By |

Drumcode, Tobacco Docks London, October 26 2019

I have found this week quite a challenge. Techno is an exacting art form. Melody is stripped away; chords are gone. What’s left behind is rhythm, some power, and a fundamental drive. Producing techno is like looking into a microscope: the effect of every little change seems magnified; the timing of each sound demands much more scrupulous attention, and the accumulation of the composition has to be be tightly managed. 

I feel nervous about uploading this track because I feel like I haven’t done a good enough job in some of these areas. That though is the purpose of the website and why I have taken on this project. I could (and probably would have) spend hours refining the track, but perhaps I’m better off taking what I’ve learned and putting it into the next techno track. There are, after all, plenty of weeks to go! 

In that spirit then, here is what I’ve learned:

*I almost certainly used too many drum elements. 

*The timing of many sounds, and in particular several of the drums, is not tight enough, reminding me of looking through a dirty pair of glasses. 

*The low end rumble also needed some more work. 

*The overall musical message isn’t clear – many different parts competing for attention. 

*On a more technical note, although I’m not a fan of the loudness wars, and making everything sound as loud as possible, a track can’t be ridiculously quiet either. For some reason the way I mixed this track meant that in order to bring the track up to an acceptable loudness level I had to squash far too much dynamic range, which did suck a little life an breath from th production.

I’ll leave you with an irony: although you don’t hear it as much now as you used to, there can still be a perception that writing dance music is easy, and perhaps even that a computer could do it. Techno, with harmonies and melodies stripped away, should, those folk might say, be the easiest form to write. Just slap a few drums into a track, add a little repeating bassline, some enharmonic tones up top and you’re done. 

Right? 

Damn wrong.

By |

I have added a site-wide player at the bottom of the screen, so the music keeps going when navigating around the site.

It also makes it easier to access all the music on one place.

Pleasing.

By |

Before mastering
After mastering

Week 4’s track is one I’ve really liked for a while, but I was unhappy with the final sound. I’m part way through the home mastering masterclass with the venerable Ian Shepherd. 

Mastering has something of a mystique to it. The Mix (all the individual parts of a track) is already fixed: the balance between the the different elements, the notes, the arrangement are all locked down. When you master you get to work only on a single file, like the one you’d get if you ripped a track from a CD.  

With Mastering, you make the grand, but ever so subtle changes to the already-nearly-finished piece of music, which make it sound as good as it can stand. It requires a more critical perspective, concentrated listening, and a very delicate hand. You make almost imperceptable changes, one by one: correcting small aspects, tightening things up here, loosening things up there. 

Ian likens the process to photoshop, and I nearly agree. Except: in photoshop you can work quite invasively, going deep into very specific elements of the photograph. I reckon it’s more like Lightroom, where you make overall changes to the image. Think of a photograph that seemed great when you took it but when you view it later, the whole thing has a colour tint that shouldn’t be there, or it looks washed out with no contrast. 

I’ve always found mastering a scary process as you can easily ruin things with a overly heavy hand. But take a listen to the before and after sounds of the track – I hope you’ll hear the improvement. Small changes can add up 🙂 

By |

Funfair, Reading UK, 2005

I have really enjoyed working on this track – I love the vibe – particularly the vocal pad. The final polishing has also been much more fun than normal, thanks to being part way through this mastering course. 

I can’t claim that the masterered version is perfect, but over on the technique section of this site I’ve posted a comparison of before and after. 

By |

London Skyline, 2017

In the Style of Hot Since ’82, if you’re interested in similar stuff.

Further thoughts on the experience of finishing this track – which was not all smooth sailing, here. I like the finished result though – so it was definitely worth the effort.

By |

Week 3’s track was not one where everything came together without friction. The track has been nearly finished for a while but was sitting in the pile of not-quite-done. This makes it a quintessential piece for the website. There are many reasons why a piece can sit unfinished for too long:

  • Sheer resistance.
  • Fear of the finished piece falling short.
  • The relinquishment of hope.
  • Lack of determination
  • The accumulation of too many such pieces, such that it all feels like a swamp and starting afresh feels more inviting.
  • A belief that only with further learning and experience can I justify the piece’s promise.

When I came to open this up, something dispiriting (in the short term, I hope) happened as I was finishing it. I was greeted by a wealth of ‘enhancements’ I’d made to various elements of the track – giving the drums a bit more distortion, the pads more fizz, the sounds more coherence. On returning afresh, I found that many of these were not helping; some were harming.

So finishing the piece mainly involved removing plenty of ‘enhancement’s that I thought were a good idea at the time, revealing the track again, and then making a far small number of overall balancing corrections.

I’ve noticed that the really good producers seem to add far, far less processing than less experienced ones. Some are incredibly judicial in their work, but each change seems to count so much more. This is exemplified by mastering engineers (who receive someone else’s finished track and make the final tweaks to prepare it for release. Their changes are often tiny: a db of eq cut here, a touch of gentle compression there. When you’re following along you don’t think their changes are adding up to much, but when you here the original again it’s like night and day.

It’s hard stuff this, but in the end I was pleased with the result.

By |

Artificial Intelligence gains ground every year, now and can do some things better than humans, even when this wasn’t thought possible. They’re far better than humans at Chess, for example; now used by even the best players to check on their moves.

Despite all this, I don’t think computers will ever produce art in the same way that we do. Music – all art, really – is something special, conveying the very essence of the human condition.

The video above is a recent rendition of Bach’s BWV974 Concerto in D Minor, Adagio. Spotify has 100s of different versions of the exact same piece, and each player interprets it in a slightly different way. Some interpret it in a very different way. I happen to like Ólafsson’s version the very best of all. I can’t quite tell you why – I’d be committing the same mistake that the computer is about to make, below: of attempting to quantify the sublime.

Here’s a computer version I recorded playing that same, wonderful transcription, but with little of the soul:

Bach BWV974 Concerto in D Minor – Adagio

A computer is a wonderful tool for making music – especially my kind of music. But it is not the composer, not the conductor, and certainly not the musician. A computer is merely an instrument.

By |

Balephetrish Bay, Tiree, 2015

I wrote a lot of this track looking out over this view, on the wonderful Island of Tiree. I’ve spent time this week polishing it back in the studio, particularly since it was written primarily on headphones.

Lapwings are my favourite bird on the Island or Tiree. I love how, like so many other birds they seem more impervious to the wind and rain than we do; but they also seem dainty with their little crop of hair, which makes this feat more impressive.

Most of my music favours minor keys, and this is not an exception.