Pat Carroll

  • Reflecting on a simple creative process

    Yesterday I had a good session of composition. I feel like recently my composition practice has been a little too much in foreign territory: incorporating too many new techniques and pieces of equipment. (I tend to do this often). I have been incorporating too many new approaches into the process, which meant that I didn’t feel like I was engaging my existing skill set.

    Over the weekend I had the pleasure of working with a bunch of high school students through a composition and production session. Preparing for this required me to really slim down the creative process into its most basic form. While teaching it, I and my student helper both agreed that we often complicate the creative process too much. What we were putting the students through sounded so simple, yet fun and explorative. We both said that we wanted to be doing what the students were doing in our own studio sessions.

    So yesterday, I did. I just carried out the creative process in a very simple format: improvising, landing on a core sound and idea, looping this and recording more sounds around it, experimenting with different processing techniques, mapping it out into a structure. All the time, just using Live and the Prophet as my main instruments, both of which I am very comfortable on.

    I spent some time back in session view while the core materials were playing in arrangement view, which allowed me to record little loops and random flourishes. I then looped these and recorded them into arrangement view, automating their levels and filters to allow them to gradually grow and retreat when necessary.

    When was necessary? Well, this brought me back to how I have typically carried out the arrangement process in the past. The structure emerges from some initial improvisation. This involves me recording a long performance, building the sound as I go until I have a full structure. I then spent some time tidying it up and getting rid of any errors. Sometimes I will trim the structure if I feel like I stayed too long in one level of intensity. I then build elements around the trajectory of this sound. The main sound forms the macro structure while the other supplementary sounds articulate the structures on smaller time scales.

    This process worked well with this piece I worked on yesterday. I actually started working on a part two of the piece, but it grew to be something entirely different, so I’ll probably split this off into its own project file.

    The whole process was just nice. It was about 2 hours of work. It engaged my existing skill set while still forcing me to challenge my abilities. I’ve been conscious of applying the concepts of deliberate practice to my creative work and I feel like this session was operating in the perfect range of difficulty — just beyond the current abilities — for encouraging skill development.

    HERE is a link to the result.

  • Plans for the next record

    I’m putting together some ideas for my next record. I like to start with a bit of a plan like the one below, but I think this is probably the most formal and structured plan I’ve made.

    The purpose of plans, as I see it, is to provide the first steps and the ways forward when feeling a little lost. They’re not to be stuck to in a very dogmatic sense – I’m very comfortable knowing that I can and probably will deviate from it.

    A big focus for this plan is to separate the different stages of the creative process onto particular pieces of equipment. I’m beginning by gathering a bunch of material onto the Tonverk SD card, then sketching on that box, before moving to Bitwig to record into and flesh out, then Live to do a final round of touch ups. I’ve found this to be a good practice, as it really forces me to be aware of what stage of the creative process I’m actually working on. In modern DAWs, you can do everything, from sketching to arranging, processing, polishing. In my experience, this vast amount of options can stifle creativity, mostly in the early stages of building a work. I’ve made a conscious effort below to assign myself particular platforms to work in at the various stages of creation.

    Skill development goals:

    1. learn the Tonverk deeply
    2. learn Bitwig deeply

    Inspirations:

    1. Murcof
    2. Taylor Deupree
    3. Loscil
    4. Purl
    5. Lawrence English
    6. Offthesky
    7. Abul Mogard

    Aesthetics:

    1. Dystopian, but moments of light
    2. Cinematic
    3. Not only long droning pieces: more ‘composed’ and shaped
    4. Tapey, driven, textural, experimental

    Creative Framework/Limitations:

    1. I will begin with a pool of materials, some recorded by myself, some gathered from elsewhere.
    2. I will do all writing, sketching and sequencing on the Tonverk.
    3. I will record and do additional creative processing in Bitwig
      1. (I am leaving open the option of jumping to Live if this is really hindering the creative process),
      2. I will carry out an additional round of and creative processing in Live.
    4. I will write a development log specifically for the record
      1. Descriptions of what I did,
      2. ‘Findings’ and discoveries about the equipment and techniques,
      3. Reflections on how it’s going.

    Process:

    1. Gather materials:
      1. Record improvisations
      2. Source samples
      3. Record instruments
      4. Load onto Tonverk SD card
    2. In Tonverk:
      1. Build the sketches on separate patterns in the Tonverk
      2. Process sounds
      3. Focus on one piece per session
      4. Record into Bitwig
    3. In Bitwig (if realy struggling with creative flow, jump into Live):
      1. Carry out additional processing
      2. Record extra layers
      3. Adjust arrangement
      4. Export stems, bring into Live
    4. In Live:
      1. Mix tracks

    I want to document these sorts of projects on the blog, and so I’m adding a post category of ‘DevLog’, and a post tag of the record title, which is currently “tonverk_record_2025”; it’ll change eventually. For future works, where I carry out a similar process, I’ll carry out the same format, adding them to ‘DevLog’ category, and adding a new post tag for the record title.

  • Thoughts on ‘Pandora’s Star’ – Peter F. Hamilton

    Pandora’s Star is a science fiction book by Peter F. Hamilton, published in 2004. I began this one because I absolutely loved his recent book, Exodus: Archimedes Engine, which is set in the world of an upcoming video game. I gave that one an easy 5 stars – it had such interesting concepts, setting and a good pace.

