2025-02-17
I want to write a bit about my current music making process.
I'm spending some time to grow as a producer of electronic music. I've previously written about how I work. To summarize: I make original, instrumental (no singing) electronic music using synthesizers and drum machines.
For idiosyncratic reasons I use a kind of retro workflow which does not use modern music production computer software. This creates constraints on how I work. Most importantly, I can work on only one song at a time, and when a song is done I cannot revisit and modify it.
The hardware I use has not changed much. I have started adding some outboard equalizers. Besides that I have been rearranging some of the equipment so that it's closer to my main sitting position in front of the speakers. I'm slowly shifting from an "everything is connected and ready to go" to "the pieces I'm actually using are in an ergonomic location" organization. It's OK for me to partly reorganize the studio just for the current song.
This is mainly about the drum machines. Instead of having 5 or 6 wired up and ready to go, they now just sit in storage on a shelf in the studio. I pick one for the song and position it on a rack near me.
It feels like it's been a very long and slow process for me to get better at mixing. I find it difficult that whenever I read about it it's treated as a role and production stage separate from the artistic ideation. First you "write" a song, then you "record" it, then you "mix" it. These are separate stages executed by specialists. For me on the other hand these stages happen at the same time and I am the one doing all the work.
It also doesn't help that whenever I read about mixing it's all about software plugins and DAW sessions with 100 tracks. It looks so different from what I do.
Addendum 2025-02-22. To be clearer, the reason much mixing advice is hard for me to follow is that I do not work with multi-track audio, only stereo. My mixes are always live. This means that I cannot revisit my mixes after the fact or ask someone else to improve them for me. I have to get the mix right while I record.
I've been using compressors for a while now; I have a drum buss on my mixer which goes through an equalizer and a compressor, then back into the master buss on which I have another compressor. I rarely touch the master buss compressor. The drum compressor I usually play with a bit so that whatever it does to the drums sounds nice.
I've come to understand that one of the creative uses of drum compression is to change the balance between the close-mic'ed sound of the drums and the room sound. Because I use drum machines there is no room sound. As a creative solution for this "problem" I've started using a drum submixer with a reverb processor on a send/return loop. This drum reverb then goes into the drum buss compressor and I get some of the "compressor magnifies ambient sound" effect without there being any microphones.
I'm also learning that "drum buss" is not always a helpful concept because it suggests I'm only allowed to have drums in there. What's really going on is that some of the tracks in my song go through an aggressive, noticeable compressor (i.e. the drum buss) and at the end the whole mix goes through a more gentle "glue" compressor (the master buss). Which sounds go where is a creative choice.
I mentioned above I've started using outboard equalizers on the individual tracks of my mixer. I don't understand why the outboard sounds better than the built-in equalizers of the MixWizard but they do. I mostly use outboard EQ's to accentuate some part of the incoming sounds. This goes against the usual advice of using equalizers to dial down problematic parts of the spectrum. I dial up the good bits and then I can turn down the overall level.
Besides getting better equalizers, I also got more sweepable highpass and lowpass filters. People who use DAW's are laughing now because these are included with the software. I on the other hand have to realize I need them and then go out and buy them.
The advice to use highpass filters when mixing is quite common. There is limited "room" in the lower end of the audio spectrum so it helps to remove the low end of tracks that don't need it. What I did not realize is that highpass filters are also very useful for bassy sounds (drums, bass). For this you need to be able to continuously adjust the cutoff frequency. Hardware mixers often do have highpass filters but they are at a fixed frequency which is only useful for sounds that should have no bass in the first place. So now I have outboard highpass filters that let me dial in the right cutoff frequency.
I was surprised to learn that lowpass filters are also very nice when mixing. Drum sounds have sharp transients which means they contain high frequencies. Synths can also send out a lot of high frequency signal that you would not get from a microphone pointing at an acoustic instrument or a human voice. I never knew that putting a 6dB non-resonant filter on things could sound nice; in a synthesizer a 6dB filter rarely sounds good. But when mixing they're great.
Aside from creating mixes I am more satisfied with, I have also been making big changes in my composition process.
Over the past year I have tried various approaches, including almost blind faith improvisation. But all these approaches were based on the idea of building a fully scripted linear sequence.
By "fully scripted" I mean that everything that happens is recorded into the sequencer. When recording the song I would press "play" on the sequencer and lean back while it plays the song. This is similar to what people do when arranging music in a DAW. You have a horizontal scrolling window with a cursor. You can put the cursor at the beginning, press play and the song plays until the end.
What I'm doing different now is that I improvise the arrangement of the song. The music I make consists of small repeating phrases and rhythms that I can turn on and off on the sequencer. Now when I hit "play" I must get to work and perform the arrangement or else the recording ends up as the same 10 seconds of music looped over and over.
I've recorded a video of what this looks like.
What I have "discovered" here is not a new idea. In fact it is probably what many people would consider a more normal way of creating electronic music, compared to what I used to do. But for me it is a very exciting development, for several reasons.
Firstly, this way of working lets me do more with less. In my previous song arrangements I struggled to find a good balance between recognizability and variation. Repeat the same 4 bars over and over, and everything in your song becomes recognizable but the lack of variation will make the song boring. At the other extreme, if you add too much variation then your listeners loose their bearings. By making an arrangement with fewer elements in it and creating movement and tension by turning them on and off I can create the amount of variation I want without bamboozling the listener.
Secondly, this way of working lets me add more arrangement details. It takes effort to come up with an arrangement idea and then to program it perfectly so that it happens at the right time in a linear arrangement. By improvisationally performing the details I can have more of them and I don't have to think about where to put them, I just go by feel.
Thirdly, it seems that this way of working lets me avoid what I'll call the funnel approach to song making. If you are nailing down every little development in your arrangement, you become more and more invested in what's already there and the song starts to feel like a funnel with less and less room for change and improvement. For me this used to create a kind of rush to finish the song and escape the funnel. I would be driven to reach the finish line where there is nothing left to improve. By the end I am burned out on working on the song but not sure it's where I want it to be either.
With this new way of working it feels more like one big experiment. I record every performance of the arrangement and I feel free to change things as I go along. Only afterwards will I pick the "final" version of the song. Experimentation is more fun than being in the no-fun funnel and there is more room for the song to grow in unexpected directions. There is less stuff in the sequencer so it's less scary to change, remove or add things. The project remains open-ended up to the point that I decide to wrap it up.
I understand that for some people, the funnel process is helpful because it helps against decision paralysis. But what I am learning now is that for me and my music, it is better to keep experimenting without committing to things.
It feels silly to write these things down because I am learning so much and things are constantly changing. This information is probably outdated by the time you read it. I wanted to write it anyway because I'm excited about these developments, both with the mixes and with the new improvisational approach to arranging. Thank you for taking an interest!
Tags: music