this should be interesting
developing style
-
vviizzoonn
- mnml newbie
- Posts: 95
- Joined: Mon Jul 24, 2006 7:02 am
- Location: New York, NY
developing style
for all those production veterans on the boards: how has your style progressed over the years? what happened throughout your various stages? when you sequence out a new idea do you normally go with what sounds good or adapt ideas and techniques from tracks you already know? where's that balance between the subconscious ideas and the conscious ideas?
this should be interesting
this should be interesting
nice topic. when i started first i was into house music mainly. i remember the first loop i tried to do was influenced by nalin & kane type of sound. as my tastes started to vary alot it kinda brought some kind of "experimentation" to my sound...makes me think if i actually have a unique sound. probably not, cuz i change alot. at some point i got really interrested in idm and artists like autechre, boards of canada and aphex to name a few. the way their beats sounded was so cool. untill today i'm trying to incorporate the same approach. looking back it took me around 6 years of trial and error. i never had anyone to teach me this or that. just the music i liked and tried to emulate my fav artists. today, hm...it's a bit different, but nothing huge changed. i'm still learning about arrangement cuz i think it's very important besides the initial idea ofcourse. sometimes i know to stuck on a pattern how i make a track. sh!t, actually i do music all the time like that. make a 8 bar loop, drop the rhythm, add bassline + whatever comes handy. but lately i started to take another approach. instead of putting the rhythm first, i push other elements to take shape; and it's working really good. ur not stuck on some rhythm which hypnotises you and you can't break loose from it..then all of the sudden your ideas just vanish. it's really weird. i'll never forget the advice popkan posted on this board. about how he never puts hi hats in the first stage of the making. it's a silly thing, but it really matters how you work onwards. one of my friends works on music by visualising it. he knows to have the whole track resonating in his head and just goes from that. i dunno about it, altho the last book i read was talking about the same thing. apparently it's better to work like that, but i think it takes away the unexpectancy and experimentation. all in all..i think my technique is pretty much about being [], altho i'm slowly breaking loose from it. well, when i make idm or ambient the usual dance music procedures just don't apply and i can express way better. maybe thats one of the reasons why i get alot of creativity blocks with 4/4 music. 
Drop the idea of becoming someone else, because you are already a masterpiece.
my first electronic music excursions were way back in 1983, i was in an experimental band called Acid, and we were messing around with roland gear, 303, 606, 101, and 501 space echo. i was heavily into electrofunk, and running a breakdance club. i was basically using electro beats, and layering weird sound effects and delays with the space echo. so while the grooves were totally unoriginal, the overall effect was really trippy, and different to what was coming out of New York. eventually the band morphed away from using drum machines, but kept the synth angle alive. i'd gotten a bit dissillusioned with the robotic grooves, and we got into playing real instruments.
it wasnt until 1989 -90 when i heard my first techno record, (orbital) that i fell in love with the drum machine again. this time it was a big beefy 4/4 909 kick in a club that seduced me into a life of electronica. i got into techno big style, loving it in all its forms, detroit, acid, belgian, you name it. so my style, while heavy on the 303's, also had the tribal polyrhythms of detroit in there.
back then trance wasnt a dirty word, most forms of techno/trance intermingled, so it wasnt too difficult to come up with some sort of original sound. when acid techno took off in the mid 1990's, i almost instantly got sick of hearing 303's, and knew i had to move forward, thats when i started to go more minimal and funky, but i was still playing at a blistering pace, 143 bpm, and it didnt take me long to realise that you just couldnt get the funk at that speed. so i kept on slowing down over the next few years, and got more and more shuffle and funk into the grooves.
my technique was developing into my own style, before that i'd been too heavily influenced by what was going on around me, but now i was beginning to hear cliches all over the place, and wanted none of it.
i was also getting sick of the 4/4 kick, and began experimenting more and more with broken beats, polyrhythms, etc, but keeping the essence and soul of techno, and getting more and more minimal.
micro-house interested me for a while, but again it quickly became cliched, so i absorbed it and moved on.
now i'm pretty much obsessed with rhythm, especially polyrhythms, theres so much that hasnt been tried with them, most music follows the traditional and proven mathematical patterns, and i feel ive used them all up now, and that polyrhythms are the only area left that hasnt been properly explored. sure lots of music like say latin-american music is based on them, but not so much in a minimal way, and not very experimentally.
when i first started writing tunes, i would start with a kick then a hihat, and build things up from there, but now thats the last thing i would do.
i work on rhythmic patterns without any obvious elements, like a 4/4 kick or a hihat, and add whatever kick works later, that may be 4/4 or broken beat, 2 step whatever.
