Season 2, Episode 4, Part 1: Claire Marie Lim - Music Technologist, Educator...

You're listening to The Piano Pod, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry about how they're bringing the piano into the 21st century.

Hello and welcome back to The Piano Pod. I am Eric Hunter.

I'm Yukimi Song.

I'm Clara Zhang.

Today our guest is Claire Marie Lim, otherwise known as DALL·E. A professor in Berkeley's Electronic Production and Design Department, she specializes in instruction for live electronic performance, production, and programming, and is an advocate of women and Asian representation in music technology. She is an Ableton Certified Trainer, Bitwig Certified Trainer, and Apple Certified Pro. In music education and arts activism, Claire collaborates with the Girls Rock campaign, Beats by Girls, and the Queens Public Library Network, and has received support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and Queens Council on the Arts. She develops curriculum for various ages and experience levels, having consulted for the International Center of Photography, Queens College, Coursera, and the Berklee Network. Claire also independently runs the Doll Troop, a mentorship experience where K-12 girls can shadow her in electronic songwriting sessions and live shows. Hi, Claire. Thanks for joining us today.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Welcome.

Excited to be here. Thank you.

Yes, we are so excited to have you. We interview a lot of classical pianists for this show. We're all classical pianists, the three of us, but we're also very interested in music technology and the future of music. And when we saw what you were doing on YouTube, we were just blown away. We're like, ah, we have to have her on the show. So we're very, very excited. Now you describe yourself as a music technologist, right?

Yes, that's right.

Yeah. Yeah. I love that term. Can you explain what you mean by that exactly?

Yeah, totally. And I think before I start, I'll also kind of jump in like the classical music is still very much in me too, 'cause I'm a classically trained pianist too. So it was very weird. I think my parents didn't really expect that. Like, it's like, oh, let her go get her diploma and whatever and then turn into this electronic music weirdo. Sorry, mom and dad. But anyway, yeah, so music technology, I think it's a term that I like using a lot and that a lot of my colleagues who also call themselves music technologists I use as well, mainly because oftentimes when you're in the field of music tech, you're not just in, say, only production. There's a little bit of overlap with, say, live performance, or in my case, for example, or sometimes there's a little bit of overlap in programming and sound design. So I think using the term music technology kind of encompasses that because that's actually pretty much what I do all the time. Sometimes my clients who I work with will come to me through the lens of wanting to look for a producer to help them with their music, so they might be, say, a songwriter or a composer, and it's like, "Hey Claire, can you help me make this, put it into some kind of digital form, like in a software computer program?" And then other clients that I work with will be like, "Hey, I'm doing a live performance. Can you help me put together a live show or put together my stage setup?" So it really kind of runs the gamut. It's very much kind of being like a jack of all trades, I guess, and having to go between different sorts of things. But ultimately, I love doing all of it. That's why I like it.

Yeah, that's amazing. I know you wear so many hats. I mean, just going through the materials on your website, you're like, oh my gosh, she's performing and she's producing and she's educating, activism as well, right? And technology running through it. It's amazing. But it's so interesting to me that you grew up with classical training and then found your way into technology. I've got a bit of that myself. So can you tell us what drew you to music technology originally?

Yeah, totally. I'm so glad to hear that, Eric. I think for me, it was very, very much an accident. Up until college— just for a little bit of background also, I went to a school where you had different options for majoring in different parts of music. So sometimes a couple of people would major specifically in electronic production, or people would do engineering, or people would do commercial writing, and that was initially what I kind of wanted to do. So when I first got to the college that I attended, my mind was really more set on being just a writer or a composer, because I didn't know about the possibilities of a lot of the electronic music stuff. But it just so happened that a lot of my friends who I met in my very first semester at college, I got very close to them, and a lot of them were into electronic music stuff. And at that time, still, I was a little bit of a purist. So people would bring up electronic music and you kind of think one of two things: either the electroacoustic tradition kind of in classical stuff, or you think of like a doom, doom, doom, doom, which is kind of like—

On the floor, yeah.

