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‘A master class in understanding the use of production technology as an arena of musical practice.
In this fascinating and highly accessible account, Thomas Brett proves his skills not just as
a music maker, but also as a critical thinker on the subject of music production as a cultural
space. He experiments and samples widely. He blends. He makes forays into different disciplines
his own, creating an ongoing series of metaphors that repeatedly deliver insights into music
production as a field. More than simply offering a masterful introduction to production technology,
Brett teaches us to consider its sociological context and cultural resonances. His notion of the
producer-fan helps us rethink the out-dated dichotomy that artificially separates fans from music
makers, when we know those roles can and do overlap.
You could not ask for a better guide on your quest to fully understand the craft.’
Mark Duffett, University of Chester
The Creative Electronic Music Producer

The Creative Electronic Music Producer examines the creative processes of electronic music
production, from idea discovery and perception to the power of improvising, editing, effects
processing, and sound design.
Featuring case studies from across the globe on musical systems and workflows used in
the production process, this book highlights how to pursue creative breakthroughs through
exploration, trial and error tinkering, recombination, and transformation.
The Creative Electronic Music Producer maps production’s enchanting pathways in a way that
will fascinate and inspire students of electronic music production, professionals already working
in the industry, and hobbyists.

Thomas Brett is an electronic music producer, with a PhD in ethnomusicology from New
York University. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the journals Popular Music
and Popular Music and Society, as well as edited collections by Routledge, and Oxford and
Cambridge University presses. He has released numerous electronic music recordings, and his
compositions for marimba and vibraphone have been performed internationally by soloists and
university ensembles. Thomas has played percussion on Broadway since 1997 and writes about
music at brettworks.com.
Perspectives on Music Production

Series Editors:
Russ Hepworth-Sawyer
York St John University, UK
Jay Hodgson
Western University, Ontario, Canada
Mark Marrington
York St John University, UK

This series collects detailed and experientially informed considerations of record production
from a multitude of perspectives, by authors working in a wide array of academic, creative and
professional contexts. We solicit the perspectives of scholars of every disciplinary stripe, alongside
recordists and recording musicians themselves, to provide a fully comprehensive analytic point-
of-view on each component stage of music production. Each volume in the series thus focuses
directly on a distinct stage of music production, from pre-production through recording (audio
engineering), mixing, mastering, to marketing and promotions.

Pop Music Production

Manufactured Pop and Boy Bands of the 1990s
Phil Harding
Edited by Mike Collins

Cloud-Based Music Production

Sampling, Synthesis, and Hip-Hop
Matthew T. Shelvock

Gender in Music Production

Edited by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, Liesl King and Mark Marrington

Mastering in Music
Edited by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer and Jay Hodgson

Innovation in Music
Future Opportunities
Edited by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Justin Paterson and Rob Toulson

Recording the Classical Guitar

Mark Marrington

The Creative Electronic Music Producer

Thomas Brett

3-D Audio
Edited by Justin Paterson and Hyunkook Lee

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Perspectives-on-Music-

Production/book-series/POMP
The Creative Electronic
Music Producer

Thomas Brett
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Thomas Brett
The right of Thomas Brett to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-90080-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-90079-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-02246-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

About the authorviii

List of figuresix
Acknowledgmentsx

Introduction: electronic music production as infinite game 1

1 Electronic music production, the producer, and the enchanted DAW  8

2 Musical systems and production workflows  21

3 The faintest traces: beginnings, approaches, improvising, and being lost  36

4 Subliminal feeling: presets and sound design  52

Interlude: YouTube electronic music production tutorials  70

5 Timekeeping ways: rhythm programming  79

6 Folding back in: production disruptions 93

7 Levels of detail: editing  107

8 Conjuring: arranging and mixing  116

Conclusion: the push forward  130

Suggested listening 135

References 138
Index 152
About the author

Thomas Brett is a musician and writer who holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from New York
University. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the journals Popular Music and
Popular Music and Society as well as edited collections by Routledge, Oxford, and Cam-
bridge University presses. He has released numerous electronic music recordings, and his
compositions for marimba and vibraphone have been performed internationally by soloists
and university ensembles. Thomas has played percussion on Broadway since 1997 and writes
about music at brettworks.com.
Figures

1.1 Key Edit window in Steinberg’s Cubase DAW, c. 1989 15

1.2 Ableton Live’s Session view 19
2.1 Sequencer for Arturia’s Pigments VST, with its small dice icons for randomization 24
2.2 Modulation Matrix for U-he’s Hive VST synthesizer 31
2.3 Drop-down menu for U-he Hive’s Modulation Matrix targets 31
2.4 Arturia 61-key MIDI controller 33
3.1 The author playing marimba 37
3.2 Rival Console’s “Forwardism” track idea sketch 38
3.3 Marimba chords loaded into Ableton Live’s Simpler 39
3.4 Marimba chords loaded onto Ableton Push pads 40
4.1 Reverb presets in Goodhertz’s Megaverb VST effect 54
4.2 Spitfire Audio’s Evolutions Evo Grid GUI 57
4.3 Nepalese singing bowl 65
5.1 12-pulse West African timeline pattern 90
6.1 Linear- versus cyclical-based music 94
6.2 Ableton Live’s loop brace with some parts muted 97
7.1 Zoomed-in audio waveform 109
7.2 Ableton Live’s Erosion effect 111
8.1 Hieronymus Bosch, The Conjurer (1505) 123
Acknowledgments

Thank you to the editorial staff at Routledge for their guidance; the Perspectives On Music Pro-
duction series editors Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Mark Marrington, and Jay Hodgson for their
ideas, feedback, and support for this project; Russell Hartenberger for reading and comment-
ing on a manuscript draft; Ryan Lee West for graciously letting me use one of his track sketch
photos; and Jack Mansager for his diagram rendering. This book is dedicated to the producers,
composers, musicians, and software discussed in this book whose music, ideas, and potentials
have been sources of inspiration: Ableton, Actress, Afrika Bambaataa, Akira Rabelais, Alva
Noto, Amon Tobin, Andrew Huang, Aphex Twin, Arovane, Arturia, Autechre, Arca, Arvo Pärt,
Autechre, Au5, Beatrice Dillon, Ben Lukas Boysen, Biosphere, Boards Of Canada, Boris Brej-
cha, Boxcutter, Brian Eno, Burial, Caterina Barbieri, Clark, Culprate, deadmau5, Deru, DJ Kool
Herc, Dyalla, Floating Points, Flying Lotus, Four Tet, Frequent, Giorgio Moroder, Glenn Gould,
G Jones, Goodhertz, Guy Sigsworth, Hank Shocklee, Harold Budd, Harold Melvin & The Blue
Notes, 4Hero, Holly Herndon, Ikonika, Imogen Heap, Isao Tomita, Ital Tek, Jamie Lidell, J Dilla,
Jean-Michel Jarre, Jimmy Bralower, Jlin, John Cage, John Frusciante, Jon Hopkins, Joris Voorn,
JVNA, Kaitlyn Aurelia-Smith, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Keith Jarrett, King Tubby, Lanark Artefax,
Laurel Halo, Laxity, Logos, Lorenzo Senni, Loscil, Mark Fell, Matmos, Max Loderbauer, Miles
Davis, Modartt, Mr. Bill, New Order, Nils Frahm, Noisia, Nosaj Thing, Objekt, Ólafur Arnalds,
Oneohtrix Point Never, Philth, Phuture, Pierre Schaeffer, Pole, Prince Paul, Public Enemy,
Ransby, r beny, Ricardo Villalobos, Rival Consoles, Rob Clouth, Robert Henke, Roni Size &
Reprazent, Sam Barker, Skee Mask, Skrillex, SOPHIE, Squarepusher, Steinberg, Stenny, Steve
Duda, Steve Hauschildt, Steve Reich, Ted Macero, Terry Riley, The Winstons, Timbaland, Tim
Hecker, Tipper, TM404, Tom Cosm, Tom Holkenborg, Trevor Horn, U-he, Virtual Riot, and Wil-
liam Basinski.
Introduction
Electronic music production as infinite game

Picture an electronic music producer at work. S/he sits with headphones on, facing the glow of a
computer screen, a hand on the trackpad, pointing and clicking, drawing in notes, dragging parts
around, making adjustments inside music software, listening to what happens. Working with
synthesis and samples, beats and rhythms, textures, soundscapes, and ambiances, s/he’s building
a track of shape-shifting sonics whose virtual world of timbres and relations goes beyond the
acoustic. The producer is in Accra or Berlin, Chile or Toronto, designing sounds by collaborat-
ing with his/her tools, shaping the music, and evolving perception. The track could be pop or hip
hop, floating ambient or kinetic bass, but making it—producing it—is an experimental, future-
oriented process that takes risks, that runs counter to convention (Demers, 2010: 7). This is the
producer’s Quest: to create sounds, structures, and feelings that have never been configured this
way before.
This book is about the craft of electronic music production and how producers think about
it. Its impetus is my own curiosity about how other producers approach production. The chap-
ters herein offer reflections on practitioners’ experiences, configuring a mix of history, how-to
guide, auto-ethnography, and idea sampling from a broad span of practices about the dynamics
of invention and artistry in electronic music production. The book explores the uncertainties and
discoveries of the production process, particularly as it relates to using DAW (digital audio work-
station) software, the most significant development in music production since the invention of
tape recording in the 1930s. DAWs such as Live, Logic, Cubase, FL Studio, Pro Tools, Reason,
BitWig, Reaper, and others turn computers into studios, open up production to an ever-growing
community of practitioners, and give musicians a dynamic meta-tool with which to compose. It
is within this context that I explore electronic music production by considering the interactions
between producers’ thinking, their tools, their workflows for using these tools, and the music that
results. From sound design to improvising, from editing to arranging and mixing, the craft of
production lives in the production process itself.
Producing electronic music is open-ended—a kind of infinite game that is seemingly without
end. The reason for this is that, at any point in the process of making a track, there is so much a
producer can do. Whether recording audio, synthesizing sounds, sequencing a groove, or chop-
ping samples, the producer has options upon options as to what’s next. This open-endedness
sometimes creates a sense that one’s music will never have definitive point of being finished. In
the DAW, a track is an elastic composition in flux, always one mouse click away from a variation
or a reworking, as fungible as our understanding of its potential to become something else. It is
for this reason that the perceptual aspect of production is key: the shape our music takes is inex-
tricably connected to what we notice and how we respond to that noticing. The craft of electronic
music production, then, is an experience that expands in proportion to our interaction with the
music in progress: the music takes form as we think through what to do (or not to do) next, react
to happy accidents, and deliberately refine its sounds. When you are producing, the uncertainties
2 Introduction
you encounter are your navigational system for figuring out where to go next. What’s next? is the
most urgent question, a springboard for forward motion as you leap from how the music sounds
now to the future of what it might become.

A perception and decision-making Quest for tacit knowledge

Philosophically, this book is guided by three ideas. The first is that how you interact with, and
respond to, your musical system (a set of tools) shapes your music. How you produce is influ-
enced by your prior musical experience, your go-to sounds (whether you use presets, loops, or
make your own sounds), and the musical controllers such as keyboards or drum pads you use
to get ideas into the computer. But experience and equipment merely support the most incisive
tools you already possess: your perception and decision-making. Your perceptions shape how
you understand and interpret what you hear, and your decision-making builds on this awareness
to bring you to the next steps.
The book’s second contention is that music production is a discovery adventure or, more
grandly, a Quest, a word from the Latin verb quaerere which means “to ask, seek.” Your Quest
is a seeking to discover ways of producing that make sense of your experience and distill your
disparate influences and obsessions into your own sound. Producing music is a gradual process,
which means that a production workflow that creates meaningful sonic results that are authenti-
cally yours is earned through experience. For producer Prince Paul (Paul Edward Huston), pro-
duction is asking questions:

I think that’s the best thing in production when you ask yourself questions, “Can I make this
go backwards but only the snares go forward?” And then you start to find out the answers to
those questions and that, I think, enables greater production.
(Schmidt, 2003)

The book’s third contention, which may sound obvious to some readers, is that the craft of elec-
tronic music production is learned through practice. The producer learns from doing, and more
specifically, from iterations over time. It is from doing and iterating over time that I have learned
about a software’s functionalities and how to make sounds feel one way or another. What may
not be obvious is that it is only from practice that a producer acquires tacit knowledge. Tacit
means understood or implied without being stated, and tacit knowledge is knowledge we arrive
at from personal experience that is difficult to verbalize and explain. The concept was developed
by Michael Polyani, who summarizes it as “we can know more than we can tell” (Polyani, 1966:
4). This book tries to tell more than I know by gathering and amplifying the tacit knowledge that
guides the practices of electronic music producers.
Following Prince Paul, each time you produce you set up a feedback loop between the ques-
tions you ask about sound and the answers you receive in sound, in effect developing your tacit
knowledge. This book is neither a how-to book nor does it proscribe a one-approach-fits-all
way to electronic music production, because such an approach does not exist. Moreover, even
though there are many established methods for how to make already recognized sounds (e.g. lo-fi
drums, or supersaw leads), I urge you to think of your production Quest as a way to evolve your
own processes and workflows for creating sounds you would like to hear—or didn’t know you
wanted to hear until you heard them, just now. In this sense, The Creative Electronic Music
Producer takes a How about? approach. As we will learn in the chapters that follow, there are
so many ways a producer can move. Some producers build upon beats, some work with melo-
dies or drones, some create sample libraries that become music, some sound design as they go
along, some prefer hardware synthesizers, some sample from field recordings, and some do a bit
 Introduction 3
of everything. But since no production approach is comprehensive and not all approaches may
speak to you, there is no reason to commit to a single way of working. A distinguishing quality of
attuned producers is that they are tacit knowledge-based “creative technicians” who build tracks
with whatever they have at hand, paying close attention and making careful decisions based upon
what they hear (Harding, 2020: 58). Paying close attention is key because it leads us to compel-
ling sounds and helps us decide where to take them next. In sum, electronic music production is a
call and response between you, the producer, and a set of tools you have configured as a musical
system. Production lives in the space between the music and our responding to its sounds. It lives
in the craft of uncovering in our tacit knowledge what we didn’t know we already know.

From outer inspiration to inner spur

I am neither a newcomer to electronic music production nor an especially advanced practitioner.
In 2020, I made a recording, Plentitudes, for marimba and electronic sounds. I had made other
recordings before this one, but this project was more involved, combining my marimba playing
with beats, melodies, bass lines, and processing. I took notes on my workflow and insights, my
mistakes and frustrations, and these notes were a starting point for the topics explored in this
book. As the music took shape, I wanted to connect my project with the practices of other elec-
tronic music producers by trying to understand the structure of their experience. I was interested
in learning about how other producers arrive at what they know, how they apply that knowledge
in their production work, and the dynamic relationship between their knowing and their sounds.
Like many producers, I am continually listening to the music of others and wondering how
and why they made it sound the way it does. Interesting and enchanting sounds motivate me,
and I have my antennae out for production concepts, tips, and hacks I might learn from. I read
interviews, watch production tutorials on YouTube (more about which in this book’s Interlude),
browse gear reviews and discussion threads, and sometimes even read software manuals. This
information about music production culture as a field of practice offers a sense of how others
work and what is possible to do with production tools. We can call this outer inspiration, a tun-
ing into a broader music electronic production community’s co-evolution with innovations in
technology, fashions of musical style, and producers’ responding to these shifts in their practices.
But understanding how others work is only part of acquiring tacit knowledge about production.1
The other part is discovering and refining one’s own production workflows. We can call this inner
spur. Compressed to its essentials, the inner spur of production has three components: make
music, learn from your making (especially from your mistakes), and iterate (repeat) the process.
Think of your producing as a complex system that creates feedback loops between the sounds
you make and how you respond to them. In this book, then, I urge producers to consider the pos-
sibility that more than specific concepts, tips, or hacks, the feedback loops you create yourself
are the engines of your producing. Feedback loops are learning machines we devise that spur us
towards insights. Which brings us to the topic of creativity.

