The Creative Electronic Music Producer

Thomas Brett

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000405422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Medios digitales

The Creative Electronic Music Producer examines the creative processes of electronic music production, from idea discovery and perception to the power of improvising, editing, effects processing, and sound design.

Featuring case studies from across the globe on musical systems and workflows used in the production process, this book highlights how to pursue creative breakthroughs through exploration, trial and error tinkering, recombination, and transformation. The Creative Electronic Music Producer maps production's enchanting pathways in a way that will fascinate and inspire students of electronic music production, professionals already working in the industry, and hobbyists.

1 Electronic music production, the producer, and the enchanted DAW

Introduction: Four Tet’s studio

On Twitter in 2017, the producer Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) shared a photo of his studio, which consisted of a laptop computer, the DAW software Ableton Live, a small MIDI keyboard, an audio interface, and a set of monitors. “This is where I recorded and mixed the album and all the gear I used,” he wrote. Hebden’s photo and caption quickly became a meme that inspired humorous responses on Twitter from fellow producers who responded in turn with their own photos of fictitious home studios, some of which featured conspicuously dated technologies, such as 1980s mobile phones and video game consoles (Wilson, 2017).

It was unclear from these responses whether or not musicians were teasing Hebden; after all, publicizing one’s minimalist studio setup could be interpreted as a humble brag about one’s advanced production skills. But perhaps Hebden was simply showing the production community how little one requires to make music “in the box” of software. The photo captured the intersection of a minimum of gear with a quaint domesticity: the entire studio fit onto a small table, and a window behind it framed a forest setting outside. Intended or not, here was a reminder of the compactness and power of a 21st-century electronic music studio.

In this chapter, I work backwards from Hebden’s studio to explore how we arrived at our current moment in electronic music production. I begin by tracing a brief history of music production, the figure of the music producer, and three digital technologies—sampling, MIDI, and DAW software—that remain fundamental to electronic music production today. Next, I consider Ableton Live, the popular DAW whose design and capabilities are a paradigmatic example of software as a “laboratory” in which to work with sound. I conclude by explaining the DAW’s basic topology and concepts: arrangement and clip views, the mixer, audio recording and MIDI sequencing, signal routing and effects processing, automation, and mixing.

A brief history of music production and the producer

In our era when producers produce on laptop computers, it is easy to forget that the production process was not always so streamlined and accessible. Recording once required bulky equipment and technicians trained to operate it, and over the past hundred years or so, the evolution of record production and its technologies is a chronicle of ever-increasing fidelity and control over sound. In the early 20th century, recordings were always live recordings. Making a record required ensembles of musicians to be positioned around a mechanical recording device that captured their collective sound via a large conical horn and physically inscribed its vibrations onto a rotating wax disc. For a lead singer or instrumental soloist to be heard, they had to be positioned closest to the device so that their sound was recorded louder than the rest of the ensemble. Even with such proximal adjustments, the sound quality of early ragtime and jazz mono recordings, for instance, was an indistinct mid-range mush lacking clarity and depth.¹

With the development of electronic microphones, signal amplifiers, and recorders in the mid-1920s, the frequency range of recordings greatly improved, and by the 1940s, magnetic tape recording, developed by the AEG company in Germany, introduced another leap in sound fidelity and led to the first stereo recordings. Tape’s ease of editing, which had been impossible with disc recording, led to its quick adoption by radio and the music industry in the United States. Within a few years, components of tape-based audio production had evolved, which remain fundamental today, including: overdubbing and editing, “stereo (since the fifties) and front/back placement, refinement of sounds relative to each other by means of equalization, augmentation with effects, and dynamic control” (Burgess, 2014: 112).

Music production is an omnidirectional and comprehensive way of making music. Production, notes audio production historian Richard Burgess, “fuses the composition, arrangement, orchestration, interpretation, improvisations, timbral qualities, and performance or performances into an immutable sonic whole” (Burgess, 2014: 1). The architect of this fusion is the producer, a person with “a specific set of musical competencies pertaining to the production of a record” (Shelvock, 2020: 3). The producer figure extends back at least to the work of Les Paul, an American guitarist and recording enthusiast who pioneered various tape recording techniques in the 1940s and 50s, such as sound on sound, building layered textures using two tape machines, and varispeed, using a sound recorded at half speed then playing it back at regular speed to produce a higher pitch (Burgess, 2014: 51). Paul’s experimental, one-man band approach created a template for the producer’s craft, and his widely adopted production methods became a toolkit with which to explore “a gradational compositional approach” to recording (ibid.: 54). As heard on songs such as “How High The Moon”, a 1951 track which featured overdubbed tracks of guitar, bass, and singing, Paul’s multi-track techniques, notes Burgess,

disengaged production from real time, teased apart its component strands, and approached it as an incremental composition in sound, conflating it with the songwriting, arranging, orchestration, performance, and technical elements.

(Burgess, 2014: 51)

Paul’s approach to music production as an incremental composition in sound is fundamental because it showed in practice what Burgess identifies as “a magnitudinous expansion of agency by which producers could influence the musical and sonic outcome” of a recording (ibid.: 1). In this way, Paul’s tracks presaged and influenced the elaborate multi-track recordings of the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and many other 1960s rock and pop bands. Multi-track recording put the producer at the helm of the studio and created new musical possibilities via a mode of production that effectively turned the recording engineer into a mixer who was fast becoming recognized as “a musical creator of a new kind” (Chanan, 1995: 270).

