How Electronic Artists Use Creative Constraints

Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt printed a deck of cards in 1975 for the moment a session gets stuck. Burial made his early records in Sound Forge, an audio editor, without a sequencer. Aphex Twin says the sounds on Syro came almost entirely from hardware. Daft Punk built some of their best-known Discovery singles on loops from old records. Our bet is that these choices are more than eccentricities, and a big part of why each of these artists sounds like nobody else. We read a lot of great electronic records as constraint documents, in which the constraint is the album.

"Honor thy error as a hidden intention." – Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies, 1975

Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies: draw a card

In 1975, Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt printed a deck of 113 cards, each with a single instruction. "Use an old idea." "Honor thy error as a hidden intention." "Repetition is a form of change." The instructions that come with the deck say to draw a single card "when a dilemma occurs in a working situation."

Eno kept coming back to the deck. Revised editions followed in 1978, 1979, 1996, 2001 and 2013, and the cards were used again on David Bowie's "Outside" (1995). They are best known from Bowie's Berlin albums ("Low," "Heroes," "Lodger"), which Bowie co-produced with Tony Visconti. Eno was a key collaborator on all three, not the producer. Bowie and Eno used the cards for instrumentals on "Heroes" and much more on "Lodger." For "Boys Keep Swinging," Bowie had the band swap instruments so they would sound like "young kids in the basement" discovering their instruments. Guitarist Carlos Alomar moved to drums and drummer Dennis Davis to bass. In our view, holding the "wrong" instrument puts you back in the beginner's mind that virtuosity erodes.

The cards work because a constraint forces a decision the artist's habits wouldn't have made. One card in the first edition reads "Discover the recipes you are using and abandon them." A producer's worst enemy is often their own default behavior, the tendency, on every new song, to reach for the same compressor, the same drum pattern, the same chord change. Oblique Strategies are a way to break that habit.

What to copy: write your own deck. Ten cards is enough. Make them specific to your weaknesses. "Delete your favorite element." "Use a tempo you hate." "The melody is in the bass part." Pull one before each session. Expect the card to be useless most days. Now and then, it may lead to your best work.

Aphex Twin: hardware first

Richard D. James told Groove magazine in 2014 that his album Syro was "all hardware actually," with "maybe a few plug-ins," although half of it was sequenced on a computer. His reason was that "a computer can't do distortion, everything on the computer just sounds perfect, which is nice if you want to make perfect tracks, but if you don't, then you're kind of stuck." The Syro artwork reputedly lists 138 pieces of gear used on the record, and he was modifying electronic equipment before he started writing music.

The lesson we take from this is commitment. A sound you print from hardware is hard to tweak tomorrow, so the decision gets made today, and the take you commit to is the take that ships.

To us, that is part of what sets his records apart. Working entirely in the box, you can recall any patch forever, which makes it easy to keep reaching for the same presets as everyone else.

What to copy: for one session, work entirely with hardware or with plugin instruments you do not save. Commit every sound to audio immediately. Delete the MIDI. Force yourself to live with what you printed.

Nicolas Jaar: untrained on purpose

In a 2011 interview from the "Space Is Only Noise" era, Nicolas Jaar said he likes the Juno-106 and the SH-101 but uses them "very little because they're so obviously electronic." About a third of his music, he said, was recorded on acoustic instruments, many of which he doesn't really know how to play: "not knowing how to play them helps me get out of preconceived notions of how to play the instrument."

The goal, in his words: "I like it when it's neither organic nor electronic, when it's really a bizarre mix of both." Not knowing the instrument is the constraint, and it keeps the playing loose.

What to copy: pick an instrument you can't really play. Record ten minutes of it, keep the moments that surprise you, and build the next track around them.

