In this weblog, I’m chronicling my adventures in the process of learning to make techno music.
Mostly I let the music do the talking, but I can easily be engaged in discussions in the comments sections.
A secondary goal of the weblog is to help other electronic music composers by exposing some of the guts of my compositions. In many posts you will find part by part breakdowns and pointers to software used to generate or modify sounds. In this way, readers can get a jump start on their own endeavors.
As far the music itself, I call it techno. I’m trying to stop with the techno sub-genres, they’re limiting and divisive. It’s not house or techno or post-rock downtempo speedcore nubreakz, it’s just Techno.
My purpose is to inspire the next generation to explore a part of music that’s little-abused in techno: the improvised melody. I love minimalism, I pioneered DJing minimal records in the early 90s, but there’s plenty of minimal stuff going on. I also love big melodic things. Hey, “Strings of Life” was the inspiration, no?
I’ve seen a lot of good live techno shows in last few years, but hardly any that use melodic improvisation. Techno improv tends to be more along the lines of altering structure more like a traditional DJ. Melodic improvisation will let techno add even more to the history of human music.
About the audio clips
Some of the audio file formats on make::music are ogg & flac files.
Ogg is a lossy compression scheme similar to mp3, while flac is a loss-less compression.
I really like the Open Source aspect of these audio formats. It really scares me to think about locking things I’ve created up in a format, like mp3, that is patented or owned by a company.
Companies go bankrupt, CEO’s disappear to Bermuda with the payroll, etc., but open standards are yours forever.
Snippets & bits are oggs at the lowest quality setting, the “-q -1″ option which makes them nice and small.
Full tracks will be released as both a high quality ogg and a flac file.
So go get something that plays ogg & flac files: Ogg Vorbis Home