    I felt that Pandora’s Star (PS) was good, but not as good as Exodus. PS felt bigger and wider than Exodus, but I felt that the writing at times was just a little unrefined. This is the most male gaze story I’ve read in a long time (potentially ever), where every female character was overly sexualised, young and most of the times using the attractiveness for manipulative purposes. While this was most likely just Hamilton’s style of writing back then, it could also have been interpreted as the state of humanity in a world where death has basically been overcome through ‘rejuvenation’ of the body, making everyone horny, sexy 18–25 year olds. At least that’s one way you could justify it… But all the interactions between a male and female character ultimately revolved around sex and attraction, which got a little old, but (even though I’m ranting about it here) didn’t really ruin the reading experience for me. Most of the time it just led to an eye-roll and laughter.

    The concepts were pretty bloody cool though. I’m relatively new to sci-fi; I’d say I’ve read 10 sci-fi books over the years, loving some like Hyperion and Children of Time, but also not loving a few. But I could tell while reading PS that the main antagonist, MorningLightMountain, was a very special kind of alien. I loved the chapters from its perspectives, while also being terrified of it. I think the thing that made it so special to me was its non-humanness; not really angry and wanting to just go out and wipe out the human race, but doing so from a place of not having the concepts of compassion or pain. It simply needs to expand, to take the resources, to become omnipresent and immortal – whatever is required to do so. What I loved was how this was scary when contrasted to how humans think – to human nature.

    I loved how an important conversation takes place with MorningLightMountain that aims to understand its goals, but it’s not carried out by a human; it’s between the alien and an AI. I thought this was interesting, seeing two different non-human consciousnesses discussing the fate of humanity, and seeing the AI as more human than the alien.

    Something I really enjoyed about the book was its look at not only new technologies, but their effects on humanity. Specifically, the book centres around the presence of wormhole technologies. There are places that in real space are separated by huge distances, but due to wormholes, they’re effectively neighbours (linked by a vast network of trains!) This is something I’ve been interested in quite a bit recently – how certain technologies drastically shape humanity, and what human life looks like in societies where those technologies dominate.

    I did have a hard time with the lack of a clear lead character. There are a lot of characters in this book, and it didn’t feel like one was the main one the reader should be rooting for. For me, I did find myself gravitating towards the Paula Myo character, and also the storyline of Ozzy Isaacs. But it was definitely more of a large ensemble of players, rather than a clear through-line character.

    Overall, really enjoyed it. It was a little wordy – it probably could have been cut down to 800-900 pages – but it was also really immersive. Keen for the second one, but won’t jump in straight away.

    4/5

  • Loving the Tonverk

    Yesterday, I had a session on the Elektron Tonverk using a portable battery plugged into it’s USB-C port for power. It worked really well.

    I have a feeling that the Tonverk might be exactly what I’ve been after for a while: a very powerful and capable machine that is portable, fairly self-contained (as in it can cover all the bases for a piece of music – playback of materials, processing), and aimed at more experimental approaches to composition. That’s another thing: this machine does feel like one that is leaning a little more into the composition side of ‘doing music’, rather than one aspect of music making, such as making drums or making synths, or solely the performance of music. I think with future updates, it’s just going to continue to get better and have more functions added to it.

    It has copped quite a lot of negativity recently, and this has been interesting to see. I feel like people who are upset about it have some grounds for their arguments, but are also being unreasonable at times. Sure, the device has bugs and some glitches, but it’s nowhere near as bad as people are making it out to be. And I feel like people went into the announcement of the machine with a clear idea of what they want the machine to be, only to be disappointed at the fact that it didn’t align to  their expectations. I think many people just wanted an Octatrack mk3. Even after using it for only a few days, and it still being in its infancy, I can definitely see that it is something entirely new for Elektron, borrowing from parts of their other machines, but really taking a new approach. I’m very excited for it.

    I think it would be a great device to begin a whole record on. It has everything there, and it would be a nice exercise to gather a bunch of materials onto the SD card, start a new project, and just build everything on the machine. This would be good for at least getting a collection of tracks to the point where they can then be further processed and mixed in the DAW. But all of the sequencing, rhythms, some processing, and core elements could be there.

    I also love the idea of sampling things into it from external sources like my phone or iPad. This makes it a really portable machine that I could make a little case for, containing the external battery, a 3.5mm – dual 1/4-inch cable, and some headphones to be able to take the machine anywhere, do some sampling, and make whole pieces anywhere.

    There are a couple of methods for sampling with the Tonverk:

    First is normal ‘melodic sampling’ of sampling in a note and playing this back polyphonically. Multi-sampling is an extension of this to capture more samples per sound/synth patch (samples for different pitches and different velocities).

    The second the approach is that of looping parts of longer recordings, eg. for tape loop-inspired approaches. I can load in a long take of me playing some melodic material on an instrument (just an improv), and then in the Tonverk, I can just play a small portion of this back by playing a single pitch and holding it for a portion of time, looping it. I could have multiple of these going, perhaps some at different loop lengths. If I was using the subtracks machine, I could have loads of these going – 8 per track, on each/any of the 8 tracks. The other two playback machines (single player and multisample) are designed specifically for melodic sampling, so I think subtracks would be the best way to go about it.

    I’d really be keen to test this process out to make some Taylor Deupree-style music. These loops could be processed by a couple of insert FX, the bus tracks, and sent to the send tracks.

    Excited to dive in more 🙂