Our best tracks always arise when the song is driven by a strong vision in terms of story, place and atmosphere.

I often play around with sounds just for the sake of it. This is useful and sometimes, seemingly, the momentum for a track starts to build… but it ultimately fizzles because it’s usually just a doodle on the keyboard with some effects on it. Inspiration for a track INTRO perhaps, but not a whole song. The exception to this is if you’re writing minimal techno in which case the core drum track is everything. 

Playing with sounds is a really great way to unwind, and should not be confused with song-writing. I regard sonic play more as a kind of paint-mixing session… developing some really interesting colours which I can have at my fingertips next time we need something to dab on a sonic canvas to suit a specific vision that Jana or I have for a piece of music. Ross Bencina’s AudioMulch (pictured) is a great program for this purpose.

It’s a great time saver, for when you are writing an actual song… when the last thing you want to do is hunt through a synth preset library or tweak an EQ.

I advise that everybody do some noodling with sounds on a regular basis, just jamming away and stashing the best gems from the process. It can be inspiring and very entertaining… but avoid tangling that inspiration up in the need to “write something”. There’s no quicker way to stop that inspired, fun flow of improvised notes and found accidental sounds than pausing to hit record and suddenly feeling bad about “messing around” when you should be “producing something”.  

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