Pat Carroll

Tag: creative process

  • Stages of the Creative Process

    Something I believe isn’t discussed as much as it should be is how different composers think about the creative process. What do they actually do, or think to do, when they enter the studio with no idea and leave it with a finished piece?

    What happens in this gap?

    I remember talking about this with someone, discussing the case of a jazz trumpet improviser (I forgot who). He said something along the lines of: “we know what [so and so] ate for lunch before his show, and which trains he took to get there, but we have no idea about what he was thinking while playing—how he did what he did.” We know so little about their creative process, which I believe is a massive loss.

    An awareness of these stages of the creative process, I believe, allows for a particularly focused and oriented creative process, rather than more of a mindset of “I’ll just head in and see what happens” one. There’s nothing really wrong with these sorts of sessions, but I’ve found the former to be way more conducive to finishing works.

    I’d like to talk about how I consider mine: To me, it consists of four main stages or categories.

    1. Gathering Materials
    2. Organising/Arranging Materials
    3. Processing Materials
    4. Polishing Materials

    I’ve built this understanding by reading about composition workflows, talking with other composers, and of course doing composition myself. I’ll break them down.

    There may be sessions where I only carry out field recordings, sketch out ideas, play and experiment with instruments, and make recordings while I do. I think of this as gathering materials. Then, there are sessions where I only arrange these recordings into musical structures: organising/arranging materials. There are sessions where I focus on making the sounds more ‘interesting’ through applying effects: processing materials. There are sessions where I only edit and mix these resulting elements, or master the finished work: polishing materials.

    The way of using this understanding of the creative process is to have a clear idea of what stage I’m going to be working in at any given time in the studio. It’s common to feel stuck with a work or larger project. To remedy this, I’ve found it valuable to sit back and think: “OK, where am I at with this piece? Do I have materials? Yes. Are they arranged in structures? Yes. Are these structures interesting or logical? They could be better…”

    …and then away I go into the second stage of the process.

    During this session, I might think that the sounds need some more character, then I know I’ll need to move into the third stage. If I realise I have a section that could do with some contrasting material, I’ll move back to the first stage.

    This desire to build a mental model of the creative process came from me thinking about how modern DAW software facilitates a non-linear workflow, rather that coaxing the user through more of a linear one. At any given time you can jump between each of these stages of creation. This contrasts the more linear design of a piece of software like Da Vinci Resolve, which moves the user through the necessary workflow to create, edit, enhance, and export a piece of video through specific modules made for each stage of the workflows.

    This isn’t to say that non-linear workflows are bad—in fact, the freedom DAWs offer the composer in terms of workflow is their strength.

    But I do think that it’s beneficial to think—at least sometimes—in categorical terms when it comes to the creative process. Every composer has a toolkit they carry around in their heads and hard drives, and in their studios. It’s full of their techniques, materials and technologies they use to make their art. Knowing where in the workflow these are best used creates order, and answers, when it comes to the question of “What should I be doing right now?” Opening up a fresh DAW project, the composer can know which materials, technologies and techniques to use to begin gathering the materials for their work. At another point, they know which techniques and aspects of theory they need to apply when they are organising these materials into structures—what sorts of growth, decay or stability they lean towards, and how to portray these through editing or automation techniques, for example. And of course, wanting to make sounds interesting, the composer knows which tools and techniques to use to mould material into their desired shapes and textures. In other words, instead of knowing what their favourite tools are, it’s better to know what their favourite plugins and techniques are for specific stages of the creative process. This at least slims down the possible options for what the composer should open up to begin making materials, or apply to process existing materials.

    I don’t think it’s worthwhile though being dogmatic about sticking to the stages in sequence: the composer doesn’t need to move linearly from one to the next stage. If they want, they might create sounds and process them immediately afterwards, before organising them into a structure. In what order the composer moves through or around the stages is up to them.

    And of course every composer is going to have different stages in their understanding of the creative process.

    I just think it is worthwhile—and has been for me in the past—to have a form of mental representation of the creative process in mind, rather than considering it as a mystical, amorphous blob that we enter when we head into the studio.

  • Time Vials: Part 3 is coming out this Friday!

     

    Hey everyone, I hope you’re having a nice start to the year.

    On Friday the 16th of January, the third part of the Time Vials series will be released.

    It has three tracks — Purslane, Campion, and Abigail — which reference the book House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds.

    I was reading that book while I was finalising these pieces, and felt that the mood of the book really related to the music, so I ended up naming the tracks after three core characters of the story.

