the silence between the notes that you keep cutting
every time i edit a track i cut the silence. it's automatic. the gap between the phrase and the next phrase — gone. the breath before the drop — shortened. the space at the end of the loop — trimmed to the grid. and then i wonder why the track doesn't breathe.
silence is information. not the absence of information. the silence tells you where you are in the phrase. it tells you what's coming. it gives you time to feel what just happened before the next thing arrives. when you cut it, you're not making the track tighter. you're making it harder to hear.
what the silence is doing
i've been listening to old recordings — things made before digital editing made it easy to cut everything. the silence in those recordings is different. it's not empty. it has texture. you can hear the room. you can hear the performer breathing. you can hear the tape hiss, which is its own kind of presence.
that presence is doing something. it's telling you that the music exists in a physical space, that it was made by a person in a room, that time is passing. when you cut the silence, you cut that information. the music becomes more efficient and less real.
over at Jeremy Dean Music there's been some writing about the relationship between performance and recording — the way the recording captures something the performance had that the edit removes. silence is part of that.
the grid problem
quantizing to the grid is the same problem. you're removing the micro-timing that makes a performance feel human. the note that lands slightly late, the phrase that breathes slightly longer than the tempo would suggest — those are the things that make music feel like it was made by someone who was feeling something.
i'm not saying don't edit. i'm saying be deliberate about what you're removing when you do. the silence you cut might be the thing that was making the track work.
the Calitoy approach to this has always been to leave more in than you think you should. the rough edge, the breath, the space. it's harder to do than cutting everything clean. but the result is different.
at End of 8 i've been experimenting with tracks that are built around silence — where the silence is as composed as the sound. it's uncomfortable. you keep wanting to fill it. that discomfort is the point.
the Kurced transmissions have been doing something similar — using space as a compositional element rather than a gap to be filled. worth listening to if you're thinking about this.
leave the silence. see what it's doing before you cut it.