i dont allow any one time signature to dominate the tune and stamp its authority on it, i like to let the grooves breath. i almost never use the tradition snare or clap on the back beat, or obvious off-beat hi-hats, thats a sad left over from rock-drumming for me, i think techno should be more adventurous than that, you can put those sounds anywhere you want, there's infinite possibilities, thats why i started with techno in the first place. if i reach for the hi-hats, i stop and think -why ?? so i need something metronomic to hold it all together, why ?? can it not hold itself together with its own integrity ??
so i suppose theres a conscious effort on my part to re-invent techno all the time, but i work in a live way and thats when the subconscious comes through, so i start with a basic conscious idea, but the tunes just seem to grow out of that seed. like the tunes are already out there in the universe as mathematical possibilities, and its up to me to delineate them and bring them to life, and to do that you have to be tapping the subconscious.
its not clear to me now where the border between conscious and subconscious lies.
when i started out i knew exactly what i wanted to sound like, now i'm constantly searching for a new sound, i suppose thats natural for most musicians, so now i'm very rarely influenced by other musicians.
sorry this is way too long
it wasnt until 1989 -90 when i heard my first techno record, (orbital) that i fell in love with the drum machine again. this time it was a big beefy 4/4 909 kick in a club that seduced me into a life of electronica. i got into techno big style, loving it in all its forms, detroit, acid, belgian, you name it. so my style, while heavy on the 303's, also had the tribal polyrhythms of detroit in there.
back then trance wasnt a dirty word, most forms of techno/trance intermingled, so it wasnt too difficult to come up with some sort of original sound. when acid techno took off in the mid 1990's, i almost instantly got sick of hearing 303's, and knew i had to move forward, thats when i started to go more minimal and funky, but i was still playing at a blistering pace, 143 bpm, and it didnt take me long to realise that you just couldnt get the funk at that speed. so i kept on slowing down over the next few years, and got more and more shuffle and funk into the grooves.
my technique was developing into my own style, before that i'd been too heavily influenced by what was going on around me, but now i was beginning to hear cliches all over the place, and wanted none of it.
i was also getting sick of the 4/4 kick, and began experimenting more and more with broken beats, polyrhythms, etc, but keeping the essence and soul of techno, and getting more and more minimal.
micro-house interested me for a while, but again it quickly became cliched, so i absorbed it and moved on.
now i'm pretty much obsessed with rhythm, especially polyrhythms, theres so much that hasnt been tried with them, most music follows the traditional and proven mathematical patterns, and i feel ive used them all up now, and that polyrhythms are the only area left that hasnt been properly explored. sure lots of music like say latin-american music is based on them, but not so much in a minimal way, and not very experimentally.
when i first started writing tunes, i would start with a kick then a hihat, and build things up from there, but now thats the last thing i would do.
i work on rhythmic patterns without any obvious elements, like a 4/4 kick or a hihat, and add whatever kick works later, that may be 4/4 or broken beat, 2 step whatever.
i dont allow any one time signature to dominate the tune and stamp its authority on it, i like to let the grooves breath. i almost never use the tradition snare or clap on the back beat, or obvious off-beat hi-hats, thats a sad left over from rock-drumming for me, i think techno should be more adventurous than that, you can put those sounds anywhere you want, there's infinite possibilities, thats why i started with techno in the first place. if i reach for the hi-hats, i stop and think -why ?? so i need something metronomic to hold it all together, why ?? can it not hold itself together with its own integrity ??
so i suppose theres a conscious effort on my part to re-invent techno all the time, but i work in a live way and thats when the subconscious comes through, so i start with a basic conscious idea, but the tunes just seem to grow out of that seed. like the tunes are already out there in the universe as mathematical possibilities, and its up to me to delineate them and bring them to life, and to do that you have to be tapping the subconscious.
its not clear to me now where the border between conscious and subconscious lies.
when i started out i knew exactly what i wanted to sound like, now i'm constantly searching for a new sound, i suppose thats natural for most musicians, so now i'm very rarely influenced by other musicians.
sorry this is way too long
i'd just like to clarify what i'm saying here, or it sounds like i'm existing in a vacuum- when i started out, i consciously used ideas from the musicians who influenced me in my music, now i absorb influences subconsciously, but rarely do i consciously use those ideas.steevio wrote: when i started out i knew exactly what i wanted to sound like, now i'm constantly searching for a new sound, i suppose thats natural for most musicians, so now i'm very rarely influenced by other musicians.
sorry this is way too long
my musician friends and i are always bouncing ideas off each other, music would be no fun without that.
