I wanted to chat about Ableton’s Live today, when I came across an article at Wired on how to drop dope beats. Diplo offers these 6 tips:
1. Start with the bass line
2. Experiment with the samples at your disposal
3. Use samples as cultural allusions
4. Avoid overused sounds
5. Don’t change tempo
6. Include intros and outros
#1 caught my attention immediately. The Hurry Gain is primarily a blog chronicling my musical projects. But I also want to open this up to the other relevant issues, inclusing contemporary music commentary and technology and music production. I won’t pretend I’m an expert producer, but I’ve done a lot of experimenting over the past 10 years. I took a computer music sequence in college, and even though it stuck me as a bit rough (and my skills at the time were very rough), it wasn’t hard for me to see the potential of bringing together technology and music.
I see this taking two forms– both of which are positive developments. First is using technology to record. What’s new here is not so much the activity of recording itself, which hasn’t changed in the last 100 years or so, but how it’s possible now to record at “studio quality” depths of 24 bits and 96kHz on the home computer. This is a fairly radical notion, actually. Music production has been distributed to musicians who no longer need huge budgets. Technology has slowley been chipping away at this edifice for a few decades at least; sitting here right now, it’s quite possible to get a high-qulity setup for relatively cheap. I’ll detail my rig in a later installment. But moving on…
The second positive development I mentioned above is the capability of technology to make totally new sounds. Aside from production, by the use of sythns, it’s possible to create completely new instruments. Electronic music is the natural place to go to hear the sounding board of experimental sounds.
Both of these developments have helped create the remix movement, of which Diplo and Wired are referencing. I was fascinated by this trend in electronic music, and it likely contributed to me being less active for a while in other forms. Zne Luck Tricks is a change of gears. It’s not a remix project. I’ve recorded everything from scratch. I intend to post the loops I’ve created here, so that others may remix them though.
So, I’ve made a new category called “music production” that I’ll group posts like this one that address actually rolling up your sleeves and getting dirty with making music. I’m of the firm belief that everyone should make music, whether they play an instrument or remix. In its simplist form, you could take any song purchased from iTunes or ripped from disc, and alter the tempo. A 20 bpm (beats per minute) adjustment slower or faster would give you a whole new feel. From here, it’s not so difficult to get into mashups. The next step would be slicing apart songs and recombining them in new ways. Lastly, you could start composing loops from scratch.
Music production will explore the various ways to go about doing that– both technically, as in what software to use, and conceptually, as in why two notes sound good together yet when one is paired with another it sounds weird.
There’s a simple reason why I feel music should be played: there’s nothing more satisfying or fufilling than stacking up a groove and hearing all the pieces work together. It really becomes transcendental…but that’s a subject for another thread.
