Basquiat Work Ethics

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Coming from a period when few people made electronic music before its art was democratized, meeting people who were making music was difficult as not many people had the opportunity to produce it. You’d meet someone who would produce music, and it felt like you’d have a lot to talk about because they might have similar gear or setup, so you’d hope to be able to share insights.

Nowadays, we have been experiencing an opening of opportunities where software makes it easier to produce music. With AI, people can skip the creation process and have music custom-tailored to their imagination. I see a feeling of jadedness about the new generation among older producers.

As a friend and fellow musician said:

Making music doesn’t make you special anymore. Everyone can do it.

 

In parallel, students asked me how they could elevate their craft above that of the average hobbyist. To answer this, I looked into the case of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

 

Basquiat, An Urban Artist

 

Basquiat was known for his prolific output and unique artistic style, combining street art, graffiti, and fine art elements. Despite his short life, Basquiat created a vast body of work that continues to influence contemporary art.

One aspect of Basquiat’s work ethic was his relentless dedication to his craft. He was known to spend countless hours in his studio, often working late into the night or early morning. A deep passion for expression and creativity drove this commitment to his art.

Basquiat’s work ethic also reflected his intense focus and determination. He urgently approached each piece, channelling his energy into spontaneous and expressive brushstrokes. This intensity allowed him to capture raw emotions and ideas on canvas, resulting in visually striking and intellectually stimulating artworks.

 

While prolific, he made a name for himself that we still relate to nowadays. If you analyze his work, you will see that he used multiple ways to make a name for himself that can be applied to music-making.

Let’s look into the points that made him rise to the status he built.

 

Source Material

 

In the video, the narrator talks about how Basquiat found a book that served as an inspiration base. Basquiat uses a collection of icons, logos, and images on a specific page in many of his artworks. It was his vocabulary, and it became his motor as well. If his pieces were set around a theme, you’d see these same icons being omnipresent. This is a way of always having a collection of repetitive ideas that, in a way, established his brand.

 

The way I teach music is not too far from that approach. I encourage any artist I work with to build a set of references and allocate a lot of time to finding samples that ignite excitement. Services like Splice offer vast items, such as samples, AI sketch generators, plugins and other tools. Compared to jazz, electronic music has too many sounds to pick up, and it’s easy to get lost in which sound one should pick to make a new song.

Your source material could be divided into 2 main categories:

  • Place holders. These are sounds you use by default in all your initial ideas. Back then, people would only have money to buy a 909 or a 303, which was the sound they would use de facto. As we now have access to everything, it is helpful to have a template go to sounds you use as a starting point, and then you can swap later on.
  • Identity. These are more about representing you. Some artists have identity sounds that you can immediately recognize in the first minute of listening to their song. These can be a selection of sounds, presets, or specific effects.

 

Very often, people buy hardware or soft synths randomly. It’s quite handy to use a demo to test it. But if you use some samples, they are often tagged with the synth’s name used to create them. It can also be reverse-engineered.

If you feel like samples aren’t you, remember that everything has been sampled somehow. Having quality samples trains your ears on what quality is. This is crucial for sound design learning.

If you read this blog, these concepts have been covered many times.

 

Steal Like An Artist

 

There’s one point in the video where Basquiat explains where some quotes he wrote come from, which are from some books or movies. Some images, are inspired by artworks he saw. He didn’t copy them, he stole them from a context and brought them into his world.

(Art) comes down to tastes. You basically want to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things to what you’re doing.

Steve Jobs

This is true for many things. To cook great-tasting food, you need to eat exceptional food. The same is true for sounds. I often feel more comfortable with the idea that I’m a curator than a musician. My music is a collection of ideas I love from random sources.

Your inspiration comes from your references. Nothing one has done that wasn’t inspired by someone else’s work. The fact that you do a genre comes from hearing that genre in a context that inspired you. So, you might as well start a collection of inspiring songs. It can be for one sound, one reverb, the way the transitions are done, or chord progression. If there’s one thing in a song you like, put it in your reference folder.

Then, you analyze your references. Take tons of notes, and try to imitate. Ask friends how something is done. Search Splice for similar-sounding sounds.

