STUDIO TECHNIQUES OF MY MUSICAL LANGUAGE
Preface
In October 2014, I was invited to join a friend at a residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta in which indie bands were given two weeks to work with different producers and engineers to develop tracks they were working on. I showed up having only played a couple shows with my friend, a guitarist who appropriately describes his music as “doom folk,” and had no idea that this residency was about to shape the way I make music to this day. Working with one producer in particular, Shawn Everett, particularly opened my eyes to the opportunities of studio production. Everything he did seemed like the exact opposite of conventional wisdom. We used headphones as microphones, and when he noticed a guitar that only had three strings left, he saw it as an opportunity to place an SM58 into its sound hole, unfastened. “What if instead of drums throughout the track, we just had one big crash in the middle?” he asked, and we then recorded six crashes and stacked them as he got the interns to install iTunes so we could reference the distortion on a particular Kanye West track. We ended up with an absolutely stunning track, and I returned home with a fresh perspective on what it means to make music. I returned to the Banff Centre a year later for a self-directed residency, with a monosynth I borrowed from a friend, a mediocre guitar multi-effect pedal, and borrowed the Centre’s cello. I had no idea what or how to write, but I knew I wanted to compose and implement the lessons I had learned in my previous residency. The methods and basic concepts I started developing at this residency have been the basis for nearly all my composition ever since.
As I have developed my composition tools over the years, I have realized that the idea of composing fast is a crucial aspect of all of them. The concept of “speed composition” at first seems entirely unromantic, conjuring up images of a factory-like process in which quantity is valued over quality, and formulaic pieces are churned out one after another. The reality, however, is that composing fast does not mean the piece is completed fast, but that ideas can be developed and recorded as they form in our heads. In fact, many of my “fast” composition methods really just put off the tedious tasks for later so I can brainstorm without interruptions, and I’m later stuck for a week transcribing an improvisation I played in 30 seconds.
In this paper, I am taking inspiration from Olivier Messiaen’s Technique of my Musical Language (Messiaen, 1956), a book written when Messiaen was my current age of 36. Unlike Messiaen, however, I cannot pretend that my composition career is quite ready for a retrospective analysis, and will instead present these methods as works-in-progress themselves, and discuss their shortcomings and hopeful future direction. The examples I give will mostly come from my recent album, A Really Good Spot, in which I tried to showcase process as part of the art, and consequently serve as useful demonstrations of these techniques.
CHAPTER I
CONCEPTS
While I regularly test out entirely novel writing techniques, I am describing the ones I keep coming back to, and it is worth examining what characteristics make a technique part of my regular toolkit.
I) Unpredictability
Unpredictability not only makes a technique fast, but also helps me avoid the same patterns already present in muscle memory or preconceived notions of how a piece of music should sound. With my academic background in biology, I have often thought of my composition methods in evolutionary terms. The unpredictable-idea generators produce variability, analogous to mutation, and the curation of these ideas (which usually exist as short motifs), is a selective process in which the strongest ideas survive and further evolve.
II) Accessibility
Accessibility can apply across a broad range of areas, but overall, it is a means of allowing for spontaneity and continuity in music creation. Part of what made my Banff Centre residencies productive was being given a studio that is mine, where I could leave every piece of gear plugged in, within range of my headphone cable, and useable in 30 seconds or less. If a track needed piano, two pencil mics would be waiting, and all I had to do was put headphones on, sit at the piano, and hit record. I do not use software synthesizers – not because of the sound, but because I need tactile knobs that I can reach out and turn. My modular synthesizer, by choice, has a lid that permits me to leave all patch cables plugged in and preserve my patches. Unfortunately, the accessibility of a studio setup can depend largely on living situations, and in some cases a living room or kitchen needs to be commandeered for a fortnight.
III) Usability
It is crucial that ideas can not only be documented, but that they can be documented in a near-final form, which is one reason why an accessible recording setup is crucial. This applies more so for electroacoustic compositions but is also helpful in compositions that will later be performed by an ensemble, because I like to construct a plausible digital rendition of material I will later transcribe. If I am improvising, I want the potential for that take to appear on an album.
Planning for usability, however, is an inherent tradeoff. Shawn Everett’s school of thought was to get things sounding close to how you want it to sound on the final recording before it is recorded, placing certain effects before the preamps on every take. More traditional engineers I have worked with believe in capturing the most pristine sound possible to maximize the possibilities for later manipulation, fearful that there is no “undo” button for captured audio, which potentially limits useability. I have deliberated a lot on this issue, and while I generally lean toward the Everett school, I also try to record MIDI data whenever possible, and sometimes record several versions of audio with varying levels of effects as I compose.