Yeah, I know, I joke with my students now that that's all that electronic music is, partially being facetious, but it kind of is also. So I thought of that and it was really a lot of my own prejudice that was preventing me from being open to a lot of the creative possibilities. But I started going to a lot of these live shows, and for me, coming from the lens of— or the background, rather— of being a performer, because I used to do lots of competitions and lots of onstage stuff as a pianist and a flute player too, right? So it's like stage performance experience. Coming into that sphere and watching all of these live performances, I was totally blown away. So I went to a concert once by a group called Disclosure, and it was actually in New York. It was at Madison Square Garden, and I saw them there, and that was the night that very much changed my life because they do a completely live electronic setup. So the brothers are also actually a little bit of classical and jazz trained. One of them plays the drums, the other plays the bass, but they do this really cool live electronic setup. And I, I was totally mesmerized and I said, okay, if I do get into electronic music at all, it's probably gonna be through the vein of performance. And that's what happened. So that was down the rabbit hole from there.

Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's a great segue to your current project, which is Dolltrick, right? Can you tell us what is Doll Trick and what do you do as Doll Trick?

Totally. Doll Trick is interesting because she's kind of like— first of all, I refer to her a lot in third person, mainly because when I first started doing electronic music, I personally felt very scared about it for a number of reasons. Mostly because I, first of all, really didn't know what I was doing at the time. So it's just like, what is going on? Second of all, because I didn't really have the courage to do a lot of the more performative things that I saw either the peers or the idols that I had— not idols, but the inspirations that I had doing. And it's partially because they were mostly white men, so it was a very weird situation. It's like you look around and there's no one who looks the same as you, until later on in my story, which is what I'll get to. But yeah, so I created Dolltrick in college, when I was still in college. After I took a turntable class, actually. I took a class on turntablism and the first assignment was to come up with a DJ name. And it stuck. I didn't think it would stick, but I just thought of it and it stuck and ended up becoming my artist project name. So I stuck with that name and it's kind of my avenue of having some kind of platform to just really be free with music and a little bit of an unfiltered type of sense. I feel like if I went into the music creation process as Claire, it would come out very different. But Daltric gives me a little bit of that freedom. And it's because of that that I usually kind of have her very separate. I like to think of her as like maybe like 10 or even 20 years younger than me in terms of like the freedom that she has to do stuff. She's very much just a lot more liberal in a lot of the choices that she makes, and I think of the Daltric project as really being, yeah, it's totally separate from, you know, what people will hire me for. Like my clients won't necessarily be like, I'm hiring Daltric. Sometimes they are. But like, let's say they're looking for an engineer on their tour or something. They're not hiring Daltric, they're hiring Claire. Or if they're looking for lessons, they're looking for lessons from Claire and not Daltric. So that's a little bit of her on the side.

Yeah. That is so interesting to me. I think that's like a really ingenious solution to a problem that I frequently run into, which is like how to get started and get over my own creative anxieties. Do you have other kind of personas or do you like compartmentalize differently for all the other different projects that you do?

Yeah, that's a great question. I do actually have one other persona. It hasn't been active for a while, but I used to do a lot of live modular synthesizer jams and my artist name for that would be Cable Wrapper, which is funny. 'Cause sometimes there would be like spoken word stuff also. But yeah, there's that mainly Dolltrick is the main one. Main one, I think. Like, sometimes even when I do a lot of performance stuff, and my students and also my audience who have seen me perform live will notice this too, but I'll do a little bit of like a switch out sometimes. So I'll be like, hey, this is Claire, and then I'll go back into be like, hey, this is Daltric right now doing the performance stuff. So it's a lot of that. It's a little bit like a split personality thing, but it's not that crazy yet, I hope.

Yeah, well, you know, I think, um, A lot of performers, I hesitate to say all performers, but a lot of performers certainly have a certain separation between their public life and their private life, right? You know, what they put on performance versus what they create on their own.

When you do the tour, are you doing as DOLTRICK and by yourself, or do you have a team of group of musicians to go along with?

