This Week in Music Production - Infinite Mudpies
This week in music production, we’re taking a look at something I’ve been obsessed with lately: infinite mudpies with Phase Plant.
For those unfamiliar, In EDM/Dubstep production mudpies are what we informally call a long audio file packed with completely random and chaotic noises. You don’t intend to use the whole thing. Instead, you generate this big messy block of sound and later dive in to cut and resample the most interesting bits.
Why Phase Plant?
For this, I’ve been using Phase Plant by Kilohearts. It’s a crazy powerful synth like Serum but with effectively infinite oscillators and a very different FX routing workflow.
If you know me, you know I’ve been massively inspired by Virtual Riot lately who is one of my favorite producers and is an absolute sound-design wizard. On his Patreon (check it out here) he’s released Phase Plant patches, and a few of these lean heavily into randomly generated sounds, meaning every time you trigger them, you get a different noise.
Perfect for mudpies.
Here’s how I’ve been building them inside Ableton:
Load a Randomizing Patch: Start with a Phase Plant preset from Virtual Riot or anything that spits out unpredictable textures.
Duplicate the Track: I’ll often make multiple versions to maximize variation. This could be with different melodies, note lengths, etc.
Bounce to Audio: Print everything to audio.
Dig In Later: Once I’ve got a library of these chaotic sounds, I resample tiny slices to use as fills, risers, ear candy, or transitional glue.
The goal isn’t to make a “usable” sound up front but rather to stockpile chaos and then mine it later when I need inspiration.
For the kind of music that I make, I really enjoy sprinkling in unpredictable textures. Mudpies give you a reservoir of happy accidents.
Need a quick fill? Chop a glitchy half-beat from your mudpie.
Want ear candy? Grab one bizarre plink, ram it through Izotope’s Trash, and see what happens.
The best part is that no two mudpies are ever the same.
