Steffi talks on the art of DJing

The Dutch DJ/producer/Panorama Bar resident appears in the latest AllSaints Basement Session video, discussing the finer points of her DJing among other topics.

Steffi interview - AllSaints Basement Sessions from AllSaints Spitalfields on Vimeo.

Atjazz & Jullian Gomes - Overshadowed Reviewed.

So now you've heard the original.... Take a moment to ask yourself what stood out? An the reason I say this is because....  No two people will hear the same thing, in that sense we all interpret records differently!


First off let me be the one to tell you the tracklist:


Atjazz & Jullian Gomes - Overshadowed (ARC - 38)


1.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes 
2.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes  (Atjazz Galaxy Aart Dub)
3.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes  (Jullian Gomes Perspective)


PURCHASE HERE


Yes that's right..... I can assure you that you will be receiving one of the best vinyls I have heard in a while (No Bullshit) this is a hot joint. It's hard to review tracks for me as I see sound and that effects in turn how I feel and interpret a record but here goes anyway. Usually with records I would see landscapes, different forms of impacts, various colours and or stories. Yeah you guessed it, with this record I see a short story. (It's possibly best to have the original track on in the background as you read this first review)


Track by track, whats the crack?


1.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes


First point to make is the kick drum just screams at you with a ferocious force that will drive deep in the heart of any clubs sound system, I would liken it visually to the moment when chubby rain impacts on a puddle. Immediately as the kick is thrust in you are hearing these haunting yet melodic keys, which has all the eeriness of your average haunted house but makes you feel more mellow than a 1970's hippy. 


So now picture this groove building with some well mixed tape noise in the background and now you have the point in the visual story in-which the young girl is looking out the window, as the rain beats down on the windowsill she puts her hand to the window and a single tear falls down her face. (At this point your unsure whether this is a review, a badly written script or if im crazy...... Answer is probably the later)


Moving on.... You remember you have the constant chant of the clav, driving the groove and a minute in the track breaks into a deep dark and dubby groove that has a consuming presence, which is quickly followed up by a deep driving bassline that makes the hairs on your neck raise, so close your eyes and we can really do some work on the dancefloor here!!!! You have the claps and snares flowing throughout the mix with the enchanting keys building and building. At this point you notice that the girl at the window has seen a ghostly figure motioning up the garden path toward her, the tension is building and the arrival of this ghost is imminent. Then you realise the girl at the window is not scared or sad, it's someone special coming home and the hi-hats are motioning waves of excitement and the changing hi-hats are expressing beaconing the need to hurry inside as they build. All the while the haunting chants are just echoes of memories this girl has of that special someone, it all becomes clear. (At One has lost the plot!)


As the track brakes for an aptly timed interval the door to the house is blown open by the wind and the girl turns from the windowsill to face her door slightly ajar. Everything calms slowly as the anticipation for the impending crescendo of sound and that special some one to re-enter as the girl peers toward the door. At this point the crescendo comes and the track comes back in just as it stopped, not what you expected right? Neither did the girl, the chants an dubby beats continue to drive you through. The girl smiles, just as i suspect you will and she embraces the thought that....... The special someone was never going to come through the door or inside, it was just to let her know she was being watched over, cared for, loved still from a distance. Overshadowed......


Quick note: I just wrote this with the track on a loop, the story ends abruptly for me but how will you perceive the track? How will you hear it? What will you hear? How will you feel? (this was wednesday night 11pm, after having missed the apprentice). I know one thing though...... Tomorrow I will probably see something totally diferent...




For the next two tracks, there will be no story thats the joy in buying the record.....


2.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes  (Atjazz Galaxy Aart Dub) 


This is typical Atjazz fuckeries, he takes a track and puts into a completely different zone!! With a dope deep soulful house work out of dubby beats, percussion and a serious musical journey. Opening up with a notable almost reverse melody and progressing with some dope additions to the track musically including the faintest guitar or maybe even harp riff in the background. Now you know when Atjazz does Astro remixes he means business.... yeah well, a Galaxy remix tells the Astro where to go..... please believe. 