Daft Punk: build on a loop

Several of Daft Punk's best-known "Discovery" singles are built on loops from older records. "One More Time" samples Eddie Johns' "More Spell on You," and "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" samples Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby." "Robot Rock," from the next album "Human After All" (2005), samples Breakwater's "Release the Beast." It was never a rigid rule. Thomas Bangalter talked about making "fake samples" that listeners took for old disco or funk records, and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo estimated that the duo played half of the sampled material on "Discovery" themselves. For "Random Access Memories" (2013) they went the other way, with session musicians and a sample on one track only, "Contact."

In our experience, building on a loop solves several problems at once. It gives you harmonic and rhythmic specificity that rarely comes from a blank canvas. It anchors your choices. Every drum hit and synth line has to fit the loop, which closes off the infinite-possibility paralysis of an empty session. And it commits the track to a single emotional center.

What to copy: dig for ten minutes on YouTube or a free public-domain archive. Find a four-bar loop from a record nobody knows. Time-stretch it to your tempo, filter the life out of it, pitch it down a fourth. Build the track around it. Or do what Daft Punk sometimes did and play a "fake sample" yourself. You are not allowed to use any other melodic source.

Burial: waveforms, not a grid

William Bevan, the producer behind Burial, made his early records in Sound Forge, an audio editor rather than a music sequencer. Asked in 2006 whether he used a sequencer, he answered: "No." His drums are, in his words, "definitely not necessarily in time", and he places them by looking at the waveforms. "I know when I'm happy with my drums because they look like a nice fishbone." And when people doubted that a whole album could be made that way, he told The Wire in 2007: "Yeah well I did."

The result is Burial's swing, drums that lurch and breathe in ways a quantize template would flatten. He put it bluntly in 2006: "When I try and do drums that are too regimented, they lose something," and "If I used a sequencer my tunes would sound rubbish."

What to copy: turn off the grid in your DAW. Disable the metronome. Record a drum part by tapping pads or playing keys in real time, with no quantization. Move audio regions by ear, not by snap. The first track will probably sound sloppy. The fourth may sound like you.

Hudson Mohawke: make your own samples

Hudson Mohawke builds part of his sound library himself. "I normally collect samples from friends, or I have someone come over and play piano or play a bunch of different synths, and I'll record that and make sample packs of all that stuff," he told Novation.

He describes flipping a sample as "a challenge to yourself", a matter of making it exciting to him rather than having "just taken a loop and whacked some drums over it."

What to copy: make your own sample pack before you make the track. Invite a friend to play piano for ten minutes, or record yourself on an instrument you rarely use. For a week, every sample in your tracks has to come from that pack, or from one single medium, such as voice memos, cassette tapes or AM radio. In our experience, a single source gives a set of tracks a coherence that mixing alone can't.

A 7-day constraint challenge to try this week

Pick one constraint per day. Finish a sketch (not a finished track, just a 60-to-90-second sketch) under each constraint before midnight. The goal is volume, not quality. You will probably hate at least three of them, and two may give you ideas you'd never have found in a "normal" session.

1. Day 1: Oblique Strategies. Write five constraint cards on paper, draw one, and obey it for the whole session.
2. Day 2: One synth. Every sound in the track comes from a single synth. No drum samples. Generate the kick from the same synth as the lead.
3. Day 3: Hardware-or-commit. If you have hardware, only hardware. If you don't, every plugin instrument gets printed to audio within five minutes of being added; no recall.
4. Day 4: One loop. Find one obscure 4-bar sample, or play your own. Build the entire track around it. No other melodic content allowed.
5. Day 5: No grid. Disable the metronome and quantize for the entire session. Tap drums in by hand. Live with what you record.
6. Day 6: One medium. Every sample in the track comes from one specific source: your own voice memos, AM radio, a single film, a single TV show.
7. Day 7: Delete the best part. Take the strongest track you made this week and delete the element you're most proud of. Rebuild around the absence.

Some days you will not love what you make, and some days you may not finish. That's fine, because the constraint is the assignment and the finished track is a bonus. What you will have at the end of the week is seven sketches that don't sound like anything else you've made this year, and a working knowledge of which kinds of limitation suit the way you work.

Eno, Aphex Twin and Burial each worked inside a limit of their own. Find yours.