Creativity, the experimentalist’s mindset, and making many

small mistakes
Creativity—“the generation of high‐quality, original, and elegant solutions to complex, novel,
ill‐defined problems” (Mumford et al., 2012)—is a fundamental tone running through this book.
The word is often used to describe using imagination or original ideas to produce something
beautiful or innovative or of value like a piece of music, a dance, a theorem, a novel, a sculpture
(cf. Boden, 2004: 1). As listeners and fans of electronic music production, we find a track creative
when we notice its sounds doing things that haven’t been done quite like this before. We hear
4 Introduction
new timbral, rhythmic, or melodic worlds; a spin on a musical style that is some way unique; or
we hear a producer approaching familiar sounds from new angles to create an unusual beauty or
unexpected feeling. We might say that producers think about creativity insofar as they seek the
original and unconventional over what has already been done, continually refining their craft in
pursuit of new sounds.
It is commonplace to understand creativity in terms of expression, because our made things
have an expressive form or intent. But, as I hope to show, we might also understand creativity as
a way of responding to a situation that has already been set in motion. In fact, for many produc-
ers, creativity is an approach to practice that engages with complexity and welcomes surprise
moments. In electronic music production, creativity happens in the interaction between the pro-
ducer and the musical system in which s/he works. The components of a musical system differ
for each producer, but ideally, the system has the potential for some degree of complexity and
nonlinearity, meaning that it can generate outputs different from, and greater than, its inputs.
Like a microphone placed in front of an amplifier that generates a screeching feedback tone,
a complex system connects a producer’s workflow and its resulting sounds in feedback loops
that can cascade in nonlinear ways over time. Just as the tone is picked up by the microphone
and amplified back into it, feedback loops carry a producer around and around the circuit of a
system. By trying things out, making small changes, swapping sounds, routing in effects, and so
on, any one of a producer’s creative decisions can have huge output implications. As complex-
ity theorist Donella H. Meadows notes, “complex and delightful patterns can evolve from quite
simple sets of rules” (Meadows, 2008: 159). From a complexity perspective then, producing
electronic music is a way of responding to nonlinear, turbulent, and dynamic processes never
entirely under the producer’s control. As we will learn in Chapter 2, the DAW or any other con-
figuration of technologies used as a musical system is a powerful tool for production discoveries
through complexity.
This book reframes conventional thinking about creativity in electronic music production
and its implications for how we work, drawing on insights from producers as well as the work
of practitioners outside of the musical realm.2 Perhaps its most vital production insight is that
creativity does not emerge from random anywheres, but from a system in which it can flourish.
Producers arrive at such systems through experimentation, random discoveries, and iteration.
As we adopt the mindset that creativity in production is not inspiration per se, but experimenta-
tion and discovery, not waiting for good ideas to appear but instead playing with whatever one
has (a sound, a pattern, a sample, a parameter, a malfunction), we position ourselves to discover
novel ways of combining and transforming our materials to make new sounds. Adopting an
experimentalist’s tinkering and iterative mindset, we notice creative moments emerging almost
as if by their own powers—as a by-product of our having spent time trying things out. Whether
you are new to electronic music production or an experienced practitioner, give yourself permis-
sion to continually experiment, repeatedly make many small mistakes, and disrupt your habitual
ways of working.3

Three aims
In the chapters that follow I interweave my work on Plentitudes with the history of electronic
music production and the practices of other producers whose sounds, approaches, ideas, and
sense of adventure have inspired me. (Examples of their music are provided in this book’s Sug-
gested Listening.) The chapters are roughly chronological, each one considering a different facet
of producing electronic music: setting up a musical system, choosing sounds, improvising and
recording ideas, rhythm programming, disruption, editing, arranging, and mixing. While these
production tasks are not necessarily distinct—in practice they often overlap and can happen in
 Introduction 5
any order—by treating them separately I hope to convey the essentials of their workflows, guid-
ing concepts, and links to broader themes in the history of music production. In sum, I have three
aims:

1 to suggest ways of thinking holistically about creativity in electronic music production as

a complex and dynamic system by describing the open-ended, ever-changing encounter
between the music producer and sound’s enchanting landscape of possibilities
2 to distill lessons from experiences of adventure, uncertainty, serendipity, complexity, and
feedback loops that arise when producing electronic music
3 to suggest ways of moving production forward through iterative, trial and error-based tinker-
ing, improvising, exploring, recombining, and transforming

Think of this book as a mixing console through which to combine ideas about electronic music
production. Think of its chapters as channel faders and effects send knobs on a mixing con-
sole, with each fader on the console raising the volume on a different theme of the text, each
knob routing these themes to the thoughts of other producers and back again, and blending this
shared tacit knowledge about production into a composite mix. Like a reverb+delay+distortion
chain of effects processing a sound, The Creative Electronic Music Producer routes sounds into
words, listens for ghost notes and reverb tails, and explains production processes as circuits of
understanding.

Chapter outline
This book’s chapters combine a mix of reflections, examples, and case studies to consider the
practice of electronic music production through a series of related topics. Chapter 1 works back-
wards from our current production moment to trace a brief history of audio production in which
I explore the figure of the music producer, the studio as compositional tool concept, and the
advent of MIDI, digital sampling, and the DAW. A case study on Ableton Live, the most influ-
ential DAW of the past two decades, explains how the software encourages an experimentalist
mindset in electronic music production. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of basic
DAW topology and concepts to orient the novice producer.
Chapter 2 explains the importance of configuring complex musical systems and workflows for
interacting with them. I provide numerous examples of such systems, with a case study on Brian
Eno’s early systems of sonic treatments and generative loop machines. The chapter concludes
with suggestions for setting up a music production system, controllers, templates and sound sets,
and how to begin the process.
Chapter 3 considers the beginnings of a production project. I connect my experience working
on Plentitudes with insights from other composers and producers, describing broad concepts to
consider when starting a project that help the producer interact with a musical system. The con-
cepts are: devising the appropriate system for a musical gesture, discovering the dialectics among
our ideas and our musical system and how they “talk” to one another, focusing on a small thing
to discover everything musical in it, production placeholders and through-lines, finding permuta-
tions and combinations of a limited sound set to create series of variations, and letting tools and
their workflows guide and outsource creativity. I also consider how improvisation shapes many
facets of production: finding interesting sounds, happening upon accidental counterpoint, being
lost and getting un-lost, using call and response, emulating the sound of a virtual band, and cap-
turing maximum musicality. I conclude by discussing the importance of mindset, the value of
seeking out the unusual to allow for interesting production discoveries, and steps for resisting the
musically predicable.
6 Introduction
Chapter 4 examines presets and sound design in electronic music production. I trace a history
of preset sounds from the one-touch rhythms on home organs, 1980s synthesizer patches, to
today’s VST plug-ins, sample packs, and production “composing kits,” with a case study on Spit-
fire Audio’s Composer Toolkits. Building upon my experience designing sounds to accompany
my marimba playing, I consider how producers negotiate limited sound sets, production discon-
nects, the 80% lesson, synthesis thinking, the acoustic sound ideal, and sonic uncanny valleys. In
sum, despite the plethora of sounds available to producers today, designing one’s own sounds is
the surest path to finding one’s own production voice.
Interlude: YouTube electronic music tutorials considers representations of electronic music
production and fandom in online video tutorials. First I explain the role fandom plays in elec-
tronic music production, focusing on the specialized activity of producer-fans who are ama-
teur producers themselves. Some of these producer-fans create production tutorials, while others
watch the tutorials and leave comments. This fan activity offer us a way to assess how knowledge
about music production is conveyed and consumed. Next I turn to five production tutorial exam-
ples from the YouTube channels of Tom Cosm, Andrew Huang, Bill Day (Mr. Bill), Joel Zim-
merman (deadmau5), and Christian Valentin Brunn (Virtual Riot). These videos offer aspiring
producers a plethora of ideas about techniques and workflows for sound design, such as Brunn’s
six production concepts: Create the MIDI part first, Wet and dry contrast, Layering, Layers of
rhythmic movement, Random-sounding parts, and Make boring sounds more interesting. In sum,
producers’ workflows, techniques, commentary, and choice of sounds give us a sense of tacit
production knowledge in action, inspiring us on our own production Quests.
Chapter 5 traces a history of rhythm programming, one of the most intricate and impactful
components of electronic music production. The chapter explores how producers from the 1980s
onwards used drum machines, pad-based Grid controllers, and then DAWs to program rhythms.
I show how producers’ encounters with these technologies shaped how they think about rhythm
and beat construction. Next I discuss the anatomy of rhythmic grooves as constructions with a
limited set of sounds in tension and opposition that develop over time, and offer five rhythm pro-
gramming examples. I conclude with five general rhythmic principles applicable to any musical
context: play grooves, layer rhythmic parts, go beyond drum fills and short-term phrasing, think
in timelines and pulsation, and edit sounds and rhythms.
Chapter 6 examines moments of disruption in the music production process that can change
the direction of a track-in-progress. I explore the implications of disruption in the form of lin-
ear and nonlinear ways of working, creating variations from a single sound, reincorporating
mistakes, applying effects in layers, and musical transitions. Two case studies, on the musics of
producers Sam Barker and Lorenzo Senni, consider the disruptive techniques of muting four-on-
the-floor beats and isolating build-ups. I argue that disruption requires the producer to subvert
a workflow, question methods, deconstruct or distort too-clean or otherwise predictable sounds,
re-pitch and re-arrange sounds, or apply some other form of change.
Chapter 7 examines the craft of editing. As the alteration of sounds after their initial record-
ing, sequencing, or sound design, editing is the primary axis of producing electronic music dis-
persed along every stage of making a track. Building upon online fan discussion about the editing
prowess of producer David Tipper (Tipper), I consider editing from several perspectives: the
zoomed-in view in a DAW, as a meta-tool, as performance, as a way to develop phrasing, and as
a balancing of repetition with variation. I conclude by elaborating on producer Mr. Bill’s idea of
editing as a game of amounts.
Chapter 8 examines arranging and mixing, which comprise the organization of a track into its
final linear sequence and sonic balance. In Part 1, I build on two examples drawn from producer-
fan discussions on Reddit and Twitter to explore contrasting approaches to arranging: timed/
measured sections versus organized tapestries of parts. Next I consider the cons and pros of
 Introduction 7
viewing the arrangement as a linear timeline in the DAW, producer Kara-Lis Coverdale’s idea
of arrangements as expressions of narrative and complexity, and producer TJ Hertz (Objekt)’s
idea of arrangements as by-products of effective automation of parts, transitions, and effects fills.
The section concludes with a case study on Autechre’s “bladelores”, a 2013 track that exemplifies
arrangement as an ever-changing process unto itself. In Part 2, I consider mixing in production as
a kind of perceptual conjuring that creates enchantment. I present a mixing checklist for hearing
the music’s unfolding as a sonic landscape that balances four dimensions: stereo field, frequency
spectrum, front to back depth, and movement of these dimensions over time. Next I consider les-
sons from mixing on headphones, the difficulty of balancing “objective” listening with subjective
experience, the power of muting and reducing sounds, and how a mix compresses the time of
its making. I conclude with six general arranging and mixing concepts relevant to any musical
context: contrast, compensations, musical lines, surprise, efficiency, and accumulations.
The concluding chapter brings together the book’s broad themes into a final mix. I build on
producer Amon Tobin’s concept of pushing forward to describe the urgency of hearing beyond
the particularities of our musical systems to learning how to think with, and through, them.
I begin with four lessons from the feedback loop of production: make many small errors through
experimentation, work on the most problematic thing, take note of what you are doing, and let
your changing perception of your work feed back into your process. Next I propose seven prin-
ciples by which to push forward one’s productions: play and capture, develop the simple into the
complex, notice and keep going, refine, reduce and arrange, assess quality, and take your time.
I conclude by considering types of failure and how to curate authenticity.
I hope that in this book’s gleanings on creativity in electronic music production you will find
resonant ideas you can use on your own production Quest. Let’s begin.

Notes
1 In an essay about advanced competency as a form of magic, the blogger autotranslucence suggests we
absorb “the alien mental models” of other artists: “When you are attempting to learn implicit knowledge
that by definition you don’t understand, it is important to have a bunch of examples in front of you to feed
your brain’s pattern-recognition systems” (autotranslucence, 2018).
2 Practitioners including architects, chefs, filmmakers, cartoonists, computer programmers, neuroscien-
tists, mathematicians, inventors, and high-wire walkers. Insights abound in Leski (2015), Adria (2010),
Catmull (2014), Lynch (2007), Snider (2017), Kocienda (2018), Eagleman and Brandt (2017), du Sautoy
(2020), Taleb (2014), Rubik (2020), and Petit (2015).
3 As you experiment, make mistakes, and disrupt yourself, you can also take notes on your production
practice to understand what is working and what isn’t. Like your production practice, your notes will cre-
ate their own feedback loop over time to steer you in a direction you want to go. In appendix to his 1959
book, The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills explains the value of keeping a journal to capture
any “fringe thoughts” to lay the groundwork for “systematic reflection” on one’s work (Mills, 2000: 196).
1 Electronic music production, the
producer, and the enchanted DAW

Introduction: Four Tet’s studio

On Twitter in 2017, the producer Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) shared a photo of his studio, which
consisted of a laptop computer, the DAW software Ableton Live, a small MIDI keyboard, an
audio interface, and a set of monitors. “This is where I recorded and mixed the album and all the
gear I used,” he wrote. Hebden’s photo and caption quickly became a meme that inspired humor-
ous responses on Twitter from fellow producers who responded in turn with their own photos of
fictitious home studios, some of which featured conspicuously dated technologies, such as 1980s
mobile phones and video game consoles (Wilson, 2017).
It was unclear from these responses whether or not musicians were teasing Hebden; after all,
publicizing one’s minimalist studio setup could be interpreted as a humble brag about one’s
advanced production skills. But perhaps Hebden was simply showing the production community
how little one requires to make music “in the box” of software. The photo captured the intersec-
tion of a minimum of gear with a quaint domesticity: the entire studio fit onto a small table, and
a window behind it framed a forest setting outside. Intended or not, here was a reminder of the
compactness and power of a 21st-century electronic music studio.
In this chapter, I work backwards from Hebden’s studio to explore how we arrived at our
current moment in electronic music production. I begin by tracing a brief history of music pro-
duction, the figure of the music producer, and three digital technologies—sampling, MIDI, and
DAW software—that remain fundamental to electronic music production today. Next, I consider
Ableton Live, the popular DAW whose design and capabilities are a paradigmatic example of
software as a “laboratory” in which to work with sound. I conclude by explaining the DAW’s
basic topology and concepts: arrangement and clip views, the mixer, audio recording and MIDI
sequencing, signal routing and effects processing, automation, and mixing.