 

All these experiments build your imagination, which leads to core ideas to keep. It can take 50 ideas to find one exceptionally satisfying. Try to make many of them and blatantly get inspiration from everywhere.

Hip-hop artists are more comfortable taking ideas as they always sample other people. I have to say I’ve been seeing many clients remix pop music in the last year, so the bootleg aspect is becoming an option. However, remember to respect the work of anyone you directly sample.

 

Have A Message

 

One of the messages Basquiat had that motivated him was that there weren’t enough black artists in the art world. He wanted to change that and involve himself, making it the center of his work. The strength of having a message is its appeal for the media to look into what you have to say, and it rallies followers who resonate with it.

 

Punk music has its anarchist message, and hip hop has a gang-related message for some artists, while for others, it’s about the struggle of people in the current world. House music has also had a history of representing a safe space for queer people to dance to. Whatever genre you embrace, there’s a history of its upbringing, and sometimes people forget the political roots of it. While knowing the backstory is not an obligation, you can also piggyback a genre to bring your story and values.

 

Having a message and a vision will help bring a sense to your music, and in times when you might hit a wall with inspiration, your message will drive more inspiration.

 

Speed

 

If you read this blog or work with me, you know that speed is one element I believe in. Ideas come and go, sometimes very quickly and don’t always remain. Having the speed to bring your ideas together will help you catch ideas on the fly, perhaps so that you can finish them later but, most importantly, to see if they make sense. It’s one thing to have an idea; it’s an idea to make it work properly.

 

With Basquiat, he was working fast. Blazing fast. In the video, they share that his meeting with Warhol stimulated a lot of creativity and that at one point, JM did a self-portrait of them in a fast moment and then brought it back to Andy, who was amazed by how fast he was. One of the reasons why artists are slow nowadays comes from poor organization and lack of methodology. The more you are organized in managing your time and art, the faster you become. Music production is a series of phases, and if you sit down to make music and want to do it all at once, you’ll be hit by decision fatigue.

 

The second obstacle is ego. That part of yourself always has the impression it has something to prove, to control and to be something you are not. That leads to procrastination and distraction. My view of music making is fueled by fun in all parts. When fun is present, you are in the flow.

 

Flow is key to success.

Study, Memorize, Internalize

 

The last part of the video is where I saw the strongest parallel with what, as an artist, I do. In my free time, I listen to all kinds of music, radio, and movies and study many tutorials on YouTube. I think I watch about 10 per day. I take a lot of notes from those, and then when in front of my computer, I will test new findings or revisit techniques I was doing to give it a new twist. For each song, I started with a technique exploration, and I developed new ideas by practicing.

 

Saving macros has become something that I just now do always. I will map some parameters to the knobs of the macro and then have fun creating presets by randomizing or just tweaking with a controller.

Doing these sketches touches everything above:

  • Increases speed.
  • I have more control over my vocabulary, coming closer to my message.
  • Ease integration of ideas that I “steal” or get inspired from.

 

Quitting Streaming and Selling Directly

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I’m not sure if you’ve been following trends lately, but there’s been a backlash against streaming sites. I know it’s new, as the resentment towards those platforms has been intense ever since Spotify became the first leading one, with a ridiculously low amount back to artists, but it seems there’s been a change in the narrative lately.

Where it started

 

From the various videos I’ve seen on YouTube, it seems like it started with Kanye West’s rejection from the different platforms where he advertised during the Super Bowl, which led to huge traffic to his site.

 

 

After watching that video, I’ve seen more and more news going in that direction, but that wasn’t new. In late 2023, since I spent time on forums, Reddit, and Facebook, I’ve seen a wave of comments from artists who were fed up and wanted to sell their music themselves more and more. The direction people were going for was to quit all streaming sites and head to Bandcamp alone with a personal shop.

 

I’ll share some personal thoughts about this in a post that is a bit more philosophical than technical.

