As I regain my ground in hardware production, something I was never good at in software was maintaining cohesion. I think I attribute this to the not enough limitations aspect. Cohesion might mean different things to everyone, from using the same drum kit through the entire track, to ensuring reverb tails aren’t chopped off, etc… I almost never write under a song structure, which I think is an issue. But I also don’t want to force myself to conform to a structure just to maintain cohesion. I’d like to do what I want but make it work…
How do you personally maintain your definition of cohesion through changes in tracks? Assuming they aren’t a 4 bar loop with mutes. Nothing wrong with that though, just not what I’m digging into.
Not really helpful perhaps but I almost actively fight against cohesion to some extent. After working within linear DAWs for as long as I did, trying to pry things off the rails as much as possible is often more my focus.
Good question. I make deep / minimal house and most of my songs have some type of pad sound. When I end one section / song I keep the pad running for 4 bars as a sort of interlude. Switch to the next pattern with a new but different pad and introduce a kick or hi hat pattern to help guide the change (sometimes that pad is in a new key). I find this helps keep the illusion of cohesion even though I essentially just started a new song.
If I am going for a longer jam I just keep total tracks playing to 60% of my available tracks and cycle through different items. Sometimes the bass play with the pad and sometimes the lead plays with the pad. At times there IS no pad (the horror!).
Through every major change in your track, have at least one (if not most) of your sounds continue to play as they were. Only change one or two elements per transition. Of course, this is just rule of thumb stuff – feel free to go for sudden changes of everything if it works for the track
I must say linear production was never my strong suit. The only album I’ve made doesn’t have a single song with anything remotely resembling an AB… structure, for better or worse.
Strange because I grew up reading music and even took some music theory which revolves around linear production.
I do this a lot. You can broaden the idea out too: it’s easier to find a new chord by just changing one note, or vary a pattern by just changing a part of it. Say only change the last 16 steps out of 64.
It makes the music kind of “morph” while keeping shape.
Take your main hook, copy it, pitch that a 5th or an octave, douse it in fx, offset the time it starts and loops, and remove a lot of its content so the additional layer you are creating isn’t adding too much.
The result is a deeper exploration of the main theme of the track, and something you can weave in and out to keep things moving.
Sometimes soloing that new layer works great for intros or outros.
Ha - that’s interesting: I was almost entirely the opposite. I came from a scratch DJ background so the cut & paste aesthetic informed much of what I did, but I had this overwhelming feeling of needing to “make proper songs” so I studied more rigid structures until it became incredibly difficult to break loose from them. My first 7" and 12" EPs are much more enjoyable to me than my first album as I feel as though I hadn’t really grasped the song structure approach fully in the earlier work but it had become more embedded by the time I made the tracks for the album. It’s an approach that feels too safe and predictable but it wasn’t remotely the result of external pressures from the label etc. I did it wholly to myself. I ended up making myself into something that I naturally wasn’t and, once I realised that I’d done so, have often struggled against that ever since.
To echo what @Not_DIV1N and @PeteSasqwax have said; structural cohesion is not something I worry much about. I like things to develop how they develop.
I haven’t really reflected on this before, but I think “cohesion” comes into my work in two main ways:
in terms of my sound design - for me that means using a limited palette of tools that I know really well, and so can work quickly and fluently with, but also trying to push what I can do with those tools, find new techniques, and so on.
in terms of feeling. I always try and develop an emotional core for each piece (it can be simple or complex, an image, a few words - just something with some emotive resonance) and whenever I find myself waiving or something isn’t working or I’m just going way off piste - it can be useful to have something to focus on. Not always of course, sometimes getting lost is the goal but y’know
I’ve nothing to add really, most of my music is so repetitive both myself and my listener have fallen asleep long before anyone’s worried about whether or not it feels cohesive.
If I’m trying to change or advance the way I make music, I find I do best when I start off in my comfort zone, then try to work incrementally towards my goal. I guess if you want your tracks to sound more cohesive, you first need to work out what cohesive means to you and start working towards it.
So if you feel like your tracks aren’t melodically or thematically cohesive, set yourself a goal where you make a track which progresses the melody or theme in some new way (I like @AdamJay’s suggestion here) but keep all other aspects nice and easy, then you’ll probably find that there wasn’t much wrong with your tracks all along and you’re worrying about nothing.
Be it a musical scale, a tempo, a time signature, a song structure, instrumentation, orchestration, sound sources, fx.
Example, “Im going to make an EP, 6 tracks, using 1 drum machine and 2 synths, no other gear. Im only going to use one delay pedal, one reverb pedal. I’ll record them all as live jams.”
Set limits, and stick to them. There’s your cohesion.
i personally like music that goes places.
maybe it’s just a matter of making transitions between the sections.
of course having lot’s of different sounds etc might be a lot more work so everything sounds good.
did u ever read Dennis Desantis book? It’s quite sweet, lots of little tips. Ableton is the sort of example used but the concepts can be applied broadly. one of the tips was removal. Deleting things. sort of chiselling away rather than continually piling clay on the thing. So whatever you’re working on copy it out for like 15 minutes, so you have all this material to sculpt and carve back and alter
A trap that I’m trying not to fall into so eagerly is writing four-measure phrases and then promptly overworking them. Even if I end up satisfied with the phrase, it can be tricky to expand upon while maintaining cohesion – unless the subsequent phrases are simply variations.
While adhering to a predefined song structure may be unduly confining, I think there’s something to be said for striving to produce relatively complete musical thoughts before investing a lot of time on elaboration.
By this I mean that, at mid-tempo, an eight-measure sketch for core drum sounds, bass and perhaps a lead sound may produce a more coherent idea than stitching together two highly-specific four-measure phrases. I find this practice leads to better foundations for further refinement and elaboration.