    If you haven’t read the book, definitely give it a go — I highly recommend it. It’s a work of far-future science fiction that looks into the nature of humanity and what could be considered ‘human’ in speculative scenarios involving cloning and the manipulation of the body with technology, in the spirit of transhumanism. It touches on core ideas of post-humanism — how has/does our concept of the ‘human’ change, and what can be considered human after technological additions and changes to the body. (The character of the ‘Spirit of the Air’ was mind-blowing.) But it’s also just a really cool story!

    The third part of Time Vials begins with the track Purslane, which was built using a modular synthesiser running through some guitar pedals. It was recorded as a single take and then further processed in the computer, with a few extra parallel layers added: The original recording was sent out into other pedals, processed in different ways, then brought back into the session and overlaid with the original. I’ve been experimenting with this approach to processing and working with hardware — making multiple layers from a single piece of material, blending them, fading them in and out, and allowing them to morph over time. These techniques come very much from the workflows of Max Cooper and Jon Hopkins I learnt about some years ago, as well as approaches to electroacoustic music composition.

    The second track, Campion, is a little simpler and came out of a jam I was doing one afternoon on the Prophet synth. It’s just a few chords looping and gradually building over time. Nothing too crazy with this one, but I felt it worked well between Purslane and Abigail, and I also used some of the same processing techniques on it.

    Abigail is a slower-paced piece, and it’s one I actually started in between teaching classes at SAE. I set myself up in one of the studios and explored a workflow using Granulator, a granular synthesiser in Ableton Live. I was listening to a bit of A Winged Victory for the Sullen at the time — if you haven’t heard them, definitely give them a listen. Their influence mostly comes through in the atmosphere and chords, but I went for more of a synthesised approach than they typically do. I also started playing around with really high-frequency ‘pings’, which I love hearing in experimental electronic music — particularly in some Japanese work. Those really digital, high-frequency bursts almost act like pinpricks of sound in the upper registers.

    Overall, this EP feels like it sits comfortably as a part three. It brings the energy down slightly (not that the Time Vials series could be considered heaps ‘energetic’) and focuses on sustained sounds rather than plucked elements or strong pulses; everything feels more fluid on this release. In contrast, I focused more on pieces with a clearer sense of rhythm and pulse in part four — not necessarily percussive, but with a clearer and stronger rhythmic grid.

    Part three is out on Friday, and you can pre-save it here. I’m really looking forward to hearing what you think.

    Much love!

    Pat

     

  • AI Collaboration to Build an Album Art Generator

    I used AI in some interesting ways over the past couple of days to do two main tasks: edit writing I had done, and build a website for making generative graphics for album art. The former is probably not so interesting anymore (which is crazy to think, given how novel these workflows are), but the latter definitely was. Both of these collaborations have been interesting in exploring the spectrum between non-use and overuse of AI.

    Non-Use and Overuse of AI

    Non-use, to me, feels a little short-sighted in some settings, as it denies the possibility for augmenting my skill set to do new things. There are absolutely times for non-use, but I personally definitely want to avoid total Luddism. Overuse, on the other hand, is basically getting the AI to make the entire thing for you — the article, the image, the song, the code script. AI can be overused in these ways, and then you can pass the products off as your own. But even though the AI created the thing, isn’t it still ‘your own’? Or do you have to create the thing entirely yourself in order to say it is, in fact, ‘your own’? These sorts of questions relate to areas outside of AI, such as the use of audio samples from platforms like Splice, or stock images on Unsplash.

    I should say that this is not an exercise in proving overuse to be outright Bad — like most things, there’s nuance to be emphasised. Instead, I’m simply exploring my experience of different uses of the technology — what does it feel like to not use it at all? Is it still rewarding to use AI to entirely create the thing? How can there be a balance of getting the reward of creating something while still leveraging the capabilities of the AI?

    Collaborating with AI

    • Writing

    What I was exploring in my two uses of AI yesterday was using it in an assistive way. For the written work, I wrote the draft, and the AI went through it and pointed out possible ways of editing the writing, fixing errors, and identified wrong information (in my case, I got the author of a book wrong). In this instance, the AI was acting in the same way that a human editor acts. I went through a very similar process when I wrote my PhD: passing the draft I had written to the editor, waiting a month, and then receiving a document full of suggestions and fixes. The downsides of this process are that it took a long time, and there were some errors that the editor had made in their suggestions (something to do with the reference style, from memory). The pros, however, were that I gave someone a job — the work employed them, and gave them money for their labour. And, while I said it was a con before, I actually enjoyed that time off and away from the thesis to gather my thoughts about it, and to approach it again with fresh eyes and ideas. By using an AI to edit the document, I am effectively avoiding getting a human editor to do a job.

