The parameter locks stuff is typical electron fun, i.e. switching out a sound or heavily modifying a sound’s parameter’s per step. This feeds into the voice management aspect where you use single track to do multiple types of drums and percussions. No sound will actually play ‘over each other’, but with certain styles of music, the drums can alternate in and out like Kick kick snare hat hat kick snare hat (ghost snare) as a one bar loop and you’re only using one voice. Yeah, the voices will cut each other off, but that’s were management comes in so that you only take as much time playing each voice as it actually needs. For sounds that need more time, you can use a delay to give it a ‘tail’ that’s not made by the synth and you free up the voice to become something else.
I hope this makes sense. All kinds of sound interplay can happen in this way. Some songs you think are absolutely mad and doing a lot of things at once are doing actually a lot of things in a sequence and there’s not really a lot actually playing at the exact same time. So it comes down to the effect you want your music to have how this works in your favor.
Voice management can also refer to things like have a HUGE PAD BREAKDOWN with no drums and you use all the voices for a lush pad sequences that makes all the voices into a smooth wall of sound…and then drop out back to ‘every step is a different sound’ etc. But that comes from, again, writing songs around a small polyphony because you can’t write ‘normal songs’ with constricted amount of simultaneous voices. You have to work around it at all times and always think at all times in terms of ‘how many voices do I have left to do this thing I want to do at this point in time in the song’…the parameter lock takes a lot of ease off the limited polyphony and makes it easier to do voice management.
Actually, I thought the Model Cycles gives a very good kindve foundational example of making electronic music via its machines: kick, snare, metal, perc, tone and chord - taken together, all a very fundamental approach to varied instrumental elements in a track. Of course, you can change any track to be any machine, but I think the device does a good job of offering the basics in order to work up a tune for ‘beginners’.
Just because you mentioned Burial, who I believe is arguably the best electronic musician of all time…
He pretty much just arranged samples in software that is basically an Audacity equivalent - or at least this is what he has said. It’s pretty simple songwriting, basically adding and subtracting key elements of the track when it feels right. The buildup and breakdown of energy.
I think the moral of the story is keep it simple. If the drums, pads, melodies, fx all sound good on their own, and together, you can just consider the simultaneous playing of these parts the “peak” energy moment of the track, then subtract portions for intros/outros/bridges.
If you’re in a more live setting, I think it’s still the same thing. Add and subtract energy as you see fit. Don’t overthink it. Doesn’t matter the genre or instruments.
The MD addresses voice management by providing 16 voices. The MnM addressed having only six with the DigiPro machines, which allow you to specify a different note / hit per trig. But it was the dark trinity that fully developed the concept of plocking machines.
You can think of musical composition like written or spoken language. Letters become words, words become sentences, etc. The pitch of a single note has little meaning. Line up a few notes, each with higher pitch, and you create a scale fragment or an arpeggio. Similarly, the amplitude of a particular note means little outside the context of other notes. Line up a series of notes, each with increasing amplitude, and you get a crescendo. Group things together so the result is something other than the sum of its parts.
You can also think of composition as either the fulfillment or the breaking of musical expectations. Those expectations need to be built before they can be broken.
Another important feature in good composition is elision. Instead of ending one idea and beginning another, make the end of one idea equate with the beginning of the new idea. Jazz musicians try to play though the changes. Some electronic musicians talk about sharing one of the elements, such as a track or voice, between one section and the next, creating a kind of glue holding the sections together.
Another effective technique is rhythmic/metric augmentation or diminution. The beat will suddenly act as if it’s twice or half the speed. The all-time classic example of this, imo, is in the first 30 seconds of Led Zeppelin’s “Living Loving Maid.”
It’s easy to write about these generalities of composition, but using them effectively is tough.
My view is that classical composition and traditional rock/pop have the follow-the-rules game on lock. Electronic music doesn’t need to follow any rules or can make up the rules of the game for each song. So do whatever you want. That said, you can steal from classical and apply it to electronic. I’m learning a new arabesque piece on my piano and really enjoy the arp patterns in it. I just reuse them on my synths. A delicate pianissimo arp on the piano becomes super banging line in a techno jam.
