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(reuploaded the track link)

TLDR

Looking back through the lens of this prompt, there’s a few “habits” I tried to challenge this week:

  • being more of a synthesist than a DJ - preferring to work from the ground up, building my own synthetic sounds rather than taking advantage of readily available, complex and rich sonic material like acoustic instruments, recordings, sample packs, stems or even parts of tracks/movies/etc.
  • a fixed mindset when approaching familiar sounds: e.g. treating an acoustic guitar part as just that, rather than seeing it as raw sonic material that can be stretched and transformed in any way imaginable
  • not embracing randomness, again for me it’s about having a fixed mindset of “I know what I want to do”, rather than being open to “what is”, the randomness and chance and embracing the fact that the world isn’t the way I want it to be. There’s beauty in such embracement, it’s like having the randomness as you co-author. I love it.
  • disregarding the old projects, but revisiting them to re-contextualize the old recorded material and ideas could be a wonderful experience

The Context

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of sound synthesis - to the point where sound synthesis has become the core of my music practice. Just a few days before the challenge I realized that I’m pretty tired of it now and I could probably benefit from a change…

When I read this weeks’ prompt I thought of challenging this in this way: what if I work with bigger building blocks?

Rather than building up my own sounds and compose the basic elements, working my way from the “bottom up”, I’d work “top-down”, starting with already rich and complex sonic material and arranging it together.

I thought of a DJ workflow as the opposite of what I’ve been doing recently (thought informed by my recent visit to a DJ friend who showed me the basics of how to work with a mixing desk).

Not owning a mixing desk and not being savvy enough with it, I decided to stick to the tools I knew (for the purposes of this challenge). I’ve an idea of opening some old project that I didn’t finish and treat its tracks as stems on a DJ desk, remixing it and giving it a new life.

The Process

I decided to open an old project of mine (I knew which), but when I loaded it in Ableton, I realized I opened the wrong one… My first impulse was “Let’s close it, I need to find that particular I had in mind!”, but then (thanks to the lens of this challenge) I decided to embrace this random event and work with the project I did open.

I revisited a project from 11 months ago. I rarely do that. I was stunned how different I approached music back then: there’s a danceable beat! There’s recordings of me playing guitar and a bass! There’s a recording of my breathing as an ambient background noise texture! There’s also that custom percussive/timbral instrument hacked together from an (almost audio-rate) arpeggiator, a drum rack, and a pitch shifter which I almost forgot about…

It was really fun to apply my new knowledge and experience to an old project - playing mostly modular synths for these 11 months seemed to influence my approach to organizing sound :slight_smile:

Just one example: that project contained a muted nylon guitar track. I remember having fun jamming along the track, but the part just didn’t fit. This time I was able to re-contextualize that material:

  • I no longer saw it as a fixed “guitar part”, rather I saw it as a malleable raw sonic material, from which I can create new sounds, new parts.

To fit the mood of the track, I transformed a 2 bar loop of the guitar part into a percussive sound by pitch shifting and rhythmically gating it:

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Then, I sliced the part on the timeline to create more space and variation, and to make it fit the other elements of the track:
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Finally, I put a Beat Repeater effect on it to give it even more randomized variation.

In the end, that track (muted and disregarded in the original project) has become the essential part of the whole track, serving as the main melodic content and a nice contrasting element to the noisy sound in the 2nd part.

Take-aways

A quick summary of my experience this week:

  • working with “larger building blocks” - e.g. samples or even stems can be helpful to fight the fatigue from doing lots of synthesis. Think of DJs -vs- synthesists. Sometimes it’s nice to change the hats.
  • revisiting one’s old projects can be surprisingly refreshing - it allows to see one’s progress, get in contact with the shift of your perspective and interests, also apply new knowledge techniques in a different context.
  • approaching any sound with an open mind, seeing it as raw, malleable sonic material can be helpful. E.g. being able to take a nylon guitar sound and turn it into a percussive melody. Or taking a cymbal sample and turning it into a drone or a bass sound. Anything is possible, I’d love to remember that more often.

Reflections on Juntos

Since I first started doing the juntos I can see how much progress I made in terms of being able to release imperfect, “unfinished” tracks.

Duh! Of course the tracks are unfinished, of course they are imperfect. They will always be, just like any art works!
I’m learning to accept this fact as being an integral part of the creative practice. When I did my first junto a few months back things weren’t so simple - the perceived imperfection and unfinished-ness of my own work caused much frustration.

It was refreshing to see and experience works of other Junto members, to get a glimpse into their creative worlds, to see the amazing variety of approaches. Such a good reminder that there’s no right and wrong.

I learned to work faster, implementing and iterating on the ideas, then letting them go for the next one. And it feels great! So much better than sweating over details and getting stuck with one project :slight_smile:

Now on to listening works of others, so intrigued by which habits other folks identified and challenged.

Thank you for this excellent prompt!

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