Even down to the reverse chimes everything is where it should be, the vocal samples are executed to perfection, the layers of keys upon keys are worked well and the end product is a force to be reckoned with. All in all a dope work out and fitting dedication. 


3.) Overshadowed - Atjazz & Jullian Gomes  (Jullian Gomes Perspective)


Yeah yeah Mr Gomes, we know you got the juice. This 'perspective' is a straight four to the floor killer, deep, moody, dub groove. You have this almost minimal version of the track with a deep dark bassline driving the whole way through, with crazy background noises, synths and fx being positioned in & along the way, as well as the original key riff. Until you come the break when we almost fade to black and this deep dark chugging bassline comes right back in with the drums, hitting you with nothing but solid building grooves as the track builds back into the motion. For me this track really kicks at this break and does a wonderful job of making you screw up your face! With samples and sounds being positioned to perfection to kill you with ambience.  Mr. Gomes definitely brings that late night heat.


For me this package is a solid (9/10) and just all round niceness.....


For all you vinyl junkies Overshadowed will be out on 22nd May, no digital option is available as yet.


PURCHASE HERE

Why does music make us feel? The Science

By Jonah Lehrer

Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. As Schopenhauer wrote, “It is we ourselves who are tortured by the strings.”

We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. A brand new paper in Nature Neuroscience by a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of “the potent pleasurable stimulus” that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including fMRI and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people that experience “chills to instrumental music,” the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. (These were the lucky few who most reliably got chills.) The scientists then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favorite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored.

Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI) they were able to obtain an impressively precise portrait of music in the brain. The first thing they discovered (using ligand-based PET) is that music triggers the release of dopamine in both the dorsal and ventral striatum. This isn’t particularly surprising: these regions have long been associated with the response to pleasurable stimuli. It doesn’t matter if we’re having sex or snorting cocaine or listening to Kanye: These things fill us with bliss because they tickle these cells. Happiness begins here.

The more interesting finding emerged from a close study of the timing of this response, as the scientists looked to see what was happening in the seconds before the subjects got the chills. I won’t go into the precise neural correlates – let’s just say that you should thank your right NAcc the next time you listen to your favorite song – but want to instead focus on an interesting distinction observed in the experiment:

In essence, the scientists found that our favorite moments in the music were preceeded by a prolonged increase of activity in the caudate. They call this the “anticipatory phase” and argue that the purpose of this activity is to help us predict the arrival of our favorite part:

Immediately before the climax of emotional responses there was evidence for relatively greater dopamine activity in the caudate. This subregion of the striatum is interconnected with sensory, motor and associative regions of the brain and has been typically implicated in learning of stimulus-response associations and in mediating the reinforcing qualities of rewarding stimuli such as food.

In other words, the abstract pitches have become a primal reward cue, the cultural equivalent of a bell that makes us drool. Here is their summary:

The anticipatory phase, set off by temporal cues signaling that a potentially pleasurable auditory sequence is coming, can trigger expectations of euphoric emotional states and create a sense of wanting and reward prediction. This reward is entirely abstract and may involve such factors as suspended expectations and a sense of resolution. Indeed, composers and performers frequently take advantage of such phenomena, and manipulate emotional arousal by violating expectations in certain ways or by delaying the predicted outcome (for example, by inserting unexpected notes or slowing tempo) before the resolution to heighten the motivation for completion. The peak emotional response evoked by hearing the desired sequence would represent the consummatory or liking phase, representing fulfilled expectations and accurate reward prediction. We propose that each of these phases may involve dopamine release, but in different subcircuits of the striatum, which have different connectivity and functional roles.

The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to. What aspects of music are they responding to? And why are they so active fifteen seconds before the acoustic climax? After all, we typically associate surges of dopamine with pleasure, with the processing of actual rewards. And yet, this cluster of cells in the caudate is most active when the chills have yet to arrive, when the melodic pattern is still unresolved.

