Sweetspots

21st century music-making concepts (part 1)

This is the first in a series of essays that attempt to think through (and with) concepts that I think are important to the state of (electronic) music-making today.

1.

As so often, I spent yesterday evening messing around with sounds. Not really working on any specific piece of music, but just dragging and dropping, twisting and turning knobs, buttons and faders, going around in circles in the hope that something that sounds pleasing might emerge. This particular song-and-dance will be all too familiar to almost everyone making electronic music today. An accompanying internal monologue might look something like this:

Where to start? Uhh, let's pull down the lowpass filter, add some resonance. Needs more spice … adding a bit of filter drive and filter FM ... still sounding a bit boring. A pitch envelope? Nope, not working, let's pull it back ... I suppose an LFO to the filter cutoff couldn't hurt, right? This LFO's too fast, let's slow it down ... now it's too slow, speeding it up again ... yeah, that's sounding better. Now what? Maybe some reverb, let's bring up the send ... more ... more ... now it's too much! Let's pull it back a touch ... that's better. Ah! What this really needs is a filter envelope, just snappy enough without being too percussive ... now, this envelope's sounding a bit loose, let's make it tighter ... too tight, attack needs to be a touch longer ... yeah that's it, sounding just right now!

What is this just right that we are always chasing after? It is what we colloquially call a sweetspot, a certain arrangement of parameters that stands out as sounding particularly pleasing ("sweet") to our ears. This "sweetness" is an emergent phenomenon that is more than the sum of its parts; appears as something novel that was not there before. When tuning one or more parameters, a sweetspot might emerge, but it is never clear to which exact parameter value this sweetspot is supposed to correspond to. Its beginning and end are fuzzy, because a sweetspot is a holistic gestalt that only exists as embedded within a specific situation.

Sweetspots are always hyper-specific. Even the slightest change of situation and they might just vanish. You might have a reverb dialed in perfectly, but then you change something else entirely, like a filter cutoff, and suddenly, this reverb's no longer sounding so sweet. We may try to find our way back to the original settings, but the situation's already changed, we cannot go back to where we were before. Sweetspots do not exist in a vacuum, but always in interplay with other (actual and potential) sweetspots that come together to form an interdependent system. To make not just a pleasing sound, but a sweet musical composition requires weaving together layers and layers of lower and higher-order sweetspots in a vast and complex web. A daunting task, to be sure, but sweetspots do become easier to conjure and sustain with time and practice. For example, staying in the sweetspot while riding the oscillating feedback of a tape delay might be difficult at first, but over time, one learns the movements and gestures required.

2.

Sweetspots effect and affect our music-making process. We often stumble from one sweetspot to the next, almost as if it itself were guiding us to its sibling. Within a sweetspot, it is easier to interact and maneuver around. Sweetness invites more sweetness. Everyone has had that (rare) blissful experience of being in that sweet state of being, one lucky move leading to the next, gliding from sweetspot to sweetspot, everything seems possible. We experience a special kind of easy, effortless being that we often describe as a "flow"-like state. With Spinoza, we could also call it "joyful". Sweet joy increases our "power of action" to interact and connect with the world, to affect and be affected.

The opposite state is what Spinoza calls "sadness" - perhaps we could also call it a "sour" state. When cut off from sweetness, we find it more difficult, perhaps even impossible, to connect and interact. Everyone has had times where everything just seems to sound wrong and nothing is coming together right. Being outside the sweetspot, with no land in sight, can feel like being in alien territory. Tools and strategies you've used for years might suddenly appear as useless. But just as soon as it left, sweetness might make its return, sometimes seemingly out of nowhere, now tasting all the sweeter after having felt its painful absence.

3.

While sweetspots will always remain fickle things, there are environments in which it is easier for them to emerge and foster. Today, our primary environment is the studio, the holistic sum of all the tools that we use to make music. Since our music-making is mediated through the tools we use, they are a kind of prosthesis through which we access and form sweetspots. Of course, not all prostheses are created equally. Some just seem to make it easier than others. You often see this articulated in gear reviews in sentences like "great piece, it's all one big sweetspot...", or "this thing sucks, I spent a couple of hours with it and nothing sounded right, it has a tiny sweetspot for sure." While we all respond differently to tools, some just seem to be better at facilitating sweetspots than others.

As a general rule, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the ease of sweetness and a piece of equipment’s - any such tool itself being an interrelated network of various parameters - overall complexity. Classic pieces that are known for being "all sweetspot" tend to have rather simple parameter layouts. Take the most popular compressor of all time: the LA-2A. It is a one-knob machine, either turn it up or down it down, that's all. There's something inviting to such take-it-or-leave it simplicity. If there is a sweetspot, we know it must lie within the traversal of this one knob. It better a good knob! Luckily, a piece like the LA-2A is mostly sweetspot, thanks to the complex adaptive optical compression circuit it hides behind its simple interface. It is almost as if, working tirelessly behind the scenes, the device itself is taking care of the sweetspots for us. Perhaps that is why it remains perennially popular almost seventy years on.

