Something that I need to improve myself with is producing and composing more tough music. The initial starting point is hard — I’m a vegetarian, happily married man working for a great fruit computer company in Silicon Valley, with few problems in life, so the amount of conflict in my life is extremely minimal. Does not exactly inspire one to be tough…
I don’t have much problems producing mystical or beautiful music. But the amount of la-la-la material could go overboard. It’s also a good challenge to extend oneself, to see how far you could grow in a new direction.
My new motto is: pretty-gritty-strange. If I hit all those three in my production work, I’m happy. The gritty part needs focus now.
There are of course raw technical tricks to achieve toughness in music: raw saw-tooth oscillator synth sounds, filter sweeps with really rough algorithms, Camel Phat that munches any sound to any kind of distorted reality….
Another one is to avoid using pads and long winding arrangements, rather keep the drum and bass lines hitting the speakers, with simplified synth leads. This is a lot what the new electro-progressive music is about, as well. Also, using tight loops of sound snippets, sounding like the system needs to be rebooted…
But the other part is just the mental attitude, to try to put this in place while I’m very hesitant to become aggressive — tried for a long time to remove that part from my mind. Oh well, the challenges…