The question I get more than any other: what do you do when you sit down to make music and nothing comes? You want to work, Live is open, and there is simply no idea. I wanted to answer that with a full session instead of a talking-head explanation. This is one of my uncut sessions, and it started exactly in that spot. I wanted to make music, I felt uninspired, and I still wanted to do it. So I let the sequencer do the work.
Sequencers are already good at placing notes
A sequencer is always perfectly on the grid. You can add swing, sure, but at its core it hands you mathematically clean positions for notes. Euclidean patterns are the obvious example: the steps get spread out as evenly as possible, and those spots just work. Shift the pattern by a step, run a second one against it, and now these perfect spots play each other out. You get interlocking rhythms you would never have drawn in by hand.
That is the whole trick. I am not composing from nothing. I let the math make a proposal, and I decide what to keep.
The method
Very simple, and it works because it is simple.
- One MIDI track. Sound design a channel, run a sequence into it, have fun with it.
- Record what you like straight to audio. Commit. No going back to tweak the MIDI later.
- Change the sequence. Maybe change the sound source too.
- Back to the same MIDI track, new sound, new pattern, record another line.
- Repeat.
After a while you have a stack of audio tracks, each one a committed sequence. Because they all came from the same grid logic, they already sit together. They give you a groove, they give you ideas you would not have come up with on your own. In the session you can watch it build up: sub, low minds, perc loop, fx perc, bass line, melo poly, noise. Every one of these was the same single MIDI channel at some point.
The limitation is the point
I give myself a rule: only one channel to sound design and record on. From there you have to go. That sounds restrictive, but it is exactly what gets me moving when I am stuck. There is no menu of possibilities. There is one track, and the only decision is: keep this take or not.
Once the audio lines are playing against each other, the session starts talking back. All these things together already form a composed situation. From there the decisions get easy. This one, I only want the low end. This one, just the highs. That one goes. And you go on like this until it is a track.
It is generative, and it is not AI
I want to be clear on this because the word gets thrown around a lot right now. What you have at the start is a generative system, but it is you making randomness happen. You decide which sequence runs, which take gets recorded, which audio channel stays, which gets deleted. Then you sound design the survivors into a finished piece. The sequencer proposes, you decide. Nothing is being done for you that you did not set up yourself.
Where this session ended up
I did not want to make techno that day, but I also did not know what I wanted. So I set the tempo to 70 BPM and followed the method. It turned into this weird bass music, dub kind of thing. That is the other reason I like this approach: it is a really good way to find new music, not just a way to get unstuck in the style you already know. Set a tempo you would not normally use, hand the first moves to the sequencer, and see where it goes.
About the video
Like always with these session videos, there is the intro and then no more cuts. Okay, almost: there is a cut when something breaks, or when the baby is screaming. Everything else is the full process of how this track came together, without a mic, just me and Live. Sit back and watch the whole thing to catch all the little tricks, or skip to the parts that interest you.
Next time you sit there with nothing: one MIDI track, a sequencer, commit to audio, repeat. Give the grid the first move and take it from there.
If you enjoyed this, check out Let Go of Control and Use Randomization to Find Your Sound and The Creator Concept.