One Thing Leads To Another: 100 Music-Making Inspirations

Back in 2017, we started the One Thing video series with the idea of bringing you monthly snack-sized portions of music-making inspiration directly from the workspaces of amazing artists around the world. Having now reached our 100th One Thing episode, we wanted to take a look back, thank the artists for their generosity and give you an overview of all the topics covered (there’s a bunch!). Check out the thematic breakdown below – we’re sure you’ll find a few things you can use in your own work right away.

Arranging and Mixing

Adding elements to a track is the easy part – getting them to sound good together is another matter. Here’s Dot to the rescue with a simple but effective approach:

More videos on arranging and mixing:
Hannes Bieger – Tuning drum sounds
Morgan Page – Tune drums like chords
Sasha Perera – Chords to monophonic lines
Maximilian Walch – Parallel effect chains
Arbour – Recording the speaker

Breaking Habits

When you do something regularly, you naturally start to cultivate habits around that practice. Mostly, this is a good thing, but sometimes habits can feel like they’re holding you back from making the music you want. Here, Catnapp demonstrates a radical way to break out of routine:

More videos on breaking habits:
Astronautica – Breaking habits
Nick Hook – Beat it!
Daisy Chute – Trying new instruments
Owen Ross – Escaping habits
Brian Funk – Record first
Katie Gately – Composing without listening

Composing

Melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, structure – the building blocks of music offer an infinity of possible combinations and permutations. Here are a few compositional ideas, such as Maya Shenfeld’s overtones technique, that you can try out directly in Ableton and see where they’ll take your tunes:

More videos on composition:
John Kameel Farah – Building scales
Ben Lukas Boysen – Dynamic layering
Plastica – Arpeggiator for rhythms
Kingzquest – Randomizing chords

Drums & Rhythm

The backbone of almost all modern music is the rhythm, and drums are often the element we start with when working on a new track. This is a deep, multi-faceted topic and the one we’ve made the most One Thing videos on. Check out Chuck Sutton’s cool and fun way of imparting a ton of expression to the sound of foley percussion:

More videos on drums and rhythm:
Ninajirachi – Textured drum layers
Lucky Paul – Rhythmic chance
Robert Lippok – Sine wave percussion
Computo – Generate rhythms
Andrea Belfi – Bass sounds from cymbals
Mans O – Building complex rhythms
JWords – Alternating rhythms
Aygyul – Random percussion parts
Yuka C. Honda – Drum variations
Electric Indigo – Granular echoes
Dennis DeSantis – Humanizing clips

Field Recording

It’s not only our instruments and voices that offer us the sound material to make music with – if we open our ears, we’ll realize that the whole world is teeming with sound that we can use. Capturing and using field recordings is a skill and art of its own, as Junichi Oguro demonstrates:

More videos on field recordings:
Kyoka – Exploring noise
Drum & Lace – Re-pitching field recordings
Ayako Okamura – Tuned ambience
Rokeya – Searching for rhythmic sounds

How to Start

It’s been pointed out that there is nothing more daunting than the blank slate, the white canvas or the empty Ableton Live Set. The problem of how to start is one that all of us music-maker faces, from the freshest beginner to the most seasoned veteran. Fortunately, there are many possible starting points as Sky Deep shows:

More videos on how to start:
edIT – Creating narratives
Yvonne Ringsdorf – Layering inspiration
David Heartbreak – Naming first
DJ Rap – Transform hit songs
Kodh – Bespoke dice
Sirintip – Starting with data

Jamming

Getting into that state of flow where you’re spontaneously reacting to what you’re hearing in the moment, without conscious thought is probably one of the most rewarding things about making music. Over the years, a number of artists have shared their methods for setting up conditions to get there. Check out Rojin Sharafi coaxing rhythmic patterns to jam with out of Granulator III:

More videos on jamming:
Laura Escudé – Controlled randomness
Andrew Toy – Improvising to automated effects
Lorena de Tena – Jamming with mutes
Monomite – Delay as a sampler
H Lite – Scrubbing for variations
Richard Veenstra – Modular jams

