Minimalism

That’s part of it too! I know how my brain works (kinda, it’s debatable lol) I always seem to pick things to take on that are extremely difficult and challenging. I could have taken up a Martial Art with just a few moves vs Hapkido (which has thousands of variations on several dozen techniques) and I have a hundred other examples. I lean towards the Japanese aesthetics where things are simple, but you can take that simplicity to infinitely high degrees.

I spent a couple of months focusing on a more “minimal” approach with a Digitone serving as my main device with a side of Circuit Mono Station for an analog voice.

A lot of possibility in terms of sounds coming out of either device, especially the Digitone.

But focusing on compositions that have 4 track/8 voice constraints using a consistent FM synth and sequencer workflow really clears the mind and lets one focus on musical ideas. Working in a DAW or a kitchen sink device like an MPC Live, I personally have a tendency to want to keep adding elements, and if I don’t go in with a solid plan of what I want to create, I can find myself lost in possibilities and just messing around without any real musical outcomes.

I like the Digitone because it’s naturally inspiring to me and I can easily go in “cold” without a specific plan, and within a short time of focused play, I’ll have the core of some good sounding music that I can then polish and expand to a performed live track.

So because of my positive experience with the Digitone, I just added a Digitakt to the setup so I can have a complimentary focused drum/samples device with almost the exact same workflow.

Adding the DT should be fine because musically, I’m now in the habit of keeping things focused on core musical ideas instead of some of my earlier more busy approaches.

When I started doing electronic music again after years away, it was for-hire and mainly “big room” EDM for vocal artists. So that’s where I started to get into that mindset of “more is more” and artificially filling up sonic space.

But my personal taste IS for the more minimal stuff, with techno, house, ambient, underground electro and even more experimental soundscape music, so that’s where I’m consciously pushing. Elektron gear seems to be ideal for what I’m doing and where I want to go.

Here’s my current setup, good for my focused workflow approach, but with a very large palette of available sounds.

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Hard to explain.
I’ll use the example of Gymnastics by Regis. It’s not a good album because there’s minimal instrumentation. It’s a good album because he’s a very good producer who clearly knew how to get the best out of his kit, however minimal.
The countless dozens of copycats who followed in his shadow, many of whom set out to sound “minimal” missed the point completely. A lot of producers, especially in that era, thought they could get away with being shit, repetitive and derivative by calling what they were doing “minimal” when it was actually just bloody boring.

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Never heard that record. I’ll give it a listen

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:point_up_2:
wrong thread mate.

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All you need is a strip of fairy lights and a kazoo.

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Bit philosophical - but is the art of minimalism not just great judgment in choosing the space between the notes (per Count Basie I think)?

The notes themselves are the easy bit, it’s how many of them to edit out

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Yeah that makes total sense. I read an article about Aphex and he does it that way too. Just throws 75 parts together and then brings things in and out and fills as necessary. It totally could just be where I’m at at the moment, wanting to do it like this, but I usually try to go with my gut as it’s not as big a liar as my brain tends to be :grin:

I’m downsizing a bit myself.
Finding that Drumatix + A4 go pretty far for my needs, especially if I lean on some DAW FX for the drums to give this constrained drum machine a bit more depth.

The pendulum swings, from minimum to maximum, hot to cold, winter to summer, relaxed to constrained, slow to fast, and then always back again.

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Philosophical is absolutely fine… yes I think it’s a fine way of just getting a clearer focus of ideas. Without as many variables you can ideally create “perfection” within a given context. That doesn’t mean it will make for a good song or anything but you know what I mean. I think that’s what I’m after is just more focus and immediacy.

Another benefit is that you dig deeper into the gear you have and then beyond that, the ideas you want to express right? Some of the best things I hear, that I like, have such a clear intention behind them that you understand exactly why they were done. It’s sometimes a bore if you can predict exactly what note will be next though.

Sort of off topic but “The Hero’s Journey” is a framework that, while it can’t truly be overused, can certainly become a fill in the blanks type of process. Hollywood caught on to this and now we have these completely generic movies churning out where they basically insert a different character and give it a different name and it’s such a shame.

This is what blew me away about Burial, he’s not minimal by any stretch of the imagination but he tells legit stories with his music. Stolen Dog - that song is telling a detailed story via sonic metaphor or something.

So by paring things down to their core elements, you can build a sonic vocabulary. Single words or emotions or whatever you choose to call them. Then those single words can become sentences, paragraphs, chapters and then at that point it’s really become something.

