I’ve been listening for the last six months quite a lot of minimalist music — it all started with this 2006 music overview article at Resident Advisor. Anyway, here’s my own private notes on how to make minimalist techno dance music. As with punk rock long time ago, there are certain patterns that need to be applied. If you know the patterns, then you also know how to break them, which is then important.

Start with a drum loop, if possible use TR808 or T909 sounds. The kick should not be as dry and hard pumping as in house music. Claps are in, also weird syncopated drum sounds, if possible created with synthesis driven drum machines such as Ultrabeat (Logic), microTonic, or something similar. Use simple hihats, no house pumping, either.

I think for a lot of the synth sounds, such as bass lines and lead lines, use an FM synthesis engine, EFM (Logic), NI FM8, Live’s Operator or Octopus (one of my favorite FM synths, as I could get gritty synth sounds from that one). But don’t indeed make gritty sounds, rather spectral sounds. The bass sounds could either be atonal, or somewhat tonal. You could paint the bass melody directly into the MIDI editor, no need to velocities and similar things.

The bass and lead melodies should if possible use odd scales, microtonal, or otherwise non-western. Also use syncopation again if possible.

Now, then you could copy the bass line into another MIDI track, change some notes and use another FM synthesis or similar sound. The leads should have a lot of verb, to make it spacy.

Add some odd pads, no strings, rather non-conventional ones, and also some effects.

Final production — there’s seldom any need to make heavy cuts and stutter effects in minimalism, rather tonal changes that carry into the space with reverbs and delays. Listen to early day Eno tracks and you get a feeling of the total production. Or, my favorite composer, Steve Reich (such as Magnificient Void).

Now when you know some of the rules, feel free to break them so new music will be created.

Go this this link and there’s more info about the track listing as well as the download link.

Some additional notes. I really personally think that New Musik’s 24 Hours from Culture Part II is one of the first minimalist tracks, it has an 808 drum loop, as well as very simple melodies and atypical chord progressions. I remember listening to that track ages ago and thinking: hmm, good idea, but it would never fly for a whole album. Little did I know that minimalist music is so big today. So I started the mix with this track. New Musik is anyway one of my big influences since the early days of my music creation phase.

Otherwise, the idea with the Pretty Gritty Strange Mix Collection is to try to achieve a balance of 1/3 pretty music, 1/3 gritty music, and 1/3 strange music. As in mathematics, it’s hard to get this balanced. This mix also has one of my own tracks at the end — many producers do mixes to promote their own material, so hey.

I also added in podcast links now for easy subscribing to all the mixes I will export, I actually have a couple of others lined up, like one with minimalist music. Some might wonder, hey where’s all the free music you usually uploaded. This is what happened. But rest assured, something cool will show up soon.

I tend to move between mix and track production modes — back and forth. Both are fun!

Here’s another interesting experiment I did today when working on some new electro-funk tracks for future release. I wanted very tight and rhythmic, but unpredictable sequencer like runs.

What I ended up doing was do drag in various house music MIDI drum files into positions where I had all kinds of synths, and the result was exactly what I wanted. Saved my fingers, too, as I didn’t need to compose anything, just reuse existing MIDI files I have here.

It’s also very good for Game Boy like quick runs of simple waveform synths that beep left and right. Just drag in any drum MIDI files into your synth tracks, and see what happens.

With Logic’s MIDI window it was also easy to select all the MIDI notes, and drag them up and down until they somewhat fit the key the rest of the music was playing in.

Larry Wall of the Perl programming fame has coined a cool term for the Three Virtues of a Perl Programmer: Laziness (reuse existing code), Impatience (angry when the computer is lazy, anticipate things), and Hubris (write code that others can’t say bad things about). I think these three terms also apply to electronic music producers. In this case my goal was laziness, wanted to get a result fast, and use something existing.

See this site. He has very interesting thoughts about the current state of record labels left and right pushing material done by semi-musicians, causing an overflow of material, and other thoughts how to grow as musicians.

I kind of agree with the idea of musicians/composers always having a need to learn more about music, how to compose, what has been done in the past.

It’s for example very good to listen to other music than just electronic dance music, even if you are an EDM producer.

Writers write, programmers program, composers compose. It’s a constant progress. Just doing quick stuff material and hoping it sells might or might not work, but in the long term it’s much better to really work on the craft. Even Mozart’s first compositions were somewhat naive, but he progressed super-fast.