 

The early Peer 2 Peer Era

 

As I was making music in the late 90s, I remember working one day, and some of my colleagues were saying they hadn’t been listening to the radio anymore since they downloaded their music instead. Knowing you could access all the songs you wanted for free was intriguing and shocking. I remember browsing for some music, mainly pop material, and barely any electronic music I liked besides The Chemical Brothers. It didn’t take long for all the music CDs to appear. Months after I checked, it fueled some internal conflict about all this. But what was clear then was that all the geeks and real music lovers I knew were keeping an eye on the coming songs.

 

Mp3.com

 

Then I discovered the website MP3.com, where artists post their music and meet others. See it as the ancestor of Soundcloud but around 1999 or 2000. A handful of people were doing the same kind of music as I was, and it was useful for creating a little community. Not long after I was on there, I got an enigmatic message from a German guy explaining what Netlabels were and asking me if I wanted to join his under the name of Thinner. It was small, and the concept of netlabels was still in progress.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Netlabel concept, the idea was to use the highly popular stream of downloads to the advantage of artists by inserting your freshly made music in there. The logic was that since people were all getting the new music, we could benefit by adding ours. We were okay with not making any sales; it was purely to ensure our music would be heard.

And it worked.

 

The Thinner wave

 

Thinner got big at one point, hitting 40k downloads on the first days of a release. Everything was hosted on the Archive.org site, where other Netlabels also appeared. German media started looking into it and covering it. Since I was the Canadian representative, local media has approached me to learn more about it. Radiohead did the same thing not long after with a free release, and the media went wild for it. Ironically, when I joined Thinner, I had local DJs telling me it was a bad move, that I would never gain respect from serious labels, and that I would burn myself out.

The exact opposite happened. My first European tours were directly linked to my Thinner releases, and when I was performing, people would come to me, all talking about their favorite songs from my albums.

Not long after, I got signed to Hawtin’s M_nus label, which was sort of the first time someone who got known from Netlabels transitioned to a bigger vinyl label. I feel that then, people started giving some credit to the movement Thinner created.

This experience shaped how I saw Spotify appear. I remember at the peak of Thinner, Sebastien Redenz was already saying that the best way to make it sustainable was to sell songs for 1 cent. He had it in mind, and that observation prepared me for the Spotify model.

Piracy Music and Soulseek

 

In pair with Netlabels, most people still download music, mostly torrents or Soulseek (Still used now). I think that, with the mentality of the late 90s, people were downloading with no shame. It created a community, and while hanging out on Soulseek, I made some friends abroad who eventually got me gigs locally. I used it to share my music. Some of my precious releases leaked, and I preferred not to since it was an agreement with the label, and I saw the community from another angle. I remember someone who got the release told me that “Music is made to be free anyway.” That was a bit disappointing for them, and later on, that same person got a release out and complained on Facebook that people were sharing their music on Soulseek.

 

There are many ambivalent emotions regarding that, and in the end, I think it comes down to the artist to decide how their music should be shared, which is sort of what I see nowadays with the Spotify backlash.

 

Bandcamp and Direct Selling

 

Since the early 2000s, I think only one shop I experienced did things right: Bandcamp. I mean, as of a business model, because their anti-trust approach was quite disappointing. That said, it’s not perfect, and some parts are a bit frustrating, but most of it is spot-on for what, as artists, we need. Even the share of money works. I’ve always been frustrated that shops like Beatport don’t let you pick a price for your release, which I find quite dumb. If you’re a label, there are numerous tools for selling, and it works well.

I wish there was more control over bootlegging. Now and then, you see someone reselling an artist’s music without shame, but it usually gets a lot of hate.

Selling your music from a website has some flaws:

  • Costs for a secure site
  • A shopping system that evolves with the market and remains accessible
  • Updates
  • Creating traffic
  • Marketing

Those are the little parts of it, and you’re venturing yourself into the entrepreneur’s path, which is hard. I often say this to clients: until people tell you they want to buy your music, there’s no reason for you to want to sell it. Many people get depressed from their music not selling…

 

So, is it worth it?

Like I said, not until there is a demand. You need to feed your community first, making sure people around you love your music and will talk about it. That requires a lot of time, dedication, and patience. Few people can afford an ad at the Super Bowl, so aiming for little things first can make a difference.