    If I were to get the AI to write the entire article myself, I would not develop any of my writing or thinking skills. Through using AI in more of an assistive way, I am engaging abilities through the act of writing the draft and editing it, constantly practising my writing and thinking skills.

    It comes down to this core question: do I want the thing done, or do I want to do the thing?

    In using AI, I am trading some work off to it, but, importantly, I’m able to manage how much of this outsourcing I am doing.

    • Programming

    The other way I was using AI was by building a small program for creating generative visual art pieces for album covers, using the traditional generative art concepts/techniques. In generative art, the artist creates a set of rules and processes which then execute to produce the final art piece, rather than creating the finished piece directly. Each run yields a unique piece, generated within the constraints of the rules laid out in the system. These sorts of systems can be built using code, but I have no experience writing code, so I decided to talk ChatGPT through my ideas for the program, and see how it went. The very first program it created worked very well, generating images exactly like what I was after. The program had a few sliders to adjust parameters like Density and Stroke Weight, and allowed me to select which types of shapes it would use. An element of randomness was implemented, and pressing the ‘Regenerate’ button produced a new image each time, under the same core rules. This allows me to generate a cohesive set of images that share similar characteristics but are individually unique:

    Two main issues arose from my minimal coding experience. Firstly, I could not easily edit or debug the generated program myself. When I prompted ChatGPT for fixes, its accuracy was sometimes inconsistent, often leaving me unable to add or alter elements. This collaborative process, however, became a learning experience. ChatGPT responded to me as if I was a beginner, rather than a completely clueless coder. This pushed me slightly beyond my capabilities, developing some of my understandings of how code works. I did, however, struggle at times to find where to paste the new code, so I asked ChatGPT to tell me what the old code looked like so that I could find it and replace it with the new code.

    I obviously didn’t feel like I had created the program myself. Sure — the artworks it produced felt sort of like mine, but the program itself didn’t. If I had coded that program, I would feel far more rewarded every time it produced an artwork.

    Reward in the Creative Process; Ownership

    But is this much different to, say, a person who works in woodworking, doing most things by hand, but then acquiring a particular machine that allows them to do so much more? It’s still creative work, but now the person is relying on a machine to do some of the work that they originally wouldn’t have been able to do themselves. Is there much of a difference here?

    (Something I did observe was that it did drive me to really want to learn to code. I’ve been interested in other forms of programming using objects in platforms like MaxMSP and Bitwig’s The Grid, but I’ve never fully taken the plunge with learning to code. That could be a side project I undertake this summer.)

    Again, it comes back to the core question: do I want to have the thing done, or do I want to do the thing?

    Do I want to learn the techniques, put them to use, fail, succeed, learn and feel ownership over my creations? For sure. But is there also a bit of joy in having this program in front of me that has been made specifically for me, based off my ideas? Absolutely.

    I don’t think it’s black or white. Having the AI simply produce the generative art images itself, and then calling them my own… that feels far more empty. In the same way, getting the AI to write the entire article, or getting it to produce an entire piece of music, seems like too much outsourcing to feel much reward in, and connection to, what has been created. There’s very little creative joy in those types of processes.

    There is something that feels good about being able to do things ourselves. Sure, we can store information in a personal knowledge management program like Obsidian or Notion, building a large collection of notes about our interest. Or we can just say, ‘Hey, it’s on the internet; what’s the need to remember these things?’. But it feels good to know the things yourself: to hold the ideas in your head, and be able to merge them and explore the connections yourself. There’s a self-sufficiency that comes from that. It feels good to learn new things, and be able to do new capabilities and skills. It feels good to be very good at something. As a software update for a phone makes it a more capable device, going through skill- or knowledge-development processes feels good and deeply rewarding. Gaining new capabilities is one of the things we praise in our culture: development, growth, maturity, advancement. Think of Neo in The Matrix gaining the capabilities of Kung Fu fighting. Think of the montages of characters in sports films, training hard, struggling, falling, getting up again, training, training, training, and eventually getting very good at what they struggled with before. These sorts of stories permeate in our culture because they align with a core element of modern experience: development and expanding capabilities.