Yes, I know, the best approach is just to compose and release what one feels is important. But sometimes the marketing mind kicks in and reasons that ‘hmm, this track is not exactly what the dancing audience is tuned in just now…’

This has happened to be recently, and also in the past. As for recently, I did a set of happy dance songs, and in this current climate of Berlin-electro-dry-serious techno funk, I just felt, my right side marketing brain, that it would be an uphill battle to try to sell this just now.

So what happens is just to put the tracks on hold, on the hard disk, and wait 12-16 months or so. The interesting aspect of this new post-modernist cultural world is that the cycles of reinventing the past are very quick, so one could just be patient and wait until the cycle of ‘happy music’ is here, then do a little bit post-processing, clean up the sounds, and release the music.

This leads to good strategies how to save projects so they are usable a couple of years in future — more about that tomorrow.

I was going through three-four year old Ableton Live productions, and found a couple ones that I will resurrect and release soon as tracks. Anyway, what I noticed when I was composing years ago was that I really tried to put together intro-verse-chorus-verse and so forth compositions.

For a while now, while I’m in this Berlin tech house mode, such parts are not really needed, or common, so I’ve been just following the modern patterns of ignoring them and just writing longer sections.

Still, there’s something special about variations in a song that makes it vivid and interesting. I think by resurrecting these tracks and using modern production tricks — and also re-creating some of the synths, especially bass lines that now are different — there’s maybe a nice synthesis happening between old and new.

Maybe this is also suddenly a new sound, hehehe.

Otherwise, I’m very happy I could open up old Ableton Live 3.0 projects and just continue from there. It’s good to put aside projects that don’t work at a certain time, and resurrect them later and possibly finish the track.

I found this YouTube video about Simmons drums yesterday — and it was great fun watching it, for many reasons.

Simmons electronic drum sounds were the trademark for many Brittish synth pop bands in the early eighties, but other bands like New Musik also used them. They had a very distinctive sound, you should know it by now as one of the electronic drum sound memes in your mind.

Going back to my memories. I was in two bands (actually same members, but two different musical angles) where we needed a Simmons drum kit, and our nice drummer saved enough money to get the first kit in Finland, maybe in any of the Nordic countries. At that time they were custom made, and you had to wait for three months or so before they were delivered. The price was also half-way astronomical.

Anyway, what you could do with them! You had a really unique sound, few bands sounded like you. Today most of the equipment is within reach for anyone, which is good from a democratic point of view, but makes it harder to sound different just based on the equipment you have.

When we arrived on gigs, the sound guys were confused when all we asked for were 12 ports or so in the mixer board — all instruments including drums where connected directly into the board. The only mikes needed were the singer microphones.

Our drummer had to re-learn how to hit the fixed pads, he used to complain about this from time to time. The kick was really strong, you could really push the kick sound out with live gigs, which was great.

Once, at a gig, we could not get out any sound from the Simmons kit, we were desperately looking for the problem cause. The ultimate reason was that one of the light technicians had built a power supply chord that looked like the ordinary chords, for 380V (in the Nordic countries, you have different plugs for 220V and 380V), and we had plugged in the kit into the 380V outlet. Fortunately the electronics did not get damaged, and we found a proper outlet and could start the gig.

I read this interesting blog entry by Guy Kawasaki about customer feedback. Customers who could give feedback to products or services give higher evaluation to the service or product.

So hey! Give feedback below about what you would like to see me cover. I’m open for any ideas.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about writing more about the state of electronic music, look into various new synthesizers and their usage models, and dump out more Ableton Live and Logic tricks when I encounter them in the studio.

Feedback is good. It’s just sometimes hard to accept it. One thing good to learn is that if you don’t get feedback, you really don’t know where you are going. It might be that the whole track or product is ignored, or has the wrong feeling of one or the other kind. That’s why I really like sending my tracks to the various DJ promo pools that are out there.

However, if you ever seen Rashomon, a good Japanese movie by Akira Kurosawa, about a scene in the forest that is played back four times, with four different interpretations, you learn that nothing is objective. If you know yourself that what you’ve done is good, or special, just go with it. Usually such pioneers are recognized. But listen carefully to feedback, it might give you insights you never thought of yourself.

Also, when giving feedback, be honest. I’ve seen so much gratitude feedback out there, style “good work, keep up with it”. Sometimes it’s to not create enemies, sometimes for personal PR, really. If you get honest, valuable feedback, cherish it, there’s less of it out there than you think.