But I think it could be worth it for a label that has sales, but Bandcamp is where it should start. It’s quite common to find releases on Bandcamp that have no sales. I think it’s better to wait before putting your music there. Recently, Deezer removed 26 million songs that had never been played (or were problematic), and the overflow of music is not helping anyone.

 

The Other Model

In parallel to all this, I’ve seen another new movement, in a way. On a topic thread, someone commented:

 

Music fans are basically abusive. You tell them you’re being exploited, they say they care but then continue doing it. That’s no surprise if you see how people continue buying at H&M or getting the latest smart phone. I don’t really want to give my music abroad, I want to keep it to my friends.

 

The conversation was about what would happen if musicians had the other mentality of not wanting to share their music with the whole world. Instead, they focused on immediate contacts who wanted to listen and play the music. There was a consensus that they’d rather give the music to 5 people who want to listen than pay Tunecore or Distrokid to have their music everywhere and see it was played 10 times. Rarity creates value, not total accessibility.

 

Why would someone pay for something they can have in a snap of a finger?

 

This conversation continued for a while, and I noticed some friends and clients going in the same direction. I played music on a friend’s birthday and checked the content of my friend’s USB stick. He had a folder with around 50 songs of an artist I had never heard from. They were all outstanding. I later checked streaming sites or shops, and none of those songs were there. My friend told me about a few artists who make songs every day and don’t sell them. Instead, they pass their music to DJs they like.

 

You’ll ask, what is the business model here?

I don’t think there is one, or at least it’s unclear. Some people have accepted that they won’t turn their music into a business until people are interested in buying or catching a label’s eye. They know they want their music to be played by DJs, who will eventually get someone’s attention. I think that is the motivation beyond commercializing their music. I like that a lot. It’s a follow-up version of the Netlabels, but more aimed at community building than desperately wanting to get everyone’s attention. That guy made a point, and here I am talking about him.

Perhaps, as musicians and artists, our approach must be more experimental. Running a shop is one, but I don’t think we have found the right way yet. We need more of a community with shops… Which is what Bandcamp is.

Let’s see what the future holds.

 

Music Timbre Essentials

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(Photo by Ayush Kumar on Unsplash)

 

When we dive into electronic music, one concept continually shapes our audio landscape, and you might not even know what it is: timbre.

Often described as the “color” or “tone quality” of sound, timbre is the characteristic that distinguishes one instrument or sound source from another, even when they’re playing the same pitch at the same volume. In this article, we will approach what I have learned about timbre in electronic music, focusing on how synthesizers and envelope design play pivotal roles in its creation.

Why is it important to understand what Timbre is about?

Well, if you’re interested in sound design, this should be your entrance to that world. If you know how it works, then you’ll have an understanding of how sounds are made. This means you can then extrapolate your imagination’s bleeps into real-life bloops.

Pigment from Arturia

Understanding Timbre

 

At its core, timbre is on a multi-axis, covering the aspects of sound. It has various factors such as harmonics, dynamics,  overtones, attack, decay, sustain, and release. These elements collectively shape the fingerprint of a sound, allowing us to discern between a piano, a trumpet, or a synthesizer.

To give you an example, you can play the same C2 on all those instruments, but your ear would be able to identify both the notes as well as what are the instruments. That is because the ear understands timbre’s multiple elements as unique.

In detail, those elements that will determine a sound’s color would be:

  • It’s the head. The very beginning of a sound will contain dynamic information that will let you understand what it is. For example, a drum and a piano are both percussive instruments but sound completely different.
  • Spectral profile. The way a sound is composed will be a collection of different tones, harmonics, and overtones. That also involves noise and inharmonicity. The last point, also known as noise, defines a certain amount of non-linear components, that are random and don’t follow a precise pattern.
  • Dynamics. This is how the sound changes over time. Of course, this is related to the envelope of that sound (ADSR).

Synthesis and Timbre

 

In early 2024, I decided to join the Synthesis class of Sarah Belle Reid. I was a bit doubtful at first because since I started making music, in the early 90’s, I’ve learned everything by myself and continue learning every day as well. Being under the impression that you can have access to all knowledge gives you a lot of drive but also creates a blindsight where you also have information you didn’t know you don’t know.