On the other side of the fence though, there is nothing wrong with fiddling and playing around. It’s fun and spontaneous and some things couldn’t have come about in any other way. I want to get to the point where I don’t play around aimlessly waiting for something. But instead, like all the great artists do, I want to “play” :smile:

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That’s a great point too! I think it’s all just cycles. This is just where I’m at in the pendulum right now. Thanks everyone for the fantastic comments. I wanted to get some more perspectives on this idea and Elektronauts certainly rolled in to deliver! :laughing:

Sounds like you need a dose of Miles Davis to get your juices flowing.

Sparse jazz, though I’m far from being a jazz aficionado, is inspiring stuff. Endless formless broken incomplete melodies around a theme that all hangs together despite little apparent structure or resolve; my mind boggles as to how the musicians make it all hang together. A great antidote to 4-to-the-floor loopism. i don’t know much about jazz chronology, but late 60s early 70s seems a rich ground for ideas - rooted in 50’s bebop but venturing into funk and electronic.
Maybe it was all just well rehearsed, but often it seems more like inspired savants able to jam away across modes and scales seamlessly, with little apparent effort as to where to navigate next.

I have liked minimalist dub; Deep Chord and the like, but scopewise it seems to ultimately lack dimension.

Minimalist techno similarly lacks mojo and heart. It’s hard to get that organic feel into minimalism, but particularly so for techno.

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Funny you mention that, I actually am moving that direction with what I’m looking for on vinyl. Son got me a record with a Herbie Hancock track on it, Watermelon Man, totally weird and cool and a totally new genre for me. Love riffling through dusty bins at the thrift shops and second hand stores!

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Check this out; blues meets jazz meet miles

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Yo Herbie Hancock is the fucking man, man. His modal stuff with Miles Davis (59 through the 60s)and his modal stuff by himself is fire. His weird funk and weird synth stuff is good too.

Shit I should go relisten to him

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I think Robert Hood’s music has heart.

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And i’ve gone off on a tangent to be fair.
I suppose the point I was trying to badly make was that for me, engaging minimalism is like a sparse composition that leaves the listener to imagine a far more complex piece of music lurking in the shadows, that little clues lead along the path. Your enjoyment of the minimalist approach is that of the overall framework, the composer leaves much silent, but you can imagine the space in the gaps.

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Most of my tracks now are just one machine recorded straight to stereo, maybe two at most. It’s hard to say this is necessarily a ‘minimalist’ approach when using Elektron machines because you’re given so many options to precisely manipulate change over time, but it does force you to reckon with how different elements of a piece fit together instead of just adding or subtracting parts to generate change. This is one take of an A4, for example.

I found this interview with Mark Fell (who you might know from doing presets for the Digitone) very instructive on this topic. To quote it at length:

Did you never think “I’ll buy another synth to do bass or melodies” or something to add a third element to the music?

Fell: I could never really afford it. I had no money basically. I didn’t work – I was either a student or unemployed for a long, long time. Although it became a horrible thing, I was very happy to be unemployed because it meant I could just do what I wanted to do and get an amount of money to live on each week. There were no jobs anyway because there was 100 people going for five jobs. I thought I might as well get out of the race.

But that just became my way of working. I think at some point I tried doing making music on more than two units but it just didn’t seem to work. Like having too many ingredients in a recipe. So I stuck to two machines. Probably 90% of the first SND stuff was all done on one sampler and the thought of adding to that equation just always seemed wrong. Even now I don’t have much equipment, but I have things that tend to be in storage and then I’ll just get them out to use for one thing and then put them back in storage.

I can’t understand why anyone would have a studio full of lots and lots of stuff. I see photos of other people’s studios and there are all these racks of equipment and stacks and keyboards and things and it just doesn’t compute. I was a kid in my bedroom for three years, with one piece of equipment, and I just explored in micro detail what that equipment could do, so I understood every little quirk of it.

For example, I had a Yamaha TX81Z, which uses four-operator FM synthesis and had a few quirks to it. There was this mode, which rather than being multitimbral was like a multitimbral setup, but every time you press the note to progress to the next sound in the series of sounds that you specify. So every time you played a note it could produce not just a series of notes but a series of sound changes as well. So I just did loads of work with that, setting up simple sequences of sound changes and note changes that would go in and out of phase and things. That became one of the kinds of techniques that I still use today.

Can you elaborate on how you use that kind of technique now?

Fell: I tend to be quite limited in the processes or technologies that I will use during the production of a record. So I won’t think “I can add this and I can add that and maybe I can put this over the top.” For me it’s always about one or two elements that you keep re-explaining in detail, rather than adding another layer on top. It’s about I look at the process and the technology and trying to just work with that, not confusing things by bringing too many ingredients to the production.

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