Yeah, that's a great question, Yukimi. So what usually happens for my case, it kind of depends. If I do, if I am If I am touring as Dolltrick, then I usually go on my own. It's— I've done it enough at this stage that I can like pack everything into a suitcase and I just like go around. But that said though, most of the time if I'm getting hired to work with other people, like if I'm on their teams, then yeah, that is with a team of people. So I'll be like one out of, I don't know, a crew of like 50 or something people on like a bus or depending on the size of of the tour. Sometimes it's, it's smaller too, so it really depends on the situation. I've done both before. Wow.

And I, I've seen your, um, YouTube clips and also I've listened to some of your original songs on, you know, um, music streaming services. By the way, one of your songs is on our fall playlist on Spotify.

Oh, thank you so much.

So that our viewers and listeners can really enjoy your song. Anyway, so I've seen some cover songs, like, you know, you are doing covers, but also you have your original. So when you're touring, do you do both, or are they all original? Maybe not songs, but music?

Yeah, that's a great question. Sometimes I try to do a mix of both, mainly because also for myself, like, I love doing covers. I think it's so fun. And also because This is like— it partially is because of this, but sometimes I like doing covers that not just are for my main audience, which are mainly around a certain age range, but to appeal to other folks too. Sometimes when I do a Fleetwood Mac song, for example, my parents get very excited. I love Fleetwood Mac. Me too.

Yeah!

So I love doing Fleetwood Mac stuff, and I'll send them funny clips of like, "Hey, I want to hear your favorite rock song." I sing a song in an electronic fashion, my parents will laugh a little bit, which is fun. So sometimes it's a little for them. Sometimes a little bit of jazz as well, because my grandparents, my grandfather especially, he's a big fan of Sinatra and stuff like that. So I used to do some weird flips that would make him laugh as well. So there's a little bit of that too. I mean, I grew up listening to a lot of bands, older stuff that I think a lot of my students right now wouldn't know also. Regard, like sometimes I'll do stuff that's really popular with them, like whatever is like on the, you know, the Billboard charts now or whatever they might like. So there's always a mix of things. I love covers.

So yeah, but with your, you know, electric music background, it's gonna sound much different.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think that's also something that I like to really think about as one of the powers of doing electronic music stuff, just because A lot of the time when we think of covers, or when a lot of people think of covers, sometimes they think of just, you know, a person sitting with their guitar and like singing into a mic. It's like an acoustic version or something. So that's why sometimes a lot of people will call it, you know, a remix instead. Although, you know, technically if it's a remix, sometimes there's original material from the song, so it's still a cover that I'm doing. It's just like an electronic version of a cover. But yeah, lots of cool opportunities with sounds.

Yeah, and you know, while I was watching YouTube, one of your videos, and you were playing a flute and with a keyboard, and even a keyboard that I have never seen before. I'm sorry, I'm a really, really good old-fashioned classical pianist, so I'm very boring in that way. I only know black and white keys or 88 keys. That's all I know. Anyway, so what does it take to be you? I'm very curious because, you know, I have students of so much potentials and I want to give them as much as I can, you know, and I'm very curious. I mean, not only you have this, it sounds like you've done, you know, traditional music lessons, and but also you have the knowledge of technology, um, the computer software too, because you, you are also a DJ, right?

Right, yeah.

Yeah, so I am very curious what it takes to be Miss Claire Lim. Tell us.

