3 Musical Ideas I’ve Learnt From Brian Eno

Summary

This video from WHIRRINGS highlights three key musical concepts learned from Brian Eno, a renowned musician and producer. The ideas explored are: embracing the notion of being a 'non-musician', considering the studio as a musical instrument, and treating sound like a paintable material. These concepts have greatly influenced the creator's approach to music-making, emphasizing creativity over traditional musical training. The video's engaging narrative encourages viewers to adopt beginner's mindsets in their creative pursuits and explore the boundaries of sound and technology.

Highlights

• Brian Eno revolutionized music by coined the term 'non-musician', encouraging creativity over technical prowess. 🎶
• The video emphasizes the studio as an instrument, changing how music is composed and recorded. 🏢
• Sound can be manipulated like paint, allowing artists to reshape it creatively. 🎨
• The concept of a beginner's mind parallels Zen Buddhist philosophy, inspiring unique problem-solving solutions. 🧘
• Brian Eno's approach includes using technology innovatively, encouraging experimenting beyond standard uses. 🤖

Key Takeaways

• It's okay to be a 'non-musician' and embrace your unique creative path. 🎸
• The studio is not just a recording space; it's an instrument in its own right. 🎛️
• Think of sound as a material you can mold, like an artist with paint. 🎨
• Adopting a beginner’s mindset can lead to more innovative and authentic creations. 🧠
• Technology plays a crucial role in modern musical creation, allowing endless sonic possibilities. 💻

Overview

Brian Eno, through his eclectic career and innovations, teaches us that there’s more to music than traditional instrumental mastery. The video discusses the idea of being a 'non-musician', where Eno himself didn’t follow the conventional path of learning instruments but focused on creativity and exploring new ways to make music. This concept liberates creators, allowing them to break free from the mold of mastering an instrument as a measure of musicianship.

Another fascinating concept discussed is thinking of the studio as a musical instrument itself. Instead of arriving with complete compositions, Eno’s approach often involved walking into the studio and using it creatively to develop his music. The studio transforms into a tool for composition, where technology assists in creating unique sounds and music becomes a blend of art and science.

Lastly, drawing parallels between music and visual art, the idea of treating sound as a material to be shaped and molded is explored. Brian Eno’s process likens music production to painting, where sound is molded like colors on a canvas. This exploration encourages artists to manipulate sound deeply and creatively, highlighting the potential for endless innovation with digital music tools.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Brian Eno This chapter introduces the listener to Brian Eno, an English musician known for his time with the band Roxy Music. The speaker plans to discuss three core ideas influenced by Eno that have impacted his own approach to music-making. For those unfamiliar with Eno, a quick visit to his Wikipedia page is recommended.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Brian Eno's Career Overview The chapter provides an overview of Brian Eno's career, highlighting his early involvement with the band Roxy Music before initiating a solo career and pioneering ambient music. It mentions his collaborations with notable artists such as David Burn and Robert Frip, as well as his extensive work as a producer with famous musicians including David Bowie, Talking Heads, Coldplay, and U2.
• 01:00 - 02:00: Influence and Materials about Brian Eno The chapter explores the multifaceted career of Brian Eno, highlighting his collaborations with various artists on numerous albums, and his work as a widely exhibited visual artist. It mentions two books about him: one is his diary titled 'A Year with Swollen Appendices,' and another focuses on his music. Additionally, Eno's 'Oblique Strategies' creative cards are discussed, which are used in studios to inspire creativity.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Core Ideas and Non-Musician Concept This chapter delves into the core ideas and creative processes of a non-musician, who emphasizes the importance of doing nothing as a foundational part of creation. He discusses his views on music, technology, and studio work, which are widely quoted online. The insights offered reveal a personal philosophy that can be applied to various creative endeavors, offering a unique perspective on how to approach work and creativity.
• 03:00 - 04:30: Studio as an Instrument The chapter titled 'Studio as an Instrument' discusses the use of studios in music production, with references to quotes attributed to Brian Eno. The author notes a disclaimer about the authenticity of these quotes, as they were sourced from the internet without in-depth verification. The quotes are used illustratively to explore the idea of the studio as a musical instrument in itself.
• 04:30 - 06:00: Sound as a Material The chapter titled 'Sound as a Material' introduces the core ideas around non-traditional approaches to music making. The speaker discusses the concept of being a 'non-musician,' which they apply to themselves. This idea reflects not pursuing the traditional path of mastering an instrument to a high level. Instead, it emphasizes an alternative approach to being a musician. While acknowledging the value in traditional musicianship, the speaker expresses a personal preference for working in music through different means.
• 06:00 - 07:00: Conclusion and Ways to Support the Channel In this chapter, the discussion centers around the traditional belief that virtuosity is an essential part of understanding and making music. The chapter explores different perspectives on music, emphasizing that learning and perfecting an instrument might be demanding and not necessarily the only way to appreciate or create music. The speaker shares a detailed quote reflecting on the ingrained notion that musical virtuosity is a fundamental requirement, suggesting openness to alternative paths in musical pursuits.