But such easy access to sweetness, while comforting, can also send us into complacency. When sweetness is easy, it is tempting to revisit the same, familiar sweetspots over and over again. Novel sweetspots are rarely located in the realm of the known and easy to access. While more complex and difficult to use tools may result in failure, failure is also the pre-condition of experimentation and innovation. Those that start playing the violin know that it is considered to be a particularly difficult instrument to play, one that hides its fickle sweetspots behind endless hours of practice. But is that not also part of its beauty? Would we not lose something if it were easier? Perhaps this logic also applies to many of the more involved and painstaking processes in electronic music, such as complex multi-parametric sound design and micro-editing. Sweetspots that require hard work may end up being all the sweeter in the end.

4.

It is an obvious point, but it is nonetheless worth remembering that what we consider to be "sweet" is dependent on social, historical and technological factors and has undergone drastic changes throughout history. In the pre-modern world from Pythagoras to Kepler, what sounded sweet and right was thought to be determined by mathematical and harmonic ratios that not only applied to music but the cosmos itself. Accordingly, a musical sweetspot was not just an aesthetic achievement, but an articulation of the logical and ethical structure of the universe. In this model, there is no place for contingency - what is sweet is so because it has to be, and what is not amounts to an affront to divine and cosmic law. No wonder dissonance had a bad reputation.

With the advent of modernity, this millenia-old model falls apart. Contingency invades the music of the spheres, sweetness is no longer defined by objective cosmic laws. It becomes subject to aesthetic taste, which means that we are forced to invent our own laws that decide over what is sweet and what is not. But despite being inherently subjective, aesthetic taste always appeals to an (imagined) objective social consensus (as any reader of Kant's third critique will know). In order to rescue itself from sourness, popular music clings to this assumed consensus, and declares certain sounds as perennially sweet. After all, isn't part of why classic gear is considered to be all sweetspot that it evokes the sounds of records that have long entered popular music's “sweet consensus”?

5.

Today, with the advent of DAW-based music-making, the amount of available parameters has exploded to near infinity. One could start tweaking and drop dead before ever running out of novel parameters and possibilities. And not only has the amount of parameters increased, but so has their resolution. instead of being "about half way", a parameter tells us that its precise value is "0.512". In the realm of fractions and decimal points, sweetspots are usually not taken care of by the tools themselves. We are forced to work towards reigning in this parametric chaos ourselves, a task that traditionally was taken care of by instrument makers and designers. Some DAWs have already attempted to respond to this new reality, for example, Ableton Live lets you configure parameter ranges for MIDI and macro assignments. If a parameter value of "100" is too much, and "25" is too little, you can configure the knob to remain around the sweetspot of "50".

While such techniques are certainly useful, they are still a far cry away from the take-it-or-leave-it simplicity of an LA-2A. Luckily, there are now digital emulations of all the simple, proven, classic gear you may desire. But embedded within the impossibly complex system of the DAW, they hardly deliver the dream of simple, easy sweetness. Unsurprisingly, in response, so-called "DAW-less" setups have become a trend in recent years, although they seem to rarely deliver exciting music. Perhaps because, as Theodor Adorno reminds us, one cannot make contemporary music without dealing with contemporary techniques and technology , which are in turn socially and historically constituted. A messy, complex world demands a messy, complex music-making process.

Nevertheless, the free market, never letting a business opportunity go to waste, has brought us an entire micro-industry dedicated to selling easy, simple sweetspots in the form of presets, patches, sample packs, tutorials, "recipes'' and so on. Is everything you're cooking up just sounding a bit sour? Try our fool-proof, ready-made, all-sweet solution! As easy as it is to be cynical here, it is also clear that these products are responding not so much to outright laziness as a widespread deeper desire for sweetness. After all, aren't we all, secretly, wishing for a Big Red Button? And, as the classic meme about the producer who starts herding goats to truly make "their own drums'' shows, it's never been easy to pinpoint where comfort ends and laziness begins. As such, the usual questions remain: does sweetness equal sweetness, no matter where it originated from? Is there really a difference between the classic "pre-set" sweetspots of a 909 or 303 and the modern purpose-made, sample-pack sweetspot? Does home-grown, hand-made sweetness taste better? And how hard should we be working for it, to be worthy of sweetness?

6.

Sweetspots present us with a perennial dilemma: too much and we remain stuck in the easy and familiar, too little and we get lost in the sour. Is there a solution to this predicament? Today, a common response seems to be a turn towards a "hybrid" approach: a studio environment that mixes both low-complexity systems and high-complexity systems. The former often being (analog) hardware and the later being (digital) software, although the general principle of mixing simple and complex can be applied to either medium.

Great things can happen with the right mix of sweet and sour. But nonetheless, isn’t any search for a perfect middle ground ultimately doomed to be futile? Tweak things around as much as you like, clean up your gear-closet and plugin folder, go out and buy that one piece of gear that will really (really, this time!) be the "game changer" you were needing all this time, eventually, you'll be back there, in one of those desperate moment where getting anything at all into the right ratio, its sweet-spot, just seems utterly impossible. With the garden of Eden (the perfect studio) remaining forever out of reach, all we can do is make do with what we've got, perpetually tuning and evolving along the way. Explore the terrain, forge out temporary sweetspots as you go; never get too comfortable, but remain open to ease and luck. Pick your battles, pick your candy, pick your poison.