Yeah, I think, to be honest, Yukimi, I think it's just a lot of nowadays, especially since you mentioned your students, and I tell this to my students too, It's about taking advantage of whatever resources you have, right? And I think they're in a very different position from us because even— I know I look very young, but I didn't grow up with a— I'm not from the generation that grew up with smartphones, right? But now they do. And even for a lot of them, when they were 5-year-olds using an iPad or something, on that iPad you can put a lot of stuff. You can put things like music software, you can put little things like music games that a lot of the younger students I work with, K-12, they use a lot too. And that develops a lot of their musical sense as well. So oftentimes for a lot of the students that I work with who are interested, or even just people in general who are interested in getting into music technology, I often joke— it's not a joke, but it's very serious— like the biggest asset that you have is your phone, just because you can put so many things there. Like even off the top of my head, a really good one to get started with is if you have an iPhone, the GarageBand app. That's native to the iPhone lets you do so many things. And the cool part about it is that you can save your projects also and you can send them to yourself so that then you can use it on your computer. So there's a lot of stuff that goes on in between that. Um, and that's often like a really important step. I think that a lot of people take on too, and especially for, for the folks who are coming from a more classical background, like even myself thinking back to when I first got into this, um, the best part about having a little bit of a piano background is that most types of music technology softwares nowadays have a piano interface. So it's kind of like you already know the language. The only main thing that might be different is when you press a key, you won't hear a piano sound, but you'll hear a bass sound, or you'll hear a synthesizer sound. And that also takes a little time to wrap your head around, because it does get surprising. It's like, "Wait, this should be a—" this should sound like a piano but it doesn't, so you have to kind of adjust your head a little bit around that too. But that's one of the benefits of having a little bit of keyboard background too, so that's actually why I often encourage people, even if you don't see yourself as a full-out concert pianist, getting a bit of a keyboard background if you're interested in production or interested in electronic music is really, really good, so do that.

Thank you for saying that. I mean, you're saving our jobs. —as a piano teacher, for sure.

No, I'm so serious, you feel me? And I mean that really seriously too, just because I think a lot of the strongest folks that I've worked with, be it artists or students or even just my own mentors too, they have had a really wide range of knowledge, not just in the Western sphere as well with classical music theory, but even just going beyond into Indian Hindustani music or Kannada music or different parts of Chinese music, different regions of China, being able to be aware of the different music styles, and Western classical music being a good foundation for understanding harmonic concepts. I think that's one of its main strengths as a system. So big advocate of learning something as a secondary instrument.

Wow, thank you. That's great to know. So I know I'm asking too much, so— but this would be the last one now. So as you're growing up, who or what was the influence like? Um, was it your music teacher or maybe family members who were in the industry, or maybe you were interested in gaming or computer classes at school?

I'm very curious. Yeah, the— as far as As far as the gaming goes, because a lot of people— for an interesting anecdote is that a lot of the folks that I meet think I play a lot of video games and something, but I don't. I grew up with zero video games. Mom and Dad were like, "No." I did watch a lot of TV though. So in terms of music exposure, I would really say it came from my grandparents, I think, on both sides of the family. My parents themselves, aren't super into music at all, or really no one in my family is a professional musician actually. So there's that. And I guess coming from my background, for a bit more context, I grew up in Singapore, but half of my family, my dad's side, is actually from the Netherlands. So it's a little bit odd. But yeah, even on both sides of the family, no one was very much into like, "You should do this as a living," because the idea was like, it's not a living going into it. And also like I'm the only child, so it was a lot of like pressure and the only grandchild for my mom's side, which is a little crazy also. So there's a lot of kind of like music is cool, we'll let you be exposed to a lot of it to be cultured, whatever that might mean, and then you can do whatever you want that's not music. So that was the main line of thinking. But I grew up listening to a lot of different ranges, types of sound. So my dad's side would do a lot of the classical stuff. And actually my oma, my paternal grandma, she bought me my first piano, which I still have now.

I have so many similar stories.

Yeah, totally. And it's great. It was like— I still remember, it was like a mini 1.5-meter-tall kawaii piano. I still have it at home. So she bought that and she was really amazing as a pianist. She never really had any formal training, so she would only play by ear, but she was brilliant. So she got me that, and then I got started with piano lessons, I think when I was like 5 or 6, around there. Got started on flute later, I think when I was 10 or 11, I think when I was 11. And then on top of that though, listening to a lot of the stuff that my parents like, even just on the radio, we would listen to a lot of older stuff. So I grew up on The Beatles, Eagles, Fleetwood Mac. What else would they listen to? A lot of Chicago. These '80s and '70s types of things, but I loved it. I loved all of it, would absorb it in. And then my grandparents on my mom's side will listen to a lot of the crooners like Sinatra, Engelbert Humperdinck, which is Louis Armstrong, which was really fun. And yeah, so kind of growing up into up until like college, that was pretty much most of the music I would listen to, maybe a little bit of like Billboard stuff here and there. But yeah, that was mainly it. And the hope was that I would just come to enjoy music and appreciate art and hopefully not go into it as a career.