A brief history of music production and the producer

In our era when producers produce on laptop computers, it is easy to forget that the production
process was not always so streamlined and accessible. Recording once required bulky equip-
ment and technicians trained to operate it, and over the past hundred years or so, the evolu-
tion of record production and its technologies is a chronicle of ever-increasing fidelity and
control over sound. In the early 20th century, recordings were always live recordings. Making
a record required ensembles of musicians to be positioned around a mechanical recording
device that captured their collective sound via a large conical horn and physically inscribed
its vibrations onto a rotating wax disc. For a lead singer or instrumental soloist to be heard,
they had to be positioned closest to the device so that their sound was recorded louder than
 Electronic music production 9
the rest of the ensemble. Even with such proximal adjustments, the sound quality of early
ragtime and jazz mono recordings, for instance, was an indistinct mid-range mush lacking
clarity and depth.1
With the development of electronic microphones, signal amplifiers, and recorders in the mid-
1920s, the frequency range of recordings greatly improved, and by the 1940s, magnetic tape
recording, developed by the AEG company in Germany, introduced another leap in sound fidelity
and led to the first stereo recordings. Tape’s ease of editing, which had been impossible with disc
recording, led to its quick adoption by radio and the music industry in the United States. Within a
few years, components of tape-based audio production had evolved, which remain fundamental
today, including: overdubbing and editing, “stereo (since the fifties) and front/back placement,
refinement of sounds relative to each other by means of equalization, augmentation with effects,
and dynamic control” (Burgess, 2014: 112).
Music production is an omnidirectional and comprehensive way of making music. Produc-
tion, notes audio production historian Richard Burgess, “fuses the composition, arrangement,
orchestration, interpretation, improvisations, timbral qualities, and performance or performances
into an immutable sonic whole” (Burgess, 2014: 1). The architect of this fusion is the producer,
a person with “a specific set of musical competencies pertaining to the production of a record”
(Shelvock, 2020: 3). The producer figure extends back at least to the work of Les Paul, an Ameri-
can guitarist and recording enthusiast who pioneered various tape recording techniques in the
1940s and 50s, such as sound on sound, building layered textures using two tape machines, and
varispeed, using a sound recorded at half speed then playing it back at regular speed to produce a
higher pitch (Burgess, 2014: 51). Paul’s experimental, one-man band approach created a template
for the producer’s craft, and his widely adopted production methods became a toolkit with which
to explore “a gradational compositional approach” to recording (ibid.: 54). As heard on songs
such as “How High The Moon”, a 1951 track which featured overdubbed tracks of guitar, bass,
and singing, Paul’s multi-track techniques, notes Burgess,

disengaged production from real time, teased apart its component strands, and approached
it as an incremental composition in sound, conflating it with the songwriting, arranging,
orchestration, performance, and technical elements.
(Burgess, 2014: 51)

Paul’s approach to music production as an incremental composition in sound is fundamental

because it showed in practice what Burgess identifies as “a magnitudinous expansion of agency
by which producers could influence the musical and sonic outcome” of a recording (ibid.: 1). In
this way, Paul’s tracks presaged and influenced the elaborate multi-track recordings of the Bea-
tles, the Beach Boys, and many other 1960s rock and pop bands. Multi-track recording put the
producer at the helm of the studio and created new musical possibilities via a mode of production
that effectively turned the recording engineer into a mixer who was fast becoming recognized as
“a musical creator of a new kind” (Chanan, 1995: 270).
It was during this time that the producer became known as the person in charge of a recording’s
overall sound. An example is George Martin, the producer at Abbey Road studios who worked
with The Beatles. Martin drew on his experience recording and arranging classical music and
comedy albums to help The Beatles achieve unusual sounds in the studio. His creative contribu-
tions included arranging parts for string quartet, making tape loop collages, and devising unusual
miking and sound design techniques (with Abbey Road’s engineer, Geoff Emerick). Another pro-
ducer from this era is Phil Spector, who devised his “wall of sound” aesthetic by recording and
overdubbing large bands with multiple instruments doubling parts, and applying large amounts
10 Electronic music production
of echo to the result. This lush sound can be heard on The Ronettes’ 1963 track, “Be My Baby.”
Spector described his incremental-based aesthetic as important as the song itself:

I was looking for a sound . . . so strong that if the material was not the greatest, the sound
would carry the record. It was a case of augmenting, augmenting. It all fitted together like
a jigsaw.
(Buskin, 2007)

Beginning in the 1960s and paralleling the rise of the music producer, recording sessions
took place mostly in acoustically treated studios equipped with microphones for capturing
the sounds of musicians, a mixing console for recording them onto multi-track reel to reel
tape machines, and an array of hardware signal processing devices (e.g. compressors, plate
reverbs, distortion boxes) through which to alter the sounds either during or post-recording.
Within the studio space, there were clear demarcations among musicians, sound engineer, and
producer: musicians performed the music, while the engineer and producer decided how to
best record and mix the performance. But technological tinkering in the studio blurred these
distinct musical roles. Consider a few examples: The Beatles’ production adventures with
Martin for Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Club Hearts Band, Joe Meek’s boldly pushing compres-
sors “to create pumping and breathing effects” for his instrumental space age pop album with
The Tornados, Telstar (Cleveland, 2014), pianist Glenn Gould’s “post-performance editorial”
decisions to tape-splice together his best takes of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier with
engineers at CBC Radio (Gould, 1966: 53), Osbourne Ruddock (King Tubby)’s dub remixes
that dismantled reggae tracks “into something else entirely” by using delay and echo effects
(Hebdige, 1987: 83), or engineer Ted Macero’s cut and paste recording collages for Miles
Davis’ In A Silent Way. Macero’s description of his production approach with Miles explains
the goal of this technological tinkering, and remains useful advice for producers today: “How
can I make this better? It’s good, but electronically can we do something to give it more
impact?” (Lee, 1997) Producers such as Paul, Martin, Meek, Spector, Gould, Ruddock, and
Macero understood how the techniques of music production could deeply shape a music’s
sound and feel.2
The centerpiece of recording studios had always been the mixing console, a device for com-
bining multiple audio signals on separate channels into a single stereo output. In 1981, Solid
State Logic (SSL) introduced the first consoles with total mix recall, which allowed producers to
“perform” their volume and effects changes to mixes in a DJ way and have the console remember
these moves through computerized automation, “thus eliminating the reliance on human memory
or indeed channel strip notes jotted on pieces of paper” (Bennett, 2019: 38). Crucially, with these
consoles the mixing component of music production “began to be an iterative process rather than
a performance” (Burgess, 2014: 101). In this way, SSL automation presaged the vast automation
capabilities that are now a standard feature of the DAW software on your laptop.
Fast forward back to Hebden’s home studio: electronic music producers create in the tradition
of record production, but they control and oversee every aspect of a musical project—from con-
ception, performance and recording, sound design and editing, to arranging and mixing. Indeed,
it is common practice, notes Richard Burgess, “for the same person . . . to write, perform, arrange,
engineer, and produce hit tracks” (Burgess, 2020: 95). Today, electronic music producers mostly
work alone using DAW-based musical systems, sometimes with additional hardware such as
synthesizers and signal processors. Playing the roles of musician, sound designer, and engineer
overseeing every aspect of their tracks, producers record, edit, and mix as they go, shaping and
refining the music at each step of the process. In short, in electronic music production, the pro-
ducer is the composer (Moorefield, 2005).
 Electronic music production 11
Recording as the basis for composing
In 1979, the producer and production philosopher Brian Eno gave a talk in New York City titled
“The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool” (Eno, 1979). Amplifying (though not acknowl-
edging) the studio-as-instrument approach of producers such as Les Paul and Joe Meek from a
few decades earlier, Eno explained the virtues of using the studio’s functionalities as a springboard
for composing. Eno, who once played synthesizers with Roxy Music, recognized the potential of
the studio not merely as a place for recording already composed music, but for recording as the
basis for composing. Rather than rehearse and arrange music first and then go into the studio to
record a completed track, Eno advocated for tape recording-based composing music in an addi-
tive way—for example, by overdubbing, sound designing, and editing the results—and being
responsive to the chance accidents and discoveries that inevitably arise while working among the
studio’s connected technologies. In a 2011 interview, he explained the approach:

You could make a piece over an extended period of time—it didn’t have to preexist the pro-
cess, you could make it up as you went. And you could make it like you would a painting—
you could put something on, scrape something else off. It stopped being something that
was located at one moment in time. It started being a process that you could engage in over
months, or even years.
(Baccigaluppi & Crane, 2011)

Eno had been putting this philosophy into play since the mid-1970s using his Oblique Strategies,
a set of aphorisms he devised with the visual artist Peter Schmidt that were printed on a deck
of cards and intended to help artists think differently about creative problems. Eno had used
these aphorisms and the studio as a compositional tool approach in his work with the ambient
keyboardist Harold Budd, King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, and later with David Byrne, U2,
and Coldplay. In these collaborations, a recurring theme in Eno’s producing was not so much
pursuing a particular sound, but rather encouraging artists to focus on the potentials of the pro-
cess at hand, and most importantly, maintain a supple awareness in the studio. For Eno, the most
important idea is attention:

I’ve come to think that attention is the most important thing in a studio situation. The atten-
tion to notice when something new is starting, the attention to pick up on the mood in the
room and not be emotionally clumsy, the attention to see what’s needed before it is actually
needed, the attention that arises from staying awake while you’re working instead of lapsing
into autopilot.
(Baccigaluppi & Crane, 2011)

MIDI
In the early 1980s, the processes of popular music production and the studio’s configuration as a
compositional tool expanded exponentially in response to two technological developments. The
first was an array of relatively affordable synthesizers, sequencers, drum machines, and samplers
from companies including Roland, Korg, Yamaha, Oberheim, Sequential Circuits, Linn Elec-
tronics, Ensoniq, E-mu Systems, and Akai. The second development was an electronics com-
munication protocol called MIDI, or musical instrument digital interface. Jointly devised by
Roland and Sequential Circuits’ founder Dave Smith, MIDI enabled electronic instruments to
be connected and synchronized with one another. MIDI remains essential to electronic music
production today. Smith explains that the reason MIDI has endured is simply that it was cheap
12 Electronic music production
to implement, and “still covers about 95% of what people need to do” (Schmidt, 2014). MIDI
and popular MIDI-compatible instruments like the Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer, notes Ryan Did-
duck, “helped reorganize the structure of musical data . . . altering the aesthetic qualities of music
subsequently made with them” (Didduck, 2017: 90). Being able to perfectly sync MIDI devices
was as fundamental to the aesthetics of 1980s music production as Les Paul’s incremental com-
position in sound technique had been to the making of classic rock records in the 1960s. With a
MIDI-connected synthesizer and drum machine, for example, a musician could trigger multiple
patterns that played together perfectly. Repeating patterns of MIDI notes known as sequences
could be recorded and stored onboard the instruments themselves, and soon, in MIDI sequencing
software such as Cubase (discussed further in this chapter). In short, MIDI opened up a new way
of thinking about composing in terms of “an unprecedented degree of post-performance control
to an instrumentalist or engineer” (Barry, 2017: 158).
From its inception, MIDI had its detractors who said that the protocol constrained the sound
of the music made with it by imposing a binary/on-off/one-zero grid. MIDI’s grid, notes Robert
Barry, suggested “certain ways of working—the use of quantized rhythms and discrete, tempered
pitch classes—by making them simpler to do, making them the ‘default’ settings” (Barry, 2017:
159). Yet it was precisely MIDI’s default constraints that freed music producers from the instru-
mental conventions of a traditional band of musicians, a topic we discuss further in Chapter 3.
MIDI shaped popular music’s sound by nudging musicians to recognize a new composing toolkit
comprised of programmed drum patterns, step-sequenced melodies, and chord progressions with
which to work. MIDI’s fixed grid, observes electronic music producer Stefan Goldmann, became
a structural feature, shifting producers’ attention onto a new field of play:

MIDI sequencing and looped audio hardly allowed for the micro rhythmic and dynamic vari-
ations a manual performance granted, yet any detail that was mere nuance before could be
fixed rigidly and thus become structurally relevant. It is precisely the repetitive grid that can
make minute variations as stable as pitches on a piano. New fields of play. This very shift-
ing of attention, the reallocation of both creativity and generic aspects is what keeps music
diverse, constantly evolving without surpassing its predecessors.
(Goldmann, 2015: 18)

Digital sampling
A few years prior to MIDI, digital sampling was developed by Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel of
the Australian digital audio company Fairlight, whose Fairlight instrument, released in 1979,
combined synthesis and digital sampling into a kind of pre-DAW music workstation. “The digi-
tal memory recorder it contained was an important feature,” notes Paul Harkins in his history
of digital sampling, “anticipating the development of MIDI sequencing and the Digital Audio
Workstation (DAW)” (Harkins, 2020: 6-7). Although the concept and practice extends back to
the 1940s with Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète tape loops of train sounds, collage experi-
ments that “echo still in all contemporary sample-based music” (Brend, 2012: 24), Ryrie and
Vogel coined the term sampling to describe their process of digitally playing back short segments
of an audio recording at different pitches to reconstitute its sound. As Vogel summed up the seem-
ingly magical workings of their invention: “Just take the sounds, whack them in the memory and
away you go” (Hamer, 2005). The Fairlight was used by experimentally minded pop producers,
including Trevor Horn, Kate Bush, and Peter Gabriel, who wove samples of everyday sounds
and non-western instruments into their tracks (Harkins, 2020: 28–32). “Most other people didn’t
understand at the time,” said Horn, “sampling was like a mystical world” (Peel, 2005). Another
early sampling system was the Synclavier I and Synclavier II by New England Digital. Released
 Electronic music production 13
in 1977 and 1980, both of these instruments were marketed as “Tapeless Studios.” While the
Fairlight and Synclavier cost tens of thousands of dollars and were used mainly by wealthy
pop stars, the instruments were harbingers of future ways of working with sound as a malleable
material.
By the mid-1980s, more affordable digital samplers, such Ensoniq’s Mirage, E-mu Systems’
SP-12 and SP-1200, and Akai’s MPC, were helping musicians devise new production workflows
for building tracks. Hip hop musicians, for example, moved from using turntables to samplers,
using the SP-12 /1200 and the MPC60 to create breakbeat- and sample-based song structures.
Samplers were becoming recognized as meta-instruments built from already recorded sounds
that “made sonic material much more reusable, malleable and open to transformation,” thereby
fundamentally changing the production process (Stratchan, 2017: 5). Here is drum and bass
producer Roni Size describing how he and his Reprazent production crew made their 1997 track,
“Brown Paper Bag”:

We wanted to make music that sounded like the future. . . ‘Brown Paper Bag’ started off as
samples of double bass licks. I chopped them up on the sampler and suddenly there was a
song.
(Simpson, 2018a)

Throughout the 1980s, 90s, and beyond, future-oriented producers used samplers and other
MIDI-connected electronic instruments to build tracks that would define the sound of new
wave pop, hip hop, and the myriad varieties of electronic dance music.

Reams of musical data in accessible form: Steinberg’s Cubase

Along with MIDI and affordable digital samplers, the 1980s saw the emergence of first-generation
DAW software. Computers had been used in music since the 1950s. In 1951, the Ferranti Mark 1
computer at the University of Manchester was programmed to play “God Save The Queen” and
in 1957, Max Matthews used his MUSIC I software at Bell Labs to perform a 17-second compo-
sition (Prior, 2018: 63). By the 1970s and early 80s, computer processing had improved and the
first home computers, such as the Apple II and Atari 520ST, appeared. As Michael Chanan notes
in his history of the composer, the computer during this time was fast becoming “the univer-
sal electronic musical instrument, subsuming all types of electronic and electro-acoustic music
production” (Chanan, 1999: 272). The emergence of DAW software, then, brought together a
constellation of technologies. In his book Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society, Nick
Prior locates DAWs as “fitted neatly into an historical moment that drew together pre-existing
innovations in keyboard-controlled performance programs . . . MIDI . . . the lowering of manu-
facturing costs and the increasing domestication of the PC” (Prior, 2018: 71).
An early DAW innovator was Steinberg Research, a company formed in 1984 by Karl “Char-
lie” Steinberg, a musician and studio engineer, and Manfred Rürup, a keyboard player. Stein-
berg’s first product was a 16-track MIDI sequencer called Multitrack Recorder, which was soon
developed into Pro-16, a 16-track MIDI sequencer for the Commodore 64, a popular home com-
puter at the time. Inspired by an Atari 520ST they had seen at a trade show that had built-in MIDI
ports and a mouse-controlled interface, Steinberg and Rürup saw “the possibility of making
a professional product that could be used everywhere without additional interfaces” (Ramage,
2010). In 1983, Steinberg released the successor to Pro-16, Pro-24, designed for Atari’s 520ST,
a more powerful computer than the Commodore. Pro-24 offered 24 tracks of MIDI sequencing,
each track with independent controls for volume, panning, and note velocity. The software also
14 Electronic music production
introduced several editing screens, including a MIDI edit list and a step sequencer-style grid edi-
tor for drum parts, quantization timing correction, and score notation. Most importantly, it was
the first software to feature an arrangement page that “listed the tracks vertically and the timeline
horizontally, something which actually changed the way people think about composing” (Twells,
2016). In 1989, Steinberg released Cubit, soon renamed Cubase. A magazine ad touted Stein-
berg’s Visual Song Processing (ViSP) technology, which was a way to describe the horizontal
display of a song’s MIDI parts:

With ViSP you have a clear visual representation of your song at all times, you can watch
as your music takes shape from beginning to end and you have total accessibility, without
constraint, to go anywhere, anytime, in real-time.
(RetroSynthAds, 2019)

Displaying a song’s arrangement of MIDI parts was just one of the DAW’s many conveniences.
A 1989 review of Cubase in Music Technology magazine described the software as “the ulti-
mate expression of the programmer’s art” and declared, “the onus is on the machine to come to
terms with the often capricious temperament of its human operator rather than vice versa” (Lord,
1989). Curiously, the reviewer, Nigel Lord, got the relationship between the DAW and its user
backwards: over the subsequent decades the onus would be on electronic music producers to fig-
ure out ways of working around the quirks of computer-based production. Nevertheless, Lord’s
description of Cubase’s capabilities for recording, editing, and arranging MIDI still resonates.
The software, he said, “leaves you feeling slightly breathless is in its ability to see things quite
literally—your way. It can lay before you reams of fiendishly complex data in an astonishingly
accessible—and above all, human form” (ibid.). In his study of synth pop producer Trevor Horn,
Timothy Warner explains in broad strokes how MIDI sequencing’s reams of data impacted 1980s
electronic music production practices, recalling Eno’s composing in an additive way concept:

The development of MIDI, and particularly MIDI sequencing programs, during the 1980s
enabled the manipulation of musical material in new ways: ideas can be developed by work-
ing directly with sound and then copied, ‘pasted’ and, if necessary, modified wherever might
seem appropriate. Hence, rather than beginning with a specific structure in mind, musicians
can allow structures to evolve though an investigation of the potential for combining the
various ideas.
(Warner, 2003: 87, italics added)

The first version of Cubase for the Apple Computer was released in 1990, and in 1991 Cubase
Audio was released, which supported recording audio tracks as well as MIDI. In 1996, Cubase
introduced VST (Virtual Studio Technology), a protocol for virtual effects plug-ins to be used
inside the software, allowing Cubase “to use the host computer’s native processing power to
manipulate audio in real time” (Future Music, 2011). In 1999, Steinberg’s VST 2.0 protocol
allowed plug-ins to be controlled by MIDI. This functionality has had perhaps as profound an
impact on electronic music production as MIDI itself. VST 2.0 allowed producers to use MIDI-
mapped parameter automation in their productions—in effect, bringing the total recall of an SSL
mixing console into new sonic territories. Steinberg soon licensed the VST technology to other
third party plug-in developers, which in turn led to VST instruments and effects becoming a lead-
ing plug-in format. Finally, Cubase’s graphical user interface (GUI) introduced features that have
since become staples of all DAWs: it displayed the MIDI data on each track and allowed users
to move MIDI sequences around by clicking on and dragging them using their computer mouse,
while right-clicking brought up a toolbox of editing options (Figure 1.1).
 Electronic music production 15

Figure 1.1 Key Edit window in Steinberg’s Cubase DAW, c. 1989

In the 1990s, as Steinberg was developing new versions of Cubase, other music technology
companies developed their own DAW software. In 1990, Mark of the Unicorn released Digital
Performer; in 1991, Digidesign launched ProTools; and in 1992, Emagic created Emagic Logic
(which became Apple’s Logic Pro). These programs were soon joined by Image-Line’s Fruity
Loops in 1997, Propellerhead’s Reason in 2000, and Ableton’s Live in 2001.
These DAWs looked visually similar, providing an Arrangement page in which to display
musical data on a horizontal, left-to-right timeline, coupled with a mixing console screen with
track volume faders, effects Sends, Pan knobs, Mute and Solo buttons, and other controls. With
their timelines, pop-up windows, database-style layouts, drop-down menus (Stratchan, 2017: 77),
drag-drop, cut-paste, and other audio editing functions (Holmes, 2008: 301), DAWs re-framed
music production as “a malleable digital landscape” (Prior, 2009: 87) in which the graphic rep-
resentation of musical events presented musicians with “sound as an object rather than a stream”
(Zagorski-Thomas, 2014: 134). Users of DAW software had to learn a new production workflow,
specifically: they “were expected to use the computer mouse to select and change parameters”
(Prior, 2008). The DAW, explains Nick Prior, required the producer learn to think digitally:

Thinking digitally . . . requires a shift in the attachments, modes and haptic efforts needed to
compose within techno-spaces comprising windows-type arrangements, menus, scroll bars
and cursors that are controlled with a mouse, trackpad or MIDI controller.
(Prior, 2018: 74)

All of this to say that the DAW + computers irrevocably introduced a new way of music produc-
tion: mouse pointing-and-clicking.
16 Electronic music production
The DAW
There are no theoretical limitations to the performance of the computer as a source of musical
sounds, in contrast to the performance of ordinary instruments.
—Max V. Matthews3

Three decades after Steinberg’s Cubase, the DAW remains the most significant development
in electronic music production since the advent of tape recording insofar as it changed how
musicians produce music, the sound of that music, and the experience of musician-music tech-
nology interaction. DAWs are “surely significant cultural objects,” notes Prior, “equivalent to
studios, guitars or synthesizers in the impact they have had on music and therefore appropriate
for detailed studies on their design, use and marketing” (Prior, 2018: 75). Between the develop-
ment of Cubase in 1989 and Ableton Live in 2001 (see the Case Study further in this chapter),
DAWs encapsulated the history of music production practices by reproducing and extending the
functionality of the recording studio. Using a DAW, MIDI sequencing, audio recording, editing,
and mixing “could now be done in one environment” (Stratchan, 2017: 77). At the same time,
the scope the electronic music producer broadened as his/her skills merged the practices of com-
poser, performer, DJ, arranger, producer, and engineer. By the 2000s, a generation of musicians
“with little or no experience of the hardware studio” were learning production in exclusively
software-based environments (Prior, 2008: 924). In fact, many of the artists discussed in this
book, including deadmau5, Virtual Riot, Mr. Bill, and Jlin, began their production careers in the
DAWs Cubase, Reason, FL Studio, and Live.
Like a microphone that picks up sounds from all over, the DAW is an omnidirectional compo-
sitional interface, inviting the producer into music making from multiple vantage points. Where
a band once composed and rehearsed a song and then went into a studio to record it, now the
production moment is fluid, connecting what were previously separate activities and domains of
musical or technical expertise into a single compositional experience. Moreover, a significant,
yet perhaps under remarked fact of the DAW is its broad accessibility. Using a DAW, a novice
musician can produce and learn about production techniques by recording audio, sequencing
MIDI, looping and arranging beats and chords, and mixing the results. Expensive hardware that
was once found only in professional studios (e.g. the Teletronix LA-2A compressor) or university
electronic music labs (e.g. the Buchla 100 Series modular synthesizer) is convincingly emulated
by affordable VST plug-ins inside the DAW. As Matthew Shelvock notes in his study of hip hop
production, “cumbersome analog processes which required bulky hardware” are now digitally
mimicked (Shelvock, 2020: 2). The DAW, summarizes Richard Burgess, “revolutionized the art
of music production. It bestowed upon many more producers, songwriters, and artists than ever
before the power to manipulate and optimize music, as easily they can words with a word proces-
sor” (Burgess, 2014: 134). In sum, a DAW encapsulates a plethora of production tools, awaiting
our creativity. Let us turn now to some of the DAW’s potentials and functionalities.

A laboratory for thinking

Building on his notion of the studio as a composing instrument unto itself, Brian Eno encouraged
musicians to treat it “as a laboratory for conceptual thinking—rather than as a mere tool.” Eno’s
suggestion to think of the studio as a compositional tool applies equally to the DAW. Producers
use the software as a space in which to “work up their musical experiments” (Hennion, 1989:
406)—that is, to try out sounds, to apply concepts (e.g. What would it sound like if I played this
audio at half speed?), make mistakes and iterate to accelerate their learning, and save each idea
 Electronic music production 17
they try (e.g. a sample, a sequence, an effects rack) in case they want to revisit it later. As a labo-
ratory in which we can both hear and see our sounds, the DAW invites ongoing experimentation
with ways of making, modifying, and combining sounds. This experimentation can be over-
whelming to contemplate: there are no surefire methods by which to produce, and every producer
evolves his or her own ever-changing methods and routes discovered over the course of their pro-
duction Quests. However, there are some fundamental concepts of DAW-based electronic music
production. We can apply these concepts to our work, no matter what kind of music we make.

Taking creative cues from software

The DAW has numerous basic production techniques built into its functionalities, awaiting you
to put them into action. So rather than ponder what ideas you may or may not have (which is a
common source of “creative blocks”), use the software’s design as a foundation and springboard
for your creativity. Take a moment to consider: every function, parameter, setting, preset, or con-
trol in the DAW is a tool you can use. Each of the DAW’s functionalities and capabilities—audio
recording, sampling, MIDI sequencing and part layering, signal and effects processing, editing,
arranging, and mixing—contains a plethora of production techniques to explore.4 Producer Boris
Brejcha reminds us, for example, how every parameter on a VST synthesizer or effect plug-in
can be adjusted and automated:

You can do automation with every knob you have on a synthesizer. And this makes your
track—it starts to live, because the sound is moving a lot, it’s changing a lot, and so it sounds
not all the time the same. I think this is the best choice: playing more with effects, for exam-
ple, or with automations than using more sounds.
(Brejcha, 2018)

In sum, the DAW’s power is that it plays multiple roles:

• it is a shape-shifter, capable of modeling other sound sources, spaces, or processes—a stu-

dio, a collection of instruments, a sequencer, a score, an algorithmic process, a mixing con-
sole, a chain of signal and effect processors—which the producer can deploy to play with
audio and MIDI, editing, arrangements, and mixes
• it amplifies ideas, positioning the producer to be analytical, architectural, and precise about
the intuitive, gestural, and vague contours of the creative process.

Case study: Ableton Live

Ableton Live was developed in 2001 by two electronic musicians, Gerhard Behles and Robert
Henke, who designed the software to seamlessly integrate composing, production, and perfor-
mance. Similar to, yet unlike, longstanding DAW software like Cubase or Logic, whose staid
visual interfaces are modeled on the look of analog studio mixing consoles and other hardware,
Live avoided skeuomorphic representations (Lagomarsino, 2017), conceived instead as a sui
generis “technoscape” with a flat and minimalist GUI (Prior, 2008: 923). Live was unique in two
ways: it was the first software that could seamlessly loop and time-warp audio samples to syn-
chronize to a track’s tempo, and its Session view offered a new way of visualizing and organizing
musical data as building blocks called clips. In Live, the clip is “a piece of musical material: a
melody, a drum pattern, a bassline or a complete song” that plays once or loops, and groups of
clips can be arranged into horizontal scenes triggered collectively or in various combinations “to
create larger musical structures” (Ableton, 2018: 4). For example, a track with three clips might
18 Electronic music production
have a 1-bar kick drum pattern, a 20-bar chord sequence, and a 4-minute field recording. Trig-
gering these clips to play together in a scene will create ever-changing combinations of sounds
as the clips loop at different points.
As distinctive as Live appeared, its use of clips as the essential “unit of creativity” (Zagorski-
Thomas, 2014: 76) as well as its “naturalization of the loop paradigm/sampling aesthetic within
the DAW” distilled key moments in electronic music’s history (Marrington, 2019: 69n2). Using
the software, it is not especially difficult to create musique concrète-style sound collages, canonic
loops, or remixes. The software’s potential uses are amplified by Ableton’s online creative eco-
system that positions Live as a part of the experimentally-oriented producer’s creative toolkit.
Ableton’s ecosystem includes numerous video tutorials and interviews with Live users about
their production techniques, and Loop, the company’s annual conference on music, creativity,
and technology. The design and functionalities of Live have made it among the most impactful
music production technologies of the past two decades, earning a loyal following among elec-
tronic music producers.5 Many musicians (including this author) have embraced Live’s non-linear,
modular, and recombinant musical aesthetic, building tracks by experimenting with various combi-
nations of looping clips before recording them into a linear arrangement.

DAW topology and concepts

Minutiae on a screen: arrangement and “clip” views
The DAW represents sounds as visual objects on the screen, which means that whether you work
with audio samples or MIDI sequences, when you use a DAW you look at your sounds while lis-
tening to them (or, listen while looking). The producer Jon Hopkins describes the “accepted fact”
of the DAW’s visuality in electronic music production, which assists the producer’s “infinitesi-
mal tweaking across loads of parameters” (Smith, 2018b). “A good 90% of the process”, Hopkins
admits of his own production work, “is essentially just looking at the screen and playing around
with things” (Rancic, 2018). Consider then, the screen as a window onto the inner workings of
your production project, a map of its terrain. As your monitors or headphones reproduce the
music’s acoustic space, the screen displays a schematic in which all of the sonic components of
your track are connected, compressed into a “single entity” (Marrington, 2011). All DAWs have
an Arrangement view page, where the music is laid out in a linear, left to right timeline, as a series
of audio or MIDI events (Constantinou, 2019: 235). Live and, more recently, other DAWs such
as Apple’s Logic Pro and Mark Of The Unicorn’s Digital Performer, include non-linear clip dis-
plays of audio and MIDI events that can be looped and triggered in any combination (Figure 1.2).

The mixer
All DAWs include a mixing console page, where each audio and MIDI track is displayed as a
vertical channel strip with input/output routing options, a volume fader, a pan control, mute, solo
and record buttons, effects Inserts, and effects Send controls. Mixing is generally done on this
page, although mixing automation is drawn in on the project’s Arrangement page.

Audio recording and MIDI sequencing

The primary purpose of a DAW is to record audio and MIDI data. A project is comprised of any
combination of audio and/or MIDI tracks. Sounds for audio tracks can come from audio samples
or from a live performance captured by microphone or direct input and sent into the computer
 Electronic music production 19

Figure 1.2 Ableton Live’s Session view

via an audio interface. Sounds for MIDI tracks can come from the DAW’s own VST instruments,
from third-party VSTs, or from external hardware sources routed into the DAW.

Signal routing and effects processing

Within the DAW, sounds can be routed in many ways. A fundamental way of routing MIDI and
audio is through signal and effects processors such as compressors, reverbs, delays, etc. Such
signal and effects processing can be inserted directly onto an audio or MIDI track via an Insert,
or placed onto an effects Return track controlled by a track’s Send control. For example, a reverb
inserted onto a Return track can be sent (routed) in varying amounts to multiple audio and MIDI
tracks simultaneously. This processing technique is commonly used to create a sense that dif-
ferent sonic elements in a mix inhabit the same acoustic space. Return tracks are also a CPU-
friendly way of applying effects. In the DAW, signal routing and effects have no end, limited only
by the producer’s ideas about where to send sounds and how to treat them.

Automation
Automation refers to directing the DAW to perform specific production tasks over time. The
most common type of automation is mix automation—for instance, having the volume of an
individual track smoothly increase or decrease over a portion of the arrangement. However,
automation can be applied to virtually every parameter within the DAW and its VST instruments
and effects. For example, one might automate a reverb’s Size setting to change from a small to a
large space, a distortion effect from soft to heavy, or a granular sampler from subtle to glitched.
In general, automation is a way to add fluid and sometimes imperceptible changes to a track’s
20 Electronic music production
parts, and therefore a sense of life to a production. Producers use automation to shape dynamics
and add contrast, change which sounds are “in focus,” and morph parameters of audio samples
and synthesized sounds to create textural-timbral shifts impossible to achieve any other way. As
with signal routing and effecting processing, there is no end to the producer’s automation options.

Mixing
When a producer creates a track, s/he is designing a circuit in which a collection of sounds co-
exist and interact together in time. A mix can be as simple as a balancing the volumes of a beat
and a bass line, or as complex as blending dozens of sonic textures into an intricate, evolving
whole. Mixing is the process of combining signals from different audio and MIDI tracks to create
a composite stereo blend. Blending tracks together typically involves balancing their individual
volume levels, using equalization (EQ) to shape them, and applying signal processing (e.g. com-
pression) and effects processing (e.g. reverb) to create a sense of the music as a living and dimen-
sional space. We explore some general mixing concepts in Chapter 7.

Conclusion
This chapter has traced a brief history of music production, focusing on the role of the producer,
the development of MIDI, digital sampling, and DAW software, and provided a brief overview
of DAW topology and concepts. One broad theme that emerges over the history of record produc-
tion is that as technologies have evolved and gone digital, so too has the electronic music pro-
ducer, whose responsibilities now include overseeing every stage of a music’s production inside
the DAW. Techniques such as using an incremental/additive approach to recording, sequenc-
ing, and sample manipulation form the toolkit of most every producer who organizes and edits
reams of musical data in the laboratory that is their DAW. Producers are attuned to seeing and
thinking about tracks as malleable arrangements of MIDI and audio objects, and it is an every-
day production practice to discover new sounds and take creative cues by experimenting with a
music software’s functionalities, such as combining clips in Live’s Session view, for example.
In sum, let us return to Four Tet’s small laptop-based set up with which he recorded and mixed
his album. We might reflect on the fact that his studio is more than a reminder of the power of
21st-century electronic production tools. With a DAW and various VST instrument and effects
plug-ins, Hebden uses equipment available to any producer. It might not look like much. But of
course, the photo leaves out the considerable tacit knowledge, experience, and good taste that
informs Hebden’s producing. It leaves out a sense of how a producer uses a musical system, a
topic to which we turn next.