One way to answer these questions is to zoom out, to look at the music and not the neuron. While music can often seem (at least to the outsider) like a labyrinth of intricate patterns – it’s art at its most mathematical – it turns out that the most important part of every song or symphony is when the patterns break down, when the sound becomes unpredictable. If the music is too obvious, it is annoyingly boring, like an alarm clock. (Numerous studies, after all, have demonstrated that dopamine neurons quickly adapt to predictable rewards. If we know what’s going to happen next, then we don’t get excited.) This is why composers introduce the tonic note in the beginning of the song and then studiously avoid it until the end. The longer we are denied the pattern we expect, the greater the emotional release when the pattern returns, safe and sound. That is when we get the chills.

To demonstrate this psychological principle, the musicologist Leonard Meyer, in his classic  bookEmotion and Meaning in Music (1956), analyzed the 5^th movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. Meyer wanted to show how music is defined by its flirtation with – but not submission to – our expectations of order. To prove his point, Meyer dissected fifty measures of Beethoven’s masterpiece, showing how Beethoven begins with the clear statement of a rhythmic and harmonic pattern and then, in an intricate tonal dance, carefully avoids repeating it. What Beethoven does instead is suggest variations of the pattern. He is its evasive shadow. If E major is the tonic, Beethoven will play incomplete versions of the E major chord, always careful to avoid its straight expression. He wants to preserve an element of uncertainty in his music, making our brains beg for the one chord he refuses to give us. Beethoven saves that chord for the end.

According to Meyer, it is the suspenseful tension of music (arising out of our unfulfilled expectations) that is the source of the music’s feeling. While earlier theories of music focused on the way a noise can refer to the real world of images and experiences (its “connotative” meaning), Meyer argued that the emotions we find in music come from the unfolding events of the music itself.  This “embodied meaning” arises from the patterns the symphony invokes and then ignores, from the ambiguity it creates inside its own form. “For the human mind,” Meyer writes, “such states of doubt and confusion are abhorrent. When confronted with them, the mind attempts to resolve them into clarity and certainty.” And so we wait, expectantly, for the resolution of E major, for Beethoven’s established pattern to be completed. This nervous anticipation, says Meyer, “is the whole raison d’etre of the passage, for its purpose is precisely to delay the cadence in the tonic.” The uncertainty makes the feeling – it is what triggers that surge of dopamine in the caudate, as we struggle to figure out what will happen next. And so our neurons search for the undulating order, trying to make sense of this flurry of pitches. We can predict some of the notes, but we can’t predict them all, and that is what keeps us listening, waiting expectantly for our reward, for the errant pattern to be completed. Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation.

Homepage image: Kashirin Nickolai, Flickr.

Remixing the World: A Sampler of Sampling

The possibilities of a microphone and the world are limitless, so as this week we looked at a recording of music made with playgrounds, a mic, and Ableton Live, readers responded in kind with a fantastic spectrum of sampling-inspired, real world-produced musical wonder.

Berlin's Techno Scene From The Start

Real Scenes: Berlin from Resident Advisor on Vimeo.

In Detroit’s Ruins, A Look at an Electronic Music Revolution, by Resident Advisor

We need more of this throughout London give these kids something to do.........

Real Scenes: Detroit from Resident Advisor on Vimeo.

HOW TO GET A THICK ANALOGUE SOUND.

Thick Sound

Working in music or learning to, you hear a lot of "funny" words: fat, warm... thick... organic. These descriptive words often have quite different meaning from one person to the next and that makes it kinda confusing trying to decipher what you need to know. Words like these are used because, since the days of tape and big desks, through to the time of digital DAW's, we have lost something that we haven’t quite had the lexicon to explain, or an understanding of how to express what we mean. For a long time the digital purist protested it was all in our heads, and in some ways it was. We had lost an array of subtle distortions and effects that gave audio a certain texture, a certain human / organic nature. When you hear a song - and the sound just seems so thick, so physical in coming out of the speaker and sounds so cohesive and real you may wonder how that level of production is achieved. What you’re hearing there could be any number of subtle distortions and effects. We will cover a few ways of bringing these into your production in this blog.

