- How do I distinguish minimalism from drone?
- By pulse and pattern. Minimalism has a fixed tempo and audible cells, and its change comes from those cells slipping and accumulating. Drone has neither pulse nor cell, only a sustained tone, with all its change taking place inside the timbre. One is displacement within repetition, the other is breathing within stillness.
- And minimalism versus ambient?
- Foreground against background. Minimalism asks to be heard — the figures are distinct, the attacks are clear, and you can count along. Ambient asks to be ignorable, with blurred layers and no defined attack points. Both repeat, but minimalism is awake and ambient is dissolved.
- How do I get phasing out of a generator?
- Describe the mechanism rather than the label: "two identical figures playing at a very slightly different rate, drifting apart and gradually realigning," or "a five-beat figure over a four-beat accompaniment, accents recycling every twenty beats." Prompting only for minimal and repetitive tends to return a tidy arpeggio loop, which is exactly the process feel that is missing.
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