IV) A Commitment to Arbitrary Decisions
The more I compose, the more I realize that many decisions really just don’t matter, and that what really matters is our commitment to them. The deliberation in making decisions that may as well be arbitrary is a huge time sink, and preempting their need is one of the most important aspects of composing fast. Recording audio with effects and recording MIDI may seem like polar opposites in this respect, but while the former may be self-explanatory, recording MIDI lets me later reinforce haphazard improvisations and decisions by doubling them with another instrument, and recording audio with effects. Working in a DAW allows me to immediately place audio clips in a preliminary arrangement, and it is not uncommon that the first arrangement I make by haphazardly dropping audio clips into place remains relatively unchanged in the final version.
V) Blindness
One way that I generate more unique harmonies is to “blind” myself to certain elements in a work in progress, which can be thought of as a form of unpredictability. Sometimes this means playing along to another layer purely by ear, having forgotten the exact timing of chord changes. Other times I will blindly superimpose layers in Ableton, just to see if they fit together by chance. For example, in my sextet for the Arx percussion duo and Bergamot string quartet, I had one of the members of Arx record a few notes of bowed marimba, just so I could hear the timbre. Later, in Ableton, I pasted those few notes on top of a melody I had written for the strings to play. They were in completely different keys, but created a beautiful harmonic motif that I would never have come up with on paper, and I extended this into a core section of the composition.
VI) Fun
It is worth also noting that these techniques should be fun. The more fun they are, the less will power it takes to get started, which tends to be the biggest barrier to composition for me. These techniques tend to be tactile, spontaneous, and active, as opposed to staring at a screen or staff paper. It keeps me motivated to compose, and when one begins to be tedious, this is when I tend to experiment to create new composition techniques.
CHAPTER II
TECHNIQUES
I) Layered Improvisation
Layered improvisation has become a crucial technique for me, not only in my overall compositions, but also within nearly all of my composition techniques. This can either involve recording long stretches of music or increments as small as a single bar. Layered improvisation is made possible only by technology, and while Ableton is my method of choice, it can also be done on hardware recorders such as tape machines. Because I rely so much on my ears for composing, layered improvisation lets me jot down ideas very quickly without worrying about notation. While this can be thought of as a “blind” process, the familiarity I have with my own intuition means that there is just enough predictability to produce something coherent, but enough unpredictability to produce something unique. It is very unlike improvising with another live musician, because the adaptation can only happen in one direction, rather than both musicians listening and adapting to each other.
An interesting experiment that led to two tracks on my recent album was to layer improvisations in pairs. I invited my friend and violinist Thanya Iyer to the studio I was renting – my first time playing with other people since the beginning of the pandemic. We set up a couple mics, hit record, and improvised for about five minutes together. We listened back and enjoyed it as a foundation, and decided to improvise again, listening to our previous take in our headphones. Neither of us could really figure out what key the other was trying to play in, so we ended up producing interesting modulations purely by accident.
II) Copying, Pasting, and Moving in a DAW
While it may seem obvious, and while I briefly touched on this earlier, pasting and moving elements around in Ableton has become an essential part of my writing process. DAWs make it possible to quickly test out any combination of sounds. In my piece Then, Again for Alarm Will Sound, I ripped videos demonstrating multiphonics on various instruments, and stacked them into chords. I took the recordings from my workshop with them, in which I mostly had them play slow, simple chords to test out timbre combinations, and stacked chords from the recordings on top of each other to produce much more complex chords.
Sometimes I have even experimented with pasting non-musical elements over musical ones, and just listening to the product. I began doing this after watching Glenn Gould’s The Idea of the North, in which he layered interviews on top of each other to create what he called “contrapuntal radio” (Porter, 2016). In my track “Morning is a Stray Thread,” I placed medieval Italian poetry on top of what I had already written, and quickly fell in love with the counterrhythm that the speech provided. These fortuitous juxtapositions are only made possible by studio technology and the ability to combine separate elements on a whim.
One of the tracks on A Really Good Spot, The Pines Memorial Sample Pack, was made nearly entirely by copying and pasting elements. A historic underground studio called The Pines was about to close in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. This studio had broken instruments, audio test equipment, giant speakers, objects used for percussion (such as SCUBA tanks), and old guitar pedals and drum machines from the 80’s. I booked a couple days there just to create a library of as many of these sounds as possible, later arranging them into a composition. The core of this piece was a room mic we set up to record as I walked around the room banging on different objects with drum sticks, and occasionally talking to my engineer in the other room. I then took other recordings we made from running untuned oscillators through a speaker placed on its back and filled with other objects bouncing around, as well as cello and vibraphone notes, and moved them around in Ableton until I found an arrangement I liked. The chord changes were lined up with percussive “events” in the room mic track, making the timing seem deliberate (a good example of commitment to arbitrary decisions).