So when did you come here to America from Singapore? And I assume if you're Singaporean, you have some Chinese influence as well?

Yeah, totally. That's a great question, Clara. So I came here around when I was about 19 or 20, so it's a good number of years at this point, but I came here specifically for college because I wanted to do college and I ended up going to a college in Boston called Berklee College of Music, and that's where everything happened. But yeah, so I came here for that. Prior to that, interestingly enough, most of my influences at the time were actually from classical music or like random pop stuff. But that said though, I did grow up with a couple of Chinese songs and stuff that my grandma would sing from time to time. I don't know if anyone knows this song, "Moon Represents My Heart." My grandma used to sing it all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool, there we go.

That's the only song I still remember. Yeah, totally.

So my grandma would sing that all the time. Like, . Not all the time, and that was like one of my— probably like my only like Teresa Teng songs that I still remember. So there was a little bit of that, but actually speaking of like different influences, one thing that I did listen to a lot of growing up, or not so much growing up but really as a teenager, was a lot of Korean pop, and that kind of stuck with me through up until now. Like I still listen to a lot of Korean pop as well, mainly because at the time I had a few friends who were Korean in school and they were listening to a lot of it, but also a lot of my non-Korean friends at the time were listening to it too. And this was really more of the older school bands, so bands like HOT and a little bit of Super Junior and stuff like that. So it was really, really quite a while ago. But yeah, that was another influence that kind of brought me a lot of the, I guess, palette of pop and electronic production before I actually knew that I wanted to do electronic. Stuff. Because by the time I did the electronic stuff in college, like years later, it was like, hey, I heard that in that K-pop song from 10 years ago or something. So then a lot of the bridges started to form. Yeah.

But you also did like dance and DJ culture, like you also combined that with classical music, right?

Yeah, I try to do a little bit of that too. Like for a lot of the DJing that I do as well, it's really a different pace. Paradigm from when I do the live electronic music performance stuff. So for example, if I did a more DJ style type of gig, I wouldn't necessarily bring my keyboards along with me. I might leave that at home, but I might bring something—

More DJing?

Yeah, it's more like a mixing type of style between different songs. But I try to use the way that I DJ as a little bit of— what's a good way to frame this? Yeah, I use it a little bit of like an ethnomusicological type of style. Vein as well, mainly because this is thinking also back to when I first got into electronic music. But when I first started doing a lot of it, really a lot of the figures that I would see in electronic music were just these white male DJs on stage pumping their fists. And it's like, I was very curious about the history of it, so I went a little bit deeper into that and discovered just everything was appropriated— or not everything appropriated, but A lot of it came from a different culture that isn't really acknowledged right now. So for example, when I do DJ sets, I'll use it as a little bit of a chance to inform my audience or share a little bit more with my audience about like, "Hey, here's a little bit of a historical house DJ set," and we go back to the founders of house in New York with Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan and stuff like that. And having that as a teaching tool or a tool to show people's history, I think is one of the most beautiful parts of music, because you don't always have to stand in front of a chalkboard or a whiteboard and draw stuff. You can play music and be like, "Hey, listen to how the sounds are changing over time." And in a way, it kind of speaks a little bit to music in the classical sense too. Like whenever I talk about Baroque music going to classical stuff, going to romantic stuff, here's the path that we draw through music. How do we also do that in different genres? Also.

So, so you do actually teach a lot of students too as well, or—

Yeah, it's a little crazy right now, but yeah, most of my students at the moment are from Berkeley, so they are my students up in Boston. But I still teach also at a couple of other places now and then as an adjunct. For example, at the City University of New York, sometimes I run a class in the, the MFA program over there that's called— it's not called this, but it focuses on using a program called Ableton Live to do a lot of like sound design and composition and stuff like that. So those students will do a little bit more of like studio comp work compared to a lot of my students at Berklee who do a little bit more of the live electronic performance types of things.