3 Musical Ideas I’ve Learnt From Brian Eno Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Today I'm going to share three core ideas from the legendary English musician Brian Eno. Here he is, Brian. Which come from his ways of thinking about music that have really helped me to understand the way that I like to go about making music. So if you don't know who Brian Eno is, then you perhaps should go and visit his Wikipedia page. But in a nutshell, he is an English musician who originally was in the band Roxy Music
• 00:30 - 01:00 for a couple of years on their first couple of albums and then he left Roxy Music and started a solo career and essentially invented ambient music. Um he's worked with lots of people. He's uh famously worked with David Burn and Robert Frip on musical projects and he's also worked extensively as a producer uh with lots of famous people. David Bowie, Talking Heads, Coldplay, You2, all sorts of
• 01:00 - 01:30 people he's worked with on all sorts of brilliant albums. And he's also a visual artist quite widely exhibited visual artist. So Briano has done a lot over a long period of time. So I got a couple of books on Brianino. This is his diary. Brian knows diary, a year with swollen appendices. So these are the swollen appendices. All sorts of notes and things. Very interesting read. I've got another book on him here about his music. And also got his oblique strategies cards, creative cards which you can use in the studio to inspire you
• 01:30 - 02:00 to create in a different way. Do nothing for as long as possible. He likes to talk a lot about um music, technology, how he works in the studio, and he's widely quoted online, but essentially his ways of thinking about these things come back to a handful of core ideas, and they're very interesting ideas, and I found them quite useful to understand the way that I like to work
• 02:00 - 02:30 in the studio. So, I've got a load of quotes from Brian Enino off the internet. Just a quick disclaimer that I haven't really checked the authenticity of a lot of these quotes. They're just off kind of quote sites and they're widely attributed to Brianino, but I haven't actually looked into them in any great depth. So, if these are not actually quotes from Brianino, then I'm very sorry, Brian. I'm really just using them to illustrate
• 02:30 - 03:00 the core ideas. So the first idea which I found very useful is his ideas around being a non-m musician is a concept that he applies to himself because he doesn't see himself as a traditional musician who has learned to play an instrument to a high level. I don't believe he's saying that that isn't valid. um you know he works with lots of great musicians but I think for him personally it's not a path that he wants to go down. He wanted to work as a musician in
• 03:00 - 03:30 other ways because learning an instrument is a a very definite path and a lot of work and he's never really done that and he's not interested in doing it. So here's quite a wordy quote from him about it. There was such an implicit and tacit belief that virtuosity was the siniqua non meaning was a fundamental requirement of music and there was no other way of approaching it and that
• 03:30 - 04:00 seemed to be so transparently false in terms of rock music in particular. I thought that it was well worth saying whatever I'm doing it's not that. And I thought the best way to say that was to say look I'm a non-m musician. If you like what I do, it stands in defiance to the idea of a musician being someone who spends a huge amount of time and effort learning an instrument really well. So that's his concept really. Doesn't read music, not interested in music notation. He's not actually that interested in
• 04:00 - 04:30 chords, western music in that kind of way. And I found that really quite helpful uh myself because I actually can read music and as a kid I learned to play the violin. So I went through that whole process of violin lessons practice trying really hard to get better and it was very hard and although I did quite well in some ways I didn't do anywhere near well enough to actually do anything
• 04:30 - 05:00 with that. uh I was never going to become a violinist and play in orchestras or be anywhere near that level. It's not that that isn't valid and isn't useful, but for me personally and for obviously for Brian Eno, that's not something that I want to do. And then later on as I got older, I picked up a guitar and again I felt that the best thing to do was to learn to play the guitar really well. learn loads of songs, learn all
