In the line of preternaturally talented producers to emerge from the UK in the last decade, Sam Shepherd is the preeminent renaissance man. You almost can't read an article about his work as Floating Points without feeling humbled by his many strengths. Much-loved DJ and crate-excavating record collector? Check. Neuroscience PhD? Check. Back catalogue of inescapable club tracks? Check. 16-piece band leader? Check. Command of jazz, Baroque and French impressionist harmony? Check. Well-drilled choir boy? Check. We'll spare you the full list.With credentials like these, quality music feels inevitable. But Shepherd has the nous to stop his output from becoming a staid procession of perfection. Perhaps even more so than 2015's Elaenia , his new album,, will catch Flo-Po sceptics off guard, trading the former's ECM-school tapestries for dextrous, dry-as-a-bone rhythms and an off-the-cuff immediacy that's charmingly scrappy by Shepherd's standards (disclaimer: by almost anyone else's, it's impeccably executed). While his harmonic sensibility and velveteen textures remain intact, many of's best moments are coarse, off-kilter and aggressive.Recorded in a short period of time,is an outgrowth of Shepherd's solo live sets, which are centred around a Buchla system that he's designed into a massively over-spec'd drum machine. When we visited his studio back in August, he took us through the particulars of that system and explained how it fed into the creation ofalong with other crucial components feeding into the record, such as the magisterial Yamaha CS70. But hopefully the interview speaks largely to the impact his polyglot musical education has had on his output. It should also offer approaches for the music theory agnostic to harness some of that under-the-hood understanding for themselves. As Shepherd himself is careful to point out, many of his favourite musicians have none of the skills with which he is indelibly branded. There is, in fact, hope for the rest of us.A lot of what I do is quite pianistic in that I'm initially generating ideas at the piano or some sort of keyboard instrument, then I'll write the score out for an ensemble. Often my friends are kicking about to record the parts. Most of the time you write some music and you add strings to it almost by default. That's great and I'm well into that, I've done it a lot on this album. But oboe, clarinet, bassoon, that kind of world gets a bit under-utilised. "Falaise," the opening track on, is two violins, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet and French horn. The idea for that tune was to treat acoustic instruments like oscillators from a synth.I'm not sure how I feel about that bit now. I recorded it and thought, "Yeah, cool, it's done." Then I listened back to it and wished I'd written it slightly differently. Thing is, you have to draw a line somewhere when you're writing. I like the old idea that albums are a snapshot of where you are in time but that also means I'm already kind of over it. That bit you mention, now I think, "Whoa, damn, I'm not going to do that again. I'll do it different next time." That realisation was fairly rapid after recording it.I wanted to start with something that was very organic but then quite quickly destroy it by processing it.It's the most basic Buchla patch. There's an envelope generator opening and closing lowpass gates. Changing the attack time of the envelope makes it feel like sounds are happening backwards. I did a pass changing the envelope shapes in real-time while the musicians were playing.Yep. Usually I'd have eight oscillators going into those lowpass gates. So instead of using boring oscillators I thought, "Let's use a clarinet." But to properly answer your first question, I'll start playing on the piano to develop an idea but then generally I'll sit down and write the score on paper. I usually write to paper because it's faster to get ideas down quickly. Then at some point I'll transfer it over to Sibelius.Don't worry, I dislike it greatly, too. Having said that, I want to go back to Sibelius version one.I wonder if there's a way to do it without having to download Mac OS 8 or something. Version one was all I needed because I don't use the playback function. I assume the manufacturer Avid focuses a lot on recreating truthfully what a score will sound like in reality. But the processing power it requires would probably send my computer into nuclear meltdown. Who on earth has that much computer capacity?Sibelius is useful in that it's indicative of when you've got the right notes but don't for a second think it's going to be anything like the real-life sound of musicians. What you write on the score can be rudimentary but then you give it to your friends who play instruments and it's always better. It's the best feeling in making music I think, when you give a score to instrumentalists. You might need to make a couple of changes but generally musicians are very happy to help. They'll invariably point out things like certain double stops that aren't physically possible. The violin player always has something to say.I played the piano since I was a kid but by my friends' standards I'm pretty rubbish. I appreciate that's a little disingenuous. I'm OK, I can get by, but