Got it. Yeah, well, you mentioned this earlier, so I don't want to interfere, but no, that's okay. You do like look very young, so we weren't really sure, you know, you and the— yeah, that's okay— all this like university, right? And I was just curious, you know. I mean, but you said you, you, you only moved here when you were 19, and you— so I assume you've been here for a little while, right?

Totally. It's funny that you mentioned that because a lot of my, my students will also kind of like guess that I'm very young, but it's okay. At this point they know, like, you know, that, um, it's, it's— they, they have seen my— I think one of the things that I try to think about a lot also, as far as my own prejudices go, is that that a lot of people who, even if they look young and even if they are young, a lot of the people who are younger than me even, they've done the work and that's why they're so famous. Right. It's like, so I think about that a lot. It's a little different also, I think, compared to a lot of traditional academia types of spheres because you'll often see older people again from that kind of white male professor type of generation that you see a lot. Honestly, when I was in college, all of my professors, I didn't have a single woman professor at all. And no, none of my professors were people of color. So it was very much really— yeah, it was very much still even in electronic music that's supposed to be, you know, you know, forward thinking and whatever, innovative, right? It was still very much anchored in that academic type of sphere. But now things are changing a lot. I don't think— I think even out of my department, I don't think I'm the youngest at the moment. I think there's like people who are younger than me teaching and it's great. Because that's what the students need, right? They don't need someone who hasn't been active. Sure, there's a lot of experience there and there's a lot of value in classes that come from these folks, but there's also value in classes that come from the younger people who are in the field and very active, like some more active than me even, who are doing stuff, right? And it's good because then students have these many options. It's like you get to learn from the OGs and then you get to learn from the newer folks too who are taking it to a new level. So I like that a lot about Berkeley at least.

So I was actually asking about how did you actually land your agent, you know? So how— have you had it for a long time or—

Oh, my agent? Or— Yeah. As far as like my artist stuff goes, for a long time I was actually just doing my own stuff. Like it was just me and it was stressing me out a lot. I'm sure. The time where I thought like, "Okay, I should get someone to kind of help me a little bit out." And I used to do a lot of these events or I would— not do a lot of them, but I would go to a lot of these events for women in music. And at one of these particular events, I met my current assistant or agent Liz. And she was— she's no longer, but she was a business student, music business student at NYU. And she was really great. And we kind of just met at this one event because we both went there. We didn't know anybody, so we ended up chatting. But I found out that she was helping a couple of her friends at the time who are now also artists and touring actively. She was still a student at the time and I think I had just graduated or something. But she was saying, "Hey, why don't we maybe touch base a little bit? If you ever need help with anything, let me know." And yeah, so we've been working together for about a year or so at this point, but she helps me a lot with admin stuff. Thanks, Liz! Putting things together. And I think it's important— maybe this also goes back to what Yumiko said just now about having a team, right? But at the moment, it was just— previously it was just me. Now at the moment, it's me and Liz, and sometimes I have another friend also helping me with social media stuff, so it's 3 of us. But maybe down the road, if things get bigger, I might need a bigger team. And then eventually it'll get to the stage where instead of me touring on other people's teams, I'm also doing the same thing with me, but it's with with my own team. So maybe that also goes a little bit back to just being able to make connections with people and ask for help when you need to and don't like die under the weight of everything that's crumbling when you have to manage so many things at once.

So yeah. Yeah, totally. Asking for help is certainly a very necessary skill in our field. Yeah. I wanted to circle back to songwriting. Sure. Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process? What is it like for you starting a new song?