It’s interesting how a lot in contemporary dance music is based on four-bar loops. Now, there’s more 1-bar looping happening, as well, and some occasional longer loop is in there.

Anyway, to make things interesting, there’s no need to always use bars evenly divided by four. A classical trick is to take a loop, such as a four-bar one, and just loop three parts of it. This makes it an syncopated loop that changes over time. With Ableton Live it’s really trivial to make such loops.

Or, as in the image above, this loop is not a one bar one, rather 3/4 bar long. Such syncopation loops are really good for changing drum sounds — resembling the effect with African drumming where these tricks are used. But it could be used for other cases, too.

Another example is a melody or a bass line that is seven bars instead of eight. I did a recording recently, a minimalist track, where by mistake I only recorded seven bars in Logic. I didn’t notice it until I placed out this melody loop, and it really worked out well as the variation happened over the whole track. A 9-bar track would do something similar, too. Or any other non-standard bar loop.

The key is to experiment and try out if it works. It’s true that the dancing audience kind of expects even bar loops, and the brain does not like too much non-organized material, but a strategically placed loop that is not normal will make the track much more interesting.

tasmaniandevil posted 900 really cool presets up on the KVR Zebra forum. I installed them, and they were nice. But the key thing was what he posted about how they were created. He used the performance page in Zebra2 to map various parameters into the nice XY grid system, move the mouse around, and record the new presets from arbitrary positions.

Anyway, the key point with this posting is that this is a really cool way to quickly create new parameters. Massive, that I checked out yesterday, had a similar parameter view with eight knobs, by assigning various parameters to those eight generic knobs, you could key in all kinds of new sounds, quickly.

I’m sure other software synths have something similar available, so check them out. Just map all kinds of random parameters into such generic control areas, and have fun. The other nice thing with such arbitrary control areas is that you could automate all kinds of parameters while recording the track, so the synth will really sound organic.

Another option to quickly generate new sound are any kinds of random setting generators, Logic’s ES2 has one, the nice thing with this system is that you could narrow down the randomness so the random generator does not touch everything — that usually leads to total synth madness.

Ok, I opened up the box with Massive tonight, and installed the 1.1 upgrade at the same time that was just released.

First impressions. This software synth is indeed massive. Some patches pumped out air from my reference monitors so I smelled the dust, huh. It’s also massive concerning CPU use. With my G5 2GHz dual CPU system I could get six Massive synths running, then it was done. I could even modify one patch and get the system to its knees. Looking at the CPU meters the synth is single-threaded so it pegged one CPU while the other was not doing anything.

Anyway, sound wise, if you are looking for that concurrent Electro sound with biting/strong lead and bass sounds, this might be the one. Only drawback is that I suspect many electro house producers are busy using Massive just now, so the sound will be present in many releases. But the sound is very much like a big analog synth, just moved to the computer side. I need to get the latest Vanguard, I’m behind with the upgrades there, too, to compare.

Quick check concerning the programming side, it’s somewhat more confusing than the Zebra 2 interface (which is very, very elegant, imho), but you could get the job done with this synth, just need to read the manual carefully. The presets have six default knobs by which you could also quickly tailor some special sounds from the patches.

The patch interface was first confusing — its the Kore interface — but then when you got the hang of it, it was easy to use. The problem was that some of the categories didn’t have any samples, so I looked at the empy list of patches for a short time, until I understood what was going on.

Yes, it’s a fun, strong synth. I think they did a clever job of pushing the sounds towards the ‘massive’ side as that seems to be the sound many producers want to key in just now.

As for this synth indeed being resource-hungry, I need to install it on my MacBookPro to see if there’s a difference. But there’s always the option of freezing tracks, or dumping audio tracks from Logic into Live and do more processing with pure audio tracks (something I do a lot of the times, anyway.)

The Logic EFM1 software synth is like this step-son that is always forgotten. I rekindled its friendship after reading a posting on the Big Blue Lounge forum about how to make great bass lines, and one posting mentioned that EFM1 makes good bass sounds. So I had to fire up Logic and check it out, and it was true. OK, another weapon in my bass arsenal — creating good bass sounds is one of the tough assignments with productions.