These are some of the things people consult me a lot for: lack of vocabulary, lack of understanding of concepts that are badly explained online and being pointed at what a specific sound, sounds like.

Back to Reid’s class. It starts with the basic knowledge of sound itself and goes through each element related to sound, then proceeds with a demonstration. Seeing, hearing, and being explained these concepts, helps being able to perceive sound from a very technical point of view. It’s one thing to understand it but it’s another thing to have vocabulary.

Timbre was one of the most important points of the class for me. It’s not with a simple blog post that I can go through all the main elements regarding timbre but I’d point out that the aha moment was to review how I use a spectrogram.

Seeing the sound from that angle helped me understand what timbre is about. It’s a concept that felt easy to read about but not necessarily easy to grasp.

 

Here are my 2 tips:

  1. Check the frequency response of the beginning of a sound’s information.
  2. Observe how the sound fades out and how the frequencies shape slowly.

Knowing that the beginning shapes an important part of your sound, this is a direct inspiration on how to use your ADSR envelope to shape or alter the shape of sounds you have. The amplitude of your sound can be shaped by a first envelope and a second one may shape filtering or other elements.

 

As for creating the timbre of a sound, you’ll have to combine multiple oscillators, noise, and modulations to mimic the spectral content.

 

Let’s go deeper into the envelope and content synthesis.

Envelope Design and Dynamic Techniques

 

At the heart of timbral manipulation lies envelope design—an important point of sound shaping in electronic music. You might use it with compression but it is also there for design. Envelopes lead the evolution of a sound over time, dictating its amplitude, frequency, and spectral content. Understanding envelope parameters, particularly attack, decay, sustain, and release (ADSR), is crucial for crafting dynamic and expressive sounds.

 

Attack: The onset of a sound, characterized by its initial transient, sets the stage for our auditory perception. A sharp attack imbues a sound with immediacy and presence, while a gradual attack imparts a softer, more ethereal quality.

Decay: Following the attack, the decay phase determines how quickly the sound’s intensity diminishes. A longer decay sustains the sound, while a shorter decay yields a percussive or plucked character.

Sustain: Once the decay phase concludes, the sustain segment maintains a constant amplitude until the sound is released. Adjusting the sustain level allows for sustained or staccato articulations.

Release: As the sound fades into silence, the release phase governs the duration of its decay. A shorter release yields a crisp, abrupt ending, while a longer release imparts a lingering decay.

Sounds of the real world or from instruments are rarely static. They often are never the same thing when played a few times, but they’ll be changing a bit too on different aspects: spectral variation, amplitude modulation, pitch. In the modular world, the use of LFOs and envelopes is handy to modify those aspects. You will want to use them to have slight variations.

The soft synth Pigments is very well made in that aspect where it will have a lot of different modulations possible which can then be routed to a lot of different parameters.

Dynamic Use and Filtering

 

In addition to envelope design, dynamic use, and filtering contribute significantly to timbral variation. Dynamic modulation techniques, such as velocity sensitivity and aftertouch, introduce expressive nuances to performances. Meanwhile, filtering—via low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, or notch filters—shapes the spectral content of a sound, emphasizing or attenuating specific frequencies to sculpt its timbre further.

A good way to push the filtering is to use colored filters such as MS20 emulation or vactrol. To understand LPG (Low Pass Gate) is also another option.

 

 

Ever since I got myself a Freak Module from Vult, it brought my sound elsewhere. It has multiple filter emulation, some saturation, and a duplex mode where you can have chained filters or different filters in stereo mode. It’s pretty powerful.

Conclusion

In the ever-evolving world of electronic music, timbre is something to understand if you want to define your sound and personal signature. By understanding the power of synthesizers, mastering envelope design, and employing dynamic techniques and filtering, musicians and producers alike can unlock new creative possibilities. Through this article, we’ve partly covered into the heart of timbral exploration in electronic music, uncovering the intricate interplay between synthesis, envelope design, dynamics, and filtering.  With this knowledge, may you define on your sound design skills, sculpting timbral tones that redefine who you are. Continue searching for more details and let me know if you have questions.