Limitations of composing via linear patterns

The Lounge General Discussion
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I studied classical composition. Involving organic instruments, this meant writing pieces of music linearly. Section A, then its development, then section B, recapitulation, all that stuff.

That’s how I compose electronically, but I’m starting to find it a chore. All I know is to queue up patterns. So first there’s this pattern, then I need a section B, that’s another pattern, then the next pattern is just like the last one except the high hat is different. You know the thing.

But recently I’ve started to notice, when listening to some music, that it doesn’t always sound like it’s composed that way. A lot of it - particularly some house, techno and dub - sounds moe like the artist is basically saying:

Here’s my sound palette - all my synths, samples, effects - now what I’m going to do is just randomly mute and un-mute them, to create variation, and tweak the filters a bit. All of this live, on a single pattern. And that’s the track.

I’m obviously simplifying (or am I?) and I assume there’s more to it than that, but I’d welcome the views of more experienced producers. Do you produce linearly, everything hard-coded and pre-programmed, or is the final track really a random version of potentially many, based on how you live-play it at the time of recording?

Here’s a good example. There are no real “hard joins” of “now I’m switching from pattern A to pattern B”. It just seems to “evolve” much more fluidly (randomly?) than my stuff does.

I hope this makes some sense, and thanks!

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I make a distinction between composition and arrangement. What you’re talking about sounds more like the latter.

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Another way would be to combine arranging with recording of longer audio files in which you do lots of tweaking (=not getting stucked in the same sound loop) . Starting with those audio recordings not only gives enough material to keep songs sounding organic but also leads to new ideas, for example when you change the progression in the next take and be it just that you turn down for example the second oscillator of a 2 osc synth a few half tones up or down to create a different interval. Small things like that can create ideas for bridges etc or take the whole composition to another level.
Then when i have enough material, i start arranging, adding, taking away, doing weird stuff like pitching audio inside ableton.

But of course this is a rather experimental approach and maybe won’t lead to big chart success :wink:

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Both methods are perfectly valid. It all depends on the sound/genre you’re after.

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A lot of the music in the styles you mention don’t have chord progressions either. In my ears, that makes for boring music.

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What I did when producing trap beats (and still do for tons of stuff) is to take away side melodies and make the drums slower, or take away the crash or open hat. When the hook comes, I bring it all back to make it sound more exciting, like a drop happened rather than the same loop. I don’t personally take stuff away “randomly” but I wouldn’t be surprised if others did! I’ve always wanted to learn how to arrange and structure music differently but I’ve always stuck to whats simple/works for me!

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@Tchu makes some wonderful music using this method.

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Thank you @Juniper_Steels ! :pray::heart:

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A distinction should be made between a true limitation and a technological “tail wagging the dog” outcome, in which the music becomes more of a reflection of what the machine does best, and less of a reflection of any intentions of the “creator”.

The notion of change as something happening at a pattern change…is pretty unsatisfactory, to my mind. Perhaps a paradigm shift would be to distribute change throughout the course of each pattern, with zero change at the machine’s pattern crossings. In other words, instead of creating three patterns A, B, and C, create patterns A-B, B-C, and C-end.

The method I’m proposing is easier said than done. There are no limitations of hardware, to my knowledge, that makes this impossible, though the gear, by its own nature, encourages us to create static content.

This is all related to the frequent preoccupation of my mind, that great art is more than the sum of its shoddily glued together parts.

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For music that’s made to sit within a long dj mix as part of a narrative of tracks it makes total sense to keep it simple and riff on one pattern in one key, no ‘journey’ within the track, just a settled moment within a groove. The narrative and progression comes from the DJ’s track selection and contextualisation of each piece of music.

Sometimes you don’t want every track to have a long complex story.

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Very well said!

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I find that if you familiarize yourself well with all of the tools at hand you get to decide what will help tell the story you want to tell with your music.

Muting and unmuting within a looping pattern and having modulation of the sound or notes in a looping pattern is one of the ways to create an immersive passage that has a hook for listeners without getting boring quickly. Transitioning to the next passage/pattern from a sequencer based approach is an art in itself but that is a way to advance the song, revisit an established theme, etc. Combining these two ideas where you are able to reintroduce thematic elements on a track or two at choice times while still advancing the piece through its movements is also nice conceptual glue and doing so by having a different rhythm or key applied to the same melody is a classical technique.

In fact, most of it is classical technique, but modern sequencing gives you options fixed composition would not such as probabilities, modulation of velocity or gate lengths, and random variation within a scale on very good sequencers. That isn’t even starting with options like tape style looping. These generative techniques are useful tools to combine as well, and when combined with intentional composition you can extract so much motion and variation within a given passage that lots of people will just make their songs based around one or two passages like that and still get several or more minutes of interesting and emotionally complex music from it. These too can basically be considered classical techniques at this point as modern classical artists working with electronics have been using this for decades now.

