Each week, I have been summarizing my adventures in making music. Lately, I have been composing tracks for the Disquiet Junto, the Naviar Records Haiku Music Challenge and, this year for the first time, Weekly Beats. I also have other projects and collaborations I have shared occasionally. This blog primarily contains slightly annotated posts originally found on Mastodon.
My Music
I owe myself this catch up post, my last one being about 7 weeks ago. Creating a blog post about what I accomplished with music over the course of the week was a helpful form of reflection that I have been missing. I believe what caused me to go off track was my schedule. I told myself I would publish posts on Sundays and allowed myself until Monday night if I missed my self-imposed deadline. With the Weekly Beats deadline being Sunday night and that for the Disquiet Junto on Monday, and taking into account all of the things I have to do in my personal life to get ready on Sundays for the week ahead, it was just not feasible to format and publish a blog post, even if I was just cross-posting from other websites. If I take into account the Naviar Haiku deadline of Wednesday, it seems like a day of the week that makes sense is Friday. So, from now on I am going to plan on starting to compose posts on Thursdays and scheduling them for publication on Fridays. I realize not many people read this blog, but I still find that setting my intentions publicly helps me achieve my goals.
I am also going to formally eliminate the Music + Tech + Law section. It was a nice idea, but I found that I spent all of the “Tech + Law” portion of my energy at my day job and when it came to the spare hours (or just minutes) I could dedicate to something else, “Music” always won out.
So here are those songs that won out over the last several weeks. Talk to you next Friday!
Short and sweet, this track is a quick hitter coming in at only 1.5 minutes. I scrapped the idea I had been working on most of the week and threw some samples from Splice into Ableton Simpler devices and chopped them up quickly. I kept the structure of my song short so that I would have time to do at least some mixing.
The most recent assignment for the Disquiet Junto was to make music for babies. I created a 30-second loop that repeats over the course of 5 minutes consisting of a breathy “shush” sound, synthesized rain sounds, a heartbeat kick and lullaby melody using an electric keyboard preset. The shushing sound is patterned after a device I used with my daughter called the “Baby Shusher,” an amazing machine that I would have never known existed before I became a dad.
This particular week got away from me and I found myself with just an idea on Friday and had to force myself to turn it into a rough arrangement the next day on Saturday. I also returned to a more upbeat style as opposed to more ambient tracks I submitted recently. I can see myself continuing to flip back and forth between those two styles.
This submission for the Disquiet Junto involved interpretation of a graphic score that made me think of Ableton’s session view, with each element of notation being an individual clip. I composed clips in a grid by using a pad-based keyboard to find the shape of the melody within each element. I set a follow action of “any” on each clip and the extra scenes on each track are blank, so the combination of tracks playing at any one time is random.
Another ambient track that was also started on Friday and uploaded Sunday morning. This time I was able to use a field recording I created myself. I was on a trip and stayed at a place on Lake Huron. I was able to capture the sound of the waves on a particularly windy day with my new handheld recorder.
Another ambient track with no percussion. I have enjoyed making more of these this year. I actually started on a more upbeat, funky track, but I could not get into it even after forcing myself to work on it a couple of times. I pivoted to this track on Friday and uploaded it on Sunday morning, so it came together quickly.
I started this track in Ableton Note and combined the tuned percussion sounds with soft pads. I actually started a separate project during the week with the intent to choose one or the other. This is the project that won out, but I ended up using some of the sounds from the other project because I liked them so much.
Another ambient track. I loaded all of the soft pad presets I could find in Ableton Note and started creating layers, but had to move into my DAW to see the parts in a linear layout to make sense of them. The song features a recording of rain I took on my phone. I have used this kind of sound before, but never one of my own recordings.
My first late upload this year! I was ready to submit this track before the deadline and left myself time to do so, but I couldn't help myself and started adjusting the mix instead. I got lost in making music and found myself trying to bounce it as the deadline expired. I guess that just means I really like the track!
