Music production is the process of shaping a recording or electronic composition from initial idea to finished master. It can include arrangement, performance, sound design, recording, editing, mixing and decisions about the overall aesthetic of a track or album.
In his 2007 interview with The Wire, Burial confirmed that he made Untrue in Sound Forge, editing waveforms without a conventional sequencer. He described recognising drum patterns by how they looked, arranging them into irregular, skeletal shapes rather than aligning coloured blocks on a grid. Some percussion came from video games, falling shell casings and…
During the making of Construction Time Again, Depeche Mode discovered sampling and immediately started looking beyond conventional instruments. For “Pipeline,” Martin Gore, Gareth Jones and the group went into Shoreditch recording metal objects, pipes, steel plates and other found sounds. Engineer Gareth Jones recalls drumsticks and hammers striking objects around a disused railway environment. Gore’s…
For Random Access Memories, Daft Punk made a strange decision for one of the world’s best-known electronic acts: instead of letting the computer solve everything, they deliberately brought musicians, analogue tape and large recording studios back into the centre of the process. Engineer Peter Franco has described experiments in which material was recorded directly to…
Floating Points made much of Cascade away from his normal studio. Sam Shepherd has described working in the Californian desert with a laptop and headphones rather than the larger collection of equipment available at home. The 2024 album nevertheless became an expansive return toward dancefloor-focused electronic music, with long tracks, Buchla-inspired rhythms and detailed electronic…
Arooj Aftab has described night as a major source of inspiration for Night Reign. But what catches my attention is how that idea enters the arrangement rather than remaining only a lyrical concept. The album moves among jazz, South Asian musical traditions, electronics and carefully controlled space. Her voice often occupies the centre without needing…
Nils Frahm’s Felt began with a practical problem: how do you play a piano late at night without disturbing your neighbours? He damped the instrument with thick felt and played extremely softly. Then he pushed the microphones deep inside the piano, close enough to capture sounds that recording engineers often try to remove. His breathing,…
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds recorded Ghosteen during 2018 and early 2019 across studios in Malibu, Los Angeles, Brighton and Berlin. Its instrumentation includes piano, synthesizers, loops, flute, violin, bass, percussion, vibraphone and guitar, yet much of the album feels unusually weightless. Cave divided it into two parts, describing the first group of songs…
Music project FDR-Sound Electronic Music Made in Ableton Live FDR-Sound is an independent electronic music project by Frank De Rop, based in Antwerp, Belgium. The project explores a broad range of electronic music, moving between ambient, experimental soundscapes, atmospheric compositions and more rhythm-driven electronic productions, including EDM and drum & bass. Each release can take…
Creating a soundscape that transports the listener to the heart of a rainforest can be a challenging task. However, with the help of electronic tools, it is possible to recreate the natural sounds of the jungle. We need to identify the different elements that make up a rainforest soundscape. The most obvious ones are the…
