My Strategies for making Electronic Music without playing a single note
I find inspiration in other music but seek to make music that is uniquely my own. I believe it is necessary to ignore all external influence, thinking of Making Music like a travel guide. There’s no explicit order to the patterns, although things tend to be loosely grouped by the concept. I experiment with the various patterns as I need them in order to come up in my own work.
There are some strategies that let me infuse my work with the “essence” of my inspiration, I listen carefully—and many times—to the piece that inspires me. I study it, element by element and layer by layer until I experiment with a catalogue of its attributes. Once the catalogue feels complete, and consider the attributes of sound, harmony, melody, rhythm, and form.
Any genre of electronic music, from nu-disco, dubstep, glitch music to future house
When I listen back to a recently finished track, I find that it’s too similar to something I’ve written before. I often discover this after listening back to a track a few days after it’s finished. While when working immediately after, I don’t notice the similarities. But when I take a few days of distance from my new work, I am suddenly able to hear how it compares to the rest of my music I’ve done, and the similarities become painfully obvious. Bummer restart. As soon as I realise that my new track is too similar to something I have done before, I carefully analyse all of the elements. I write down the specific technique that’s been repeated. This will form my “avoidance list” for my next track, a list of things that I have decided ahead of time to not do. My goal here is to find patterns in existing music that should be avoided, rather than emulated. In most cases I start a new track, now I am forced to find new strategies rather than relying on techniques that I already know and tired of hearing, ensuring that this track won’t simply be a clone of the last one.
Why I enjoy making music, computers offer a limitless field of possibilities
What I love is that music production with a computer offers a limitless field of possibilities when you loop the above to find your next thing. Any sound can be made, manipulated, re-recorded, re- manipulated, etc. I completely avoid an instrument that would be expected in the genre. For example, the untitled Peter Gabriel album commonly called Melt has no cymbals.
Prince’s classic song “When Doves Cry” has no bass line. These kinds of restrictions force my decision-making process into new directions. And I give myself a deadline. Nothing motivates like a due date. Since work always expands to fill the available time, it’s necessary for me to actually put a limit on that time. And viola a new track is born. Thanks for visiting my website.