Hi ,
I'd like to share a personal story with you.
When I first started the 'Whitebear' project, I was like a kid in a candy shop.
Plenty of sample libraries and plugins and tools to choose from and all the possibilities in the world, but no direction.
One minute I'd be working on a 'dubstep' track, the next minute a 'techno' one, the next minute a 'drum n bass' one, but none of them were remotely close to what I envisioned a track in that particular genre would sound like, and none of them sounded like me.
It wasn't until I'd decided to really consider the next 3 points I'm about to tell you, did I start to find 'my sound'.
- What do I enjoy listening to?
- What would I like to hear when I'm out at a club/festival?
- How do I combine all of the things I like into one coherent sounding track?
Contemplating these things allowed me to get clear on my tastes and my desires, and using those ideas as guides helped me pinpoint some sort of direction that I could start working towards.
I knew I loved tribal downtempo music, but I also knew that I loved really dark, techy Zenonesque progressive trance. So I asked myself, what would it sound like if they both had a lovechild together? And the Whitebear sound was born.
The fact that those two things seemed like polar opposites in terms of energy and aesthetic felt like it would be an issue, but in hindsight, actually provided me the opportunity to really craft a sound that was my own, exactly because they were two seemingly opposing ideas.
And it is this unholy matrimony of opposites/different things that, in my opinion, provides the most interesting and unique results.
Whilst what I did with the Whitebear project was by no means revolutionary, taking two different genres and combining them allowed me to approach my music in a way that was unique to my workflow and my tastes entirely.
It made me think in completely new ways, and THAT'S the thing that will drastically affect your output and therefore your results.
And this made me wonder, what if we took it one step further, and used the processes and philosophies from an entirely different discipline to approach sound design and music production?
If combining two things within a discipline provided (what was to me) interesting results, what would happen if we stole from a completely different discipline altogether?
This lead to me exploring that concept even more.
As I've always been fascinated with thinking about songs as actual physical landscapes, I wondered;
- What if we approached music production and sound design as if we were designing a physical space?
- What if we started to view sound as physical objects, and used concepts and processes from architecture to inform our decisions in the studio?
Sound designer Walter Murch (of Apocalypto/The Godfather trilogy fame) once said:
“Well, if an interior designer can go into an architectural space and decorate it interestingly, that’s sort of what I am doing in the theatre. I’m taking the three-dimensional space of the theatre and decorating it with sound.”
This idea of decorating a space with sound, as well as the questions I mentioned previously, served as the foundation of all my explorations with the new FORM NULL project, and has allowed me to develop ways to synthesise and arrange sound that I might not have previously thought of.
- What would a sky filled with ominous clouds, completely torn apart by lightning sound like?
- What would an obelisk made entirely out of obsidian sound like?
- What would it sound like with both of those scenarios put together?
It is not the end result that matters, but the process that gets you there.
You may end up with something that resembles an obelisk to you but a merry go round to another, or you might even end up going down a rabbit hole that leads you to something completely removed from the original idea to begin with.
The point is not to finish the experiment with an actual image of an obelisk floating amongst the clouds, but to start thinking about sound in abstract ways that will provide you with your own unique way to create music and design sound. But this can only be possible with the right technical foundations and knowledge of your tools.
If you'd like to get to know your tools better, and start to adopt a more out of the box approach to music production that will generate results unique to you, you might be interested in the upcoming course I will be teaching alongside Halfred and Re:Set via Future Media Academy.
We will cover everything from the conceptualisation of a track, to the synthesis, and right down to the arrangement, mixing and mastering of it, and help you become a more versatile and knowledgeable music producer.
If this is something that interests you, head over to the FMA website to find out more!
Wishing you lots of creativity and inspiration,
Arthur
https://formnull.bandcamp.com/
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