOs, effects, etc. because you can definitely play the most dissonant and inharmonic chord ever and morph and filter and trick it into sounding like a choir of angels.

 

That said, I think I probably missed the point of that article. I am really not at home in how science looks at music and what they are trying to achieve in the long run. I think if this sort of theorizing makes anyone inspired and it ends up being useful for looking at music from a different angle, it's good in my book. 

^I can see what you're saying in that it's maybe circular logic. I don't know enough to really say more than I think you may be right, at least partly. You'd think they would've acknowledged that fact if so, and worked it into the arguments. Again, I dunno, but no matter...

 

I think you have to ignore the 'yeah, but it's how you filter/effect it' in regards to trying to study that sort of thing. You're entirely right that you can twist many chords into a different 'feel' than they originally might have (I do this all the time) but that's out of the scope of that study of course.

 

I don't know that it inspired me, as I said I already do that sort of thing anyway, but it was interesting to try and further define and try and analyze those techniques, and it maybe gave me insight as to WHY it is that I tend towards doing that sort of thing. I'm right there with you in that I probably missed the point as well, because I know there's a good portion of stuff in there that I didn't fully grasp.