Harmonics

Harmonics are truly wonderful; they make up the character and soul of many real instruments and hardware. They are what makes a violin and a guitar sound different, and allow us to hear the differences between different materials in the real world. (Yes, that strange place outside the studio) They are also incredibly useful when working on a mix, one of the biggest mistakes people make is hearing a track with a HUGE sub bass and slaving away trying to fit massive amounts of sub energy into their mix and ending up stuck in a mire of bogged down energy as the mix falls apart.
How do they do it? Well the trick is, they aren’t putting loads of sub in their mix, and it just sounds like they are... Sounds confusing but let me explain: if you have a strong bass and you want it to fit in and flow nicely, get hold of a distortion plugin or a foot pedal to run your bass through; what this distortion will do is create harmonics that sit higher up in the frequency spectrum than the actual fundamental of the bass, but you will find the sound is still jelled and sounds like it has a heavy sub element even when you filter or eq the subs down a bit to sit in your groove nicely. So in effect you can have less 70 Hz.....more 140 Hz but it still sounds as deep and subby as it needs to without bogging down your mix with all the low frequency energy.

Physical sound

When you listen back to older tracks, they often sound more real and by real I mean literally physically coming out of the speaker. (Not in a modern “so loud your ears bleed” way either). What’s happening here is the equipment used is all imparting its tell-tale signature on the sound. Little bits of dynamic compression, harmonics and other distortions are all moulding the sound in almost imperceptible ways. In the end all this adds up and adds gravity, power and musicality to your mix if done well. Often the beneficial effects of subtle distortions can be impossible to discern in isolation or A/B tests, but the cumulative effects are often stunning and strike a deep chord with the human part of the listener. We have grown up with these distortions not only in the old records, but in our real lives - nothing you hear is without some sort of distortion, harmonic or vibration.

If you’re looking to get a mix that jumps out of the speakers, is highly dynamic and has more presence, then subtle distortion and drive on your samples may be what’s missing. You can often bring more power to you mix by giving each sound a subtle treatment of Tape, Tube, Clipping your A/D or other types of distortion. Working this way is a good way to start stamping your own character on a production.

Warmer Audio

I spent a lot of time working on and developing a sample pack recently. When creating the drum sounds it was important that they be full of character, presence and vibe and offer producers an edge. There are a lot of digital ways to create interesting sounds, but to get a vibrant and musical sound, analogue distortion can be one of your most powerful tools. Sometimes it’s enough to use just a touch to give the sound a different edge, and affect the attack portion enough to sound pleasing.

MPC Crunch

One of the tones I turned to first was the famous MPC sound. The Akai MPC units have been making their name since the late 80's and well into the 90's through to the present day. What set them apart is an almost Lo-fi crunchy sound most often found in Hip Hop, Rap and Electronic music like House. This sound defined a genre and set the tone for a lot of full bodied and punchy sounding music. In sampling percussion through an MPC I was able to give the sound more percussive energy and interest. Just the very act of running your samples through the machine can impart a little bit of a signature on your audio through a combination of the internal workings of the machine and the A/D convertors of your Pre-Amp taking the audio back into your project. and if you’re using the right equipment this can be very musical.

Tape Warmth

Tape has been much loved for years. The word warmth may as well have been invented to describe the loveliness tape can bestow upon your music. In professional circles STUDER machines were amongst others used to record some of the timeless hits of yesterday. What tape actually does to your audio is very complex, with the machines often having many stages, magnetic heads etc. It’s no wonder it took so long for companies making digital tools to come close to offering the tone you can get from a tape machine in your computer. When working this tone is probably one of the most useful to have at your disposal - the warm vibey sound is really what house music is all about. I had the chance to work with the Studer A800 and the REVOX machines; each has its own character and offers slightly different variations due to different internal components and the way they work.