    AI Augmenting Capabilities

    A major part of this is that I can use AI to help me do things I can’t do on my own, rather than getting it to do things that I can and want to do, such as writing out my ideas. It’s important to be aware that whatever I get ChatGPT to do, I won’t get practice in. If I get it to write out my ideas (for example, brainstorm something, or write out an entire article), then I won’t get practice in thinking and converting ideas to written words, which I see as an extremely valuable ability. If I get it to edit my writing, however, I will get practice in writing the ideas and some editing, but I won’t get practice in the proper fine-toothed-comb editing of writing. But this would be the same case as if I worked with an editor. If I get it to write code for programs based on my ideas, I won’t get practice coding. However, I do feel like I learnt a bit about code yesterday by working alongside the AI, copying and pasting chunks of code and looking around the script. I didn’t learn anywhere near the amount I would have if I had written the script myself, but that would take me a very long time to be able to do so. This isn’t a bad thing — learning is supposed that takes time. But this was a different experience to traditional approaches to learning: I could immediately create things of higher complexity, while learning how code works in the process.

    But the counter to all of this hyper-optimism is that these positive outcomes will only occur if users are aware of AI’s potential to do the exact opposite: to limit our capabilities, expressive capacities and creativity, to cut us off from opportunities, and to raise new barriers. Over-reliance on the technology will stop us from doing the things that allow for these positive outcomes, and will stunt our growth in developing our own skills and capabilities. Over-reliance will reduce users’ knowledge and mental capabilities, causing all sorts of issues in navigating the world due to under-education.

    Just like many past tools and technologies, AI is both a gift and a burden; it can both extend us, and hinder us. Which one of these it falls towards depends on the users’ modes of use.

  • Patience and Long Projects

    Last year, I read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It is a wonderful, realistic perspective on time and time management. One thing that resonated with me was his chapter on patience and the loss of the ability to carry out longer projects — to really stick with them for the time they need to come into being.

    I have personally found it difficult at times to sustain a project, or to continue feeling engaged with what I am doing if it is a longer commitment. Part of this difficulty is that my primary motivation for being in the studio has been to transform a work in progress into a completed track, rather than solely focusing on the process of writing music. In other words, the purpose of being in the studio is to attain something in the future, as opposed to finding a fulfilling experience in the present moment.

    This relates to notions of mindfulness, internal motivation, flow states, and delayed gratification, and I believe the ability to carry out fulfilling work lies in finding a balance between these factors. This would entail doing creative work that is still working towards a future goal, but is also engaging in the present moment, and ticks all the boxes for facilitating states of flow.

    I remember a while back seeing a post somewhere on social media of yet another piece of software being hailed as the thing that will give producers the ability to pump out full tracks in minutes, or something along the lines of this. What I do remember clearly, though, is the top comment on it: “What’s the rush?” I found this perfectly summed up an issue with how music production is marketed, but also how creativity itself is marketed or valued. There is such a focus on the quantity of work, rather than the quality of work.

    I believe that what is more important is for composers, producers, and anyone else involved in creative work to cultivate the patience required to allow projects to come into fruition. Sometimes pieces of music need to be sat with or shelved for weeks, months, or even years before their issues and potential ways to elevate them reveal themselves. If producers only aim to create many, many tracks as fast as possible, they lose sight of the importance of the ability to slowly chip away at a project.

    I have felt this with my own creative work, but I have also seen it in the context of my education. Sometimes it has taken me weeks to fully grasp a concept I have been studying. I always feel that there is no way that the process could have been sped up: it often simply needs to take weeks or months. The idea that I could learn something and it will immediately click is unrealistic — it needs to circulate in my thoughts, my subconscious, and coalesce with my prior knowledge before reaching the point when it locks in and I understand it. It simply needs to take time and cannot be rushed. This is why I’ve always been against book summaries and ‘gists’; ideas require time and immersion to properly take root, something a book can provide, but a quick summary cannot.

    This points to two perspectives of the goals of studio work: should the goal be to spend 3 hours in the studio, or to complete a project? Of course, it should be something in between these: probably to spend 3 hours on the project. The point is to consider whether there is too much of an emphasis on leaving the studio with a finished product, or simply to have spent the time on creative work.

    The results of these considerations concern the deadlines imposed on a piece. “Spend three hours on the project” is a goal that doesn’t yet set an arbitrary deadline. If the goal is to come out of the studio with a full track, this sets a deadline of 3 hours on the piece. This will inevitably limit the scope of the piece. I believe that deadlines are extremely useful, but should not be applied to a project until its possible end shape is clear to the composer. In this way, the composer knows what the product could look like as a finished product, judges how long it might take to get it to that level, then creates the deadline.