I would never offer my services to anyone as a pianist. I feel like I've got an understanding of harmony in an academic sense and I did a lot of that sort stuff growing up, looking at Bachand things like that, Baroque harmony. I got quite heavily into jazz and French impressionist stuff like Messiaen, the colours of French music of the early 20th century. I guess I'm still stuck with all that. I would like to take piano lessons again because I feel like I learnt so much about harmony through playing the repertoire when I was 18 or whatever. So broadly I would say it mainly comes from playing the piano. Also, listening to lots of records is really important. It's very difficult to pin it down.Bill Evans, well there's an example. There was a certain way he voiced his chords, stacking a fourth on a fourth on a fourth on a fourth then a third on top, for example, so he'd get these amazing harmonies that are open to interpretation, or "rootless" as you say. That's " So What " basically. When I was younger, I thought that was such a beautiful way of representing any kind of harmony. You can change the bass note and move things around slightly to create all sorts of things. I always found that to be a very open sound. I thought, "OK, I'm taking that," so it's in my library of chords. There are other pianists I took from of course, a lot of the late John Taylor, my piano teacher Les Chisel. Kenny Wheeler. I love these flat five chords that are super juicy. Jazz harmony in general really.You absolutely don't need to be able to play an instrument to explore this world. I think maybe as a kid I thought it was essential. Some of the best musicians I've met can't play an instrument. Many of my favourite musicians wouldn't consider themselves to be technically sound. But those same people can have an incredible sense of harmony.Even though I do have that technical grounding, there's a process I use that'd perhaps be useful for people who think they struggle with chords but still want to come up with something that interests them. Basically I record lots and lots of chords completely independently of each other. The overall key doesn't matter, they can have no relation to each other whatsoever. Then you sample these chords, lay each one out on a key of a keyboard and experiment with playing them back in a different order to see if a certain combination sounds nice to you.That's just one way of exploring new progressions that you otherwise might not have come across. For me, as someone who can get around a keyboard, I still might not come up with any of those combinations naturally. I've got those go-to voicings as you say. I end up slipping into certain progressions. But this technique can get you exploring harmonic progressions that you wouldn't have thought up, whether you know about the theory behind harmony or not.I've done it on the new record actually. At the end of one of the recording sessions with the winds and strings I had them play loads and loads of chords. It was punishing. They were in the studio laying down hundreds of random chords. Different keys, all sorts of stuff. Then I lay them out as samples on the keyboard and hit them in a random order and end up with something pretty cool. For me personally, sometimes I reverse engineer it and rewrite it as a score and maybe use it for something else. Of course you can also use this technique and keep things really simple. Just choose two of the chords and stick a beat under it.So there's nothing to stop anyone from exploring harmony if they can't achieve it with an instrument. Even if you play something like the flute you can't make chords, right? Obviously it's a blessing having a polyphonic instrument where you can play more than one note at a time. But yeah, sample stuff, play it back and see what you like the sound of.Another factor is what music you listen to and how that shapes what you consider to be "normal," harmonically speaking. Say you're listening to Herbie Hancock all the time and you recognise that there's a certain chord or set of chords you like the sound of—your harmonic taste is mostly defined by what else you listen to. If you only listened to gamelan you'd think all my chords sound wrong.I was in a choir when I was young. We rehearsed every day. They'd play a C and say, "OK, now you start singing." So you had to think, "Well, the next note is a G below that C," and you connect the dots between each note and come to know instinctively the distances between them. It gets drilled into you.Singing is a very useful tool for anybody to get a sense of relative pitch. It's easy to take for granted when you've got it but it's massively useful. Also, I feel intuitively that everyone can sing on a basic level and build this sense up. If you can speak you can sing. It's probably the best way to develop your internal sense of melody.It's funny you pick out that moment. I really like that tune because it's so simple. You could have absolutely zero technical ability and I could teach you to play it. What makes it a bit more interesting is that the Yamaha CS70 on which it's played has these sliders that move the pitches up by fifths and octaves.Well, that's these sliders on the Yamaha. I think it's a beautiful synthesiser.