When you are producing the most important thing to have in abundance is choice. Even subtle choices between two different machines can help you blend things and get that physical sounding nature to your recordings. Often with tape you lose a bit of the high end off your recording as it affects the top frequencies. That, along with a slight compression of the audio, and, depending how hard you’re driving it, some harmonic distortion can really add a noticeable thickness to you sound.

Distortion is real

As I mentioned earlier, distortion is a natural thing, it’s a physics thing inherent in everything around us and prominent with hardware components and processes. That’s why sometimes I think, with our excellent speakers and digitally perfect sound, things can sound a little cold coming straight out of a soft synth, and that makes it sound unreal because it’s never been bent to the will of the world, is unrealistic or too perfect. A good analogy for this would be the uncanny valley theory. Even the craziest sounds benefit from a humanity and physicality. You will see a lot of soft synth makers nowadays adding in analog emulation routines and code, some quite good too! We are in an age where computers are finally becoming powerful enough to start to emulate these complex interactions.

I like to think of it like this, when audio production went digital we ended up with a metaphorical DATA from Star Trek! It looked like a human and spoke like one, but it couldn’t feel emotions, and didn’t do all the tiny little weird things us humans do, it wasnt quite human. That’s why people said digital audio sounded cold, as it was missing something. We had to learn how to program-in all those little quirks that hardware did automatically and that has taken a long time.

Subtlety is the key

When working with distortion it’s important to know what your aim is, as there are two uses. If you want to go all out and make big rock music sounds, we will cover that in the next section. For everything else, all tonal sculpting and imparting character to your audio, it’s important to know that sometimes you don’t really need to hear it much, don’t overdo it. A good technique to follow is to increase your effect till you can audibly hear it, then back it off until you cannot. The effect you’re looking for is often more subtle than you think and if your mix down is tight, the smallest changes have the biggest impact.

Creative distortion.

That said, if you want to crank it to 11 and drive it into oblivion, distortion is also your friend. This creative use of distortion can often provide some incredibly large tones to work with. A good tip if you’re working this way is to have an EQ and Filter before you go into the distortion, small changes before can be magnified by the distortion and yield massive tonal changes for more creative inspiration.

What analogue distortion offers you.

For a producer working in todays often overly clean, modern world, distortion offers you something that is sorely missing. It doesn't matter if you buy a pack of sounds that have been crafted to include this element or have splashed out on a foot pedal or even a vintage tape machine. Even the latest software emulation are getting useful on modern pcs. The most important thing is you are aware of this dimension and what it adds to your music; power, physicality, presence, warmth and it will sound more natural to your listeners so subconsciously they will find it easier to connect with your music.

Finally They Get It..... Scientist Find A Correlation

Finally they start to understand..... scientist have finally done a study to show that music affects how we perceive the world. This is something that all of us Producers/Djs/Connoisseurs already understand but to my knowledge they have never done a study. Below is a link to that with a brief blurb.

"Like anyone else, I use music in correlation with mood, whether that’s rage, sad-bastard, drunk—or whatever. Even happy. You do too. Music effects mood. No kidding.

Well, new research from the University of Groningen suggests that music also effects how we perceive the world—not just through what lens we perceive it, but the very nature of what we perceive. It’s pretty goofy on paper: subjects were tasked with identifying smiley faces while listening to happy or sad music. Simply: if they were listening to happy music, they might recognize a smiley face even if they weren’t shown one.

While it’s not quite the happy-acid hallucination it might sound, researcher Jacob Jolij has this to say in the science journal.

Seeing things that are not there is the result of top-down processes in the brain. Conscious perception is largely based on these top-down processes: your brain continuously compares the information that comes in through your eyes with what it expects on the basis of what you know about the world. The final result of this comparison process is what we eventually experience as reality. Our research results suggest that the brain builds up expectations not just on the basis of experience but on your mood as well."