    I have tried various creative challenges aimed at these two approaches: write for 3 hours every day for two weeks, and write a piece of music a day for two weeks. Personally, I enjoyed the former the most, as the required goal was a fixed time commitment. I couldn’t make those three hours shorter or longer—it was just a three-hour block that I worked within. On the other hand, ‘a piece of music’ could be anything, and I found myself a few days just getting in the studio, recording a little improvisation on the synth, and calling it a day. In the three-hour block, that improvisation would have gotten more layers added to it, been edited, further processed; more work was required due to the nature of the challenge. On some days, the three hours flew by, but on others, it felt like a slog, but I did find it easier to get interested in what I was doing, as I had no choice but to keep writing for the three-hour block, whereas on the track-oriented challenge, I could make the day’s session finish anytime I wanted by calling the track I was working on ‘done’.

    I personally get much of my creative inspiration from authors who create giant series of books — especially fantasy and science fiction epics. The writer’s ability to sit down and chip away at a book is something I find admirable, as it demands the author to acknowledge the fact that this thing they’re working on isn’t going to be finished until well into the future, which means that the gratification from writing “The End” isn’t coming anytime soon.

    So where do they get the gratification from? The act of writing itself—the time spent on the creative task, in the creative process. This highlights internal motivation, a key theme in Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, where motivation is derived from doing the act itself, as opposed to an external reward such as a salary or, say, income from the sales of a book.

    In the field of music, I feel that we see this less often today. There are definitely still plenty of artists who spend a lot of time on longer projects, slowly inching towards a finished record of intricate music. But there tends to be a focus on immediacy of output — of staying relevant on people’s feeds.

    We see the ‘long game’ approach to creative works in classical music. The best example is Wagner’s Ring Cycle — a massive cycle of operas spanning 15 hours of music, which took the composer 26 years to write.

    To me, this type of prolonged creative process requires patience, internal motivation, and regular creative work, while also keeping an eye on the broader picture: working on the trees (the daily work in the studio) without losing sight of the forest (the broader body of work you’re creating, and the reason why you’re creating the work). I often wonder if relevance worth sacrificing in order to create truly creative work? And I often lean towards yes.

  • Balancing Structure and Variation in the Creative Process

    Desired Output vs. Conventional Structure

    When I’ve recently sat down to write music, I’ve been more drawn towards ambient, experimental, and spatial work. It’s difficult for me to pin down exactly the type of music I’d like to be writing, but I have found that I’ve been avoiding dance music, and popular music approaches recently — trending styles with conventional popular structures. To me, this music is often about trying to match something that has come before. I’ve found myself interested in exploring approaches to music that are new and haven’t been explored before, and I often want to actively avoid conventions where possible.

    I remember Daniel Avery mentioning how he is confused to hear people talk about wanting to create sounds that reflect natural sounds and sonic behaviours, as he wants to explore sounds that are impossible, new, and haven’t been heard before. I definitely resonate with this feeling.

    But right now, my creative process feels like it’s in a bit of disarray. Every time I’ve recently sat down, I seem to want to approach composition in a new way. This does align with wanting to push music into new territory, but it also leaves me feeling fairly untethered. There’s huge value in having a process down pat that you can use to make new, wildly variable music, using the same set of tools. I believe it comes from having a process that is rigid enough to offer security, but flexible enough to facilitate a diverse and experimental output.

    The Creative Tension

    I think that’s part of the tension: I’m always trying to find the balance of established structure in the creative process, and abandoning conventions in the music itself.

    An established structure acts as a foundation. If I ever get lost, I can fall back on it and use it for guidance. I know which synths to use for certain applications, or which plugins to use for specific processing methods. I’d really like that: having, say, a single plugin for a distortion pedal, or a single plugin for a tape emulation. That way, whenever I want distortion or tape emulation, I know exactly where to go. At the same time, this bank of equipment (and creative techniques) must have the potential to create experimental music, absent of conventional structures.

    Defining the Creative Process

    What actually is the creative process? To me, it’s a collection of procedures, techniques, and equipment/technologies.

    Procedures are linear processes I move through to fulfil certain tasks. Techniques are the creative, often signature ways of carrying out those procedures. And finally, equipment/technologies are the tools (DAWs, specific plugins, modulators) required to execute them.

