EXPERIMENT: Song Sculpture

A way to stop over-thinking and surprise yourself

Midnight Voice Memos ‘EXPERIMENT’ posts are quick, playful, and slightly addictive ways to jump-start your music-making brain.

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Song Sculpture is an experiment in crafting a song from a dense sound block.

It will help you

• Explore new sound palettes playfully

• Rapidly generate complete arrangements and song structures

• Stop over-thinking and surprise yourself

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YOU WILL NEED

A DAW (e.g. Logic, Ableton, Protools)

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TRY IT

Construct a palette (5 mins)

Create tracks for 4 - 8 instruments. You could imagine you’re arranging music for an unusual eight-piece or choose sounds you never use otherwise.

Build your loops (15 mins)

Build a 2 - 8 bar loop with the first instrument. Then, with your initial idea looping, add parts from the remaining instruments. As you do this, don’t mute anything.

Explore your loops (5 mins)

Let your loop play on repeat and start muting different parts to see what combinations feel most exciting to you. Note your fav combinations.

Create a rough structure (10 mins)

Take the loop combinations you particularly love and start to organize them in the rough structure of a song. Now you have a starter instrumental!

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