Also, to prove my (silly) theory that most of minimalist music is done using FM synthesis, and while helping my son understand cross products in mathematics, I fired off a track using only EFM1 synths and one Ultrabeat drum sequence. It’s called Cross Products. I don’t know if I will release it, but it was a fun 30 minute exercise, especially running away from the drudge teaching about cross products…

As for good bass lines, FM makes sense, a lot of the low end rumble only needs to be somewhat pure sine waves with a some transitions, so FM synthesis makes this easy to achieve. You could then add more characteristics with additional FM synthesis on top.

Anyway, if you have Logic, and have not tried out EFM1 before, check it out. It’s a nice surprise.

We have gone through time and space, and frequencies, too, concerning handling mixing of tracks. Another option is stereo placement. If you put instruments in specific locations in stereo space, you could hear them better.

Anyone who has heard early Jimi Hendrix recordings know the strange feeling of hearing drums in one loudspeaker, and Jimi Hendrix playing guitar in another one. Those were the early days of learning how to use stereo systems. Later it become quite sophisticated, especially in the eighties and nineties. As a good example, the hip-hop monster hit “Chasing Waterfalls” by TLC has very elegant placements of instruments and sound tracks.

Now later it seems a lot of productions just make a big ambient sound mesh with reverb and ping-pong delays providing the stereo spread. Also, some mastering tools, such as Izotope Ozone, has provisions to spread out the audio by specific spectrum segments, causing an artificial stereo spread.

One reason, I think, is that with large systems you can’t just expect to hear stereo concepts that clearly, so with large club system with cross-over PAs there’s just little chance to do individual stereo placements. Another issue, especially with low end sounds, is that any stereo spreads caused problems when cutting vinyl, the needle starts to jump — one reason why bass and similar low end frequencies could not even have stereo chorus.

Anyway, for a quick easy way to have instruments heard, selective panning always helps, if nothing else, it could be automated so the panning moves from speaker to speaker. When working with stereo placements, headphones are really good. Just remember that enclosed headphones have one idea of the mix, if you don’t double-check with loudspeaker monitoring, you will get a false idea what is heard. This is one reason why I never subscribe to the idea of headphones only mixing/mastering.

Pheek has some good advice about this, read here.

Just a couple of other notes from me. I don’t mind scanning for good/new artists, so posting on forums with track info — your myspace account or something similar — is Ok. However, if it takes lots of work to get access to the track, such as logging into file sharing services, I back off — sorry don’t just have enough time. So make it easy for anyone for finding your music.

Also, if you want to release commercial tracks, you should guard such material, do not let it loose on P2P or even let others download such tracks. You could put up one, two or three-minute samples of the track. Or then, if you want to share it, that’s fine, but it’s not a commercial track, then. After a possible release, it’s also understood that you don’t give out the track, defeats the whole purpose.

Try to avoid trying to sell the track to multiple places at the same time, if you get multiple offers, it’s not fair when the labels put effort into working initially with you, and you had multiple people working on a record deal for you. Just stagger out the effort, one label at a time. If someone does not respond within a reasonable time, where I think max ten days is the limit, go to the next one.

But as Pheek said, if you find the right label that matches your music, and it’s good, it should work out fine.

Hey, I just got Komplete 4 and Massive from Native Instruments. It was a special deal — nice to work in the right division (pro apps) inside the fruit company. Massive is this new software synth that has very strong and analog-sounding oscillators and much more — good for electro house. Komplete 4 has just everything else: Reactor 5 that in itself could be used to build extremely complex synth setups, Absynth 4 for athmospheres, Kontakt 2 with gigabytes of samples, Battery 3 with tons of drum kids, Pro-53 that is a Prophet-5 virtual SW synth, and much much more!

Phew. I still remember the days when I had a Roland Jupiter-6 as my only synth and I used it for months, if not years, as the only synth. So now it’s just a matter of putting all my gear into use.

Let’s see, I have Logic 7 with all the synths, Reason with its arsenal, Zebra 2 that I could use for the rest of my life, Chameleon 5000, Octopus, and more and more and more… The best in this massive amounts of material is to just take one or two synths at a time, and use them for a month, and move on to the next one. So far that strategy has worked well, when I kind of get tired of one of them, I just switch to another ‘workhorse’ and use it.

But for anyone else, please, there’s no need to have tons of gear. What happened in my case was just a good deal, and I always wanted Reactor, anyway, as it’s this lego box of putting together all kinds of strange and new kinds of synthesis engines. And I wanted to write good PR about Native Instruments that provided me with this gear that I promise will be put into heavy use.