    The creative process is almost fractal in nature: micro-techniques nested within macro-procedures. Take, for example, creating a layer of interesting glitchy material. I go through an overarching procedure: setting up the material, routing it to an auxiliary channel, loading a complex processing chain, recording the output, chopping up the resulting recording, isolating the parts that resonate with me, and then further processing them through pitch shifting and time stretching. That whole sequence is a procedure, but the specific choices I make define my technique. Another composer would have an entirely different set of techniques — and use a set of different tools — to carry out their procedure of creating a layer of interesting glitchy material. A single piece might have a hundred of these procedures embedded within it, from long, extensive sequences of actions to concise procedures for things such as isolating transients in a sound.

    Rigidity; Avoiding Dogmatism

    It’s worth considering the results of rigidity in the creative process. If it’s very rigid, and the composer knows exactly what to do step-by-step — which rhythms to use, which synths to use — the composer will feel secure, but the piece will sound similar to their last one. But if the process is completely unstructured, the composer may feel lost, and each piece will sound wildly different.

    The essential task is finding that balance: the process should have enough rigidity to allow the composer to feel somewhat secure and have options for what to do next, but not so much rigidity that the resulting works are predictable. Variation — and its ability to create unexpected outcomes — can be applied to technologies, techniques, and procedures alike.

    To me, it’s similar to the move of certain DAWs to create ‘ranges’ in parameters, rather than fixed values. In Live, you can fix a velocity range that each note will play at each time it is triggered, creating a subtle sense of randomness in the sound. In Bitwig, you can create a range that an automated parameter will sit at, rather than a fixed value. This ability of establishing ranges rather than fixed values allows for some structure, but offers the possibility for variation each time the track is played. Applying this to the creative process, there is structure and security, but the possibility for variation each time the creative process is undertaken.

    My ideal process is one that results in works that do not align with conventional structures. If you make music based on techniques you’ve heard artists use, your music may align with their sound. This is completely fine early on in a career, as you develop your skill set, but at a certain point, departing from these conventions allow for a unique, personal voice to emerge. You have to allow yourself to develop and evolve the techniques you learn and mimic, to embed them in your own process — to adapt them; to break them into their fundamental components and vary these. Techniques can be built upon others, merging to create entirely new ones, akin to how technologies evolve. I believe it’s worth being aware of the true nature of techniques, and how adapting them can open us up to entirely new ways of working and entirely new types of creative outcomes. I think we’re all aware of techniques, and can talk about them well, but it’s interesting to really unpack them and get to their essence — understanding how they’re similar to technologies; how they relate to craftsmanship; how they construct our own unique ways of doing things.

  • Reflecting on a simple creative process

    Yesterday I had a good session of composition. I feel like recently my composition practice has been a little too much in foreign territory: incorporating too many new techniques and pieces of equipment. (I tend to do this often). I have been incorporating too many new approaches into the process, which meant that I didn’t feel like I was engaging my existing skill set.

    Over the weekend I had the pleasure of working with a bunch of high school students through a composition and production session. Preparing for this required me to really slim down the creative process into its most basic form. While teaching it, I and my student helper both agreed that we often complicate the creative process too much. What we were putting the students through sounded so simple, yet fun and explorative. We both said that we wanted to be doing what the students were doing in our own studio sessions.

    So yesterday, I did. I just carried out the creative process in a very simple format: improvising, landing on a core sound and idea, looping this and recording more sounds around it, experimenting with different processing techniques, mapping it out into a structure. All the time, just using Live and the Prophet as my main instruments, both of which I am very comfortable on.

    I spent some time back in session view while the core materials were playing in arrangement view, which allowed me to record little loops and random flourishes. I then looped these and recorded them into arrangement view, automating their levels and filters to allow them to gradually grow and retreat when necessary.

    When was necessary? Well, this brought me back to how I have typically carried out the arrangement process in the past. The structure emerges from some initial improvisation. This involves me recording a long performance, building the sound as I go until I have a full structure. I then spent some time tidying it up and getting rid of any errors. Sometimes I will trim the structure if I feel like I stayed too long in one level of intensity. I then build elements around the trajectory of this sound. The main sound forms the macro structure while the other supplementary sounds articulate the structures on smaller time scales.

    This process worked well with this piece I worked on yesterday. I actually started working on a part two of the piece, but it grew to be something entirely different, so I’ll probably split this off into its own project file.

    The whole process was just nice. It was about 2 hours of work. It engaged my existing skill set while still forcing me to challenge my abilities. I’ve been conscious of applying the concepts of deliberate practice to my creative work and I feel like this session was operating in the perfect range of difficulty — just beyond the current abilities — for encouraging skill development.

    HERE is a link to the result.

  • Plans for the next record

    I’m putting together some ideas for my next record. I like to start with a bit of a plan like the one below, but I think this is probably the most formal and structured plan I’ve made.

