luxcache

SOUND & BEING - Part 1: The Invisible Forces of Music Production with cndl

Added 2025-01-23 19:01:02 +0000 UTC

SOUND & BEING

Part 1: The Invisible Forces of Music Production

with cndl

In this Lux Cache article series, we look to explore the symbiotic relationship between artistic creation and consciousness, channelling introspection and analysis to uncover how technical workflows mirror inner landscapes—transforming DAWs into tools for introspection and originality. For our first chapter, Swansea-based producer cndl dissects the invisible struggles of artistic creation, blending personal insights with actionable strategies to reframe productivity, reignite inspiration, and harness chaos through sound design. Rejecting toxic "hustle culture," cndl argues that creativity thrives when freed from output quotas, advocating instead for curiosity-driven experimentation. The piece deep-dives into the cyclical relationship between inspiration and persistence, troubleshooting creative burnout with examples from Baroque-era aleatoric music to modern DAW randomisation tactics. Learn how to build a personalized sound library and transform accidental discoveries into signature textures—all while redefining what it means to "make progress" as an artist.

This tutorial is available as a Patreon text post and a preferred .pdf document format. We ask you kindly not to share Lux Cache content outside of the Patreon, our contributors rely on your donations.

INTRODUCTION TO INVISIBLE FORCES

This article explores the internal landscapes of music creation, dissecting the psychological and philosophical challenges artists navigate during composition. Rather than prescribing technical formulas, we examine how concepts like productivity—often weaponised by hustle culture—distort creative freedom, how the cycle of inspiration ebbs and flows beyond our control, and why modern sound design techniques (like randomisation and aleatoric experimentation) can reignite curiosity when traditional methods falter. By reframing productivity as a process over output, demystifying inspiration as a renewable (not random) resource, and treating sound design as a form of artistic meditation, we reveal how these elements coalesce into sustainable creative fuel. Ultimately, this is a manifesto for letting go of perfectionism, embracing the unseen “work” of experimentation, and trusting that every sonic exploration—no matter how fragmented—contributes to a richer artistic identity.

PRODUCTIVITY IN THE MODERN LANDSCAPE

On average, the modern producer is bombarded with ‘productivity tips and hacks’ daily, where producer-influencer types list some strategies that may or may not assist in the productivity of the viewer if they attempt the tips. This is ultimately a good thing, having suggestions for personal development in one’s songwriting can be an invaluable tool, however, this can lead to unnecessary pressure in terms of comparing ‘productivity’ to either yourself or something external. In this article, I intend to present how rejecting some aspects of productivity can relieve the writer of the already built-up pressure they face in composing original music.

PRODUCTIVITY - “the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input”
(Oxford Languages, 2025)

To contextualise some of these thoughts, the idea of productivity needs to be addressed. Productivity is the measure of output, whether or not there is a large amount of substance at the end of a work session. Throughout my personal and professional life, I have often come across artists and songwriters who worry a lot about being productive, which is a valid concern, but only to a certain extent. The productivity concern can often get in the way of writing and experimenting, as instead of focusing on the work in front of them, artists can be overly concerned if what they’re doing is ‘enough.’ Not ‘good enough,’ but simply ‘enough’ in terms of output. This introduces unnecessary pressure to what is supposed to be a free and exciting experience, if someone is too concerned about how much they’ve made and not the quality of what they’ve made, they may neglect the details and creative opportunities in favour of reliable strategies. This is the death of creative exploration. As modern music producers, the amount of sounds we are capable of making is limitless, so don’t get stuck thinking if you’re doing enough, if you’re doing anything at all, that is by far enough. It may help to imagine that when in a writing session, there is in reality a finite amount of work that will ultimately be done at the end, so why bother stressing over ‘how much there will be’ at the end, and just focus on exercising your creativity? I believe that when experimenting with sound, there is no time wasted, everything informs your practice in some way or another, so remember to have fun with it and ease up on the internal pressure, it’s just wasted effort that could be better spent. Just as a quick side note, stop comparing yourself to others too, again wasted effort and time, there’s a time to compare in music and that is when you’re meeting the master level of another track, any other time is far too subjective so don’t stress yourself about it! Common productivity tips like “finish a track daily” or “template-driven workflows” risk-reducing music to a mechanical task. While templates save time, over-reliance on them can limit spontaneity. Instead, view productivity as a curiosity in motion—if you’ve explored a new plugin or layered a texture, that’s progress.

INSPIRATION & CREATIVE STIMULATION

As artists, much of the work is fueled by what we know as inspiration. There seems to be an attitude towards artistic work as being purely inspired by external things, day-to-day life and experiences, which is true but I would argue these are only a part of the process of creation. Inspiration can be sought after, discovered and accidental, but why does it give artists the drive to create? The answers really are limitless, but within this section, I will discuss my personal view of the importance of it all.

