This one’s for y’all who’ve have had an impact on me this year, small or big. 2025 has been a remarkable year for me musically- it’s stopped being just about what notes to play, I’ve started connecting ideas together and it’s starting to make more sense. A musical toddler, I’ve started making my first sounds and putting them together into sputtering and hopefully intelligible phrases. Here’s to making more intelligible noise in the coming year.
And now, an invocation to the sonic gods, to grant us the discipline to come to our instruments so we may gain control and mastery of our form, and also the suppleness to let the muses take us where they may. May we step boldly into uncharted waters in 2026, and collectively push the bar.
Stay sexy y’all,
Siddarth
PS. Some extra reading for the nerds in the room
Recommendations
This Is What It Sounds Like: A Legendary Producer Turned Neuroscientist on Finding Yourself Through Music by Susan Rogers. A tremendous book that introduced me to a number of cool ideas. Written by Prince’s recording engineer, and now producer and cognitive scientist, it breaks down music along 7 dimensions to help you understand the kind of music that you tend to groove to. While normally I’d say this kind of analysis is too reductive and left brained to explain musical taste, in this case it comes from someone with decades of shop experience prior to moving to the lab so it goes down easier. And even if it’s an incomplete analysis, the book comes with tons of contemporary music along with listening notes so you’re bound to relate with at least some of it.
One such idea is that of Realism vs Abstraction. Dr Rogers makes the effective analogy of how the invention and popularization of photography motivated artists to paint the emotional reality of a scene, rather than rendering with high fidelity since there’s no competing with a camera. This birthed genres like Expressionism. A lot of music I’ve listened to thus far has been acoustic- guitar heavy music. When listening to a rock/blues number- even songs with great storytelling, my mind’s eye usually conjures up the band or a scene that’s not apart from them. In contrast, electronic music using sounds that are untethered from physical instruments tend to evoke more abstract sonic landscapes in my mind’s eye. This BIG idea has compelled me to seek out more electronica of late. A Daft Punk or Flying Lotus record play a lot more like animation in my head than Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath. Here’s a short playlist with some abstract electronica that I like.
Another gem from the book- a game to play with your friends in the living room or on a road trip. You likely already do some version of this but these rules bring more intention to the experience.
Some of the happiest times in my life have been spent in record pulls. A record pull is when a group of friends or colleagues get together and play music for one another. There are two rules. First, you must choose records that are personally meaningful to you. It could be a great performance or eye-opening lyric, a record you associate with a significant time in your life, or even the record you want to dance to at your wedding. The second rule is a bit more of a guideline. Ideally, the record should be something unfamiliar or uncelebrated—something your companions probably don’t know well—though this rule can be broken if you want your pullmates to hear a popular song in a new way.
One of the happiest outcomes of a record pull is the opportunity to discover something new about the way your companions think and feel. Gaining insight into a friend’s musical tastes can be an intimate experience that reveals how they see themselves in relation to the world, the value of aesthetic experiences in their lives, or who they want to be when they grow up (or who they wanted to be). It’s not merely a pullmate’s choice of songs that is revealing but their explanation of why a record matters so much to them. Good record pulls feature as much storytelling as music.
In that vein, here’s a record pull for you. You’ve likely already heard this banger from – Still D.R.E. by Dr. Dre. That beat along with a number of other big ones from the aughts were produced by Dre and obviously feature his impeccable ear, but the beats themselves were made by a piano man. Now I’ve never dug the piano much but Scott Storch has me sold on the keys yo. He had me when he said the piano is a percussive instrument as much as it is a harmonic one, and then produces to make that iconic bling bling sound with it.
Speaking of the keys, I messed around with them a little when I was back home in Chennai. And goddamn! It’s a simple instrument to wrap your head around. Compared to the guitar, it’s laid out linearly and concepts like triads and inversions are extremely easy to play with and visualize. It seems to me that the Western music theory and notation are designed with the concert piano in mind. And that Western music’s main idiosyncrasy- an emphasis on harmony and chords is directly derived from the interface of the piano.
That brings me another point- when learning the guitar, it helps to separate music theory from guitar theory ie. learning the interface. And Richard Lloyd’s Alchemical Guitarist video series and accompanying book do a great job of laying out a fundamental idea- that the guitar is intervallic rather than alphabetic, a claim that pianos have forfeited in lieu of emphasizing the C Major scale. I’ve only worked through the first couple chapters, and it does need to be worked through to really get the idea but it’s already paid big dividends in understanding why the guitar is tuned the way it is.
Now that you know a little about me, you know that I love my percussive instruments. I play the djembe but a single drum played by a single drummer can sound a little …limited. In seeking to make accompaniments and chord progressions for myself, I taught myself Ableton Live during Christmas. A dog bite on my index finger further added to my motivation since I couldn’t play music all week.
And boy, has it opened me up to how a record is arranged! A record is about more than just what is played, it’s about how it sounds, and the space between sounds. Messing around with a DAW for just a few weeks has got me thinking about songs in their entirety- layers, voicing, and balance. I’ve never played with synths and effects before and now that I know how the sausage is made, it’s opened up my ears to more details in tracks.
The Pedal Movie by the good folks over at Reverb is a great retrospective on the history of guitar pedals, yes. But more generally the search for unique sound in the 20th century that lead to a cottage industry of of electronics tinkerers. And also how amplification and the science of loud shaped the sound of the 20th century- Rock & Roll. It struck me that this phenomenon has a distinctly North American/Western flavor- hobby electronics tinkering and GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) requires a certain amount of boomer-esque abundance. I’m not so sure that prototyping of the same sort could happen in other parts of the world. Perhaps with digital production and VSTs, we’ll see more of that now.
Regarding synthesized sounds, Gordon Reid from Sound on Sound has an exhaustive 63 part series on synths that I’ve only made a dent on. Very promising so far… Here’s an interesting one about why percussion is really difficult to model electronically. A stretched membrane aka a drum head is an a-harmonic/atonal instrument compared to instruments like guitar, piano, harps, organs- meaning tones aren’t distinguished by musical notes but rather by their timbre. And if you’ve met any percussionist, you’ll know there’s a room full of ways to make atonal sounds.. But that doesn’t mean they’re easier to model, they’re not! Adding an extra dimension beyond just length (like say a guitar string or an organ pipe) adds innumerable difficulties in recreating accurate sound.
And last, here’s smore music to kick off your (y)ear.