• 05:00 - 05:30 your chords, get better and better at your technique. And at the time I was playing in bands and I wanted to get better at the guitar, but ultimately that was never going to happen either. And the way I play the guitar now is very basic. You know, it's a sound source for me. I'm not interested in learning scales, in getting fast technique. I'm just not interested in that. That's not what the guitar is for me. I did it recently. I thought I'd I'd like to get hold of a bass guitar because I thought what a lovely instrument to have that lower register
• 05:30 - 06:00 bass guitar. I can do some great stuff with a bass sound. Uh and then straight away I was thinking, oh, I could learn all these bass lines. I could put I could learn slap bass, you know. And then I kind of thought, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to spend hours and hours and hours learning good technique on the bass. But you don't have to use an instrument in any particular way. You can use it how you like. And I make ambient guitar music,
• 06:00 - 06:30 but I'm not very good on the guitar. But that doesn't matter because I only need to play a few notes. And that's good enough for what I'm doing. That's that's exactly what I need for what I'm doing. And so a non-m musician is thrilled to be doing music, quite happy to sit there and plunk one note all day, and he's very alert to the effect of that. I think there's something to be said in the idea that if you're not engaged in the technique and the skill of getting better at something, you can actually
• 06:30 - 07:00 sit back a bit and just listen to the beauty of the sound. So, hitting a single note over and over again on a guitar, it's quite amazing. Each note is different. There is there is something in that definitely and it's something that I feel quite attuned with that focus on sound deep listening non-m musicians really listen sometimes because that's the only thing they have available to them maybe that's a bit intense but listening listening is an
• 07:00 - 07:30 important thing I think and I think this idea of a non-m musician is quite a similar idea to the Buddhist idea of beginner's mind so beginner's mind is a concept in Zen Buddhism. Um I first read about it in the book Zen mind, beginner's mind by Sunu Suzuki, sorry. And the concept of beginner's mind is that when you first come to something like you don't have a
• 07:30 - 08:00 lot of skill at it, you actually are just coming at it with all of your individual experience and way of working and thinking in the world and that you will look to solve problems in unique and interesting ways. Then in that moment you can do amazing things and Brian Eno talks about that kind of concept as well. So I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory. That's when you do your best work. Every increase in
• 08:00 - 08:30 your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well. regard your limitations as secret strengths or as constraints that you can make use of. You know, and in that state, beginner's mind, when you first pick up something, if you if you're talking about studio gear or an instrument, you play it in a unique way. You play it in the wrong way, but it's
• 08:30 - 09:00 very interesting what happens. And I like to spend as long as possible in that beginner's mind mode. And so the concept of a non-m musician works quite well for me. I'm not I'm not interested in investing huge amounts of time in learning scales, in learning, you know, technique on guitar or or on bass um or on anything on keyboard, nothing. I just it's enough for me what I can already do
• 09:00 - 09:30 when I pick up an instrument and I can just play it. I do obviously have some understanding of notes, chords, scales because of playing the violin as a kid, but I don't need any more than I've got. So that is number one, it's okay to be a non-m musician. So idea number two from the mind of Brian Eno is that the studio is
• 09:30 - 10:00 a musical instrument. I started coming to the studio with less worked out pieces and eventually with nothing at all. I would just start working with that thing the studio as the instrument. If he had a sign above every studio door saying this studio is a musical instrument, it would make such a different approach to recording. I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound which is what good engineers do. And so, you know, when Brian Eno was talking about this, probably started talking about this in 1970s. He was probably in, you know,
• 10:00 - 10:30 pretty good studios, a lot of different styles of music use the studio as an instrument. Dub reggae, that type of producer remixing with effects and feedback. The technology has moved forward so much that even with a laptop now, you have the ability to do what you like in the studio. Whatever your setup, whatever your studio, your effects, your pedals, you know, your software, they