Yeah, totally. As far as songwriting goes, and this is something interesting that I was actually just talking to one of my other colleagues about, but a lot of people who do electronic music, they often think of themselves as producers mainly, which I do as well, but for me it's very much a merger of writer and producer. So I'm so glad that you mentioned songwriting, Eric. It's a big part of the process for me, and I think really there's nothing— if a production sounds good but it has a bad writing style or bad song, it's totally destroyed from the get-go. So for me, the process for writing often is centered around a concept, and I like to think about not so much very— sometimes it is very specific, but sometimes it's also broad. So it could be the— an example, what's a recent example? So it could be something like the idea of being defeated, right? Maybe you've tried to do something and you failed, or it could also be you've had a conversation with someone and they keep trying to shoot you down. There's a lot of ways that you can experience defeat. And I then try to create some kind of song that's related to the emotions associated with that. So not so much the actual topic itself, but a lot of the time the emotions. And the reason I bring up "Defeated" is because that's actually the name of my next song that's coming up. So that's a little bit of my process for that. I created the song based on this idea of you've tried your best at doing something, but you keep on falling flat on your face. And in this particular context, it was through the eyes of looking at a relationship, but it doesn't have to be. It could be even dealing with your daily life, right? You try to do something, you keep failing. You try to practice something on your instrument or whatever, you keep failing. Just keep getting defeated. So I like thinking of that a lot. And related to that, and this goes back to the process itself, I do a lot of these things called word pools, where it's like, I'll think of the word defeat, right? And then what's related to that? Defeat, battle is related to that. Maybe the concept of getting hurt is related to that. Like if you fall down, you get hurt, you're defeated, right? So I do a lot of these word pools. And that ends up helping me with my lyrics in the songwriting. So I'll kind of like bring them back in and have them tie back into the theme of the song. But yeah, it always starts with the theme, it kind of goes out a little bit more general, and then it comes back and is more specific. Yes.

Yeah, so I do something similar myself sometimes when I'm composing. So once you have your word pool or your, um, your associated emotions How do you start with the musical ideas? Do you improvise on a piano or sing or what?

Yeah, I'll be honest, um, most of the time if I am doing like a very song-based type of idea, it's always like piano and vocals. That's it. So that's where, that's where really a lot of the, the training has helped in. And because now I can just, you know, walk over to my, my keyboard and be just like, those are the chords, that's the, that's the song. Um, versus if I didn't have that, I'd probably be like struggling a little bit more, poking around in my software. But yeah, pretty much it always is just piano and lyrics, or piano and melody. I sing on top of it. And I'm honestly not a good singer, but I've trained myself to sing in an acceptable way. That's what I try to say.

I mean, you sound great on everything I've heard.

That's very nice, thank you. But yeah, sometimes I'll play stuff and I'll experiment with it. I'll sing it with my own voice and it's like, "Okay, that sounds a little odd." but if it sounds good, then I probably know that I'm on to something. Just because I feel like, again, going back to the songwriting process, if it doesn't feel like a compelling idea on the piano, I feel like it probably won't be a compelling idea even if I produced it out. And that's for me. I know some people will manage to take a very mediocre song and polish the hell out of it and it'll turn out great. But at least for me, coming from the place of, again, the more compositional side, if I have I know that I'm gonna have confidence in the production too.

So. Yeah, that makes sense. I wanna ask you, how do you balance that? Like, you know, playing on an acoustic instrument and then when it comes to the electronic production, there's so much work, right? And finding your sounds, samples, mixing. Sometimes I have trouble integrating those two worlds, which seems so very, like one is kind of like organic from nature. It feels like playing acoustic instruments. And then when you get into your DAW, you're kind of locked into a lot of little boxes, right? And loops. How do you manage that balance?