Loops

It could be rightly said that Ableton, the company and Live, the software, have their roots in the loop. What began as a solution to sync up multiple loops in real time has expanded quite a bit over the decades, but our fascination with the interplay between stasis and development –  the essence of looping – remains. And the fact that music-makers continue to find new ways to work with loops, such as Cloudchord’s “One loop per chord” technique here, feels very satisfying:

More videos on looping:
Mike Parvizi – Shifting loops
Ben Casey – Re-slicing
Hainbach – Unsynced loops
Ricky Tinez – Rhythms in rhythms
Marc Marzenit – Syncing percussive loops
Brothertiger – Remodeling loops
Tom Cosm – Cutting and combining

Mindset

In any complex, creative endeavor like music-making, a change of your perspective can be hugely beneficial. Check out these artists’ tips on re-calibrating your mindset starting with Charlie McClean’s insight that not focussing on results can lead to… great results:

More videos on mindset:
Jamaica Suk – Changing context
Daedelus – Move!
DJ Dahi – Colorful naming
Sha Sha Kimbo – Passive listening
Jessica Dannheisser – Immerse yourself
XLII – Destroying everything
Ed Bahonie – Finishing songs live
Bauma – Playing like a child
Rachel K Collier – Embracing nonsense

Moving Forward

Probably everybody reading this is familiar with the situation: you start working a track, it’s coming along great until… you can’t seem to be able to get past a certain halfway state. You know it’s not done, but you don’t know how to get it done. Try some of these artists’ tips on how to get over that hurdle – such as replacing sounds as a way to generate forward momentum, courtesy of Ella Zwietnig:

More videos on moving forward:
Robot Koch – Committing
Ulises Lozano – Combining tracks
Frank Zerban – Drums to bass
Ducks! – Taking turns
Cora Novoa – Exploring structures
Giulio Maresca – Sketchbook project

Sampling

Sampling, along with looping, has been a basic part of contemporary music-making for the past 40 or so years. With ever more sophisticated tools for manipulating recorded sound, sampling techniques continue to evolve in interesting ways. Check out some of the sampling ideas artists have shared in past One Thing videos, starting with Josh Spoon’s suggestion to look no further than yourself for material to sample:

More videos on sampling:
Kenny Segal – Sampling tails
Ally Mobbs – Focused sampling
KMRU – Sampling broken instruments
Risa Taniguchi – Sampling friends
ill.Gates – Sampling chaos

Sound Design

Combining creativity and technical skill to produce sounds no one has ever heard before can be incredibly rewarding. With all the tools available to us, the trick to good sound design just might lie in focussing on only a few select combinations of devices and methods. We found these videos really inspiring and suggest watching them all if you’re even slightly interested in developing your own palette of sounds. A good starting point is this JiKay demonstration of sculpting with feedback:

More sound design videos:
Fake Blonde – Chopping with chance
Splendore – Transformations
Stoni – Percussify
Sweatson Klank – Pumping sounds
El Choop – Gated noise
Baby Lucia – Resampling beat repeats
BlankFor.ms – Delay as a tone shaper
Yoav Shemesh – Creative warping
Ben Vedren – Sidechained variations
Ariel Alexander – Crossfading loops

Vocals

The voice is usually the first musical instrument we come in contact with in life. And tied as it is to our bodily existence, it contains an expressive dimension that makes it distinct from all other instruments. Which is exactly why the interplay between vocals and digital audio tools can be so interesting. For instance, check out the pitch and speed method Lyra Pramuk uses to create voices that sound like they are from a different place and time:

More videos on vocals:
Rainbow Chan – Turn one note into chords
Delhia de France – Rehearsing in slow motion
Alex St Joan – From rhythm to melody
dolltr!ck – Evolving melodies
Half Waif – Poetry to melody
Aphir – Formant-shifting vocals
Whitemary – Sidechaining Auto Filter
I Am Snow Angel – Reverse vocal intros

Stay tuned for new episodes on the One Thing page