So having listened to the 3 podcasts again, I’ve tried to summarise Fred’s music making theories. A lot of these have overlap, but I think they’re fascinating…
Non-Audiophile Technology in Professional Music. Fred is noted for his use of technology, specifically he speaks glowingly about the iPhone mic, as he loves the compression in Voice Notes, and specifically something in Whatsapp where he will send music to friends just to get that compression. He says that the phone is both his favourite mic and speaker. He talks about the human qualities this has, which he thinks comes from the fact that it’s a sound that’s part of society, so people naturally gel with it when it shows up in a record. He thinks these supposedly “consumer” tools shouldn’t be overlooked by pro composers.
Subtractive Sampling. This isn’t unique to Fred, but I find this the most interesting aspect of what he does.
The general idea here is trying to pull a sound out of the complexity of a sample is much more interesting than taking a sine wave and making it complex via synthesis. (Maybe this is a sign of the times, as this is much more doable with advances in technology and processing power.) But for a brief potted history, it goes back as far as Wolfgang Voigt and The Field with their notable use of microsampling in minimal techno; into artists they directly influenced like Todd Edwards & Tourist (who was the first person I saw talking about this technique). Then it’s a short hop/skip/jump into in the music of Jamie XX, Four Tet and Burial; who all went to the same school. (Fred is good friends with Four Tet - who himself knows Burial - and Fred worked with Romy from the XX, so it feels like there’s a definite kinship between the group even if indirectly at times.)
I wonder if that’s how he ended up using that technique; as I notice some of the sounds on USB EP are not unlike some of those in Jamie XX tunes, and there are some shades of Burial’s use of samples in Fred’s work, specifically vocal samples and also just capturing sounds on the phone and then re-using them as drums etc in the song directly. The way he describes this sounds almost like a sculptor chipping away at material, rather than a painter and a blank canvas (note; this sculptor analogy is also a more eastern way of looking at art.)
Big clarity moves. Fred talks about how it’s super important not to get lost in the detail when writing. As mentioned before, this is why Fred suggests using non-pro tools like his phone to listen to a new tune. Fred seems to recognise that audiophiles/producers are prone to going into “mix mode” mich too soon, which leads to paralysis on technical details when you should still be working on the song itself. If you start thinking about whether or not to low pass or shelve a few db in the low end, you’re in a different headspace to the one where you’re writing. Instead the focus needs to be whether the emotion and the arrangement is right, above all else.
The devil isn’t in the detail (at first). Along a similar line, he also says the benchmark for good writing in electronic music is like on acoustic guitar. You you can build the core motif of a song with an acoustic guitar and 3-4 chords, and the core of that tune is distinctive without any anything else. His point here is that if the song is right, it’ll still feel right even if you’re using the “wrong” kick. Linked to big clarity moves he also advises things like not changing the kick until right the end, and rather than EQ’ing the one you have, try 20 and see what works best. Also don’t A/B your mix until the song itself is actually finished.
The state of play. Fred talks again and again about how being playful is the key to arriving at the songs he wants; referencing that he picked this mentality up from Brian Eno. He mentions that it feels like there’s a balance between head and heart. But we only have a limited amount of heart, as those emotions are fleeting. He wants to keep the emotion alive as along as possible while writing, before then you end up in your head and over thinking things.
Out of control On a similar note, Fred seems to enjoy technology that you don’t or can’t control. He mentions the OP1 and modular where a lot of the time you actually don’t know what is going on, and suggests instruments like these can be rich tools for creativity. If you have any technical chops, you’ll fight against the not knowing part, but if you let that go, you’ll go into a song focus because you’ve given up on controling the technology. Also see: Portal, Morph and other similar VSTs. These have somewhat cryptic interfaces, X-Y controls and you can use them to obscure the technicalities behind the scenes.
On or off? Another aspect of play is that he talks about having plugin settings that act pretty much as an on/off switch. He mentions watching Boi Wonder and how they have no plugins on their mixes in the early stages. No EQ/no compression etc, and that only comes in right at the end. Fred calls out some of the stock devices in Logic Pro where when you add a channel strip, it only needs minimal tweaking and you have a final result. Rather than endlessley tweaking drums to shape the sound, Fred readliy admits that "90 percent of drum manipulation, I find I just do with the ADSR [envelope].”
Versions not version. Fred likes to have several versions of the same song, that he will often make and remake rather than a single version that he tweaks. He specifically references speed several times, talking about how he tends to work on a song for a few hours and move on if it’s not working. He mentions using time limiters on writing sessions like an hour or 15 minutes and then moving on. He says that experience has taught him this is like buying “more tickets to the lottery.”
Sonic stamp. He talks about how he starts a song with either background noise from his phone or a drone of some sort. This sets the tone and emotion and colour of the song. Famously, a lot of the stuff he samples is stuff found on social media and background noise recorded on his phone. And his relationship with Brian Eno comes up quite a lot here, as he uses drones to set the emotional scene for the song he’s building on top.
Hope this is a useful summary…
