I wrote back in March that, “last February (2023), I wanted to make a quick, impressionist, and freeform [set of] tracks that breathe and bloom around the listener’s mind.1 I ended up finishing all three in two days. A very efficient couple of days!” So when I say Second Cloud is “a personal favourite”, I think I really mean all three Clouds. But Second Cloud perhaps best encapsulates the approach I took.
The typical music production workflow involves stacking up layers of sounds to produce a coherent whole. Most often, one instrument or sound is added or recorded to a ‘track’ (perhaps a vocal on one track, a guitar on another), and the various tracks are then ‘mixed’ together to produce a final piece of music (someone singing over some guitar!). Aside from the early days of recorded music, when bands were sometimes arranged around a single microphone because multi-track tape recorders didn’t exist, this workflow has been typical for decades.
Because multi-track tape recorders have track limits,2 and because artists often want to use more sounds than they have available tracks, it became common practice to ‘bounce’ multiple tracks into one in order to make previously-used tracks available for new sounds. Of course, once this is done, you can’t go back and change the individual sounds, as they now exist as blends on a single track.
But this is not necessarily a bad thing. As I wrote here, “Bouncing several tracks down to one is often a useful part of the creative process — suddenly, making big changes seems much less daunting. When things are simplified, new possibilities emerge. It also forces you to move forward, because you can’t mess around with the original tracks anymore. You’ve committed, as we say.”
Since digital systems don’t usually have arbitrary track limits (you can add as many as your computer can run), there is no technological need to bounce multiple tracks down to a single track. It’s purely a creative strategy.
The approach I took working on the Clouds amounted to bouncing-things-down-on-steroids. The rough idea3 was that each new sound had to be bounced into the pre-existing arrangement before I could add another. Say I had a synth part I liked but wanted to add some woodwinds: I had to first record the woodwinds to a new track (in a DAW, it’s impossible to record into a track that other elements already exist on) and then merge the woodwind and synths parts into a single track before adding further parts. If I then wanted to add some vocals, I’d record the vocals and then merge those into the synth+woodwinds bounce, creating a synth+woodwind+vocals bounce.
The beauty of this approach is that I would usually play with levels and effects while bouncing the files into each other in real time, which adds to the organic feel of the tunes. Sounds seem to bleed and decay into each other, to merge and unmerge, because they kind of are actually doing that. It also adds an element of live performance to digital sound processing.
In the case of Second Cloud, the final mix comprised only five tracks, yet many more sounds were used. Those five final were not individual sounds but composites built up as the arrangement progressed. This is a very fun way to work. It’s instinctive and free and often produces results I love, as is the case with the three Clouds.4
Loyal Steve on Steve fans should by now know that I love these kinds of arrangements.
Here’s a small four-track tape machine suitable for home use.
Which was, of course, not strictly observed.
As I mentioned in the very first post here, “One of my favourite parts of the creative process is when I have all the material I need laid out in a basic arrangement and then lock myself away for a few hours to sculpt it into form.” Making the Clouds was a bit like that, but sped up and irreversible. Perhaps my previous attempts at sonic sculpture were akin to working with clay, where with the Clouds I was working with rock: once I’d played in a new layer, I couldn’t take it out again, just as once the shard is chipped off the block, there’s no getting it back on. (I suppose the main difference is that if the blend was terrible I could at least try to do it again without paying for a big new block of granite or whatever, but maybe sculptors can use glue?)