Notes
1 For a vividly detailed history of recording and recorded music, see Milner (2010).
2 Two excellent overviews of producers’ use of the recording studio, from the 1950s to the present, are
Moorefield (2005) and Bell (2018).
3 (M. V. Matthews, 1963).
4 This idea was articulated in 1975 by Jon Appleton and Ronald Perera in The Development and Practice
of Electronic Music. “Each parameter is associated with the devices and techniques of the tape studio,”
they note, “and suggest to the composer distinct creative possibilities” (Appleton & Perera, 1975: 70).
5 One metric of Live’s popularity: at the time of this writing, the software’s subreddit (“r/ableton”) has
175,000 subscribers, compared to 8,000 for Cubase (“r/cubase”).
2 Musical systems and production
workflows

Introduction: musical systems and production workflows

No matter what your level of experience, you can set up your own musical system through which
to produce. A musical system is the configuration of your electronic music production toolkit.
For many producers, this is an ever-changing assemblage of software (e.g. a DAW and VST
instrument and effects plug-ins), hardware (e.g. modular synthesizers, drum machines), or a
combination of the two (Butler, 2014: 93). No matter what kind of equipment you work with,
it is essential that you configure—and continue to re-configure—your own production system
because this system shapes how you work. “I try to expand the approach all the time,” says pro-
ducer Steven Ellison (Flying Lotus), “by using different software or adopting different tools for
the production” (Nagshineh, 2013). In this chapter I explore musical systems and workflows for
interacting with them. I begin by explaining how musical systems are kinds of complex systems
whose nonlinearities steer the producer, providing ideas upon which to build. I then explore
numerous examples of production systems, with a case study on producer Brian Eno’s sonic
treatments and generative loop machines. The chapter concludes with suggestions for setting up
a system through preferred ways of working, controllers, templates and sound sets, and how to
begin the production process.
The importance of musical systems was observed 50 years ago by Allen Strange, in his 1971
book about the methods and technologies of electronic music composition, Electronic Music:
Systems, Techniques, and Controls. Although Strange was writing about analog technologies of
the time such as voltage-controlled synthesizers, he anticipated the creative challenges of digi-
tal music production when he defined musical systems as structures that set up yet to be heard
possibilities:

The contemporary electronic music system has no pre-defined structure, but is initially a
collection of possibilities—a set of musical variables or parameters such as pitch, loudness,
space, timbre, etc., that exist in an undedicated state. The contemporary electronic music
system offers several potential means for pitch control; it has capabilities of shaping articula-
tion and loudness; it provides many methods for the control of timbre and density, and so on.
All of these possible sources and controls are components of a yet to be produced musical
event.
(Strange, 1971: 3)

More recently, Strange’s insight is picked up by composer and theorist Francois J. Bonnet in his
manifesto, The Music To Come. Bonnet’s observation of how music creation requires setting up
22 Musical systems and production workflows
“the conditions of possibility” speaks to the importance of musical systems in electronic music
production:

The challenge of any musical creation must be to invent the conditions of possibility for an
appearing of the musical, but nothing else, because that is all that lies within its power. You
don’t create music; you create environments conducive to the advent of music.
(Bonnet, 2020: 30)

Building upon Strange and Bonnet’s notions of musical systems as structuring conditions for
musical possibility, consider the idea even more holistically: imagine the musical system extend-
ing beyond the configuration of the equipment we use. Such a system would also include the
musics we listen to, how we approach and generate musical ideas, how we think about our work,
and our general mindset. The basis for your music production is who you are, and how you are.
This fact is humorously illustrated in a video interview by Telekom Electronic Beats with the
Belgian techno producer Peter van Hoesen in which Hoesen explains how he uses an extensive
collection of modular synthesizers and other equipment to make music. In the video’s comments,
an astute producer-fan named azmotronik reminds us of the real basis of Hoesen’s musical sys-
tem: “Actually, the most important piece of the equipment in this studio is PVH” (Hoesen, 2017).
Even a seemingly simple musical system then, is in fact complex in that it connects the techno-
logical with the biological, equipment with its user. Here, for example, is producer r beny con-
necting the two realms, describing his system as “searching for textures or sounds I like, inspired
by whatever I’m inspired by in the moment . . . emotions, other music, people, places, things”
(Stationary Travels, 2018).
A workflow is how you use your musical system by creatively interacting with it through a
sequence of decision-making, tinkering, and technical moves. As Nick Prior notes, the con-
figuration of a musician’s system favors “particular kinds of creative processes” by which to
use it (Prior, 2009: 82). At the same time, there are virtually endless ways to work, and by
configuring your system’s components variously, your workflows help you discover paths
of musical expression.1 Think of workflow, then, as your ways of producing music—which
includes sound designing, improvising and recording, sequencing, editing, arranging, and
mixing. Through your workflow, your work flows. “The goal,” says producer Jason Chung
(Nosaj Thing), “is to be able to output your ideas without thinking at all” (Future Music,
2018b).

Musical systems as complex systems

It can be useful to think about electronic music production as a kind of complex system. A com-
plex system is any system composed of many components that interact with one another to cre-
ate unpredictable collective behavior. Examples include the organization of human cells, traffic
patterns, global climate, and viruses. The behavior of such systems is difficult to model due to
the way their components interact with one another in unforeseen ways. Complex systems fre-
quently function in a state referred to as the “edge of chaos” to produce order and patterns from
“intrinsically noisy” components (Ziemelis & Allen, 2001). Moreover, since there are depend-
encies among a system’s components, new components added can cause the system to behave
in unpredictable ways. Complex systems like traffic patterns and global climate are typically
nonlinear and have built-in feedback loops. This leads the systems to exhibit a property known
as emergence, a condition in which “the action of the whole is more than the sum of the actions
of the parts” (Holland, 2014: 2).
 Musical systems and production workflows 23
In her 1972 book, An Individual Note, pioneering electronic musician Daphne Oram reached
towards complexity’s dynamics when she compared electronic music composing to steering a
yacht in a storm:

The resulting flow is a complex pattern of tensions and relaxations which evolve as the musical
material is worked out. The words “controlled” and “worked out” do not really convey what
I mean. There seem to be no suitable English words. I am hunting for some word which brings
a hint of the skillful yachtsman in fierce mid-Atlantic, guiding and controlling his craft and yet
being taken along with it, sensing the best way to manage his vessel, freely changing his mind
as unforeseen circumstances evolve, yet always applying the greatest discipline to himself and
his seamanship. . . . The composer has to guide and evolve his material in all its aspects.
(Oram, 2016: 27)

With this in mind, consider electronic music production as an analogous kind of complex sys-
tem capable of generating unpredictable and fascinating cascades of sound with which you can
interact, derive ideas from, partially steer, and feed back into your tracks. In production, unpre-
dictable complexities—what producers usually call “happy accidents”—are always our allies. In
“Machines and Human Creativity,” the conclusion to his 1980 book, Introduction To Computer
Music, Wayne Bateman speculated on the conditions necessary for what he calls “creative inci-
dents” to transpire in computer-based music. Like Oram, Bateman hinted at complex systems
when describing how artistic works are produced as one interacts with accidental discoveries
unpredictably generated by some kind of system:

the evolution of artistic works . . . is a continuum of spontaneous, creative incidents. The

incidents seem to occur much more stochastically than deterministically. They happen
unpredictably and by apparent accident, but also by improbable coincidence.
(Bateman, 1980: 247)

This idea of music production being a complex system, then, is not new, although today it is
somewhat obliquely referred to in the discourse of electronic music producers themselves.
Most producers do not talk about it explicitly. Instead, they tacitly engage with it through their
workflows. But some do talk about complexity in one way or another. For example, the idea is
explained by Mr. Bill (Bill Day), a producer and well-known online educator who uses the phrase
reactive artistry to describe how he approaches his DAW, Ableton Live. In interviews and tutori-
als, Day mentions a complexity-generating technique for avoiding creative blocks: whenever he
is unsure what to do next while working on a track, he tries out new ways of processing sound.
Day compares this processing to a Rube Goldberg machine that generates ideas despite its user’s
own uncertainty, giving the producer something to react to:

What I react to is just things that I make the computer do. So I set up some kind of sound
design system—like a giant chain of effects that acts like a Rube Goldberg machine: maybe
you’ll have a one-shot [sample] that goes into a reverb, and then that reverb gets sent through
some wave shaper, and the wave shaper glitches it out, and then the glitchy stuff gets re-
arranged by some weird plug-in. I’ll set up something like that and then just run tons of shit
through it and see what comes out. . . . In that sense, I don’t even believe that I had the idea.
I just set a thing up, press the button, and then it gave me the idea. . . . I don’t think creativity
is this sort of one way street.
(Gee, 2019).2
24 Musical systems and production workflows
Producer Tim Hecker explains how he connects a mixing console, guitar pedals, and other
hardware effects with a collection of software patches for Max (a programming environment
by Cycling’74) as a musical system through which to route sounds and produce unpredictable
results. Referring to it as a “data flow as a stream you can capture and mold on the fly,” Hecker
elaborates on his system:

they all connect in a network so you can wire all these things together, and have them all
modulate each other, and talk to each other. It’s kind of like modular synthesis but it’s com-
puter [-based], so you can just work with digital audio in a really fluid way. Treating it like
a river that flows between all these different things. It’s just a lot more flexible and open
sourced. . . . I just route things to each other and do feedback loops.
(Burns, 2016)

Another example: in a YouTube tutorial about Pigments, a VST synthesizer by the software
company Arturia, producer Das Glitch describes a process similar to that of Mr. Bill, configuring
the synthesizer’s sequencer settings to auto-generate randomizations on pitch, octave, velocity,
and other parameters. The GUI of Pigments’ sequencer includes “random” knobs, represented
by small dice icons (Figure 2.1). Glitch explains how he uses this randomization to guide his
workflow:

You can actually choose when to regenerate the different randoms . . . It’s insane what you
can do here in terms of experimenting to come up with a new idea, then write it to the preset,
and then the idea is there. For me, I would just keep generating these randoms until some-
thing cool is automatically spat at me, and then go with that.
(Glitch, 2019)

Producer TJ Hertz (Objekt), a producer we will hear from several times throughout this book,
goes one step further. Hertz understands his production system as doing the musical imagining on
his behalf. He allows the processes of his system to generate difficult-to-predict sonic complexi-
ties with which to work:

My approach to sound is more about letting processes and equipment do the imagination for
me, and arranging the results of that myself . . . A lot of the time it has to be something with

Figure 2.1 Sequencer for Arturia’s Pigments VST, with its small dice icons for randomization
 Musical systems and production workflows 25
an element of unpredictability or uncontrollability . . . the results of which I can sculpt or
steer into the right direction rather than create the humanism to begin with.
(Martin, 2018)

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, who produces using modular synthesizers, approaches her musical sys-
tem as a kind of orchestra, conceptualizing its sounds as instrumental sections. She sees her crea-
tive role as both composer and conductor:

My favorite way to approach composition on the modular synthesizers is to imagine that I’m
a conductor. I like to set up all the voices and get them tuned and figure out who’s going to
have the high line, who’s going to have the middle line, the low line, the bass line, and what
the rhythms are going to be. And then what their textures are going to be and what are the
parts that I’m going to interact with and what are the parts that are going to interact with
themselves and trigger each other.
(Smith, 2016)

Producer Caterina Barbieri also uses modular synthesizers as the core of her musical system,
interacting with pattern sequences and generative random operations from her modules to make
music. “Playing with these machines,” she explains

means actively interacting with this stream of sound, tuning yourself to an ongoing sound
field and making it selective [. . .] What really interests me is finding an organic balance in
my working flow between predictability and un-predictability, structure and fluidity, logos
and chaos.
(Wilson, 2018a)

Barbieri’s view of the production process perfectly illustrates the feedback loop connecting com-
poser and technologies, in a circuit:

I see the compositional process as a system of feedbacks between technology and composer,
as if it implied the creation of a kind of integrated cognitive circuit in which the design of the
machine modulates the design of the musical thought of that specific person who “plays” it.
(Merrich, n.d.)

Like Hertz’s approach to letting processes and equipment do the work of imagination while he
assesses and develops its results, the way Barbieri works with her musical system harnesses the
dynamics of complexity’s happy accidents at the edge of chaos, building upon them:

Every form of computation requires the formal definition of a set of data to produce a larger
body of output. You work within a closed system but then you define a process, a generative
grammar able to generate an open system of possibilities . . . turning that practice of compu-
tation from being just a formal technique—an automatic procedure—into a creative process.
(Wilson, 2018a)

These examples illustrate how in electronic music production the producer steers the music,
yet the system also steers the producer back by providing ideas upon which to build, sounds to
respond to, and random operations to pursue or deviate from. Ideally then, your music producing
is a dialogue with the musical system you have configured. But for this to happen, your system
needs to be sufficiently complex to have nonlinearities and feedback opportunities built into it.
26 Musical systems and production workflows
Like unpredictable weather or traffic patterns, a sufficiently complex musical system is able,
notes Barbieri, to generate an open system of possibilities in the form of unanticipated compel-
ling sounds to which one can respond through trial and error experimentation. As Allen Strange
encouraged us 50 years ago in his study of electronic music composition, “Never wonder ‘should
I do this?’ Instead an attitude of ‘I wonder what will happen when I do this?’ may lead to an
expansion or development of a unique technique” (Strange, 1971: 5). Or as producer Beatrice
Dillon puts it, “So much of this is run on complete naivety. Cast the net, pull out loads of stuff
and then just see where it takes you” (Ravens, 2019). In sum, think about the production process
as a co-generated complex system that generates unpredictable events and creatively volatile
situations for you to interpret and build upon through your reactive artistry. The producer builds
music from the ground up, reacting to a complex musical system that s/he has set in motion,
moving towards discovery.

Examples of musical systems

Over time, every electronic music producer discovers and develops a musical system that works
for them. For reasons of practicality, taste, and happenstance, one’s system often revolves
around the capabilities of a select few pieces of gear, such as a drum machine or synthesizer,
and the constraints of a limited set of sounds. Less is more. To illustrate, we turn to a series of
examples.
For his dub techno recordings Pole 1-3, the producer Stefan Betke (Pole) crafted minimalist
tracks around the crackling and hissing sound of a malfunctioning Waldorf 4-Pole filter box.
Released in 1996, the 4-Pole was originally designed “to process any audio signal with a 24db
low-pass filter” as well as modulate the cutoff frequency and resonance of sounds (Waldorf,
2021). Betke describes how he came to use the hardware as the basis of a musical system:

When I got this broken filter, it was connected to my mixing board, and at first I thought,
yeah, okay, it’s not working, it does weird stuff, leave it there. And then I forgot about it, and
I was working on rhythmic parts with my [Roland TR-] 808 and other rhythm machines. And
then, by accident, I unmuted the channel where this machine was connected to and I heard it
and thought, this is much better than every rhythmical thing I programmed in my 808.
(Grosse, 2020)

It started making all these crackles and hisses—it was running in the back of a track I was
working on, still with beats and everything, and I thought this is a nice atmosphere in the
background, so I muted the beats and the crackles came more upfront and I thought this
might be a good possibility to create something different—not working with beats but with
randomly made crackles and noises.
Since all the tracks were based on this broken filter that just crackles and hisses randomly
this was very often the beginning of the recording of a track—that gave the rhythm structure,
the main part. And then I simply started with some basslines or some atmospheres. In gen-
eral, I’m really working more in atmospheres than in song structures.
(Toland, 2009)

A second example is producer Andreas Tilliander (TM404). To make his music as TM404, Tillian-
der used a collection of renowned 1980s Roland hardware, including the MC-202 sequencer,
TB-303 bass sequencer, and the TR-606, 707, and 808 drum machines. For him, this collec-
tion of Roland instruments “turned out to be a concept. Having all these machines—or rather
 Musical systems and production workflows 27
instruments—playing at the same time” (Attack, 2013). Tilliander explains the merits of creating
a unique system for one’s music producing:

When you can buy recorded hooks, drum beats and basses it means anyone can sound like
you. If you put together a unique set of musical instruments and effects, you’re bound to
create something special.
(Attack, 2013)

The sound is everything. And by building a studio with various different echoes, multi FX,
shitty digital synths, fantastic analog ones and so on, you will sound like nothing else.
(Blanning, 2016)

In terms of both its equipment (e.g. software and/or hardware) and its sound palette (e.g. a single
sound or many different sounds), a producer’s musical system can be minimal or maximal. The
producer Calum MacRae (Lanark Artefax) favors the kind of minimal system advocated for in
this book: “I have a really basic set up. Just a laptop, software and a MIDI keyboard, they’re all
more or less essential as one another” (Inverted Audio, 2016). Producer and multimedia artist
Mark Fell assembles a unique and minimal musical system for each project, the better to con-
strain his attention so that he can focus on how the system behaves and its components interact:

My methodology is to focus on one or two specific bits of equipment and to explore them in
detail. For any given project I usually assemble a collection of equipment and processes, and
explore how they behave and interact. Rather than a universally perfect and utterly flexible
studio setup, I opt for weird and peculiar.
(Fell, 2016)

