First Musical Steps

Track: Untitled (Origin 002)

After experimenting a little, I’ve settled on a method and workflow for “journaling through music”.

The first step is sitting at the piano downstairs and coming up with a concept or sketch — this is the most important part because it anchors the DNA of the music before I start generating any material with AI. It can be a few measures, a melody, a harmonic structure, whatever I feel like putting down that day. It feels like reaching inside of myself to take a fistful of expression, shoving it into the giant swirling mass of all of humanity’s recorded music history, and getting something back that is new, but still unmistakably mine at its root. I need to do a full post sometime about how strange and fascinating this concept is.

The second step is generating a bunch of material with different prompts, and discovering what instruments, styles, mixes, genres and other influencing factors get compelling results. A lot of this goes into the trash right away, and I only keep things that feel inspiring to work with. For this first piece, I ended up keeping about ten generated tracks or so as source material.

For the third step, I split all of the source material into individual stems so that I can further refine, weed out and hone in on exactly what instruments and phrases I want to use to build the piece. All of these go into a folder, almost like a sound library. The great thing is, the pieces and parts are all fairly homogeneous because they all share the DNA of the sketch.

Then I hop into Logic Pro and start assembling the music. It’s very iterative, and things eventually take shape as I move parts around, edit, cut, listen and try to arrive at something interesting and coherent. I could also add new material in using VSTs or recordings if I wanted to (I didn’t do that for this first attempt). There’s no limit really — I could even export the results and use that to generate another batch of material with AI. It’s an incredibly powerful production engine.

I’m naming each sketch with an origin number, in case I want to re-use them in future pieces of music (like a genealogy or something). I’m not sure about titles yet since it’s a journal, but maybe I’ll come up with an album name for each year so they are in collections. I don’t really know for sure yet.