Perfection Kills The Magic | Melodic Minut

Hey friends,

Welcome to another Melodic Minute — a calm corner of the internet where we sit down at the desk, play something, and think out loud about making music. This one came out of a morning where the sun was hitting the studio, so I welcomed it with ascending arpeggios, sun sparkles and a handful of micro glitches. Life's good. :)

It's also the start of the second season. The music from the first ten episodes is now available as an album called "Mind" over on my Patreon — as a patron from level 1 you get the season albums plus new episodes one week early. Patreon support is what keeps this slow series going: / kvndra

Today's topic is one of my favourite ideas in music-making: imperfections. Taking something perfectly beautiful and letting it sound a little broken. Here the Hologram Microcosm adds random micro-glitches to the Moog Mother-32's signal — at a small amount it brings interest to a synth pattern that would otherwise repeat itself forever. The second way I invite imperfection is simply playing live: the piano is played by hand on the Ableton Push 3, freely, which means it isn't perfectly in time and sometimes isn't even the note I aimed for. I've stopped minding. In a live take there is no re-record, and once you accept that unplanned events will happen, you can think about how to react to them instead of how to avoid them. That's where the fun starts — a wrong note repeated on purpose stops being a mistake and becomes part of the performance.

Gear in this episode: Ableton Push 3, Moog Mother-32, Hologram Microcosm, Neuzeit Instruments Drop. Everything I use is listed on my Thomann artist page if you want the full overview: https://thmn.to/thocf/pn2np42i69 (affiliate link — supports the channel at no extra cost to you)

What's an unplanned event that ended up in one of your tracks? Let me know in the comments.

Stay creative,

Milan (KVNDRA)

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