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.
Last week’s track for Weekly Beats is another upbeat song featuring chopped samples, but the BPM comes down considerably this week to 105. I recall setting up the project in the 140s, bringing it down into the 130s as I started working on it, then eventually finding a groove I liked when I brought the metronome way down to 105. When I go back and listen to tracks I created in years past, I notice that I used to work in tempos hovering around 100 quite often. I am not sure what to make of that and what it means for what type of musician I am, but either way, I am happy to keep flipping back and forth between faster and slower tempos while I figure it out.
The song follows an A-B-A-B pattern created after all the parts were initially put together in Ableton’s Session View. Part A’s bassline and the vocal samples are what I like the most when I was at that stage of composing. I like where Part B ended up and I find it intriguing, but it is one of those parts that I wish I had more time to explore.
In other fun music news, I traded in some old gear for a bass guitar (partially shown in the feature image of this post). I have always wanted to learn the bass and I realize with my band, Coral Ghost, there might be some utility to having a bass on hand during our practices and maybe even an opportunity for me to record some simple parts. I’m currently researching the best way for me to learn in small increments over time and I'm starting with StudyBass.
It was my birthday yesterday and my wife got me a new cajon! I used to have one, but I lost it in a massive basement flood in 2021, so I am delighted to have one again. She also took me to see the ongoing J Dilla exhibit at Wayne State University. We walked through a gallery featuring a modest collection of pieces in various media illustrating different parts of his career and legacy. I read the book Dilla Time recently and was really touched by J Dilla’s story, so it was interesting to see visual representations of some of the topics from the book.
My wife also took me to People’s Records, a store I have never been to, and let me browse - which was very gracious of her because they have a lot of records! I did not realize it is a store that almost exclusively sells only used records. As I flipped through the crates, I felt overwhelmed with the amount of artists I had never heard of. I ended up going home with a J Dilla record, Ruff Draft, not because I had been looking for it but because it felt right after our visit to the exhibit about him. And also Strings of Life by Derrick May as Rhythim is Rhythim. I have been researching the history of techno and this is one of the tracks that stands out to me.