June 13, 2020

Music production—and a note on “the discourse” (Across the Sundering Seas 2020 #24)

Hello again, readers!

Another week, another missive from me—Chris Krycho, author of Across the Sundering Seas, this basically-weekly newsletter that you’re reading. In this space, I reflect publicly on the things I’m learning and thinking about: from longish essay-ish entries on topics ranging from the future of home economies, to theological anthropology, to physics, to technology, to music production. (Yes, music production. Read on!) If you ever feel the need to unsubscribe, you can do so at the click of a link!

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This week, much as I wish I had something interesting to say about the ongoing racial tensions and (well-justified) protests happening here in America, I simply don’t. Rather than opine in an area where I am reasonably well-informed, but not well-enough informed to add something meaningful to the conversation, I am going to carry on with the things I have been learning lately. In part because I agree very much with Alan Jacobs:

If three months ago you were primarily focused on addressing sexism in the workplace, it seems to me that you ought to be allowed, indeed encouraged, to keep thinking about and working on that now, when everyone else is talking about police brutality. If your passionate concern is the lack of health care in poor communities, here or abroad, I think you should feel free to stick with that, even if it means not joining in protests against police racism. If you’ve turned your farm into a shelter for abused or neglected animals, and caring for them doesn’t leave you time to get on social media with today’s approved hashtags, bless you. You’re doing the Lord’s work.… Neither novelty nor unanimity is a social good.

There is much that can (and should!) be said about racism, and policing, and many a related issue. Insofar as I can, I am working quietly in my own community on those things. But also: I am working (and will continue to work) on other projects, and I think that is also good and right. Jacobs again, in a follow-up post:

I think there are so many cruelties and injustices in this world that anyone who is working to constrain any of them should be applauded. And no one should assume that others are inactive simply because they’re not strutting and fretting their hour upon the social-media stage.

None of us has the ability to tackle every problem. We should not therefore abdicate our responsibility to address the big problems in our world—but neither should we allow the pressures of any given moment to define us so that we are yanked to and fro by every cultural event and moment. I care about racism and its pernicious effects deeply. I also care about continuing to just model learning in public. We can do both. So today, trivial though the subject may seem, I’m just going to write about what I’ve been learning about lately: music production.

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I had a burning question about a month ago, as I was composing a fanfare for the Crew Dragon Demo 2 launch (which I wrote about a few weeks ago). The question was: I know that people make digital instruments sound good—I’ve heard the demos for sample libraries and digital audio workstations—but how? I’ve spent the past few weeks down a deep rabbit hole of videos and tutorials on music production, and I’ve learned a ton.

The first thing I learned was about MIDI expression: the relative volume level of a given instrument sound, given an overall volume setting. The overall volume of an instrument is something you set in the mix in your digital audio workstation (DAW)—but a person playing a physical instrument in a truly musical way will not play at a single volume throughout. Instead, she will vary the loudness of her playing dynamically both in response to direct cues in the music and in response to the implicit direction of the melody or harmony and her own musical sense and taste. The same goes for a person competently playing a digital instrument in a DAW! As part and parcel of that, I learned a bit about how that is usually input: either drawn onto a track with a mouse or trackpad, or input using a MIDI controller, like the modulation and pitch wheels on a MIDI keyboard—or both.

The second thing I learned was the actual details of something I’d known in vague outline for a long time: that sophisticated sample libraries include many different samples for a given sound. These distinct samples correspond to different articulations—different ways of playing an instrument—as well as to different variations of those articulations. For example, you can think of instruments playing short choppy notes (staccato) or playing smooth, connected notes (legato). But you can also think of how an instrument might sound different if playing notes quickly one after another vs. long holds—whether they’re choppy or smooth. Picking the appropriate samples for the actual sound you’re going for makes an enormous difference in the quality of the results.

Third, I have learned just a bit about the various ways sample libraries allow you to work with those articulations. In some cases they map the idea of “velocity”—which I only knew of as mapping how hard you hit a given key on a keyboard or drum pad—to those different articulations. Hit a key harder, get a different string sound: this was a totally idea approach for me! Other times you might accomplish it using the modulation or pitch wheel on a MIDI keyboard. Or you could set it via the switches or buttons on such a keyboard. Or map some of them into knobs or sliders! (The sheer variety of possibilities borders on being overwhelming if I’m honest.)

You might think I would have learned all of these things in the course of doing the equivalent course work for a music minor¹ the better part of a decade ago. To my current chagrin, though, I didn’t take any of the classes that focused on the elements of digital music production. I focused almost entirely on the work of deciding and notating musical ideas. I don’t regret that I spent the time I did on that—all the capability with digital sounds in the world doesn’t make up for a lack of good musicality—but I do wish I had added at least one of those classes to my plate back then. I’m playing catch-up now, and I have far, far less time to just sit and play and learn than I did then.

I am contenting myself with the fact that I do have the opportunity to learn these things now, however slowly. I am enjoying watching a lot of videos about Logic Pro X (which I know fairly well from years of using it for podcast editing and production) and about the effective use of sample libraries, and I’m grateful that there is so much good material available for free online in this space. I am looking forward to putting them into practice after I have saved up some money to get a decent MIDI keyboard and a good starter sample library: I plan to export the MIDI data for the fanfare I wrote from Dorico and pull it into Logic and make it sound a lot more like a real orchestra. It’ll probably take me much of the rest of the year. That’s okay. This is how learning works!