Maurice James

The last couple of weeks I have been trying to get a much feedback as possible on the content created for the album so far. The feedback I have received has been invaluable in helping to make the album sound more professional. Due to not having access to a studio all the production and mixing has been done on headphones, which are not the best representation of what is actually happening in the track. Reference tracks have been used as a guide but I find proper monitoring helps you feel the music, as apposed to just hearing it, which is essential for techno in my opinion!

The album has been put on Bandcamp as a pre-release, due to be released on the 01/08/20 (U.K Date Format), which is enough time to finish the album and have it mastered, whether or not access to a studio is available within that time! One track has been made available to preview with more to follow!

Since we have been in lockdown I have not had access to a studio for mixing the tracks to a standard I would consider good enough to release. With no studio at home either I have been relying on the use of headphones which I find do not translate well across all platforms. Using reference tracks I have got the tracks for the album to sound as best as I can and then sent them to others for feedback. This has been a really good way to discover what is missing from them and how to improve the mix downs, which from this feedback I have gone back and made changes.

Before starting this album I had never produced techno, therefore it has taken a while to develop the skills and find my own style. As I enjoy all sub genres of techno the album so far is quite varied, ranging from progressive to rave techno and anything in between! I’m unsure whether to keep the album to one particular style so as it flows better or to keep the variation. 

To add more randomisation to this method I incorporated the random MIDI device to add notes in the scale that were not being played by myself on the keyboard, keeping more to the random nature of the album. This method produced some really interesting results that were very musical, although not every pattern generated sounded good! 

After discovering that MIDI patterns could be recorded into the sequencer of the TD-3 I started experimenting with other sequencers and effects to see if these resulted in any usable patterns. I found that without the repeated notes caused by the random playing style of the arpeggiator the results were too random and sounded less musical.

Originally the album was going to be called Probable Cause. After looking into randomness and probability I came across the butterfly effect, also known as the chaos theory. This is a concept developed by Edward Lorenz where he asked the question “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” (Vernon, 2017). The purpose of the question was to illustrate that:

 “some complex dynamical systems exhibit unpredictable behaviors such that small variances in the initial conditions could have profound and widely divergent effects on the system’s outcomes. Because of the sensitivity of these systems, outcomes are unpredictable” (Vernon, 2017).

This seemed very fitting for the album as there are many parameters that cause small variances in the initial conditions and as a result the outcome is unpredictable, therefore the same result has never been achieved twice.

With the new name for the album I contacted graphic designer Mel Robinson (Robinson, 2020) and together we came up with this artwork for the front cover. The butterfly symbolises the butterfly effect and the dice symbolise the random and chance events.

Robinson, M. (2020). Behance. Behance.net. Retrieved 17 May 2020, from https://www.behance.net/melrobinson1.

Most tracks for the album are past the idea stage and two will be complete once they have been mixed down. Now I need to find other ways to add randomness and probability to the tracks to make them more interesting! I will post some previews soon.

EDIT: Since this post I have still been using the Behringer TD-3 as well as ABL3. ABL3 is good for randomisation and automating parameters but there is something about playing the filter and resonance of the TD-3 live that adds to the feeling of the tracks, after all techno originated from interaction with machines (Sousa, 2017). 

The tracks produced so far have received good feedback from other techno producers and once I have made changes to the mix down based on this I will post the previews. Stay tuned!

This week I have been looking at random acid pattern generators. Sting!64 is a free Max for Live device that creates a new pattern every time the smiley face is clicked and it has a few parameters to control the outcome. 

Behringer’s TD-3, a clone of the Roland TB-303, has a randomize function with no user-definable parameters and therefore is completely random. 

The aim of this project is to create a techno album that explores randomness and probability. All of the melodic content will be generated completely randomly or using self-generative approaches. As the album progresses more and more elements of randomness and probability will be triggered until it reaches utter chaos!

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Picking out some good rhythms and melodies from the self-generated patterns. These are only a few of the ones I managed to get from one sequence!

This method was discovered during a masterclass by Thomas Glendinning (a.k.a ELPHNT) at the Ableton Education Tour 2020 in Plymouth. Afterwards I had a chat with ELPHNT where he recommended some more Max for Live devices for random and self generative composition. One of which was the Rotating Rhythm Generator in the CV Tools pack. It has a Euclidean sequencer which will divide the number of fills by the number of steps and then places each fill (note) evenly within the number steps (Sasso, 2019). This has been used in every track for the album on percussive and atmospheric one shots.

A full explanation of this method and others for sparking creativity by ELPHNT is available on YouTube (dBs Music, 2019).

EDIT: After researching this technique further I found that it was originally done by the pioneer of ambient and self generative music Brian Eno on the album Music For Airports. For the tracks 2/1 and 1/2 Brian used a series of 22 long tape loops, one contained a single piano note, another two piano notes, and some of them had girls singing a sustained note. The tapes were set running and the result recorded, similar to the MIDI example ("Deconstructing Brian Eno's ‘Music for Airports’", 2019).

dBs Music. (2019). Masterclass | ELPHNT Sparking Creativity and Generating Ideas in Ableton Live [Video]. Retrieved 17 May 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWFsR0HT7Pc.

Deconstructing Brian Eno's ‘Music for Airports’. Reverb Machine. (2019). Retrieved 18 May 2020, from https://reverbmachine.com/blog/deconstructing-brian-eno-music-for-airports.

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