Random MIDI Mutes and Semi-Generative Drums

Cross-posting this from my blog. You can hear an audio demo of the technique there.

I've been thinking a lot about the importance of silence in music, and I dreamed up this technique, using a sequencer to more-or-less randomly mute a signal. The idea was to program a beat but then have the sequence be periodically interrupted by silence. I was partly inspired by this tai hirose track.

Now you could just as well make cuts by hand, in post, with the mouse. But where's the fun in that? As the title suggests, I wanted something more generative.

In Reaper, we can use Gerraint Luff's MIDI Gate plugin to trigger mutes or gates. Insert it on a track, feed it some MIDI, and depending on the mode, it will mute the channel whenever it receives MIDI information (or whenever it doesn't, if it's in gate mode).

To set this up, I followed Reaper Blog's MIDI Gate tutorial. In short, I programmed a kick drum part, then sent the audio only (not MIDI, which is important) to a receive track, and muted the former track's master output. On the receive track, I inserted a sequencer plugin and the MIDI Gate, one after the other. I made a simple MIDI sequence to trigger the gate. Since my original kick drum pattern was in 4/4, and since I wanted a semi-random sound, my gate trigger sequence was a 3/4 loop, which resulted in polymetric mutes. (Next time I experiment with this, I plan to use a truly random sequencer from Cardinal or something.)

The result is a groovy kick drum part that doesn't finish its sentence sometimes. I did the same on the tops percussion part, experimenting with MIDI Gate in mute mode or gate mode to see which I liked better. For added polish, because I noticed that sometimes MIDI Gate would let just the tiny blip of the first transient through, I inserted a plain old gate plugin next in the chain to cut out any tiny blips below a certain volume threshold. I then added a hi hat loop and played some nylon guitar over it so the track would feel a little more tethered to 4/4.

The neat thing about this semi-generative approach is the element of chance. Sometimes the kick plays where I programmed it to, sometimes not. The trouble with making music in the DAW is having too much control. But the joy is when you can find ways to forfeit that control in ways that are unique to the DAW workflow. Electronic musician Jlin says in an interview, "Not having control and not knowing what I'm going to create is the beauty of how the track is made. Not only the beauty of it, but the, also is the necessity of how, and why it gets made, because I don't have control."