Carl Craig takes on bootleggers

Interesting developments over the weekend as Carl Craig responded to the uncredited usage of one of his productions on a mysterious twelve inch by re-editing the track in question and distributing it for free via his Soundcloud page.

In what is possibly the first ever such instance, Craig’s response to discovering “The Climax”, his production as Paperclip People had apparently been utilised as part of a mashup and pressed up as one of three tracks on an anonymous vinyl release, was to lift the available audio and create his own edit of this illicit version. At a time when he’d rather be concentrating on Planet E’s preparations to celebrate 20 years of releasing music, Craig seems to be taking it all in good humour, even inviting other producers to remix his re/edit of the bootlegged mashup.

In addition, the legendary Detroit techno producer seems quite keen to open a discussion on the continual issue of bootlegging via the various Planet E social networking sites, amusingly claiming fans approach him in the hope he’ll sign their bootlegged vinyl only to be rebuffed. It will be interesting to see where this leads and you can follow the developments via Carl Craig’s Twitter feed or his Facebook page.

The Climax Bootleg by carlcraignet

TheclimaxbootlegreditremixC2 "The Climax Bootleg (re-appropriated re-edit)" Quinto Remix by carlcraignet

"The Climax Bootleg (re-appropriated re-edit)" Quinto Remix" GuyHom Remix by carlcraignet

The Climax Aronika Re-Bootleg by carlcraignet

Climaxrmx by carlcraignet

Carl Craig - The Climax (David DeadRydm 0v3rEdIted r3fIx) by carlcraignet

C2-TheClimax-GuyHom-REdestruction by carlcraignet

Production Tips: Helpful all-round...

Saw This article over at nodoughmusic and thought of all the aspiring producers I know....... Heres some dope tips guys.... :-)

It’s the little things that matter most.

This week’s No Dough Music Blog focuses on the small things in a track, the little changes, instabilities and accidental mistakes which make some music great, and how extra attention to detail can really benefit your production.

Velocity & Modulation

These are both about movement, I touched on velocity in my previous blog and made quite a contentious point: that good music is "believable". I would like to clarify and expand on that idea a little.
When I referred to making your music more believable, I referred to the way our minds imagine and expect little traits found in the real world and in the way real things sound. I was not suggesting for example that all music should be comparable to something that could be done with instruments and a band.
In fact a better way of putting it would be to say, that even in the most fantastically unreal piece of music, whose sole intent is to take you to another world and sound like nothing else, even in that music we still look for the subtle variations in movement and tone that makes it sound alive and believable to us. Think of it as like the smaller details in a storybook that make the whole book's world come to life in our imagination.

Working in finer detail in terms of Velocity and Modulation can help foster an organic and fluid nature to your music. Songs that live forever as classics that you never get bored of are ALL about the small things, with an often obsessive attention to detail.

Playing Things In & Jamming.

If you have a midi keyboard this is a must, if you don’t then you must buy one. Getting your groove on and playing things in is one of the more fun ways of getting some humanity into your tracks. It Doesn't matter if you’re a virtuoso and it comes really easy to you (although that can help) or you’re new to the whole game and you find the whole concept daunting, don’t worry, even the most ham-fisted of us will find a lot of value in having a go.

Play in your percussive parts using a midi keyboard or some drum pads, record in your FX automation rather than program it in by hand. If you set up your project and your controllers in a sensible way, so as to give you hands on access to things like Delay Sends, Filter Cut-offs and Resonance, you will find things flowing more musically and just working out a lot easier and a lot quicker too, even if you do have to do some tidying up of the midi you recorded. What’s more, this improvisation can really help you stamp some individuality on your song and make it stand out. It's easy to get sucked into programming all your beats, and sometimes it’s impossible not to program them... but do take every opportunity to stamp your name on things where you can.