Sound design is it’s own game too. Some of us get so much joy making our own sounds. Others love using presets because they are fantastic almost immediately. You touched on a point that electronic music can easily feature simple chord development while the art of the song comes from sound design development. Cool too. Yesterday I heard someone play ATB’s 9PM (takes me back to my young days) on a Moog Sub37. Simple song, simple melody line, but the whole point of the song in my opinion is to hear the hook’s so sick timbre over and over.
All music is about creating tension and release. With electronics we get to pick how to do that. Create a bunch of ABAC phrases? Sure. Maybe just a drone that develops over 10 minutes. Sure too.
Congrats on the Model Cycles and joining the community.
I also like to craft a sound - and once that sound is created often a melody comes with it. I use a looper on my synth to get something going. Then I use the OT or a drum sampler to create a beat that support it…
I’m not very skilled yet so I tend to just have a loop done and stick with that. I get the idea that from there you can have different variation on rhythm and melody, but I am studying music at the moment, so getting to the point of understanding chord progression and how these could be used to create more structure around my compositions.
The structure can be exactly the same as in rock/pop/punk/whatever… Unless you are going for music to dance to. Then the structure isn’t the same, for that you got to just write with the goal of making the body want to move and that implies a focus on groove. Anything else, like the stuff you listen to can be written with the same philosophy as conventional music, just with a lot more sound design involved.
Ive been focusing on my piano playing for last few weeks (and will be a focus for 2022), and similarly playing a few classical pieces again… has reminded me how powerful simplicity can be…
with electronic music I spend so much time on sound design and layers.
yet playing classical pieces, a single note on a piano surrounded with silence can be so powerful.
less can be so much more.
also spending a bit more time with music theory has changed by stance a bit, I think less of it now a rule book, and rather a way to understand what Im hearing and playing… simple stuff like how switching to using a different chord inversion, lets parts sit together nicely.
not saying you need any of this theory, or classical music… you don’t, but I do enjoy having something to fall back to when Im a feeling a bit ‘lost’ on where to go next, or what to try…
I too went from recording and writing rock and punk songs with bands to doing my own electronic music.
For me when I listen to a lot of the progressive dance/house music I grew towards, I hear all the same methods as I did in rock n punk. Intros, cool downs, pauses, build ups, solos, loud/quiet etc, even most of the chord progressions were the same. Only difference instead of making folk dance you make em want to jump, to me it’s all very similar.
Therefore I just approach electronic music the same way I did in my bands. However best thing about electronic music is the freedom it gives you, I can do it all myself, fully explore all my ideas to completion with not having to tell other humans over n over n over n over “you’re playing it wrong!!”.
In summary, electronic music is liberating. Enjoy it!
I’d say there are several philosophies to go about this depending on the type of dynamism you want your track to have. Essentially it’s a spectrum between the dub techno way and the super detailed IDM way.
On one hand there are styles of music where you start by building a loop that sounds “alive” (usually using modulation, randomness and field recordings) on its own and you can listen to for a long time without being bored, and then the songwriting part comes in by “playing” the loop using volumes, effects and the sound generator themselves. Press record, move from the lowest to the highest intesity and then back, do one or two other takes, pick the best one and there you go, song written.
On the other hand, you can use pattern based machines (or a DAW) as explained by the fine people above and go the super detailed songwriting route. At the most extreme, you can even think of songs with one pattern par bar, where you change something every bar and go through each pattern chronologically in a very deliberate way.
What’s fun is that you can make your own combination of those two philosophies, create 3 or 4 patterns that represent the parts of your song and then record yourself moving through them and playing with levels and effects OR create a super detailed structure on your DAW and then record yourself playing some of the parts to make them come alive OR record yourself playing each part individually for a while so you get material and then make the song arrangement in a DAW OR …
There are many ways to do things, some more improvised and some more deliberate, and the best thing to do is to try those that seem fun to you and see what works!
I gave this artist a listen. Rei Harakami…never heard of him. Died too young at 40 but his music is really quite lovely. I’m wrapping my head around how intricate his compositions are, how plush they sound and how it’s incredible he limited himself to a 100 dollar sound module.
My music is fairly “electronic” based, but it has guitars, vocals, drums, and bass (bass guitar and synth bass) and I tend to write songs in a pop structure format.
