If you’ve somehow managed to complete our previous three sets of Herculean musical trials, we humbly salute you. Don’t even think about resting on those creative laurels, though, as we’ve prepared half a dozen more audio quests with which to push your creativity to the limits.
Synthesise Everything!
Having previously suggested putting together a song using a single synth (or sample), the logical next step is to do the same using as many synths as you like, but nothing else – no samples or instrumental/vocal recordings. The synths can be hardware, software or both, and you can program every sound from scratch or start from presets – we’ll leave that up to you. Drum machines are acceptable, too, as long as they’re fully synthesised, rather than PCM- or sample-based, but for the truest challenge, even the percussion elements should be programmed on regular synths. And if that seems too easy, ramp up the difficulty by restricting yourself to only instruments built on a particular method of synthesis: analogue, FM, wavetable or additive.
Make A Track With A Wild Effect On The Mix Bus
Our next two challenges are all about messing with your monitoring so as to dramatically influence the mixing and even recording/programming stages of production, before crossing your fingers and reverting to playback normality at the end, in the hope that something interesting will reveal itself.
The first imposition, then, is to stick a plugin or chain of plugins on the mix bus, set to… well, whatever you want, really! Distortion, delay, reverb, modulation, filtering… anything that radically transforms the signal arriving at your speakers. Now produce your track with the effect in place, never bypassing it for even a moment and leaving its parameters well alone; then remove it when you’re done. The mental agility required to work around this self-imposed sonic influence will be considerable, and the end product, once that processing curse is lifted, is bound to make for an intriguing listen at the very least.
Clearly, we’re not referring to the usual bus compression/limiting and EQ combo here – what we’re after is something weird, colourful and destructive, for better or worse. If you do also want to deploy your usual 2-bus plugins, though, that’s very much allowed. And how deep into the production process this aural self-flagellation should go is your call: the mixing stage would be the minimum, but the true masochist will even record instruments, program synths and all the rest of it through the effect(s).
Monitor Through Ropey Speakers
Our second monitoring challenge is to simply swap out your fancy studio speakers for something far less appropriate, then, when the mix is done, plug your mains back in and rejoice/weep at what you’ve created. The speakers in question could be those built into your laptop, a smart speaker, a pair of crappy desktop media speakers or whatever, but we urge you to find the absolute worst system you can – ie, not the NS10s or MixCubes that you already use for mix checking. And if you have no such hardware to hand, stick a speaker emulation plugin set to the electroacoustic medium of your choosing on your DAW output, and be sure not to disable it until the mix is finished. In fact, taking this option actually broadens the scope of your dodgy monitoring to take in the likes of phones, TVs, radios and more.
Push Everything Through A Guitar Amp
Re-amping – that is, the process of routing a recorded DI guitar track out to an amplifier, then re-recording the resulting signal back into the DAW via a microphone – is common practice, but how about applying the technique to every element of the mix, from drums, bass and guitars to vocals, synths and even auxiliary effects returns? We’re not (necessarily) talking face-melting distortion across-the-board – you can adjust the amp, mic and room as required for each sound, and even use different setups from instrument to instrument – but this exercise is almost guaranteed to bring out the edgier, rougher side of your mix in a way that hopefully adds to its sense of warmth, space and physicality, rather than smashing it to bits.
If you don’t own a real guitar amp, get simulating with a plugin such as Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig or IK Multimedia’s Amplitube.
Make Up An Unusual Notation System
Following up celeb-studded conducting competition, Maestro, the BBC’s 2009 series Classic Goldie saw the eponymous second-placer (pipped at the post by Sue Perkins) composing a classical piece for a climactic performance by the BBC Concert Orchestra and London Philharmonic Choir. This involved the completely musically untrained drum ’n’ bass legend scoring his arrangement using a quite beautiful graphics-and-text-based system that bore no resemblance whatsoever to traditional notation but got his ideas across to the orchestra and conductor surprisingly effectively. Goldie is also a renowned graffiti artist, which can only have helped, but everyone has some measure of drawing ability, so why not try visualising a track on paper in similar fashion, via whatever iconographic or artistic style works for you, then realising it in your DAW? Even though you’ll need to come up with some sort of musical idea on which to base your conceptual score in the first place, we’d wager that the transition from paper to audio will prove transformative, yielding something very different to what you initially expected.
Make A Song A Day For A Week. Or A Month!
Feeling energetic? Set yourself the goal of writing, and producing a finished track every day for a week, a fortnight, a month, or as long as you can maintain the routine. Tracks can be any length you like, from extended loops to coherent song structures, but they all have to be essentially ‘finished’ in terms of composition, production and mixing. Obviously, the scale of the arrangements will have a major effect on how this pans out: if you’re only working with acoustic guitar and vocals, say, you might have an easier time of it than you would with a full band or amorphous electronic music setup, so feel free to adapt your instrumentation as required to keep the challenge achievable.
Let us know how you get on with our musical missions in the comments.
Photos by Nunzio La Rosa, Adam Tagarro on Unsplash and Mateusz Butkiewicz on Unsplash.