Saturday, May 7, 2016
Download Track
My worst musical tendency — if I could put my finger on one habit I’d like to get out of — is attempting to solve problems by just layering on more and more sound. It’s funny how I see a similar pattern when I do criticism on student technology projects: “Adding more ‘stuff’ to your projects isn’t going to fix the basic problem. Adding a comments section or a ‘find your friends’ feature isn’t going to suddenly make a bad app idea good.” Which is to say: I could stand taking my own advice.
Anyway, I like complexity in sound and creating a kind of “sea of synthiness” is kind of the point of many of my tracks. But I’ve still found it helpful lately to really consider pulling things out (or slicing parts of things out) when my sonic ideas aren’t properly gelling.
Stereo B started off cluttered. Too many layers. Not enough space. Just kind of a boring mush. When I first sat down to work on it, I wanted it to be much more mellow and atmospheric than Stabilizer, just to get some variation. But the track just wouldn’t go there, so eventually I moved in the opposite direction, added much stronger drum loops and a buzzy bassline to kind of hold the thing together and took out or trimmed most of the other layers. Posted here is the result.
As usual, Stereo B is probably worth a listen in headphones.
Enjoy!
