Name: Liam Shortall aka corto.alto
Nationality: British
Occupation: Composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist
Current Release: As corto.alto, Liam has just completed the remarkable 30/108 project. As part of that challenge, he finished thirty full-fledged compositions within 30 days out of a pool of 108 sketches saved on his hard drive. Check the release out on bandcamp. We'll cover that in an in-depth interview very soon.

If you enjoyed this conversation with corto.alto and would like to know more about his work and music, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, and tiktok.

For an even deeper dive, read our earlier conversation with him about the Montreux Jazz Festival, jazz, and improvisation.



One of the things I've often thought about is what's more important: The idea, or the way the idea is shaped into its definitive form. After 30/108, what are your thoughts on this?

I think ideas without execution are not very powerful. Music to me is about actually finishing things that other people can enjoy and connect to.

I wanted to make finish these 30 tracks because I knew if I didn’t, they would just gather dust on my hard drive for years, and probably never be heard, or enjoyed, or not enjoyed by anyone. I think it’s an artist’s responsibility to turn their ideas into things that can impact and make change, even if that change is making the listener feel some joy.

For 30/108, you drew from a large collection of ideas and then shaped them into tracks in a spontaneous fashion. How different was this from how you usually work?

The beginning of the process was pretty much the same as usual - start with an idea, could be rhythmic/groove-based, harmonic, melodic or even a sample.

I suppose the difference with this 30 track album is that I didn’t have any time to sit and think over any detail, which was a really nice way of forcing myself not to over analyse the music.

It felt like the whole process, from writing to recording to producing to mixing to mastering, had a constant momentum, just because in the back of my head I knew I had 30 tracks to finish in not much time at all.
 
Do you tend to record everything, does there need to be a direction of a certain quality for you to even label something as an “idea”?

I try not to judge something if it isn’t sounding good at the beginning, because I know from my previous releases that when certain parts of the track are soloed, they can often sound mega weird without their context.

So when I start something new I try to make sure I am giving the idea enough context by experimenting with things to add around the original idea - could be a synth, percussion part, sample etc.

The music for 30/108 is extremely diverse. What did these ideas consist of?

Many of the tracks from 30/108 started as groove ideas that I wrote for the drummers, and since I’m not a drummer myself I think it was interesting to write drum parts without having the knowledge of them being actually playable on a drum kit.

The way I understand it, you were selective in terms of which ideas to use for the project. What made you pick one of those 108 ideas and work with it – what would make you go: This is something I'd like to explore a little more?

To be honest I listened through the 108 ideas, and probably around 50 of them didn’t feel like they had much mileage. I narrowed them down to around 50 “workable” ones, and then shared that folder with my friends to kind of gauge which one’s they were feeling.

Also some of them were too ambitious to finish in time, considering I had 30 tracks to work on - so it was a case of just balancing the good ones with how realistic they were to finish.
 
How would you describe the way you worked on 30 Tracks in 30 days?

I think I went all in on this project, probably more than I’d ever on anything before. The process was really difficult and time-consuming, but massively rewarding artistically and creatively. It’s felt like this has helped me find my own little corner of the place where my music sits in whatever genre I’m in.

It’s helped me gain confidence in my own ability to make decisions and actually stick by them instead of doubting myself. It’s been massively rewarding and most notably, really fun.
 
For 30/108 what marked a composition as finished?

Just whenever it felt like the time I could spend on making it better wasn’t worth the effort anymore I suppose.

To me, music can always be incrementally “better”, but in the time you spend to get that extra 1 or 2%, you could spend it working on new ideas, or just enjoying something outside of music I suppose.

Basically, at a point it doesn’t become worth spending more time on for imperceivable differences.

Do pieces don't necessarily get better if you work on them for a long time?

Again, I think trusting your gut, and trying to make music that you yourself would listen to and love, if you didn’t make it, is something that has been powerful for me.

Some of my favourite music is live recordings that are mostly improvised, so I’m always keeping that in the back of my mind when finishing something. It’s easy to “ruin” something by overproducing it - whether that’s by over-tuning the instruments, or over-quantising the drums.

It’s a real fine balance, but I think I just try to trust my instinct on that.

I would imagine that AI tools could have made the process a lot faster and easier. What role does AI play in your current process – and what are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?
 
To be honest I’m pretty terrified of what will come of AI in music and art more generally. Of course, I hope there are advancements in the laborious parts of music making (editing etc.), but I’m pretty worried about AI replacing artists, or at least eating up another portion of artists’ livelihood in a world where that has already been squeezed to an insane degree.

Saying this, I like to think that humans will always crave art made by other humans. It’s only when that line becomes so blurred that it’s not easily differentiated where it gets quite scary. It’s one of them things I try not think too much about, just to keep myself sane.
 
Generally speaking, how and for what reasons has your music set-up evolved over the years and what were some of the most important pieces of gear and software for the project?

Sampling has become a massive part of my process, from writing and finding ideas, to re-sampling things I’ve recorded and using samplers in different creative ways. I’ve always loved the sounds of heavily sampled records, like any 90s Jazz Hip Hop for example (ATCQ, De La Soul, J Dilla etc.).



And I’ve really loved exploring that further in this album, I love the way using sampling as a tool combines with live instruments that are probably more standardly used on classic jazz recordings.
 
Now the music has been rolled out, how do you look back on it? Would you say your relationship with these tracks is different from the ones you produced in a more traditional way? Is there a stronger sense of wanting to change some things – or perhaps less so?

These 30 tracks definitely feel more fresh to me now than say my album “Bad With Names” did after I released that. I think because of the sheer quantity of the music, it’s easier for me to forget little surprises in the music.

Also, I didn’t have much time at all to finish this album. So a lot of it I have actually only listened to say 100 times, instead of the usual 1000-10,000 times.