• 10:30 - 11:00 are playable and they are part of the creative process. They're not something that is just about creating a tone. For me, the studio is fundamental in the composing process. What I start with is normally very simple, and the way that I build music is using the studio as an instrument. And Brian Enino has a big focus on technology as well. He likes technology and I've got a few quotes of his about technology. I enjoy working
• 11:00 - 11:30 with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started with just a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich. I'm very good with technology. I always have been. And with machines in general, they seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement. I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet. Brian, you know, talks a lot about how people take technology and the things
• 11:30 - 12:00 that that initially they didn't like about them like CDs glitching, they then become the most important attribute of that technology in terms of its use in sound. So, glitch music comes out of CDs not working properly. uh you know nostalgic tape saturation is not something that was wanted first that distortion uh on tape and now it's something that people like
• 12:00 - 12:30 to add into their music that technology is a key element in the sound and the way that you go about your work and I love that I love to work with things work with them with a beginner's mind you know push them to their limits push them past their limits and see uh what what can come out of that. And it's amazing what you can do in this kind of way with just a very simple sound source and then layered complex effects, rounding loops, feedback, all of those
• 12:30 - 13:00 elements um are very appealing to me as compositional tools. So the studio is an instrument. So that's concept number two from [Music] Brian. And the the third the last idea that I'm going to talk about uh that Brian Eno talks about a lot is he often compares making music and being in the studio to art particularly to painting.
• 13:00 - 13:30 And he is a visual artist. He's um a successful visual artist. And so he sees sound as a material, just another material like you would paint or any material you work with in art. When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting. I'm a painter in sound. By the mid60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into
• 13:30 - 14:00 the studio, you could put a sound down and then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas. In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music is painting. They knew how to do that. So he's very much into this idea
• 14:00 - 14:30 that sound is a material that you can manipulate. And so it was a lot harder then probably in the 70s to treat sound of the material and you know you probably had to cut up tape or um use effects. But now with digital technologies this is a lot easier to do and most music is manipulated in this way. Sound is a material but I think that's quite different. Editing a piece of music in a digital way is quite different from using sound as a material. I like this idea that, you
• 14:30 - 15:00 know, you can manipulate it however you want. Um, you know, time stretching, you slow things down, speed things up so easily now. Uh, you can cut things into pieces. With digital technology, you can do all the things that used to be a lot harder to do with tape. You don't have to cut things and splice them anymore physically. You can do that very easily in um, DAWs, like Ableton Live. Um, it's amazing what you can do with sound now.
• 15:00 - 15:30 And I think there's a lot of scope in that area for really using sound as a material still. I feel like that area is probably still quite unexplored in a lot of ways. So sound as material, sound is like paint, the third concept of [Music] Brian. So that's it for this video on the ideas that I've learned from Briano. It's okay to be a non-m
• 15:30 - 16:00 musician. The studio is an instrument and you can use sound like paint just as another material. So they've been really interesting and important concepts for me as I've found my own way through making music. Briano is a very interesting guy. Anyway, like I say, the internet is full of his quotes and a lot of them are very funny and interesting. So, I hope that was useful for you in your own musical journeys. So, if you've got anything to say about Brian, just pop it in the comments
• 16:00 - 16:30 below. It's always nice to have a discussion about these topics. And if you want to support the channel, then you can in lots of different ways. Hit the like, hit the subscribe, join up to the channel for a couple of quid a month and get videos early. And on my Patreon and my Substack site, you'll find all sorts of things. Early videos, PDF guides, coupons for my music and field recordings, all sorts of things. So, that's it for this one. Hope that was
• 16:30 - 17:00 useful and I'll see you soon. Cheers. Bye. [Music]