It was during this time that the producer became known as the person in charge of a recording’s overall sound. An example is George Martin, the producer at Abbey Road studios who worked with The Beatles. Martin drew on his experience recording and arranging classical music and comedy albums to help The Beatles achieve unusual sounds in the studio. His creative contributions included arranging parts for string quartet, making tape loop collages, and devising unusual miking and sound design techniques (with Abbey Road’s engineer, Geoff Emerick). Another producer from this era is Phil Spector, who devised his “wall of sound” aesthetic by recording and overdubbing large bands with multiple instruments doubling parts, and applying large amounts of echo to the result. This lush sound can be heard on The Ronettes’ 1963 track, “Be My Baby.” Spector described his incremental-based aesthetic as important as the song itself:

I was looking for a sound … so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound would carry the record. It was a case of augmenting, augmenting. It all fitted together like a jigsaw.

(Buskin, 2007)

Beginning in the 1960s and paralleling the rise of the music producer, recording sessions took place mostly in acoustically treated studios equipped with microphones for capturing the sounds of musicians, a mixing console for recording them onto multi-track reel to reel tape machines, and an array of hardware signal processing devices (e.g. compressors, plate reverbs, distortion boxes) through which to alter the sounds either during or post-recording. Within the studio space, there were clear demarcations among musicians, sound engineer, and producer: musicians performed the music, while the engineer and producer decided how to best record and mix the performance. But technological tinkering in the studio blurred these distinct musical roles. Consider a few examples: The Beatles’ production adventures with Martin for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Club Hearts Band, Joe Meek’s boldly pushing compressors “to create pumping and breathing effects” for his instrumental space age pop album with The Tornados, Telstar (Cleveland, 2014), pianist Glenn Gould’s “post-performance editorial” decisions to tape-splice together his best takes of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier with engineers at CBC Radio (Gould, 1966: 53), Osbourne Ruddock (King Tubby)’s dub remixes that dismantled reggae tracks “into something else entirely” by using delay and echo effects (Hebdige, 1987: 83), or engineer Ted Macero’s cut and paste recording collages for Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way. Macero’s description of his production approach with Miles explains the goal of this technological tinkering, and remains useful advice for producers today: “How can I make this better? It’s good, but electronically can we do something to give it more impact?” (Lee, 1997) Producers such as Paul, Martin, Meek, Spector, Gould, Ruddock, and Macero understood how the techniques of music production could deeply shape a music’s sound and feel.²

The centerpiece of recording studios had always been the mixing console, a device for combining multiple audio signals on separate channels into a single stereo output. In 1981, Solid State Logic (SSL) introduced the first consoles with total mix recall, which allowed producers to “perform” their volume and effects changes to mixes in a DJ way and have the console remember these moves through computerized automation, “thus eliminating the reliance on human memory or indeed channel strip notes jotted on pieces of paper” (Bennett, 2019: 38). Crucially, with these consoles the mixing component of music production “began to be an iterative process rather than a performance” (Burgess, 2014: 101). In this way, SSL automation presaged the vast automation capabilities that are now a standard feature of the DAW software on your laptop.

Fast forward back to Hebden’s home studio: electronic music producers create in the tradition of record production, but they control and oversee every aspect of a musical project—from conception, performance and recording, sound design and editing, to arranging and mixing. Indeed, it is common practice, notes Richard Burgess, “for the same person … to write, perform, arrange, engineer, and produce hit tracks” (Burgess, 2020: 95). Today, electronic music producers mostly work alone using DAW-based musical systems, sometimes with additional hardware such as synthesizers and signal processors. Playing the roles of musician, sound designer, and engineer overseeing every aspect of their tracks, producers record, edit, and mix as they go, shaping and refining the music at each step of the process. In short, in electronic music production, the producer is the composer (Moorefield, 2005).

Recording as the basis for composing

In 1979, the producer and production philosopher Brian Eno gave a talk in New York City titled “The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool” (Eno, 1979). Amplifying (though not acknowledging) the studio-as-instrument approach of producers such as Les Paul and Joe Meek from a few decades earlier, Eno explained the virtues of using the studio’s functionalities as a springboard for composing. Eno, who once played synthesizers with Roxy Music, recognized the potential of the studio not merely as a place for recording already composed music, but for recording as the basis for composing. Rather than rehearse and arrange music first and then go into the studio to record a completed track, Eno advocated for tape recording-based composing music in an additive way—for example, by overdubbing, sound designing, and editing the results—and being responsive to the chance accidents and discoveries that inevitably arise while working among the studio’s connected technologies. In a 2011 interview, he explained the approach:

You could make a piece over an extended period of time—it didn’t have to preexist the process, you could make it up as you went. And you could make it like you would a painting—you could put something on, scrape something else off. It stopped being something that was located at one moment in time. It started being a process that you could engage in over months, or even years.

(Baccigaluppi & Crane, 2011)

Eno had been putting this philosophy into play since the mid-1970s using his Oblique Strategies, a set of aphorisms he devised with the visual artist Peter Schmidt that were printed on a deck of cards and intended to help artists think differently about creative problems. Eno had used these aphorisms and the studio as a compositional tool approach in his work with the ambient keyboardist Harold Budd, King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and later with David Byrne, U2, and Coldplay. In these collaborations, a recurring theme in Eno’s producing was not so much pursuing a particular sound, but rather encouraging artists to focus on the potentials of the process at hand, and most importantly, maintain a supple awareness in the studio. For Eno, the most important idea is attention:

I’ve come to think that attention is the most important thing in a studio situation. The attention to notice when something new is starting, the attention to pick up on the mood in the room and not be emotionally clumsy, the attention to see what’s needed before it is actually needed, the attention that arises from staying awake while you’re working instead of lapsing into autopilot.

(Baccigaluppi & Crane, 2011)

MIDI

In the early 1980s, the proce...