When working like this you will find that you automatically do a lot of things naturally without thinking, things that are incredibly musical, like varying the velocity of your percussion with the groove or subtle filter sweeps. A lot of stuff you do automatically would be incredibly complex to program from scratch. It's this you’re capturing, and it will translate directly into your music.

VINYL UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

Groove & Humanisation tools

Even on the earliest of Drum Machines there were always controls to add swing or shuffle and to Accent certain hits. It’s important to have a nice tight kick drum to drive the tracks on, but there’s something off-putting if everything is too straight and too static. Off-putting is probably the wrong word, boring is probably more apt. Even in the most industrial techno it is all about the groove, and often the groove is brought alive by some well-placed off-grid notes. Modern sequencers are a treasure trove when it comes to groove tools, often providing many different options to play around with. Do not under-use these tools. A touch of swing to your beats can be the difference between boring and engrossing, it’s as simple as that. Don’t be afraid to move notes by hand off the snap grid, or even play stuff in to find where the groove really comes together.

If you look at Abletons groove system each pre-set groove also features Velocity movements and the ability to add a little bit of Random movement in, which can be great to loosen things up a little. These controls are once again a way of replicating the things us humans do naturally.

But remember if a dead straight groove is part of your artistic direction, and you spend the time to make it sound interesting and work in your song then that’s not a crime either.

Variations & Repetitions

We all have shorter attention spans than we care to admit, and long unchanging, unemotional sections can make people literally stop listening. When listening to a demo, one of the first decisions a label's A&R guy will make is to ask himself is this interesting enough to continue listening.

Now there are a lot of elements that come together in the answer to that question, one of the main ones is the quantity and quality of variations in what’s going on in your track. Sometimes just changing one or two hits in your beat is enough; sometimes you will need to have a more extensive change in the form of a fill or a break to keep it going. Whatever you do, keep it changing, altering and moving, as the effect that change can have on how engrossing your music is can be powerful. Sometimes just moving away from the strong beat for a couple of bars and then coming back to that same beat can sound like a whole new section in itself. The best repetitive & hypnotic tracks are built on the suspense and tension built when going away from, and coming back to its main repetitive elements in subtle and less than subtle ways, or having the actual repeating element morph and change over time.

Layering

Layering is a very powerful tool if you want to build up a dense and interesting sonic "landscape" with your music. The subtle interactions and differences between 2 sounds when played together can add a bespoke sound to your music. Use filters and eq to allow different sounds to dominate different frequencies in your layered sound and create something much more complex and fresh.

Record, Jam & Improvise

As I mentioned earlier having a jam with your music, putting yourself in the position where you perform more of your music, is a great way to really add musicality and individuality to it. Sometimes once I have some basic ideas down, I will start by hitting record and doing a little performance with the Faders and the mutes, to see what kind of ideas I can get going for the arrangement. Some modern software even allows you to trigger specific elements or patterns.
By recording 30 minutes of pure improvisation in a rough form, you can often listen back and hear sections with good ideas that help you get a good foothold on your arrangement, and the ideas once again flow very naturally and musically compared to when you program things in.

The “Lucky Mistake”.

One thing that’s probably THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in music

“The Lucky Mistake”

We have all sat there, having worked for hours without much inspiration, and then suddenly we are enjoying an amazing sound coming from our speakers after accidentally knocking over a keyboard or hit the wrong key. Not really knowing how we made it but just enjoying it and then comes the flood of new ideas, buzzing around our minds.

Every single musician in the world has a story about some part in some track they made by accident and how it’s one of the parts they enjoy the most. The more you work and perform in little bits of your music, the more often you will have these inspiring little musical mistakes, if you are ever stuck on a song or you have started to feel jaded about it that’s the time to start ripping it apart and jamming with it...with record firmly switched on.
If you can't seem to find the right rhythm for your hats, record in a few minutes of you playing them in or if your breakdown and main section are not really cutting the mustard get playing with the faders and muting some parts and somewhere in there, you will find the answer...of that I am certain.