I tend to be quite limited in the processes or technologies that I will use during the produc-
tion 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.
(Wilson, 2018b)

At the maximal end of the continuum, Richard D. James (Aphex Twin), one of the most influ-
ential electronic music producers of the past 30 years, sets up a new musical system—which he
calls “studios” and “setups”—for each track or collection of tracks:

I realized I actually like making studios more than making music, because I like the pos-
sibilities of what you can do. I make these setups that will achieve some sort of purpose, so
the way I’ve wired it together becomes the track itself.3

If it takes you three years to set up a studio, and you’ve made one track with that setup, then
the logical thing to do is not change anything and just do another one using the same set of
sounds. Which I’ve done, and it’s always really good because it’s all ready to go. But I just
can’t keep it the same. I’ve always got to change something. All the tracks I’ve done in the
last five years were made in like six different studios. It gets a bit complicated.
(Sherburne, 2014)
28 Musical systems and production workflows
One of the most fascinating and it-gets-a-bit-complicated case studies for thinking about
musical systems is Autechre, the duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown whose music sets a high
bar for creativity in electronic music production. Since the 1990s, Autechre have programmed
their own patches in Max, using these patches as an algorithm-based complex system to gen-
erate sound worlds that they develop into tracks. The group’s recordings, notes Brown, are
“just basically a modern output of our current rebuilt system . . . and some time spent with
it” (Pareles, 2020). In numerous interviews over 15 years, Booth explains how their musical
systems function, why they build and refine them, and how they interact with them to create
music:

We’ve built up a pretty extensive deep system now. . . . It’s not like we make music, then use
the system to replay it in new ways. The system itself is making the music each time, it’s all
about the capabilities of the system dictating what the music’s like.
(Muggs, 2016)

There’s no event generation taking place other than within the system we’ve designed. . . .
How we play the system dictates how the system responds.
(Tingen, 2004)

We build systems because it’s the most instinctive way of connecting things we invent.
These systems do not produce a specific genre of music, they host modules, and manage
all the protocols that allow them to communicate with each other. If we want to change the
protocol, we have to enlarge the system.
(Tsugi, 2018)

We know what we do, and we know our habits. We built habits into the system that allowed
us to be able to elaborate or expand the parameters or refine them, or perhaps closer define
what we were after incrementally, and it made a lot of recordings happen.
(Frame, 2013)

It has always been important to us to be able to reduce something that happened manually
into something that is contained in an algorithm. Then the algorithm allows us to add a bit
more flair or a bit more deviation that we would also do ourselves in a little script. Just a few
slight tweaks can spin it out into all sorts of recreations. It’s a great way to spawn yourself if
you like . . . and spawn your actions.
(Pequeno, 2010)

In sum, for Autechre, musical systems, technology, and creativity are inextricably intertwined.
Booth sums up this intertwining’s crux perfectly: “it gets a bit hazy in terms of what’s a musical
idea and what’s a piece of technology” (Sherburne, 2018).
In between these extremes of devotion to a musical system in the form of a single piece of
gear or sound profile such as Pole or TM404, and complex generative music patches such as
Autechre’s system, are most electronic music producers who configure a system to help them
make the music they want to make. Even if one does not have the resources to build new studios
for each musical project, or Max programming expertise, this book recommends the DAW as an
affordable, powerful, and protean musical system capable of creating enchanting sounds and the
conditions for creativity.
 Musical systems and production workflows 29
Case study:

Brian Eno’s musical systems of sonic treatments and generative loop machines
By the time Brian Eno was explaining the studio as a compositional tool, he had already been
working with musical systems of one sort or another. In fact, the musical system concept is neatly
illustrated by the sonic treatments Eno began implementing in his ambient music production
work in the 1970s. Eno created these treatments by routing audio through a variety of signal
processing and effects units that were connected in a circuit. These treatments were essentially
bespoke musical systems with which to treat already recorded sounds and record the results.
Software designer Sean Costello (founder of the reverb and delay VST plug-in company, Val-
halla) explains how Eno set up “feedback paths through the mixing boards that incorporated
several hardware processors” to shape sounds (Costello, 2011). To illustrate such feedback paths,
Costello cites Eno’s “shimmer” treatment patch. This patch was constructed by routing a sound
output from a Lexicon 224 reverb unit through an AMS DMX 15-80s reverb with pitch shifting,
then into a Lexicon Prime Time delay unit, an EQ on the mixing console, and finally, back into
the 224. This circuit, notes Costello, “was just one of the ‘treatment’ topologies—[Eno] obvi-
ously put a fair amount of time into setting up different feedback configurations.”4
Another facet of Eno’s interest in musical systems is his work on generative music. In a 1996
talk on the topic, he traced its roots to the minimalist and process-oriented music of Terry Riley
and Steve Reich. Riley’s “In C” is a 1964 composition consisting of 52 bars of music, each of
which are repeated any number of times by any number of musicians who proceed through the
piece at their own pace. Eno noticed that the effect of the music’s layered pattern juxtapositions
created “a very complicated work of quite unpredictable combinations” (Eno, 1996). Eno also
cited the influence of Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain”, a 1965 piece created using two copies of a tape
loop of a preacher intoning “it’s gonna rain” played simultaneously on two tape machines. As
the machines gradually go out of sync, the voice transforms into echoing canons with strange
textural-timbral qualities. Eno was inspired by both the music’s sound and its process, noticing
how Reich’s use of tape machines was a kind of system that transformed a simple input into a
complex output. The tape machines’ going out of sync generated “a huge amount of material and
experience from a very, very simple starting point.” Eno heard in “It’s Gonna Rain” an audio
analog of a moire pattern, a visual interference pattern produced when slightly offset templates
are overlayed. “It interested me that an artwork could be a system of amplifying detail,” he
noticed (Diliberto, 1988).
Building upon the music of Riley and Reich, Eno developed his ambient music concept, based
on “a system or a set of rules which once set in motion will create music for you” (Eno, 1996).
For his 1975 recording, Discreet Music, he configured two reel-to-reel tape machines into a
“long delay echo system” through which to process sounds (Eno, 1975). In the liner notes, Eno
described the album as “a technological approach to the problem” of how to create a musical
system “that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention” on the
part of its producer. The producer’s own contribution was limited to composing “two simple and
mutually compatible melodic lines of different duration” and “occasionally altering the timbre
of the synthesizer’s output by means of a graphic equalizer.” On the album’s back cover, Eno
provided “an operational diagram” of the tape machine-based system he used to make the music.
This diagram is a kind of score that explains the processes by which the album’s sounds evolve
(Eno, 1975). In a way, the star of Discreet Music is the musical system used to generate it.
A final example of Eno’s approach to letting sounds evolve on their own is Music for Airports
from 1978, four compositions created using tape loops, some of which include three sung notes
30 Musical systems and production workflows
that repeat in cycles of varying lengths (roughly every 23, 25, and 29 seconds). In Airports and
other subsequent pieces, Eno configured loops that never repeat the same way twice, instead
generating ever new counterpoint and harmonies. Decades later, Eno’s longstanding interest in
generative musical systems culminated in the ambient music apps Bloom, trope, and Scape.
From his sonic treatments and delay echo systems to his generative music experiments, Eno was
ahead of the production curve in recognizing the creative power of musical systems.

Musical system lessons

Routing + simple rules = complex results, multi-centered action

One does not have to make explicitly generative or ambient music to implement Eno’s ideas
into electronic music production practice. First, the key idea is “how the system works and most
important of all what you feed into the system” (Eno, 1996). In the context of a DAW, a producer
might experiment with various musical systems via chains of connected effects through which
to process audio or MIDI signals inserted onto tracks, effect Return channels, or even a project
file’s master output. This recalls Mr. Bill’s setting up a giant chain of effects that acts like a Rube
Goldberg machine. Such an effects chain can transform what is fed into it in unpredictable ways,
the complex results of which can be built upon, through resampling, for example (see Chapter 6).
A broader lesson from Eno’s treatment techniques for enhancing sounds is that in the DAW,
every sound can go on a journey somewhere. Eno’s treatments are a forerunner of the many ways
electronic music producers today route sounds through their DAWs. A route is the way taken
from a signal path’s starting point to its destination.
Routing sounds is one of the producer’s most powerful techniques because it has no end. For
example, a sound can be sent through a signal or effect processing plug-in, and the results of this
routing then sent somewhere else. Or MIDI events from one track can be copied onto another
track to control another set of sounds. In an Ableton video tutorial for Point Blank Music School,
producer Freddy Frogs explains the origins of routing sounds in the analog studio and advises
producers to experiment with their own routings in the DAW:

In an analog studio we used to plug channels into other channels . . . and then worry about
feedbacking the channel into itself. Experimenting with signals in an analog studio was
essential. That is something that has been a little lost with software music. So try to use this
routing matrix—the I/O section in Ableton Live—as a creative tool. . . . Experiment with the
platform [the DAW itself]. Try to route things in different ways.
(Frogs, 2014)

When we route sounds, it generates further ideas for how to route sounds, and as we listen to
the effects of our routing we imagine yet more circuit paths to try. Within the DAW’s ecosystem,
one can also route sounds through and within VST plug-ins. Most VST synthesizers include a
modulation “Matrix” page to organize such routing options that connects a modulation source
(e.g. an LFO control) to one or more modulation targets (e.g. a Frequency Cutoff control). For
example, U-he’s Hive synthesizer has 12 slots in its modulation Matrix (Figure 2.2) and over
100 possible modulation targets (Figure 2.3). Such myriad possibilities for routing sounds from
various sources to various targets create conditions for complexity through feedback loops that
can lead the producer to unpredictable, cascading results. With the right treatments and routing,
remarkable timbres become possible in the DAW.
A second lesson from Eno’s work is to explore how “very, very simple rules, clustering together,
can produce very complex and actually rather beautiful results” (Eno, 1996). Generative music,
 Musical systems and production workflows 31

Figure 2.2 Modulation Matrix for U-he’s Hive VST synthesizer

Figure 2.3 Drop-down menu for U-he Hive’s Modulation Matrix targets

he says, “specifies a set of rules and then lets them make the thing” (Eno, 1996). In a DAW we
can implement the generativity idea via automation. For example, automating a parameter such
as the Dry/Wet control on a reverb effect so that it increases or decreases at a certain rate over
the time of a track specifies a changing set of transformations for the sound. Automating multiple
parameters simultaneously creates compelling and generative-like composite sounds from sim-
ple materials. This recalls producer Boris Brejcha’s point in Chapter 1, that through automation
a track “starts to live, because the sound is moving a lot” (Brejcha, 2018).
A third lesson from Eno: generative music seeks to avoid “a single chain of command” and is
instead “multi-centered” with “many, many, many web-like modes which become more or less
active” (Eno, 1996). As producers, we can consider how to incorporate various levels of inde-
pendent musical action into our tracks. Combining effects chains with automation of the param-
eters within the effects in the chains is one way to bloom multi-centered sonic complexities in
a track. The modular Rack system in Ableton Live helps us visualize such sonic complexities.
A Rack contains a chain of serially connected instruments and/or effects plug-ins with which “to
build complex signal processors, dynamic performance instruments, stacked synthesizers and
more” (Ableton, 2018: 283). One can even incorporate Racks within Racks to generate mag-
nitudes of multi-centered sonic complexity. In sum, no matter what style of music s/he makes,
32 Musical systems and production workflows
a producer can use his/her musical system to generate layers of simultaneous, hard-to-predict
activity via automated variations in a track’s timbral, rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic activity.

An ideal, AI-based musical system

To create a broader perspective on musical systems, consider how your ideal system might work
if it were AI (Artificial Intelligence)-based and could produce music based on your previous
work and current state, drawing on all of the tracks you have made so far, plus other sounds you
might be interested in. Such a system would have an emergent quality, meaning it would have
“some ability to recognize the pattern that you gave it and complete the story, give another exam-
ple” (Metz, 2020). On his music production podcast, Mr. Bill imagines such AI-based software
helping producers to refine their musical system by observing their decision-making as they build
tracks:

I think you could have a program that just sits in the background of your computer just look-
ing at the decisions that you’re making all the time and just build an average mean for what
it is you choose to do in every situation along the way. And after you’ve written a couple
hundred songs and it has seen you do all of that, this thing could just be like, “I know your
process” and just spit out new tunes.
(Day, 2020)

While such AI-based software does not yet exist, thinking about how it might work illustrates the
power of musical systems to generate complexity and help us produce.5 Pondering such a system
is a step towards learning how to make those sounds ourselves and, ultimately, curating our own
creativity by reflecting on the decisions we usually make in the midst of our workflows. Ask
yourself: What would my ideal musical system consist of? How would it work? And how might
I refine my existing system to bring me closer to this ideal?

Setting up a music production system

Preferred ways of working and defining a musical system

When you are setting up your musical system, consider your preferred way of making sounds.
You may already be a keyboard player, a drummer interested in applying your skills to finger
drumming on a pad controller, a DJ interested in remixing, or a newcomer to production. Even
if you do not play a musical instrument, that is no hindrance to producing. In fact, many pro-
ducers who do not play instruments work with samples, field recordings, loops, and sequences.
What is important is having a way to get information into your musical system, to load the sys-
tem with input so that you can set feedback loops in motion and engage with the possible com-
plexities or output that results. Try using a MIDI keyboard for playing melodies and chords,
and finger drumming beats. If the controller has rotary knobs or faders on it (Figure 2.4), these
can be MIDI-mapped to the DAW software to control parameters within it. Producer Robert
Henke (Monolake) defines musical systems in terms of a set of tools that interact. Henke uses
“tools” broadly to mean any combination of software or hardware instruments, libraries of
sounds, and ways of treating and routing these sounds. “It has indeed become a requirement for
every electronic musician: define your system,” he says. “Essentially it’s a quest for identifying
those five tools that interact best with each other for what you want to achieve” (Goldmann,
2015: 46).
 Musical systems and production workflows 33

Figure 2.4 Arturia 61-key MIDI controller

Keyboard and Grid pad controllers

Many electronic music producers work with some kind of controller to trigger samples and input
MIDI into their DAW. At the time of this writing, the most popular devices are MIDI keyboards
and Grid-style drum pad controllers.
The generic MIDI keyboard controller (Figure 2.4) is often referred to as a “dummy” control-
ler because it contains no sounds of its own and must be connected to a computer.6 In its standard
25-, 49-, 61-, and 88-key configurations, the keyboard is merely an input device for triggering
whatever sound you have loaded into your software. Use the dummy-ness of the MIDI keyboard
controller to your advantage! Unlike hardware instruments, the controller’s sound is not defined
until you assign a sound to it in the DAW.
Despite being without sounds, the layout of the MIDI controller is that of the piano, with white
and black keys and 12 semitones per octave that tacitly connect the producer to the long tonal his-
tory of European music. In this way, the keyboard materializes musical possibilities in the form of
potential pathways for the fingers. If you are not a keyboardist, you can still use the instrument’s
notes being close at hand to your advantage. Try out different chord shapes: if you can play a C
major triad (notes C, E, and G), you can also transpose this hand shape elsewhere on the keyboard
to make different chords (such as an e minor or a b minor diminished triad). Experiment.
The most influential controllers of the past 20 years have been Grid Controllers with rows of
touch pads arranged in 4-by-4 or 8-by-8 grid matrix formations. The Grid has its origins in Roger
Linn and Akai’s MPC60, a sampler developed in 1988 which we explore more in Chapter 5.
Examples of Grids include the MPC, the Novation Launchpad, the Monome, and Ableton’s Push.
Since Grids are not keyboards with notes laid out low to high, left to right, their design frees
the producer to approach melodies or chords in novel ways. Grids are also ideal tools for step
sequencing beats: their touch sensitive rubber pads are optimized for finger drumming and their
layout displays the beat subdivisions and flow of musical time as a sequence of flashing lights.

Templates and sound sets

A template is your default set up in your DAW that includes, at minimum: pre-configured audio
and VST instrument MIDI tracks, effects loaded onto Return tracks, and your go-to signal pro-
cessing chains or Effects Racks at the ready. One reason to use a template is to have the essen-
tial elements of your musical system present whenever you work; “a well thought out project
template will enable you to get up and running in a single click” (Walden, 2010). Some DAWs
34 Musical systems and production workflows
come pre-loaded with production templates. Steinberg’s Cubase, for example, includes “Dance
Production,” “Hip Hop Production,” and “Metal Production” templates. But make your own. As
a start, explore your DAW and VST plug-ins to find preset sounds that you like. Modify these
sounds, save them, and make them easily accessible when you are working.