III) Side-Chained Gates
Possibly my most idiosyncratic composition method, the “gate” effect in Ableton has become my go-to idea generator, so much that I feel the need to step back from it to avoid an over-reliance. Side chaining is a common technique in electronic music, but is most often used with compressors, where the amplitude of one track determines the ducking in another to make room in the arrangement. More recently, the creative use of side-chained compression has become ubiquitous in EDM, generally with the kick drum triggering momentary silence in most of the other layers. With a gate, however, the options are binary, so once a source track’s amplitude reaches a certain threshold, the gate on the receiving track will either be closed or opened, muting and unmuting the track, respectively. Other parameters of the gated track can be set to give it a more natural sound, such as the attack, decay, and the “return” threshold. Morning is a Stray Thread, (heard earlier) was my first composition making use of this. I had recorded a number of improvised layers of cello, each consisting of short, disjointed notes in random rhythms that very gradually changed pitch. To find a trigger for the gate, I initially recorded myself reading the labels on my tape machine: “Input 1, Input 2, EQ high, EQ low, Pan,” etc. I set up the side chaining so that the string layers were muted (silenced by the gate), and the gate was controlled by the vocal track with a low threshold, so that whenever my voice spoke, it would open the gate and briefly unmute the string tracks. Instantly, beautiful string bursts were created that perfectly followed the rhythm of the voice. They sounded like they took hours to painstakingly compose, but were really just the product of automatic unmuting and re-muting.
Over time I have experimented with variations of this idea. In my track “Surfacing / Irregular Verbs in the Present Tense,” I used piano notes to simultaneously mute the main track and unmute layers of strings, clearing a noisy overdriven synth layer to make way for pristine strings. I also made the attack and decay instant, so when the complex envelope of the piano notes hovered around the trigger threshold, it sounded like harsh digital distortion. In some pieces, I have muted the layer triggering the gates, so only the bursts are heard.
I have now also used this technique for purely acoustic works, such as Then, Again for Alarm Will Sound. Unfortunately, this means tediously transcribing the complex rhythms generated, and finding performers who are capable of playing those rhythms, but when performed properly, it sounds just as good (if not better) than the recorded version. In my cello duet Idle Hands, I went further and condenses the string bursts to solo cello, producing an interesting accompaniment I would not normally have come up with.
IV) Cassette Loops
Cassette loops are probably the most tactile of my composition methods, as well as the hardest to initially learn. A cassette tape is unscrewed and opened. The magnetic tape itself is removed and taken off its spool. These spools are placed back in the cassette. The tape is then cut to a specific length that determines the length of the loop (the loops are very finicky, and being only 1 mm off can cause the tape to get stuck). A tiny square of clear tape is then cut and stuck to close the segment of magnetic tape into a loop. This loop is then carefully placed back into the cassette, wrapped around the spools and threaded through the different holders, and the cassette is then closed and screwed back together. These loops can then be used in a variety of ways to produce new ideas. Sonically, they are very different from reel-to-reel loops or digital loops, which tend to have minimal distortion and a high degree of preservation of the input sound in general. Cassette loops will vary in pitch, produce percussive noises at various times, and generally behave in very unpredictable ways. The eraser head of the tape machine will also often be covered in gaffer tape. If not, this leaves a brief gap in sound between the end and the start of the loop, which is usually undesirable, but in certain instances can have a nice effect.
I will often use these loops as a starting point for a composition, creating a library of them that I can play around with. I will send music, speech, or other sounds into the tape machine input, hit record, and stop after about a loop. I will play back what I just recorded, and if I like it (I would say I keep 1 of every 10 loops) I play the loop back into Ableton and record about 1 minute of it. When I wrote the score of a short film called On the Other Side, I talked to the director about certain themes and aesthetics he was looking for, and used that to help find material to send to the loops. The film was about an equestrian and drew from old spaghetti westerns, so I used many old Ennio Morricone clips. The result of the loops is an entirely new and unpredictable pattern that often has little recognizability in relation to its source material.
V) Arpeggiation and Sequencing
The use of the arpeggiator or sequencer on a synthesizer/controller is a very quick way to produce a piece quickly. These can produce long ostinatos that last many bars, or can be rapidly altered. This is one technique in which I always record the MIDI data, allowing me to send the sequence back into the synthesizer and play with other parameters to add expressive variation. In “Surfacing / Irregular Verbs in the Present Tense,” I used an arpeggiator module in my modular synthesizer in which the set of notes was controlled by various knobs rather than by a keyboard. This not only gave an element of blindness, but also created a unique form of development due to the way each knob transformed the pattern. These transformations would have been hard for me to think of when playing on a keyboard.