One trick with all of this is that for pop music formats it takes restraint and taste to apply these ideas in a way that enhances an otherwise familiar song structure rather than creating the song structure to serve the compositional ideas you’re exploring. Ambient and techno artists mostly don’t care about that so much so they’re a lot more free to just let the sounds themselves be the music instead of the composition.

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With all the tools available on the Elektrons, it’s relatively easy to use only one Pattern. You have Conditionals, Track counts, selective Bars, Probability, 8 Bars, two hands, …

Let’s not forget the repetitive, hypnotical nature of a lot of Electronic music genres.

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As someone who has also studied classical composition, I have have found learning to create music using electronics and sequencers to be a huge mental challenge breaking out of everything I’d been taught, but simultaneously liberating for that very same reason – the fact I don’t have to think in the same way about melodic variation and harmonic development: the sentence, period, antecedent, consequent, root motion, functional harmony, and of course ending phrases with some kind of cadence which is perhaps the most classical signifier of all.

It’s also kind of hard to break out of functional harmony, this idea of the tonic–dominant relationship which governs everything. When I listen to a lot of my favorite electronic artists, there is almost no functional harmony to speak of. Chords just do whatever sounds cool in the moment – and chord motion is comparatively way more minimal. Even at a drop or end of a section I almost never hear anything I would call a dominant to tonic motion. There’s no phrases and no cadences. Sometimes it’s hardly tonal at all – mostly focused on textures and sound design.

I also feel like most (good) electronic music, when it does use harmony, is in some kind of minor key, often ambiguously so. Minor modes like aeolian, phyrgian, and dorian. I rarely ever hear the raised 7th or 6th. I also feel like harmony is less triadic and definitely not so much of a propulsive motion that we’re used to in classical composition.

Regarding form, are you familiar with the term through-composed? In my own orchestral work, that approach has always appealed to me for the abandonment of sectional structure, traditional development and repetition. I guess it’s a little more of a 20th century approach onward. Interestingly, most popular music is not through-composed, obviously having some kind of ABA / verse-chorus structure with repetition and contrast; but so much electronic music to me is essentially “through-composed” even if no one is thinking in that term. Just like you observed: they take a palette and kinda just move through it on a journey, without much concern for repetition or structure, and definitely no requirement to land back “home” to any kind of musical motif or tonic. Of course there’s more pop-oriented EDM that takes on a developed structure, but I’m not really talking about that and it sounds like you’re not either.

I don’t have any advice myself as someone navigating the differences, but just wanted to say I come from a similar world and am still trying to reconcile the two approaches. If you presumably do score study and analysis, why not do the same with electronic music you enjoy? Obviously there’s no score to follow but I’ve been doing this lately, writing down my observations around structure and what I like. I think it’s been helpful.

I was listening to an electronic track the other day which I noticed is two chords a 3rd apart the entire time (IIRC), but they don’t really belong to the same key, and they were given equal weight so it was kind of ambiguous to tell what “home” could be. The bass line had some rhythmic variation here and there but functionally speaking was the same the whole way. On paper this description sounds boring but honestly I never got bored because the way they add and subtract elements and textures over that “harmonic” bed. So for me I’m trying to let go of some of my classical impulses and allow myself to explore music in that way.

Good luck!

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I’d love to hear the track, to help cement annappreciation for what you wrote. Can you share?

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Sure, it’s this duo from South Korea I just discovered recently called Salamanda, and a lot of their music can be described this way. The album I was listening to is here and the specific track I was looking at is Hard Luck Story.

I read up and interestingly one of them is a classically-trained pianist and studied composition at university. It’s somewhat evident on their other tracks, for example “Melting Hazard” and “Kiddo Caterpillar” both of which take fairly simple melodic motifs and develop them in a non-sectionalized way. I mostly dig their production style and dreamy vocal pads that tie it all together.

I also grew up listening to Plaid/Black Dog, and BoC. I think these describe even more what I’m thinking about. They all lean more melodic and harmonic than some electronic artists, but they somehow rein it in, developing ideas through addition and subtraction without much strict concern about an arrival point. I actually think the guys from Plaid have some kind of classical training too haha.

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I did that OPN school of song workshop and he shared a technique for thinking about a composition as having multiple rooms that you can move through. The rooms will naturally have some things in common, but they will also have features that are distinct. I found that helpful.

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This makes me think about the movie Cube.

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Just nabbed the brand new 2x LP BoC album Inferno.

Haven’t yet given it a spin but was moments away from doing that when I read this. :grinning:

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A few thoughts:

Turn off the grid
Record overdubs while not listening to previously recorded material
Combine ideas from multiple sessions haphazardly
Reverse audio, Resample, combine (then do it again)

Bless!

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