Equipment doesn’t matter (that much)

From the latest software instruments to re-issues of classic analog synthesizers, there are a pleth-
ora of tools with which to produce electronic music. Sounds are cheap and easy to come by,
computer memory is abundant, and there are more instrument and effect plug-ins than a producer
will ever have enough time or money to try. One is forgiven for thinking that production is about
its gear, because there is so much extraordinary gear to use. But consider that the specifics of your
equipment are relatively unimportant. As Mark Fell reminds us, “don’t worry about what tech-
nology you need. Use what you have” (Fell, 2016). It doesn’t matter that much what equipment
you use because as a producer your primary job is to develop ways of interacting with your musi-
cal system that inspire you and generate compelling sounds. The late keyboardist and composer
Harold Budd, one of ambient music’s pioneers (and a quiet inspiration for this book), speaks to
using this approach to recording. Budd used whatever synthesizer was closest at hand: “I have a
philosophy that one is obliged to use what’s there. You don’t need an awful lot of stuff, but you
use fully everything that’s there” (Goldstein, 1986).

Conclusion: Approach and Quest

This chapter has explored the importance of setting up complex musical systems and workflows
for interacting with them. This brings us to Approach and Quest. Approach is the way you draw
on your tacit knowledge to interact with your musical system. To illustrate the concept, consider
the deceptive fact that many producers have a favored piece of gear because of its sound, its
workflow quirks, or because of how supposedly intuitive it is to use. A producer may swear by a
particular technology, such as a Korg MS-20 for basses, or an Elektron Octarack for sequences.
But remember that a producer’s enthusiasm for gear glosses over the fact that s/he has learned
meaningful ways of using and interacting with it, having discovered through trial and error uses
that makes it feel indispensable. As producer Darren Cunningham (Actress) puts it, “once you’ve
decided on the equipment you’re going to use, you have to learn it, understand it” (Duplan,
2017). Such is the way electronic music production is always a dialog between a musical system
and a producer’s tacit knowledge of how to make use of it. In sum, your Quest is to get to know
and develop both the potentials of your system and your skills for using it to create the music
you want to hear. If you are unsure what to use, consider the DAW as your primary production
tool. Software is affordable relative to its power, uncannily models the capabilities and sounds of
hardware, and is elegantly compact, compressing a studio into a laptop.

Production Quest
1 Start simple. In your DAW, set up a musical system comprised of three tracks of synthesiz-
ers, each for one type of sound: chords, bass frequencies, and percussion. Make a piece (or
ten) with this system.
2 Expand this three track-based musical system by adding three Return channels for effects.
Insert a different effect on each Return channel so that the effect can be used in various
amounts on each of your track’s three elements. For example, Return 1 can be a reverb,
Return 2 a distortion, and Return 3 a delay. Shape the music you made in Step 1 by sending
Other documents randomly have
different content
 MADONNA DEL SOCCORSO.
BY SINIBALDO IBI
Photograph by Alinari, Rome

PLATE XVI (Face Page 139)

 PLAGUE BANNER.
CHRIST AND SAINTS.
BY BONFIGLI
Photograph by Anderson, Rome
 One more Madonna banner calls for passing notice—that of
Bonfigli at Corciano near Perugia, dated 1472. It has the same
general character as his ‘Madonna della Misericordia’. The quaint
head-gear of the angels supporting her robe is the rose-wreath,
symbolic of the Madonna, which appears, in one form or another, in
so many of her pictures.
In nearly all these banners, as in other archaic works, the
dwindling size of individual figures indicates the lesser parts they
have to play. In many the Madonna fills almost all the banner’s
surface.
In another of Bonfigli’s banners in the church of S. Maria Nuova
at Perugia the figure of Christ, wearing a cruciferous nimbus,
dominates the picture. He holds the arrows of pestilence ready to be
launched among the people. His face is sad and regretful, as He
executes faithfully the behests of His Father. On either side of Him
saints bear the emblems of the Passion, and to the right and left are
the darkened sun and moon. Beside Him kneel the Madonna and the
Franciscan S. Paulinus. In the lowest part of the picture are the
chimneys and towers of Perugia, with the pest-fiend, in the
semblance of a huge bat, bearing a scythe, and the Angel of
Deliverance smiting him with his lance. Below, shepherded by S.
Benedict and S. Scholastica, the diminutive citizens kneel in prayer.
Yet another type of plague banner is that in which the figure of a
saint plays the leading rôle. The saint is always Sebastian, only
because in Umbria and Tuscany he was the chief accredited
protector against pestilence. The finest example of this type is the S.
Sebastian of Sodoma, described above (pp. 100-1).
Plague banners were not the exclusive product of Umbria. Two of
the most famous, the S. Sebastian of Sodoma and the Sistine
Madonna of Raphael, painted at Siena and Florence respectively, are
products of the Tuscan school: but it is only in and around Perugia
that they can be found and studied to advantage. The Sistine
Madonna, in which the Madonna and Child are attended by S. Sixtus
and S. Barbara, was painted during an epidemic of pestilence for the
Black Brothers of S. Sisto at Piacenza. No record exists that it was
ever actually used for the purpose for which it was painted. Bonfigli,
in the spirit of Phidias, had painted ‘Mary the Queen of Heaven’:
Raphael, in the spirit of Praxiteles, had painted ‘Mary the Mother of
God’. The people wanted a queen and Raphael gave them a peasant
woman. They could not see, as Raphael saw, in womanhood the
embodiment of gentleness spiritualizing the brute in man. They
could not see in motherhood the vision of willing suffering
transfigured to joy. It was this reunion of Art with Nature, that
dethroned the plague banner from the affections of the common
people.
Plague banners of less importance are those by Bonfigli at
Civitella Benazzone, by Sinibaldo Ibi in the convent of S. Ubaldo at
Gubbio, dated a.d. 1503, by Giannicola Manni in the church of S.
Dominico at Perugia, dated a.d. 1525, and by Berto di Giovanni in
Perugia Cathedral, dated a.d. 1526. There they will be seen for the
most part as framed altar-pieces.
Perugia’s greatest painter, Pietro Vannucci, better known as
Perugino, perished in the course of one of his city’s plagues.
Tradition has it that he died denying the Saviour and Madonna,
whom his art had done so much to glorify, and that his body was
thrown into a desolate grave beside a wayside oak. His sons
searched diligently for their father’s body, to lay it in the church of S.
Agostino, but in vain, among so many that had perished of the
plague. It is, said, however, that a priest found it and buried it under
the walls of his church at Fontignano.
The humbler Pestblätter seem to have played much the same
part in the devotional activities of the individual as did the gonfaloni
in those of the multitude. They were not exclusively German, but
were issued also from the presses of Flanders, the Netherlands,
Italy, and more rarely of France as well. Pictorial Pestblätter are
mostly rough woodcuts or copper-plate engravings, crudely coloured
by hand in some cases, and belong chiefly to the last two-thirds of
the fifteenth and the first third of the sixteenth centuries. In the
character of their subjects they are usually simply devotional, and
represent some act of expiation or intercession on behalf of
mankind. The three leading types correspond closely to the three
types of gonfaloni in their subjects:
1. Christ, the suffering Redeemer, on the cross.
2. Intercession by the Virgin Mary or by Christ.
3. Memorials of the martyrdom of special plague
saints, such as St. Sebastian, St. Roch, and St. Antony.
And closely allied to this last,
4. Intercession by these special plague saints, or by
other saints whose association with plague was more
fortuitous and less widely recognized: such were St.
Quirinus, St. Adrian, and St. Valentine.
Many of these forms have attached to them some appropriate
prayer or invocation. Sometimes the religious element is
supplemented by an exposition of hygienic precautions or of
remedial measures. Thus a devotional cut comes to be blended with
injunctions, usually in verse, as to how to stave off pestilence by
isolation, fumigation, washing, or dietary; or how to cure it by such
measures as bleeding, or plasters to hasten maturation of the
buboes.
In addition to these types, a non-pictorial type is met with, nearly
akin to the English Broadside, in which the religious purpose has
almost or wholly disappeared, and which sets out in uncompromising
prose directions of prophylactic or therapeutic character.
Pestblätter originated in more ways than one. In times of
pestilence pilgrimages were often made to the shrines of special
saints, and rough representations of these saints were provided, as
memorials of their pilgrimage to the devout. Sometimes the object
of homage was some sacred picture, which would then be roughly
reproduced as a memento. At other times they seem to have been
issued by religious communities for purely devotional purposes.
Those of secular character were either printed by order of the
municipalities, or were the product of private medical enterprise.
Original Pestblätter are to be seen in the leading museums of most
European countries. A selection of these has been admirably
reproduced in a portfolio[164] by Heitz and Mündel of Strasbourg.
Plate XVII (1) is a woodcut, probably printed at Nuremberg at
the commencement of the fifteenth century. The Almighty is
depicted with the drawn sword of pestilence in His hand, within what
would seem from its colouring in the original to be a representation
of the rose-wreath, emblematic of the Virgin Mary. In the centre are
St. Sebastian with his symbolic arrow, and an angel tending the
plague sore of St. Roch. Below is a prayer to these two saints.
Plate XVII (2) shows the Almighty above, with the shafts of
pestilence in His hands. The crowned Madonna shelters beneath her
robe her suppliants, among whom are dignitaries of the Church.
Below a group of saints are interceding with the Virgin and Child and
St. Anna. The whole is encircled by the Virgin’s girdle wrought into a
rose-wreath.

PLATE XVII (Between Pages 142 and 143)

 1. THE ALMIGHTY WITH
SS. SEBASTIAN AND ROCH

PLATE XVII (Between Pages 142 and 143)

 2. THE ALMIGHTY, MADONNA AND SUPPLIANTS.
THE VIRGIN AND CHILD, S. ANNA AND SUPPLIANTS
St. Anthony is a favourite figure of these Pestblätter. He is more
closely associated with plague and pestilence in Germany than is the
case in Italy. He is also patron saint against erysipelas, known as St.
Anthony’s Fire, which often raged in epidemics in pre-Listerian times.
He is commonly represented with the cross, on which he was
crucified, with a crutch symbolic of his great age and feebleness,
and with an exorcising bell. The passing bell was tolled originally not
only to ask for prayers for the soul of the departed, but also to scare
away evil spirits from it. The pig, that accompanies St. Anthony, is
the emblem of the Devil, whose temptings he successfully repelled.
Even in the absence of St. Anthony himself, his cross in the form of
the Greek T is often introduced, sometimes with Christ nailed upon
it. From this association of St. Anthony with the cross, it became
customary to appeal to him, as to the crucifix, in times of pestilence.
The association of SS. Quirinus, Adrian, and Valentine of Rufach
with plague is purely local and incidental. St. Quirinus was primarily
the patron saint of the gouty, and St. Valentine of the epileptic, so
that the name Veltins Krankheit was applied to epilepsy. St. Adrian
held under his special protection the Flemish brewers, and the more
creditable patronage of the plague-stricken was only a later
accretion.

A very large number of pictures are designed to commemorate

specific plagues, and were painted in fulfilment of vows made to the
Madonna and saints for deliverance from plague. Many of these have
already been considered in connexion with the legends and cults of
SS. Sebastian and Roch, to whom they were dedicated. But in far
the larger proportion of these pictures the central figure is the
Madonna (see Plates XI and XII). Sometimes she is attended by SS.
Sebastian and Roch, and by other saints as well. The added saints
are, as a rule, the special protectors of the city, for which the thank-
offering has been vowed. Sometimes they are the patron saints of
confraternities, for whom they have been painted. Sometimes the
special medical saints, Cosmas and Damian, are appropriately added
to the pictures. Examples may be seen in almost any gallery of
Italian pictures. In the Brera, Cima de Conigliano (a.d. 1460-1518)
has painted the Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist, St.
Sebastian, the Magdalen and St. Roch, the last-named showing an
incised wound on the inner side of the right thigh. The character of
the picture may be taken as conclusive evidence of its origin and
purpose.
 Titian’s picture in the Vatican shows the Madonna and Child in
glory, and St. Sebastian, St. Nicholas, St. Catharine, St. Peter, and
St. Francis are the attendant saints. This picture was painted by
Titian after the cessation of a plague epidemic at Venice for the
Franciscan church of S. Nicolò de Frari.
Correggio’s ‘Madonna di San Sebastiano’, in which she is attended
by SS. Sebastian and Roch, with S. Geminiano, the patron saint of
Modena, was painted in a.d. 1515 in commemoration of a plague
that devastated that city three years previously.
Yet another by Guido Reni (a.d. 1574-1642), in the Academy at
Bologna, was painted at the instance of the senate of Bologna, after
the plague of a.d. 1630. It was carried in solemn procession through
the city to its consecration, and from this circumstance has been
called ‘Il Pallione del Voto’. The rainbow beneath the Madonna’s feet,
and the olive branch in the hand of the infant Christ, each signify the
return of peace. The attendant saints are the special protectors of
Bologna, St. Petronius, St. Francis, St. Dominic, St. Proculus, St.
Florian, St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier.
Raphael’s ‘Madonna of Foligno’, in the Vatican, has been
accounted by some a plague picture on account of its general
character, and of the fireball descending on the city of Foligno.
Raphael, however, painted the picture in a.d. 1512, the very year in
which it is recorded that an aerolite fell into Foligno: the picture
probably commemorates the escape of some individual or institution.
There was a disastrous plague in Foligno, but not till a.d. 1523, and
it has been depicted in a hideous picture by Gaetano Gandolfi of
Bologna (a.d. 1734-1802), which is now in the Corsini Palace at
Rome.
Miraculous Madonnas abound in Italy, but are, as a rule, of little
artistic interest. A pleasing exception is the ‘Madonna and Child’ that
hangs in the tribune of the church of Carmine in Perugia. It was put
up to commemorate the deliverance of Perugia from plague at the
prayer of the Perugian Carmelites: at each recurrence of plague it
was the object of popular adoration. Formerly it was covered with a
gauze veil, which caught fire and was destroyed, but the Madonna
herself escaped any trace of injury.
The Madonna of Ara Coeli and the Madonna of S. Maria Maggiore
are both accredited deliverers from plague and pestilence in Rome.
Florence, too, has her miraculous Madonna in the small village of
Impruneta. This dark panel, blackened and perished with the lapse
of years, was found, so the legend goes, in the soil at Impruneta,
uttering a cry as the workman’s spade struck it. Seldom or never
exposed to the gaze of the devout, she has suffered the indignity of
an exposure at the hands of the omnipresent photographer. In a.d.
1527 plague broke out in Florence in the early summer. On June 2,
an enormous festival was celebrated in honour of the Virgin of the
Annunciation, that she might be persuaded to succour the
Commonwealth in its troubles. But in July and August the mortality
rose to 150-200 a day, and in the autumn to twice these numbers,
so that all business was at a standstill, and the city seemed
deserted. Then the government determined to have recourse to the
Black Virgin of Impruneta, whom the Commonwealth of Florence has
invoked so often in various crises of its history. Of her Segni[165]
says: ‘To this mother of God our city has never publicly applied in
vain, in whatever extremity of distress. It is no light or silly thing,
which I am here affirming: for in time of drought she ever sent rain:
in periods of flood, she has restored to us fine weather: from
pestilence she has removed the poison: and in every most grievous
ill she has found its appropriate remedy.’ So the Black Virgin was
brought from Impruneta, and the magistrates of Florence,
‘barefooted and in mourning, received her at the gate of the city,
and carried her in solemn and very sad procession to the Church of
the Servites. Forty thousand citizens had died in the month of
November. But the never-failing Virgin of Impruneta prevailed on this
occasion also. For with the coming of the cold weather, the sickness
began to abate. And thus the faith of the Florentines in their charm
was more than ever confirmed.’ The Black Virgin still watches over
Florence in time of drought. Readers of Romola will recall that other
stirring procession of the Impruneta Virgin, in which Savonarola
strode along defiantly among his company of black and white
Dominicans.
Throughout France and Italy numerous pictures may be seen,
recording the ministrations of local or locally venerated saints in time
of pestilence. Such is Tiepolo’s picture in the cathedral at Este,
showing St. Tecla liberating Este from plague. Pictures such as this
stand midway between the group of votive pictures and the group of
actual plague scenes, of which Raphael (a.d. 1483-1520) is the
earliest exponent.