Yeah, absolutely. To be honest, Eric, I sometimes still struggle with it too. It's so hard. And mainly it's because, I don't know, I feel like for me, and maybe y'all might feel the same way too, but when I think about some of these acoustic sounds, like thinking back to like the flute, for example, or even the piano, like a really nice, you know, Steinway, nothing beats like a really nice Steinway, right? Something about the sound of the instrument is so powerful, and that's why sometimes I end up recording these things, just recording them instead of programming things in. But yeah, that's a challenge that I always have. Sometimes my solution in a weird sort of way is to run in the total opposite direction. So if it starts off with a piano type of sound, I'll purposely choose a really obscure kind of, I don't know, synth pad or something, synth key sound that sounds very different to put me into a totally different frame of mind. And it's a little bit of forcibly removing me from the piano sound a little. Sometimes I'll inevitably end up returning to it, for example, if I do record the sound, like I mentioned. But sometimes when I'm just trying to get something into my DAW, I'll purposely pick something that isn't acoustic and see where that takes me. But otherwise, yeah, it's always a struggle. And in terms of the loop situation which you mentioned, I get so stuck in that too. So sometimes what I found myself doing is, for a lot of the production stuff, especially if it tends to be a song that I've written out the chorus for and then I want to produce after that, I'll work on say 4 bars, but then I'll set myself a timer. Again, going back to the phone as the best tool you could ever have, I'll use my phone and set set myself a timer of like 10 minutes or something, and it's like, "Doltric has got 10 minutes to figure out how to put this into a 3-minute arrangement," and then I'm just like, "Go!" And I'll do all of that. So I kind of force myself to do a little bit of structuring, and it's tough. It always is, I think. But it's one part maybe about the production process that I still love very much because it's tough and because it challenges me. I think probably the day where I've failed and I have nothing else left to do in the world of electronic music production is when I feel like I can't do anything exciting or I don't feel challenged to do something. So I kind of like that a little bit. A little bit masochistic, I guess, but I don't know.

I love it. It is a challenge and you've given us so many wonderful solutions. You know, there's that whole theme of limitations inspiring creativity, right? Yeah. Right, that's our biggest trick we've got in the bag.

Can I jump in just a little bit? Sure, go ahead. Yeah. So you are now a sound engineer, you know, sound designer, not only a composer and musician. That's just beyond my understanding. I mean, it's awesome. I've encountered so many different artists living in New York City, obviously, and then I met this lighting artist and that was just— that blew my mind. It's like the concept, new concept of, you know, art. And then that's exactly what you're doing. So were you interested in, like, because I'm a classical musician, we talk about harmonies, we talk about tone color, right? Then, um, but you know, let's say we turn the clock backwards and go back to where Beethoven was, right? And probably at the time he was somewhat close to, you know, maybe sound engineer. You know, he was experimenting with the sound because the biggest sound in his time would be what, a big, big old ship, right? Or I don't know, I— or cannonball, cannon, you know, the, the big sound. And that— I know he was deaf toward the end, but maybe that's some kind of a— as a young Beethoven, he was inspiring, and how can I have this big sound in orchestra, right? So he was doing his sound engineer. So were you, as a growing up, were you interested in sound? I mean, you know, I didn't think of that concept until— Yeah, totally.

I mean, growing up, Yukimi, in terms of like sounds, um, I don't think I was necessarily interested in like, oh, that sounds like it's not a piano, what is it? Like, I wasn't really that focused yet when I was growing up. But absolutely, I did think a lot about like, how do we use existing sounds to paint pictures? And I think that's one of like the biggest takeaways that I had from like maybe my study of like programmatic music, like back when I was a— oh my god, so many years ago now, over a decade ago. But yeah, even just going back to— since you were talking about Beethoven, like this just came to mind too, but the idea of, you know, painting pictures even through a limited number of colors. Like, I think a lot about the Pastoral Symphony and stuff like that, and it's like, how is he creating that kind of atmosphere? Like, what instrumentation is he using to do that? And I feel like it's kind of the same thing, like, much like you would have, say, in that context, the woodwinds representing a bird, maybe an electronic that's not necessarily woodwinds, but maybe you've got some kind of synthesizer sound that's very high up in the frequencies that's doing a lot of, like, you know, bird stuff. And if it's, you know, a drone thing for a pastoral kind of like, you know, very idyllic sort of atmosphere, then maybe it's not, you know, a low kind of held out note on whatever instrument, like cello or something, but maybe it's like an actual drone where you play a note on your instrument and it's just held out for a super long time. So I think a lot about— I think about a lot of orchestration like that too when I'm doing production stuff.

This concludes part 1 of our interview with Claire Marie Lim. Tune in next time to find out how Claire learned music production, hear about her career as an activist, and more.