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SELF SIMILARITY

In the past few articles of this series I’ve talked about technique and work-flow related issues all contextualized around making beats and producing electronic music.  In this article I’d like to introduce a concept which perhaps not everyone will agree with, but I think is worth talking about.  It deals more with the artistic component of making music.

The concept is self-similarity.  Basically, making tracks that sound like each other, and developing a ’sound’ as a producer and artist – meaning that someone could hear a new track and guess that it was you by the style and sonics.

An example of someone who has utilized this concept throughout their career is the grime MC and producer Wiley.  He’s one of my favorite artists from the grime scene both behind the mic and on the buttons.  His productions are bold and unique, and so is his MC personality.  He’s an artist with an outsized persona and a great deal of both personal and stylistic courage.

He’s also massively prolific.  I have no idea how many beats and songs he’s released, but it’s definitely in the hundreds in the past decade.  One way he does this is by re-using a lot of the same sounds and samples.  For example, he can finish a riddim, save the project as a new copy, delete the MIDI data, and start again using the same sounds.  He has mentioned that he works in Logic in the past, so specific to that program, you could use the ‘channel strip’ feature to achieve this.  In Ableton a similar technique would be to use an instrument rack.  Regardless of technique, after hearing so many different tracks with, for example, that wood-blocky, massively compressed Wiley snare, he has developed a very recognizable sonic signature.

For all producers reading I recommend you try this:

Finish a track, save it and then delete all the notes, patterns and melodic phrases and save with a new name.  Be careful not to hit save and overwrite your previous song without changing the name.

Now, write a new song in a new key signature, maybe a new tempo, and re-use the same sounds.  You’ve already spent a lot of time gathering and making these sounds, so they’re probably pretty good.

Focus on creating melodies, beat patterns and musical ideas, rather than sound design. Obviously in the course of the track you may end up adding some new sounds, changing existing sounds etc., but the point is you already had a nice palette to start with.

The second strength of self-similar production is that by doing this a few times and releasing the results, people will start to hear similarities between your tracks: if they like them they will often be happy to hear more of the same.  Yet another use for this technique is to make several songs using a good sound palette, and then choose the best one or two to release.  Choose two that sound similar but are different enough to stand apart, for example.  There is a fine line here between creating a sound for yourself and being repetitive, and this is where the controversy may arise.  Obviously many people, especially people who are into sounds more than songs, may complain (nerds hating on internet forums, I see you guys, don’t worry!)  It’s up to you in this case to find an artistic balance here between similarity and variation.

Maintaining a certain self-similarity in your own output can help people, both listeners and DJs, to understand your work.  By maintaining a certain somewhat consistent sound and vibe throughout, someone like Wiley can guarantee that if I am in a record-shop looking for a certain type of thing – basically interesting, weird but hype grime – I will definitely check out his new releases.

Another example of someone who does this in both the production and song writing side is Terius Nash, aka The Dream, another artist I find very inspiring.  As a producer/songwriter his  shiny, heavily processed, cotton candy R+B is immediately recognizable, whether it is he himself as an artist singing “Rockin’ That Sh*t” or someone like Rhianna singing “Umbrella” (he wrote both).  Again, in this case it can be both a strength and a weakness, but for someone like The Dream who made his initial mark as a behind-the-scenes song writer/producer (with partner Tricky Stewart) this guaranteed that when his clients went shopping for a single they could go to Radio Killa (his company and he’s not kidding with the name) and be confident that they would get a certain type of track and that it will probably set the charts on fire.