Show notes
Sarah Belle Reid is a performer and composer. She plays trumpet, modular synthesizers, and a wide array of electronic gadgets. Sarah holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. She teaches music technology and modular synthesis at universities and her own online programs. Sarah spoke about how she combines her classical training with electronic music production and sound design. She explains how she keeps curiosity and joy central to her work. Sarah and I discussed the importance of mindset and perspective in the creative arts. Sarah's Learning Sound and Synthesis Course opens again in August 2023! Listen on Apple, Spotify, Google, YouTube Show Notes: Sarah's Official Site - https://www.sarahbellereid.com/ Learning Sound and Synthesis Course - https://www.soundandsynthesis.com/ How to Design Your First Modular Synth Patch Free Course - https://www.soundandsynthesis.com/firstpatch2022 Sarah's Facebook featuring her Create with Courage posts - https://www.facebook.com/sarah.bellereid Now's by Sarah Belle Reid and David Rosenboom - https://reidrosenboom.bandcamp.com/album/nows Support Sarah on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/sarahbellereid Sarah's YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@sarahbellereid No Input Mixer Tutorial - https://youtu.be/oUhfkaVUPY8 The Art of Is by Stephen Nachmanovitch - https://amzn.to/44rikXq Zen Mind Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki - https://amzn.to/44MSJIT Brian Funk Website - https://brianfunk.com Music Production Club - https://brianfunk.com/mpc 5-Minute Music Producer - https://brianfunk.com/book Intro Music Made with 16-Bit Ableton Live Pack - https://brianfunk.com/blog/16-bit Music Production Podcast - https://brianfunk.com/podcast Save 25% on Ableton Live Packs at my store with the code: PODCAST - https://brianfunk.com/store This episode was edited by Animus Invidious of PerforModule - https://performodule.com/ Thank you for listening. Please review the Music Production Podcast on your favorite podcast provider! And don't forget to visit my site https://BrianFunk.com for music production tutorials, videos, and sound packs. Transcript: Brian Funk: Hello everybody. Welcome to the music production podcast. I'm your host, Brian Funk. On today's show I have Sarah Bell-Reed and Sarah is a performer, composer, trumpetist, modular, synthesis, that's hard to say. She makes a lot of really wide ranging music and one of the descriptions I really enjoyed was that it's graceful, danceful, silk falling through space and a pit full of centipedes. Which describes just how it goes from so many different extremes from more traditional classical sounds all the way to far out stretching the definition of music with noise and a lot of the electronic stuff that goes into it. She's a doctorate of music arts at California Institute of the Arts, teaches music tech and modular synthesis online. I've been watching the introduction to modular synth course, which is cool. Sarah, it's great to have you here. Thanks for taking the time. Sarah Belle Reid: Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. Brian Funk: You have a very impressive resume of stuff you do and it's so wide ranging. I think it's really cool that you have this, it's like the nice place music is going, especially music education, where people are starting to take the traditional stuff and bring in some more new stuff, some of the more cutting edge stuff that's happening out there. And it's such a nice thing to see that you're bringing that to your performances, your music, and also your teaching. Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah, yeah, well, thank you. Brian Funk: Heh. Sarah Belle Reid: I think for me, you know, I have a very traditional background in my musical training. But I always had this feeling, even though I didn't quite know how to describe it or what it meant, but I always had this feeling that there was something more that I wanted to be able to explore in my music making. And so when I found and was introduced to these more experimental aspects of making music, like improvisation and just experimental electronics and all of that, it really felt like. all of the puzzle pieces were coming together. It wasn't a replacing of everything I had developed as a traditional or classically trained trumpet player. It was just like, oh, now this story makes sense. Now my Brian Funk: Mm-hmm. Sarah Belle Reid: voice feels more complete. You know what I mean? So it's like it all came together. Brian Funk: Yeah, I've found that for myself too, just over time, the different things in your life that feel so separate from each other. Sometimes they start coming together into this one path and you need a little time to see that happen. At least I definitely did. Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Brian Funk: And it's nice too because sometimes the music education departments are very steeped in tradition and kind of resist this stuff. They see it as something that they, you know, almost like a challenge to it, maybe. I'm not sure, but I've run into that myself occasionally with trying to bring in just I teach high school English as a day job and trying to bring in like music production, Ableton Live stuff Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah. Brian Funk: into it. Not everyone is interested. Some people in the music departments were really excited and other people were kind of like, that's not music. I kind Sarah Belle Reid: Oh. Brian Funk: of got that feeling. Do you encounter that ever, some of those different challenges and how people see it? Sarah Belle Reid: Oh, of course. Brian Funk: haha Sarah Belle Reid: Absolutely. Yes. Both in, you know, in educational spaces and just in the world, you know. with people having different musical experiences, different backgrounds, different perspectives, different things that they like. Sometimes the music that I'm really interested in and that I make is challenging to listen to. Sometimes it doesn't have a traditional obvious hook or even a repeatable rhythm that you can snap along to. Sometimes it's just very... kind of amorphous and more like... sound design. You know, a lot of the time people, some people will say, oh, your music is more almost like experimental sound design than it is quote unquote music. To me, in my opinion, it's all music. Like all sound is music. But yeah, people sometimes express all kinds of opinions. And I've definitely, I've had some challenging conversations with people who don't get it and don't want to get it. But I've also had some really exciting deep conversations that are more based in curiosity. People who don't get it and are like, okay, what is happening? You know, I don't know what I'm hearing. What am I hearing? Can Brian Funk: Right? Sarah Belle Reid: you tell me how to begin to listen to this? And I love those kinds of conversations. You don't have to get it right from the beginning. You know what I mean? In fact, I feel like that mentality of, you know, you have to get it when it comes to music actually can really perpetuate that siloed. way of thinking that you can find in some educational systems, like what I believe you were talking about, where it's like, this is classical music, this is jazz, this is pop music. Brian Funk: Right. Sarah Belle Reid: I feel like if we could give everyone a little more permission to not understand things and have that be okay, we would be Brian Funk: Hmm. Sarah Belle Reid: able to maybe blend a little bit more freely between all of these different modes of making music. Brian Funk: Right, yeah, that's cool you Sarah Belle Reid: It's Brian Funk: say Sarah Belle Reid: just Brian Funk: that. Sarah Belle Reid: a thought. It's just something I've been thinking about. Brian Funk: Well, I guess you probably get a lot of the, sorry you play your trumpet so nice, but these buttons and knobs. Sarah Belle Reid: Well, I even get, believe it or not, it depends on the concert and the audience, but I've even had people come up to me afterwards and say, do you, after a long performance on trumpet, be like, well, do you ever play a nice melody on that thing, on that horn, you know? Yes, in fact, I do. Thank you for asking. It's just a mix. You know, everyone has different backgrounds and perspectives that they're coming from, so. Brian Funk: Well, art, you know, especially when it's new, always challenges people and Sarah Belle Reid: Exactly. Brian Funk: it divides people. And that's part of what's nice. Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah. Brian Funk: And there's people, I don't know who it's credited to, but just kind of, it's better to have people love it and people hate it than just to have people, okay, I've heard Sarah Belle Reid: Right? Brian Funk: this before. It's Sarah Belle Reid: Have Brian Funk: more Sarah Belle Reid: people Brian Funk: of that Sarah Belle Reid: forget Brian Funk: again. Sarah Belle Reid: about it. Brian Funk: Yeah. Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah, I once had a mentor tell me that early on and I'm so grateful that they shared that with me because it's really stuck with me. If you move someone with your music, even if you're moving them in a way that maybe feels slightly negative or they don't like it or they don't get it, you're still stirring something up within them. Brian Funk: Mm. Sarah Belle Reid: You're expanding their life in that moment. Your music changed them in some way. It made them question how they think about music. It made them hear new things. That's actually incredible. Brian Funk: Yeah. Sarah Belle Reid: And so from my perspective, it's not that I gave up, but I let go of the priority of trying to have everyone like my music many, many years ago, and now I'm focused on sharing really meaningful listening experiences with people as one of my primary goals in making music. Brian Funk: I imagine trumpet came first. Sarah Belle Reid: Yep, actually, well, piano way back and then trumpet and then electronics. Yeah. Brian Funk: How did you get introduced into that electronic world? What was it that, was it like somebody, a friend or? Sarah Belle Reid: I was in grad school in California, so it was pretty, you know, relatively late. I had been playing trumpeted music for many years at that point, but I had never even seen a synthesizer. I had no idea about this world at all. And for some reason, I decided to join a class called interface design, which is a class where you actually design and build your own. musical interfaces or interfaces for musical expression. So it could be