Principles of Electronic Music Production

Principles of Electronic Music Production offers a comprehensive overview of the fundamental concepts that shape contemporary electronic music production, revealing it as a complex tradition. Over ten chapters richly illustrated with the practices and ideas of innovative musicians past and present, across a range of styles, this book looks at the producer as an omnimusical figure-a composer-performer-engineer who improvises, designs sounds, programs MIDI, sculpts audio, makes beats, shapes arrangements, and balances mixes. The chapters explore the power of serendipities and musical systems, the phenomenology of listening, using minimalism and constraints, the lessons of AI, playing software as a musical instrument, the alchemy of sound design, creating dynamic musical form, and iterating tracks towards quality to answer a perennial production question: how does one make music that sounds alive at many levels at once? Establishing foundations that music production students, professionals, and hobbyists can build on when thinking creatively in their own work, Principles of Electronic Music Production is a fascinating insight into the art of electronic musicianship.

Thomas Brett is a musician who has played percussion on Broadway since 1997 and holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from New York University. He is the author of The Creative Electronic Music Producer (Routledge, 2021) and writes about music at brettworks.com.

Introduction; 1. Serendipities; 2. A Living Musical System (Alive at Many Levels at Once); 3. Attention and Attunement; 4. Minimalisms and Constraints; Interlude: AI in Electronic Music Production; 5. Sonics and Instruments; 6. Learning Producing and Building Tacit Knowledge; 7. Ambiences and Atmospheres; 8. Towards Dynamic Structures; 9. Iterating Towards a Quality Without a Name