Perfection Kills The Magic
Hey friends,
There was morning sun in the studio the other day. The kind that comes in low and puts little sparkles on the desk, right across the cables and the Push 3. I didn't plan a session that day. I just sat down and welcomed it with some ascending arpeggios, and half an hour later I had an episode..
That morning turned into Melodic Minute EP. 11 — and into a conversation about something I keep coming back to: imperfections. Or, put differently, taking something perfectly beautiful and letting it sound a little broken.
The grey little box that ruins things on purpose
The Hologram Microcosm usually lives in my setup as a sparkle machine. Beautiful, shimmery, easy to fall in love with. In this jam I used it for the opposite: random micro-glitches on the Moog Mother-32's signal.
Just a small amount. Enough that the pattern stumbles slightly every few bars.
And that tiny stumble is what makes a repeating synth line interesting. Without it, the Mother-32 plays the same sequence forever, perfectly. With it, there's something to listen for.
Why I stopped re-recording my mistakes
The second way I invite imperfection is much less technical: I play things live. The piano in this episode is played by hand on the Ableton Push 3, freely, while I'm exploring.
Which means it isn't perfectly in time. Sometimes it isn't even the note I aimed for.
I used to hate that. As a perfectionist, my first thought was always: great, now I have to record it again. It took me embarrassingly long to notice what changes when you play live for real: there is no re-record. You have to live with your unplanned events.
That sounds scary at first. In practice it's liberating, because it removes most of the overthinking. If you already know that no take will be perfect, you stop asking how to avoid unplanned events and start asking how to react to them.
(And no, I'm not talking about the unplanned event where your whole system freezes on stage. That happened to me once. I don't want to go back there.)
The wrong note is a decision, not a verdict
Let's say you play a note that's completely out of key. It sounds terrible for a second. The unplanned event has happened — now what?
One option: break out in sweat, beat yourself up, wish you'd never touched that key. If you ask me, that doesn't sound like fun at all.
The other option is to work with it. Play the wrong note again. Repeat it as if it belongs there. Suddenly it's not a mistake anymore, it's part of the performance — and sometimes it adds exactly the tension the pattern was missing.
You would never have found that if you hadn't played the wrong note in the first place.
Some of my best musical ideas came from things that didn't work out as planned. Things I filed as mistakes, until they made perfect sense in the surroundings they landed in. "Mistake" is probably too harsh a word for that. Let's call them unplanned events.
So if you make some this week: don't be harsh on yourself. Work with them. Your performances will get less stressful and a lot more fun.
What's an unplanned event that ended up staying in one of your tracks? I'd love to hear it.
Stay creative, Milan (KVNDRA)
P.S.: Melodic Minute is a slow series, and Patreon support is what keeps it going. Patrons from level 1 get every episode a week early plus the season albums — season one is up now as an album called "Mind". If you'd like to help the series continue: https://www.patreon.com/kvndra