    The purpose of plans, as I see it, is to provide the first steps and the ways forward when feeling a little lost. They’re not to be stuck to in a very dogmatic sense – I’m very comfortable knowing that I can and probably will deviate from it.

    A big focus for this plan is to separate the different stages of the creative process onto particular pieces of equipment. I’m beginning by gathering a bunch of material onto the Tonverk SD card, then sketching on that box, before moving to Bitwig to record into and flesh out, then Live to do a final round of touch ups. I’ve found this to be a good practice, as it really forces me to be aware of what stage of the creative process I’m actually working on. In modern DAWs, you can do everything, from sketching to arranging, processing, polishing. In my experience, this vast amount of options can stifle creativity, mostly in the early stages of building a work. I’ve made a conscious effort below to assign myself particular platforms to work in at the various stages of creation.

    Skill development goals:

    1. learn the Tonverk deeply
    2. learn Bitwig deeply

    Inspirations:

    1. Murcof
    2. Taylor Deupree
    3. Loscil
    4. Purl
    5. Lawrence English
    6. Offthesky
    7. Abul Mogard

    Aesthetics:

    1. Dystopian, but moments of light
    2. Cinematic
    3. Not only long droning pieces: more ‘composed’ and shaped
    4. Tapey, driven, textural, experimental

    Creative Framework/Limitations:

    1. I will begin with a pool of materials, some recorded by myself, some gathered from elsewhere.
    2. I will do all writing, sketching and sequencing on the Tonverk.
    3. I will record and do additional creative processing in Bitwig
      1. (I am leaving open the option of jumping to Live if this is really hindering the creative process),
      2. I will carry out an additional round of and creative processing in Live.
    4. I will write a development log specifically for the record
      1. Descriptions of what I did,
      2. ‘Findings’ and discoveries about the equipment and techniques,
      3. Reflections on how it’s going.

    Process:

    1. Gather materials:
      1. Record improvisations
      2. Source samples
      3. Record instruments
      4. Load onto Tonverk SD card
    2. In Tonverk:
      1. Build the sketches on separate patterns in the Tonverk
      2. Process sounds
      3. Focus on one piece per session
      4. Record into Bitwig
    3. In Bitwig (if realy struggling with creative flow, jump into Live):
      1. Carry out additional processing
      2. Record extra layers
      3. Adjust arrangement
      4. Export stems, bring into Live
    4. In Live:
      1. Mix tracks

    I want to document these sorts of projects on the blog, and so I’m adding a post category of ‘DevLog’, and a post tag of the record title, which is currently “tonverk_record_2025”; it’ll change eventually. For future works, where I carry out a similar process, I’ll carry out the same format, adding them to ‘DevLog’ category, and adding a new post tag for the record title.

  • Loving the Tonverk

    Yesterday, I had a session on the Elektron Tonverk using a portable battery plugged into it’s USB-C port for power. It worked really well.

    I have a feeling that the Tonverk might be exactly what I’ve been after for a while: a very powerful and capable machine that is portable, fairly self-contained (as in it can cover all the bases for a piece of music – playback of materials, processing), and aimed at more experimental approaches to composition. That’s another thing: this machine does feel like one that is leaning a little more into the composition side of ‘doing music’, rather than one aspect of music making, such as making drums or making synths, or solely the performance of music. I think with future updates, it’s just going to continue to get better and have more functions added to it.

    It has copped quite a lot of negativity recently, and this has been interesting to see. I feel like people who are upset about it have some grounds for their arguments, but are also being unreasonable at times. Sure, the device has bugs and some glitches, but it’s nowhere near as bad as people are making it out to be. And I feel like people went into the announcement of the machine with a clear idea of what they want the machine to be, only to be disappointed at the fact that it didn’t align to  their expectations. I think many people just wanted an Octatrack mk3. Even after using it for only a few days, and it still being in its infancy, I can definitely see that it is something entirely new for Elektron, borrowing from parts of their other machines, but really taking a new approach. I’m very excited for it.

    I think it would be a great device to begin a whole record on. It has everything there, and it would be a nice exercise to gather a bunch of materials onto the SD card, start a new project, and just build everything on the machine. This would be good for at least getting a collection of tracks to the point where they can then be further processed and mixed in the DAW. But all of the sequencing, rhythms, some processing, and core elements could be there.

    I also love the idea of sampling things into it from external sources like my phone or iPad. This makes it a really portable machine that I could make a little case for, containing the external battery, a 3.5mm – dual 1/4-inch cable, and some headphones to be able to take the machine anywhere, do some sampling, and make whole pieces anywhere.

