I’ve been learning to make electronic music for about 6 months now, and I’ve accumulated quite quite a few loops and patterns and half-put-together things that I’m struggling to know what to do with. The pile is getting bigger, and as I listen back and my hand hovers over the delete key I find myself thinking “I don’t really like this, but it could turn into something…” So nothing gets deleted and the pile gets bigger and nothing gets finished and I feel like I’m wasting my life.
I get ear fatigue really quickly, and bored easily, and start vacillating between keeping it all or dumping it all when neither is the answer. I need to give this stuff some space. I need a way to listen back to this stuff from time to time to understand what’s what and get clarity on what to focus on.
The theory
If I hear these loops repeatedly over time mixed in with published music I’ll form some opinions and ideas about them. Their flaws will become more obvious and I’ll hopefully develop my ear a bit. For some I will be hitting the skip button every time. Others I’ll listen through. For the ones I spend time with, I’ll get ideas about what can be improved.
My wife is fantastic at composing photographs of people. Looking through our photos it is easy to tell who took what. She told me she learned that from scrapbooking. Years of cropping photos taught her what to crop out when taking the photo. I plan to leverage the same mechanism.
As I listen back I can favorite tracks I think have real potential. If it has a star, it stays, if not, it goes.
The challenge is to get this stuff rendered and put somewhere I will hear it without getting tangled in the whole “making a finished track” minefield. Make it easy, no friction.
Where to put it
I’ve been using Plex for my music library. It works well and one advantage is it’s easy to add audio files to the library just by adding it to a directory – handy for doing large numbers of files. I just need a way to get stuff into an audio file, drop it into the correct directory, and refresh the playlist in Plexamp as I do so.
Plex also has favorites and 0-5 stars for ratings which is plenty for sorting.
I could use Apple Music. It just requires dragging the files in as an extra step.
Getting it there
The challenge is how to take a short loop and turn it into something long enough to get a thoughtful listen, but not so long that I’m constantly jabbing the ‘next track’ button because it lacks normal song structure. AND not get drawn into any editing and refinement. The goal here is not finished songs. The goals is an audio file just long enough.
I’m looking for the lowest friction method possible – something I can scale over dozens of loops without it being a part time job. My goal is just enough to let me form an opinion, not something shareable.
I use Ableton, so it will be the landing spot for making the audio file, and I worked out some simple steps. These steps depend on how the material was created in the first place:
Elektron Tonverk
This one seemed the most straightforward so it’s where I started.
- If there’s a song, record the song into Ableton Live & save. I haven’t had one with multiple songs yet, I’ll figure that out when it happens.
- If there’s just patterns, make a song that repeats the patterns in order, each 4 times. Then record the song into Ableton Live & save. I’ll start with this and improve it later.
- If there’s just one pattern, give it a listen and decide if there’s enough there. If so , then make a song to repeat the pattern 4 times and record.
- Some things are just a simple beat, or me experimenting with sound design or whatever, and I’m going to just skip those.
Ableton Push 3 stand alone & Move
The Push and Move integrate with Ableton more easily, and the work flow is similar.
- If there is just one scene, then add a follow action to play it one to four times into the arrangement, and then export. If it’s short I may set the follow action to play it more than once.
- If there are multiple scenes then add follow actions to play them in order, and export. Beware the Clips Trap The tricky part is that each track can have a different number of clips, and the scenes are rows, but because Ableton was designed to be played in session view there might be some gold in the different combinations of the clips. What do I do with this? Should I fill in the empty spots in each row with the clip above? NO! The enemy of better is best, and I need to keep it simple! For now, I’ve decided to just play the scenes as they are even though it means I get just a few clips that weren’t actually intended to be heard together. I think I’ll hear it for what it is, but time will tell.
- If there are multiple scenes with follow actions – a partial arrangement – then just play that & export the audio.
I have an inbox folder on my Mac to put all the sets from Push & Move. One by one I load each one, do a save-as into a folder called “_Evaluating” and processing it according to the steps above. I can do one in less than a minute in most cases, and because there are no creative choices to be made, it’s pretty easy work to do.
The Tonverk ones take a bit longer – I create a project in “Evaluating” with the same as the Tonverk project, record, and export.
Adding metadata makes it work
I discovered metadata is really important for making this work, and also has an unexpected benefit. Without it finding anything to listen back or add to playlists is a pain. Here’s the metadata I’m adding to each audio file:
- Track name = file name. I use the auto file naming in Push and Tonverk, so I get delightful monikers like “Glistening Namesake.” That’s just fine for a working title, and really anything works.
- Artist, album artist, copyright = my name
- Genre because that’s how I filter for listening
- Year because that reminds me how old the thing is.
- Album is “Loops & Unfinished tracks”, mainly because Plex is weird about items that don’t have an album name but also I want anyone who might run across these to KNOW they’re not finished work.
I use an app called Music Tag Editor 5 to add the metadata, but it’s out of production and there’s lots of other options. I like MTE5 because it’s easy to enter stuff for one track and have it be the default for the rest.
The unexpected benefit happened when I noticed that I show up as an artist with no image in Plex, and it looked kinda empty. So I grabbed a portrait of me that my daughter took a while back and added it as artwork to the metadata. Suddenly the whole thing felt much more finished and professional, even though I don’t love the photo. Not ready for Bandcamp or whatever, but a lot closer to it than it was before.
How it’s working out
Does it work? Is the theory sound? So far I’ve learned a few things as I’ve been listening back over the first few days:
- Some just grate immediately and I can’t hit the skip button fast enough. I wish there was a “hate” or “delete” button. For now I’m just skipping.
- Some are more compelling to listen to, and even though I don’t like them exactly I find myself listening rather than skipping. They’re kind of ear wormy and as I hear them in my head I have variations showing up. I haven’t had any of these be strong enough to act on, but I think some will grow to that level. These get a favorite.
- Some items blend in. I mean it takes me a second to recognize it as my own, but otherwise the production fits in. They’re listenable. I take this as a good thing, and it gets a favorite. The question now is if new ideas to finish them will appear.
I’m forming stronger opinions about it all, and it will be MUCH easier to dump the stuff I don’t like and sort the rest.
I figure I’ll let this go for a while and then when I have a moment I’ll go through the entire album and sort into _WorthFinishing or delete as needed. I think I’ll also change the album name on items to give me a way to separate them when listening.
More to follow!
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