Inspiration - “the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.” (Oxford Languages, 2025)

Here below is my take on inspiration and how it appears in a cyclical fashion during the process of creating artwork.

In this graphic, I aim to demonstrate my personal view of how inspiration works in terms of what the artist uses it for. As shown, the inspirational moment leads to motivation, which I view as the initial drive to see the idea through. This eventually runs out, which then leads to persistence, which is where the work of creating really is. Of this flow chart, the most important step by far is persistence.

PERSISTENCE IN PRACTICE

“the fact of continuing in an opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.”

In composition, persistence is that period of time spent after the first loop of the track is developed, it’s the struggle to come up with a complimentary section to the original idea which leads the direction of the song. It’s when the artist has to think of ways the song could go, and it can be a huge drag but it really is where the work is, and after some time the persistence is the ‘flow state’ of making music. Inspiration is fleeting, and motivation can be exhausted, but persistence is the only thing that is controllable. When struggling with ‘productivity,’ people often resort to reasons like not being motivated, which isn’t the element that they’re missing, as motivation serves as a spontaneous urge to do something, rather than the actual act of doing it (it is the fuel). Persistence outweighs this in terms of creating, it’s like a muscle that needs to be exercised, if you’re feeling uninspired and unmotivated but still want to create the only thing you have to rely on is persistence, which means to just keep at the work. Through the method of ‘just doing’ eventually you will come across something that inspires you, this moment of inspiration then gives you a sense of direction creatively which gives you the motivation to see that idea through, but once that motivation is spent a lot of people would call it a day, however, if you return to being persistent you could experience this cycle a few times in one session, which would lead to a lot of creative work being done.

From my personal experience, I have always found it difficult to find inspiration from external things or in day-to-day life. If I do, it’s usually on a large scale about a story I’ve researched that I could write a whole album about, but that is extremely rare for me. This has left me feeling a little left out from people who do get inspired by external things happening every day until I realise what really gets me in the flow, and that is simply the act of making. This isn’t to say that finding inspiration in daily life or the mundane is a bad thing, this is just another angle that may be useful to the producer when composing music. Being inspired by the process is a very useful thing to have, becoming wrapped up in the work and feeling like you’ve just got to do one more thing constantly is a great way to stay in the flow and express yourself through music. I feel that looking for inspiration is unfortunately not a guarantee, as I feel like you’re not really supposed to know when inspiration strikes you externally. However, if you’re working at something and suddenly a new sound or chord appears that really gets your interest, you’re becoming inspired quicker and more consistently. Over time, it seems this method of becoming inspired by working is tried and true, it’s feasible that a guitarist in the 1960s would be inspired by simply sitting at a piano and experimenting with chords and melodies, yet this may seem intimidating to the modern producer, as sitting down with a midi keyboard and a synth playing sine waves may not provide that immediate inspiration or spark they are looking for. From my experience inspiration is an unknown sensation that comes on when it isn’t expected, if you expect inspiration, more often than not you won’t get it. Through all this, it may be difficult to find that inspirational moment to feel the compulsion to write a track. One method that has recently become popular for producers struggling with sound design from scratch is to get into randomisation, more on this shortly.

EXPRESSION THROUGH SOUND DESIGN

The idea of sound design stirs different feelings and opinions in music producers. Some find it to be a daunting task to load up blank projects and being faced with their usual plugins with the task of creating something new to be difficult. Yet some find it a creative and pressure-free experience, where they are able to tinker and experiment with sound to craft specific sounds to later use in compositions. In recent times, it has become popular to have dedicated sound design projects, where no composition or attempts at writing music take place, they are simply to craft original sounds unique to the producer. Nik of Noisia recommends creating a bank of sounds in one project to open in another project just to reduce the amount of clutter that can cause many types of issues and confusion when composing. It has arguably become commonplace for many producers in the experimental music field to do this. Having dedicated sound design projects where the goal is to simply create sounds rather than ‘music’ or a ‘song’ can be extremely useful, as it exercises your creativity and crafts your skills as a producer, as the sounds you have created are for later use, they are to be banked into sample packs unique to you. From this process, when the producer next composes, they have a sample pack of unique sounds that they possess, so the pursuit of originality is suddenly easier as they know that no one else in the entire music production world has these sounds. The structure would look something like this:

This has become a fairly common way for producers to manage their projects, as it helps track a song's progress. From this method of working, a producer is able to go back through their work in case changes need to be made at later stages, and organisation. So by using this strategy of separating sound design projects from composition projects, the producer has two methods of working, one is similar to a sketch pad, or a collage; where the goal is to craft sounds for later use, regardless of how they’re going to fit together as that isn’t the aim here, the aim is to make as many samples as the producer sees fit. The other is the compositional project, where the goal is to give these sounds purpose as music. From this point, I have a very useful example of a sound design technique that provides unique and interesting results.