PLATE XVIII (Face Page 146)

THE IMPRUNETA VIRGIN
 PLATE XIX S. TECLA LIBERATES ESTE FROM
PLAGUE
By Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
Photograph by Naya, Venice (Face Page 147)
Raphael’s drawing of ‘Plague’,[166] now in the Uffizi gallery at
Florence, has become much worn with time. The picture is divided
into two parts by a head of the god Terminus mounted on a lofty
pedestal. To the right it is night-time, but the interior of a house of
mourning is shown in vertical section. In its courtyard is a young
man, with a torch in his right hand, counting the number of stricken
animals, while with his left he prevents one of the sheep from
coming near to those that are dead. An ewe lies dead with a young
lamb fastened to her dried-up udder. An ox lying down surveys the
scene sadly. Above this corpse-strewn court a stream of light,
penetrating into the interior of a room, illumines the figures of two
Sisters of Charity, as they minister to the master of the house, who
is dying: he is stretched on his bed, lying in a dense shadow—the
shadow of impending death. He seems to turn away from them and
to reject their help.
In the other part of the picture it is day, and daylight shows up
everywhere scenes of suffering, death, and desolation. In the
foreground lies the body of a woman stretched out in death, while
her child struggles to reach her ice-cold breast. The father bends
down hastily to hold the child away, and, as he does so, covers his
nose and mouth with his hand, to keep out the contagion of the
pestilence. Behind this group an older woman turns away in horror:
before it, an old man buries his face in his hands against the plinth
of the statue in an anguish of sorrow, while a young man makes off
in panic. In the background broken columns and the dead body of a
horse serve to intensify the desolation of the scene.
Raphael’s rendering of the scene, for all the horror of its details,
serves rather to inspire pity than horror. He holds the balance evenly
between the horrible realities of the plague and the redeeming
spirituality of human nature. Compassion and suffering stand side by
side. The ox pities his kind passively, as the Sisters seek to minister
actively to their kind. In the features and attitude of the child
Raphael has depicted the devotion that does not die with death. The
deepest note of pathos is touched in the form of the old man in the
centre of the picture, whose grey hairs are brought down in sorrow
to the grave.
It has been asserted that Raphael’s rendering of the dead mother
and the child was inspired by an actual record of Ambroise Paré, but
as Paré was only born three years before Raphael died, the
statement falls to the ground.
Raphael’s debt seems to go back as far as to Aristides of Thebes,
who flourished about 340 b.c. Pliny[167] mentions a picture by him,
which so impressed Alexander the Great, at the sack of Thebes, that
he took it for himself, and ordered that it should be sent to Pella.
According to Pliny, the picture represented a wounded mother lying
at the point of death, and her infant child creeping to her breast.
Fear is written in the expression of her face, lest the child should
draw blood from her breast, now that her milk is dry.
Raphael’s drawing has been engraved by Marco Antonio
Raimondi under the name of ‘Il Morbetto’. In Delaborde’s Marc-
Antoine Raimondi it is reproduced under the name ‘La Peste de
Phrygie’, because on the pedestal are inscribed the words of Vergil:

Linquebant dulces animas aut aegra trahebant

corpora.[168]

Vergil, in this brief description of pestilence, aims at no more

than mere poetic effect. It is introduced only to fill up the cup of
trouble for the Trojan wanderers, and is compressed into a few lines.
The Trojan fleet had just made the land: Aeneas had laid the
foundations of a new town, and Ilium was to live again in Pergamus.
Then the plague broke out.
 PLATE XX PLAGUE.
A DRAWING BY RAPHAEL
(Face Page 148)
 Iamque fere sicco subductae littore puppes;
Connubiis arvisque novis operata iuventus,
. . . . . . . . subito cum tabida membris,
corrupto caeli tractu, miserandaque venit
arboribusque satisque lues et letifer annus.
linquebant dulces animas aut aegra trahebant
corpora; tum steriles exurere Sirius agros;
arebant herbae, et victum seges aegra negabat.

Scarce stand the vessels hauled upon the beach,

And bent on marriages the young men vie
To till new settlements, while I to each
Due law dispense and dwelling place supply.
When from a tainted quarter of the sky
Rank vapours, gathering, on my comrades seize,
And a foul pestilence creeps down from high
On mortal limbs and standing crops and trees,
A season black with death, and pregnant with disease.

Sweet life from mortals fled: they drooped and died.

Fierce Sirius scorched the fields, and herbs and grain
Were parched, and food the wasting crops denied.
(Fairfax Taylor.)

As it stands, this is an outline sketch of a famine-pestilence,

which Raphael had no intention of depicting, when he adopted the
line. Surely Sisters of Charity would not figure in a Phrygian plague,
some thousand years before Christ!
Besides pictures, a few medals exist commemorative of plagues
prior to the sixteenth century: these were sometimes struck as
mediums of spiritual consolation. Frequent devices on these were
representations of Christ on the Cross, or of a Serpent on a pole.
The specimen figured here (Plate I (4)) is a Wittenberg thaler of
1528. It shows these two devices on the opposite faces of the
medal, each with a descriptive legend.
The fifteenth century had drawn to a close in Italy amid a
confusion of epidemics. Pintor, the personal physician of Pope
Alexander VI, has left a book in which he says that the morbus
Gallicus first appeared at Rome in March 1493 and had claimed
numerous victims by the August following. Then, after an inundation
of the Tiber in December 1495, plague broke out fiercely in Rome.
Pintor states that the touch of certain precious stones was vaunted
as a specific. In 1493 plague was raging also at Genoa and Naples.
At the latter city the mortality amounted to 20,000 souls. A Genoese
chronicler, Seneraga, attributes the outbreak at Genoa to pollution of
the shore by the dead bodies of the Jews, who had sought sanctuary
there on their expulsion from Spain in 1492, but had died of
starvation on the outskirts of the inhospitable city. Jewish writers
asserted that there was plague in Spain, and that it was carried by
the fugitives in their ships to Italy. Most of the expelled Jews found
shelter from the persecution of the Cross under the protection of the
Crescent, in Constantinople, Salonica, the Levant, and Northern
Africa. It was this far-reaching epidemic that drove Charles VIII of
France out of Florence, Rome, and Naples in succession, almost as
soon as his army had entered them.
 CHAPTER IX
Throughout the sixteenth century plague epidemics follow each
other in almost unbroken succession throughout Central Europe. In
Rome alone, during this century, there were no less than twelve
severe outbreaks. The archives of the Capitol and the registers of
contemporary notaries[169] abound in scattered information
concerning these visitations. It had become an established custom
that at the first appearance of an epidemic the Pope and his court
should escape from Rome to a place of safety, leaving the
municipality to provide for the situation as best it could. In May
1449, Nicholas V had fled into Umbria: in 1462, Pius II had fled
successively to Viterbo, Bolsena, and Corsignano. In 1476, Sixtus IV
had flitted in like manner from place to place. So in April 1522, at
the height of the epidemic, it seemed only in accordance with
precedent, when Adrian VI from his secure seclusion in Spain sent
word to Rome of the necessity of imposing a fresh tax for supporting
a crusade against the Turks. The Cardinals seem to have desired to
emulate the example of Adrian, for in June the Town Council asked
the Sacred College not to forsake their posts. Deserted by their
spiritual leaders, the populace lent a ready ear to the imposture of
the Greek necromancer Demetrius of Sparta. He persuaded the
terrified people that the plague was the work of demons, and that,
by appeasing them, it might be brought to an end. So he paraded
the streets of the city, leading by a silken cord a bull that he
professed to have tamed by spells, and sacrificed it in the Colosseum
with full pagan ritual to the hostile demons. As soon as the clergy
realized the enormity of the sacrilege they had condoned they
instituted a penitential procession, which marched through the city,
scourging themselves to bleeding and crying Misericordia. If we may
credit Paolo Giovio, chief physician to Clement VII (a.d. 1523-34), it
was neither prayer nor sacrifice that put an end to the plague, but a
wonderful oil invented by Gregorio Caravita, a physician from
Bologna. The Oratorio del Crocifisso, near the church of S. Marcello,
is said to have been erected in expiation of this event. This plague
lingered on at least till the following year, a.d. 1523, for Benvenuto
Cellini[170] records his experience of it in some detail. He says that it
dragged on for months, and that several thousands died daily in
Rome. In not unnatural apprehension on his own account, he
determined to adopt such amusements as would promote
cheerfulness of mind, which many believed to be the best remedy
against infection. So he betook himself to shooting pigeons among
the ancient monuments of Rome, and found the pursuit so beneficial
to his health that he succeeded in staving off for a long time the
plague, to which many of his comrades succumbed. But somewhat
later, after spending the night with a young serving girl, he himself
fell a victim and has recorded his initial sensations as follows:
‘I rose upon the hour of breaking fast, and felt
tired, for I had travelled many miles that night, and
was wanting to take food, when a crushing headache
seized me: several boils appeared upon my left arm,
together with a carbuncle which showed itself just
beyond the palm of the left hand, where it joins the
wrist. Everybody in the house was in a panic: my
friend, the cow [Faustina] and the calf [the serving
girl] all fled. Left alone there with my poor little
prentice, who refused to abandon me, I felt stifled at
the heart, and made up my mind for certain I was a
dead man.’
By the constant ministrations of a male friend and the help of a
physician, whom the apprentice summoned, Benvenuto threw off the
sickness, but while the bubo was still open and plugged with lint
under a covering of plaster, went out riding on a little wild pony.
Benvenuto’s account is valuable as the record of the personal
sensations and sufferings of a plague-stricken man, and tells us also
something of the treatment to which he was subjected at the hands
of sixteenth-century medicine.
Benvenuto says that the joyous reunion of the survivors, after
the plague was over, led to the formation by one Michael Agnolo, a
sculptor, of a club of all the leading painters, sculptors, and
goldsmiths in Rome. The meetings of the club, to judge from his
descriptions, seem to have been devoted to merrymaking rather
than to artistic discourse. On his return to Florence he found that his
father and most of his household were dead, and his surviving sister
Liparata, believing him to have died at Rome, swooned at sight of
him. But under the mellowing influence of supper, at which weddings
were the main topic of conversation, sorrow speedily gave place to
gaiety.
Marselius Galeati of Padua at the beginning of the fifteenth
century had drawn up the first known code of ‘Regulations against
the Plague’, based on the belief that the disease was imported to
Italy by foreign commerce.
From the records of the city of Rome it is possible to gather some
idea of the measures adopted by the Popes and Town Council for the
suppression of epidemics of plague. There isolation of infected
individuals or districts was attempted. All wearing apparel and other
materials and articles capable of spreading the infection, were liable
to be destroyed. The city gates were closed, and every incomer was
subjected to strict inspection, and was frequently rejected. Those
gates that were left open could only be used from daybreak to
nightfall, when they were locked against all comers. Navigation of
the Tiber was sometimes suppressed; Lanciani says that an order
was issued on July 30, 1575, that all the boats on the Tiber should
be scuttled in three days, because it was found that the boatmen
were ferrying passengers across stream for bribes. Two
transgressors were actually put to the rack for their offence, which
was placarded over them for all to read. On one occasion a
wholesale destruction of dried fish was taken in hand. Contract
medical practice seems to have existed even in these days. Lanciani
has noted among the city records agreements between physicians or
quacks and Roman families for the provision of medical advice and
drugs for a stipulated payment of money. Wills were often dictated
from windows, while lawyer and witnesses stood in the street
beneath.
Confraternities for ministering to the sick and removing them to
the hospitals existed in Rome, though perhaps numerically less than
in other great cities of Italy. The confraternity of the Pietà had been
instituted during a plague epidemic, in the time of Eugene IV (1431-
47), and still has a nominal existence in Rome.
Plague broke out fiercely again in Rome in 1527, at the time of
the sack of the city. Florence was also involved in this same
epidemic. It is this visitation that gave birth to Machiavelli’s
Descrizione della Peste di Firenze dell’ anno 1527, cast in the form of
a letter to a friend. In it we find no vivid picture of the awful
catastrophe that was overwhelming Florence, but in place of that a
cold-blooded cynical record of the trivial doings of a loafer
sauntering idly through the streets of the plague-stricken city. It is a
record that challenges comparison rather with the casual entries of
Pepys’s Diary, than with the formal descriptions of Bocaccio and
Manzoni, his own compatriots. Opening with a vapid soulless
lamentation, in the vein of Petrarch, over the general demoralization
and devastation produced by the plague, he passes on to describe
his own daily mode of living, from which his correspondent is invited
to infer that of the general body of citizens. The liaisons of licentious
monks, the vile ribaldry of infamous buriers, the vain recourse to
preservatives against the plague, these are the things that are
uppermost in his mind, as he depicts his own amorous intrigues
against the dark background of the plague, with the fidelity of a
Pepys and the light-hearted insouciance of a Guy de Maupassant.
Villari, Macaulay, and others have declined to accept the
Descrizione as an authentic product of Machiavelli’s pen. They
cannot reconcile its garrulous obscenity with the stern cold-blooded
restraint of the author of the Principe—the frivolity of the one with
the sinewy manhood of the other. They seem to forget that, so far
back as 1502, amid the stirring life of the camp of Caesar Borgia, he
had found leisure to write similar puerilities to his friends in Florence.
Political rectitude, or if we may not ascribe this to Machiavelli,
political sagacity is no guarantee of moral righteousness, and
sensuality is not the exclusive property of the young. Moral levity, as
the history of pestilence shows, is a usual product of the constant
imminence of danger and death; and with Machiavelli political
degradation had left moral levity in sole possession of the field.
A copy of the discredited production still actually exists in the
handwriting of Machiavelli, with revisions inserted in the manuscript
in that of his friend Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi. Villari advances the
strange suggestion, that Machiavelli had merely copied out what
Strozzi had composed. Is it not equally reasonable to suppose that
Machiavelli had used an actual letter of Strozzi, as the basis of a
casual composition? This would explain the fact that it is cast in
epistolary form, as well as the apparent discrepancy of style.
Francesco Berni (c. 1490-1536), a contemporary of Machiavelli, has
apostrophized plague in one of his satirical poems or capitoli. A
cleric, to whom indolent pleasure was the be-all and end-all of
existence, he must surely stand alone among writers as one who
would hug the pestilence to him as a friend.
‘The pestilence time is good—a fig for other
times.... Firstly, it carries off the rabble, it destroys
them, makes holes among them and thins them out—
like a housewife among the geese at Allhallowtide! In
the churches there are none to press upon you.
Besides, none keep any record of buying or borrowing.
Yea, buy and make debts, for there will be no creditors
to trouble you. And if a creditor should come, tell him
that your head aches, that your arm pricks, he straight
will go away, and will not turn him round! If you go
out, no one will cross your path: rather is place yielded
to you, and honour done you, especially if you are
clothed in rags. You are lord of yourself and lord of
 others. You can watch the folk’s strange antics and
laugh at others’ fear. Life has then new laws: every
pleasure is allowed.... Above all, there need be no
work done. It is a choice life, serene and large: time
passes very gaily from dinner time to supper.’[171]
In a.d. 1530 there was plague in Geneva,[172] which is
memorable as the occasion of an accusation against certain persons
of disseminating the disease by means of concocted poisons. In the
spring of the year a dissolute young man, one Michael Caddod, was
seen to throw down a handkerchief near a shop. Some one picked it
up, and its foul smell aroused suspicion. Caddod was forthwith put
to torture, and in his agony implicated Jean Placet, an unqualified
surgeon in charge of the pest-house, together with his wife, son,
and servant, and one Dom Jehan Dufour, priest and confessor to the
pest-house. Under the influence of torture, they were driven to
admit, that they had sworn solemnly on a Book of Hours to join in
spreading the plague, so as to enable them to pillage the sick. Placet
and his wife, they said, had prepared the poison from poultices that
had been used on discharging buboes, by drying them to powder
and then adding veratrum. Caddod and his wife undertook to spread
it about the streets, while Placet and his wife administered it to
patients in the pest-house with promptly fatal results. Suspicion fell
on Placet, and a barber-surgeon, Bastian Granger, with his assistant,
was instructed to keep an eye on his doings. Madame Placet was
equal to the occasion and gave the pair short shrift with a dose of
poison in their food. In the end Placet and Caddod were convicted.
Their hands were first cut off in front of the houses of their
supposed victims. Next their flesh was cruelly lacerated with red-hot
pincers, and finally the headsman’s axe put a merciful end to their
sufferings. Young Placet’s age obtained for him the lenient treatment
of hanging, while Dufour was first unfrocked and then hanged. A
rapid decline of the plague ensued on so acceptable a sacrifice.
A few years later, in January 1545, a recurrence of plague in
Geneva raised anew the phantom of another plague plot. This time
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