    There are a couple of methods for sampling with the Tonverk:

    First is normal ‘melodic sampling’ of sampling in a note and playing this back polyphonically. Multi-sampling is an extension of this to capture more samples per sound/synth patch (samples for different pitches and different velocities).

    The second the approach is that of looping parts of longer recordings, eg. for tape loop-inspired approaches. I can load in a long take of me playing some melodic material on an instrument (just an improv), and then in the Tonverk, I can just play a small portion of this back by playing a single pitch and holding it for a portion of time, looping it. I could have multiple of these going, perhaps some at different loop lengths. If I was using the subtracks machine, I could have loads of these going – 8 per track, on each/any of the 8 tracks. The other two playback machines (single player and multisample) are designed specifically for melodic sampling, so I think subtracks would be the best way to go about it.

    I’d really be keen to test this process out to make some Taylor Deupree-style music. These loops could be processed by a couple of insert FX, the bus tracks, and sent to the send tracks.

    Excited to dive in more 🙂

  • Treating Material Roughly

    I’ve recently been working on the Elysian installation quite a bit. It’s being presented next Friday the 26th of September, 2025.

    I’ve primarily used the material of Time Vials (all parts) as a starting point. I used it to map out a base structure for the work, which ran for approximately 45 mins. This foundation gave me a good overview of the intensity trajectory the piece would travel through.

    With this, I created a bunch of new material by heavily processing the existing sounds and pieces, and creating new parts. This process presented me with an important lesson: be rough with your material. What I mean by this is that it’s important to get out of the mindset of the engineer, who is focused more on the subtleties and fine-tuning of existing material, and into the mindset of the creative and experimental artist. There’s so much information out there about the ‘correct’ ways to treat audio, but I’ve found that this mostly comes from an engineer’s perspective of working with sound. There is a massive focus on tidying out audio, or changing it subtly to meet an artist’s vision. Of course, there are examples of discussions of tones and overdriven sounds, but I feel like there is very little being discussed about the longer processes that can be undertaken by experimental artists working with material with more of a generative approach: aiming to create new materials, rather than clean up existing materials. To future me, I say: when doing work similar to this installation, go ahead and carry out very drastic levels of processing on your existing material, whether that is parts of, or entire, tracks. Transpose and stretch whole pieces; granulate them; run them through some spectral processors like SpecOps; do all of these things in a chain. Use ‘finished’ pieces or parts as the raw material in processes that result in new pieces. This isn’t some groundbreaking idea or anything – it’s a very common technique for more experimental or technical electronic music. But it’s one that I’ve really employed to create the installation piece, and want to adopt more in the future.

    I remember hearing Blawan talk about his studio processes, centring around similar drastic approaches to resampling material. It involved starting out with a drum groove or percussive synth line (created on a drum machine or modular synth), which is then processed and recorded it into a DAW. Then, the recording is sent through more processing equipment, driving or altering it in a range of ways, and recorded back into the DAW. This process is repeated over and over. At some point, you can stop and listen to what you’ve made, and it’ll most likely be pretty experimental and ‘weird’.

    What’s important here is the mindset: don’t think your material has to be treated like it is so fragile. Be rough with it.

  • Plans & progress for Machine Hall installation

    I’m currently working on an Installation that will be presented on the 26th of September at Machine Hall in Sydney. The event is called “Elysian”. I’ve sent over the references to the visual artist I’m collaborating with for it, Kevin Nguyen.

    I’m now in the process of building a big foundation of music, which I’m going to send over to Kevin by the end of the week. It will be good to have this all as a framework to then build new material on top of. I want to play with some generative music approaches to create that material—a bunch of randomness and unpredictability on top of more stable material. Bitwig will be great for that. I’ll record long takes from a generative system built in Bitwig’s ‘The Grid’, and isolate the useable parts to work into the foundation.

    At times, I want the generative material to be the sole focus, and at other times, I want it to sit behind or embedded within the foundation layers. I want there to be a decent flow to the music, but also areas where the focus does shift between different types of material. In other words, I want there to be a kind of contrast between different sections. I want this contrast to be in the types of sounds used—presenting textural and atmospheric materials, and then more pulsatile and transient ones. Sort of like a mix between the Hypnus Records sound and Ryoji Ikeda’s approach to minimal-glitch (but no one can do it as good as Ikeda—he’s just an example of someone who nails the installation approach. It almost feels cliche to reference his work, but there’s no denying how good it is).