Perhaps the fastest pieces of music I wrote began with a short sequence. I had to compose 15-, 30-, and 60-second versions of the same motifs in one day as a one-off gig writing for a pharmaceutical commercial. I experimented with various looped sequences, finally landing on an ostinato I liked, and then added piano chords under it, a cello melody, and some extra sounds I had abandoned in other experiments.
VI) Scaffolding
Scaffolding is a term I use to describe improvising layers over another piece of music (either my own or someone else’s), and then removing the initial piece, leaving only the improvised layers. It is analogous to constructing a bridge or archway, where a temporary structure is put in place before the bridge can stand on its own, and then removed. New layers can then be added to turn these improvised layers into something more coherent. My example here is an assignment I wrote for Donnacha Dennehy’s seminar on translation and transformation, where I recorded many layers of viola da gamba (some layers were more tonal, and others more textural) over Sibelius’s tone poem The Swan of Tuonela. This provided an interesting transformation, partly because the improvised textures tend to harmonize rather than focus on the fundamental, so when the original piece is removed, the harmony becomes the fundamental, and also because I am blinded to the direction of the original piece.
VII) Combining techniques
As can be gathered from the previous descriptions of my techniques, most pieces I write combine multiple techniques. In Then, Again, I used scaffolding to help improvise my gated string bursts, playing over a recording of Jordi Savall’s ensemble that was in a similar key to my piece. Following along with those chord changes added an extra element that Steve Mackey would describe as “wrongitude” when I pasted these bursts on top of my existing harmonies.
Often when using gates to create string bursts, I will copy and paste sections of improvised strings, or move the trigger audio around until I create a burst that I like. I will then compile the best ones and arrange them within the piece.
CHAPTER IV
LOOKING FORWARD
The techniques described here are works in progress, constantly evolving, and they do have weaknesses that I hope to eventually rectify. Most of these techniques, for example, make it difficult to modulate in a piece, so the few times it does happen are very cherished moments for me. Modulations are something that I have mostly understood on paper, and because I am a cellist and tend to play a single voice at a time when I compose, it is hard to envision them as I improvise. One solution here would be to develop the scaffolding technique more, since I have only employed it a few times. Another would be to improvise in two different keys, and later find ways of joining them on paper, after the different sections are notated. In Then, Again, I have a section in the middle in a different key because I wrote it separately. The piece cuts directly back to the original key at the end of this section with no pivot, which had an effect I liked, but in the future I would like to attempt more smooth modulations.
Another limitation of these techniques is that, while they work well on instruments I am able to play, such as the cello and synthesizers, it is still very difficult to write for other instruments, particularly those that cannot be imitated with cello notes, such as brass or percussion. One solution here would be to take a more collaborative approach in my layered improvisations, like I did with Thanya Iyer. This would mean either improvising as a small ensemble, or directing another player’s playing, and then arranging this within the piece. In Then, Again, as I mentioned previously, I wrote some of the brass and wind parts by downloading demonstrations of extended techniques on those instruments, which also ensured that the techniques were playable. This however, can get complicated – for example, I initially used a flute multiphonic that had a beautiful microtonal interval, only to later realize that the flute in the demonstration was tuned in baroque tuning (about a half step lower), making that diad impossible when tuned to A440!
I have also left out techniques I use with my modular synthesizer for brevity, but this is a whole other realm that fits well into my list of desirable traits. I am new to modular synthesis, however, and would like to spend more time developing some of its idea-generating capabilities, such as non-linear sequencing.
Finally, returning to evolutionary biology terms, many of these techniques, especially in their infancy, cause me to have a sort of “punctuated equilibrium” model of composing, consisting of long periods of stasis interrupted by rapid change when a good idea finally appears. With all of these techniques, I sometimes get instant results that I love, and other times spend hours re-making tape loops, re-positioning superimposed tracks, or finding the right track to use for scaffolding before something finally clicks. My hope is that as I further develop these techniques, those periods of stasis become smaller and smaller.
References
Messiaen, Olivier. The Technique of My Musical Language. United States, American Reprint Service, 1956.
Porter, Jeff, 'Radio as Music: Glenn Gould’s Contrapuntal Sound', Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016; online edn, North Carolina Scholarship Online, 19 Jan. 2017), https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469627779.003.0008
String arrangements in Then, Again