RANDOMISATION

A recent trend that has appeared (or rather reappeared) is randomisation. Randomisation as a music production technique is the process of moving several parameters at once to produce unusual sounds in quick succession, like trying to get a plugin to adjust every function in a single move. The results are intentionally unpredictable, often crazy and almost always interesting. This is comparable to performance improvisation, which gives room for performers to interpret a piece of music or sound in their way, which is arguably what happens when a producer uses randomisation techniques to craft sounds they then choose to include in their composition. This is not a new strategy, as computer-generative music goes back as early as the 1950s when many people made use of the developing sounds of electronic music equipment in an improvisational manner. Even in 1971 the ARP 2600 featured a sample and hold function where periodic samples of an incoming voltage were used to modulate other parameters on the synth, effectively making unpredictable changes to the sound. Going even further back, renaissance and baroque embraced improvisation on compositions by leaving certain sections vague enough to leave it up to the performer, essentially randomising that section. This is known as Aleatoric music, a form of music that relies on the improvisational choices of the performer, the structured randomness was dedicated parts of compositions where what the performer would improvise would be combined with the scripted notation.

Randomising in a DAW is an incredible method for coming up with unique samples in a short amount of time. There are many ways to go about doing this, but ultimately the technique remains the same; adjusting many parameters and once and resampling the outcome. Even in hardware randomisation is being embraced, for example, the Empress Effects ZOIA multi-fx/modular/guitar pedal has a dedicated random module that can be set to generate a random value each time a button is pressed, these values can then be mapped to any parameter on another module.

When it comes to randomising, it can often feel as though the ‘credit’ of making the sound can diminish, as though the producer really did just press one button over and over. However, I would argue that with randomly generated sounds, the true expression and artistic identity of an artist come through. For instance, after a session of sound design through randomisation, the producer is left with an extensive library of sound, where they are now tasked with turning these sounds into music. One producer may hear a certain sound and decide to not use it, whereas another could base a whole track off one specific sound, and so this shows how much the artistic taste of each producer comes through. One producer will hear something someone else would miss, and then appropriate the sound into their track in another unique way, just because the sounds were ‘easy to make’ doesn’t mean they’re not hard to work with, and so the challenge is taking these crazy sounds and putting them in songs in a pleasing way. Randomisers are arguably very personal as every time a producer resamples the outcome is unique to them, the skill then comes from processing the samples into a more ‘musical’ state, as opposed to listening to purely randomised and generated sounds. From here, the producer’s skills develop over time and eventually lead to a mixture of designing sounds from scratch to incorporate with their randomised sample banks as they become more experienced in how these specific sounds are made, once again crafting their own sound, for example this could be a carefully crafted bass sound with glitchy generative sounds. As shown in the examples, there are even plugins that have dedicated random functions (Fracture, Hysteresis), as well as Ableton that has incorporated generative midi and the overpowered audio rack macro randomiser function into Live 12, again proving that this method of randomising is very powerful and even encouraged.

SOUND DESIGN - APPLICATION OF TECHNIQUES

Here are some examples of randomising in Ableton using a technique from Mr Bill showing fracture preset skipping and (video 2) a dnksaus technique of randomising macros, as well as a (video 3) demonstration on using the ZOIA to generate randomised sounds:

🎥 cndl - Lux Cache Video 1 (Rando Fracture).mp4

🎥 cndl - Lux Cache Video 2 (Rando Macros).mp4

🎥 cndl - Lux Cache Video 3 (Hardware Rando).mp4

FINAL THOUGHTS

From everything stated in this article, there is one point I personally see as a solution to everything regarding inspiration and productivity concerns and that is to just stay at the work. If you’re committed enough, the harder moments of writing a song become easier and more rewarding over time, as each track finished or sample pack made adds this subconscious, abstract information of methods for approaching composition and building techniques. This is what the aim is, to gain experience in writing music that informs all the tracks going forward, and it has helped my creative health a lot. Last year I released my first song after years and years of producing. This finally gave me some insight into how to finish a song, which led to 5 more songs being finished and released that year. I couldn’t describe in detail how I knew the songs were finished, all I could do was recognise a similar way I felt about the track knowing that I didn’t want to add anything and that I was satisfied with it. This is a result of the inspiration -> motivation -> persistence consistently giving me results and becoming easier over time. Doing that led to me writing and finishing this article for Lux Cache! I hope that whoever reads this takes some of these points and considers whether or not they would benefit from them. Don’t ever put too much pressure on yourself, if you’re making anything at all, you’re doing great.

Thank you so much for reading!

- cndl.