Each week, I have been summarizing my adventures in making music. This post will catch you up on the past three weeks! 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.
Week 40: I kept my streak going of working in non-standard time signatures, this week working in 9/4. I am not as excited about this one as I am with my tracks from the few weeks prior, but I am glad I tried. Having to come up with beats and melodies outside of the normal 4/4 context has been a good challenge that has helped me learn.
I also listened to Jason Timothy's Ableton & Music Habits Podcast this week and one thing he said stuck with me - that every track can benefit from more texture. He suggested taking ambient noise or a field recording and adding effects then placing it low in the mix. So, one of the pads on this track is a field recording of rain sounds with a filter and a resonator on it. The tip about adding texture also inspired me to go back to a technique that I have used before where I create a drum rack with glitchy percussive elements and arrange them randomly in a loop. Adding these extra layers of texture made me much happier with the track as I was wrapping it up.
Week 41: Well, I sat down to bounce this song and upload it, and Ableton decided to do a full plug-in scan including some that I was using. I'm glad I gave myself a small window of time so I could still get this uploaded in time!
This song is in 13. I count it as two measures of 4 followed by one in 5. I started another track in 4/4, but I wasn’t inspired to finish it. I am really liking working in non-standard time signatures. I can see myself taking a track like this further if I were able to spend more time with it.
I started out in Ableton Note, which only lets you have a metronome running in 4/4. So I had to create a beat to keep time to and then adjust the length of each scene to be 13 steps.
Week 42: This track started out in Ableton Note with a Drum Kit I loaded with a handful of different vocal samples in the same key that I found on Splice. Then I created a Drum Kit with actual drum sounds that I already had in my library. I decided to use two different sets of kicks and snares with two kicks and two snares in two different patterns. I like the feel of the beat when I do that because it creates a sound more like a real drummer who plays each hit in a pattern at a different volume.