something that has buttons and knobs on it, like an Ableton push, something that maybe is a MIDI controller, or it could be, you know. anything you could imagine that you might want to use to control sound. So people were building wearable sensor-based things that they would then give to dancers and the dancers would move around and that would give them data to turn into a synthesized sound or to control lighting. And I really wanted to build a gestural interface to go on my trumpet. That was kind of where it started. So I had never used Ableton. I had never used a synthesizer. I had never even used like an effects pedal, but I Brian Funk: Hmm. Sarah Belle Reid: was like, okay, I wanna do this because this sounds really cool. How can I turn my trumpet into some kind of controller for electronics and visual? At the time I was really interested in like coded visuals and stuff like that. I don't do a ton of that anymore. But so I started there. And then once that thing was built, I realized. you can't make electronic music without understanding how electronic instruments work. So then I started to work with modular synths and more in Ableton and different programs on my computer to kind of pull it all together. Brian Funk: Right, right, so that Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah, Brian Funk: pulled you right into that world. Sarah Belle Reid: exactly. It's kind of a strange introduction into the world of electronic music, but I'm grateful for it. So. Brian Funk: It's something that I really was interested in when I first started getting into computer-based music. I started on guitar, playing in rock bands, not trained or anything like you, but more grimy punk rock angle. Once I started finding out about MIDI controllers and that you can put them together and map them how you want, it really made me think about just instrument design in general. Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah. Brian Funk: Just how amazing it is that certain things like a trumpet or like a guitar or piano have stuck around for so long Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah. Brian Funk: and still seem almost like these unsolved puzzles that have so much left to give. And now... there's all these new kind of ways of looking at music. And it's a really fun time. There's always something new coming Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah. Brian Funk: out. That's a totally exciting new way to create music that Sarah Belle Reid: Yep. Brian Funk: sometimes relies on skills you have already. And sometimes it enables people that have no musical training at all to Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah. Brian Funk: create really interesting music. You have, um, can you describe what you did to your trumpet a little bit? Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah, I Brian Funk: I've Sarah Belle Reid: can... Brian Funk: seen some pictures and like, it's, it's kind of, it's like space age almost. Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah, so basically what it is, it's a little collection. So basically it's run with a microcontroller, an Arduino, which is a little tiny microcontroller that you can get for, I think, 20 or 30 bucks. And it allows you to attach different sensors to it and read the data from the sensors. And so I built this little enclosure that goes onto the trumpet and it detects the motion of the valves, so the pistons that you use to change to play different notes, and also the amount of pressure that you have, that your left hand has on the trumpet as you're holding it, and also the tilt. There's an accelerometer in it as well, so as you move the horn up and down or side to side, it will detect that as well. And then that Arduino, like I said, it just reads the data and allows you to transmit that data onto a computer. And from there, you have to get creative and figure out what you want to do with it. If you want to use it as MIDI to control a MIDI synth, or if you want to convert it to some other data format, which you can do and send it to another program and so on and so forth. But the real music making starts at the computer end of things. Brian Funk: Hmm. Sarah Belle Reid: And the device, which I call MIGSI, which is Minimally Invasive Gesture Sensing Interface, remember folks, I did this in grad school. It was very much my thesis, so it's super nerdy. I apologize. Brian Funk: That's cool though. Sarah Belle Reid: But yeah, that part is really just about sensor data capture, like gestural Brian Funk: Hmm. Sarah Belle Reid: data capture, yeah. Brian Funk: Right. And you have to then, like you're building the instrument, you're building this thing, and then you have to decide what all of that stuff does, which Sarah Belle Reid: Yeah. Brian Funk: can change for, I'm sure every performance. Sarah Belle Reid: Exactly. And that's the most challenging and also the most rewarding part. I co-designed Migsie with someone named Ryan Gaston, who I was in school with at the time. And we, I remember we got to the point where all of the sensors were working. The data was flowing to the computer and we were just looked at each other and we're like, what the heck do we do now? Like, what do you do with seven streams of…
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