Working process

[suhr]

Not really a Helio issue, rather merely a question.

Could you tell more about your working process in Helio, especially for 31edo? It's rather hard to improvise in 31edo on a normal keyboard, but you write 31edo pieces with all the fine details.

PS: I really liked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-TVVXDiMEI

[peterrudenko]

Thanks! That's a tricky question, because for me making music is and has always been all about the old good "doing whatever the fuck you want" :)

My workflow largely revolves around a lot of experimentation, where the important part is to feel free to rollback or delete the parts my ears are comfortable with. The version control page kinda helps with this: at some point I know I've made something which feels like progress, which I'm afraid to lose accidentally, and this fear brings friction for making further changes, and noticing this friction is how I know it's time to make a checkpoint.

When I'm out of ideas and don't know where to start, I just do some random stuff: maybe do a melodic inversion of some previous sentence and see what happens, or arpeggiate some chords (I have a number of home-cooked arpeggiators, and your question is a good reminder for me to document how arps are supposed to work and probably to add some built-in ones) - but the result is almost never quite good, and serves as a starting point for further tweaks and refactoring.

That's about it, off the top of my head: most of the tricks I find are not related to working process, just various musical ideas, often random.

It's rather hard to improvise in 31edo on a normal keyboard

At the moment I'm not improvising in 31edo per se, just writing in the "diatonic" subsets of 31edo with some "xen" decorations: to me it looks like microtonality gives another dimension of tension-release cycle, so to speak: something like going from the familiar "diatonic" sound to dissonance or just strangeness, and then back home, to the (more or less) familiar sound.

[suhr]

Oh, so the answer is basically lots of editing. Well, I always found this hard since I can barely glue musical phrases together.

diatonic

That's quite a stretchable word. For example, surely picrelated is diatonic

(https://vocaroo.com/15sV8J7AeQ2b)

https://soundcloud.com/juhani-nuorvala/enharmoninen-sarja-enharmonic-suite is probably diatonic too, and only in the case of twelve tone (or more) serialism you can be sure it is not diatonic.

[peterrudenko]

Oh, so the answer is basically lots of editing. Well, I always found this hard since I can barely glue musical phrases together.

I feel like sharing this link here, because what Alpha Lobster says about "production vs editing" at 1:28:00 is super relatable.

https://soundcloud.com/juhani-nuorvala/enharmoninen-sarja-enharmonic-suite

That guy makes some sick stuff! A great inspiration source, thanks for sharing)