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. (But not this post!)
I admit it. I did not think ahead when I wrote my last post (promising a post today) because I did not plan on uploading any new songs before today! So instead of new music, this entry will give a little update on my life in music and other creative endeavors.
The good news is that I am on track to complete my Weekly Beats submission by Sunday. Friday is usually the day that I convert whatever project I have been working on in Ableton’s session view over to arrangement view so I can start giving the song some structure. I did exactly that earlier today and I am very happy with the track so far.
In some significant, personal music-making news, I am going to move my home studio into a new rental space going forward. My wife and I agreed that it makes the most sense for our family for me to have a separate space to go to. I have been making it work as a bedroom producer, but I would really like to play my drums more and mix my songs on my monitors more often. I also continue to work with Coral Ghost and having a place to track drums and rehearse live could be very cool for that project and hopefully others like it in the future.
I also got a new music toy that I am really excited about. It is the Polyend Tracker Mini. I have enjoyed using my iPad to make music, but I have been looking for a way to compose music without having to look at a computer screen. That is what made me buy a Push 2 in the first place, and to a certain extent using that device has been a success when it comes to reducing time in front of a glowing screen. But what attracted me to the Tracker Mini is that it is handheld like a small iPad, but also completely standalone. Once I get the hang of it, I can hypothetically create a finished track without ever opening my laptop. Sure, I can do that on an iPad, but there is something to be said about using a device that cannot connect to the internet!
Working with the Tracker Mini so far has overall been positive. I will say the learning curve is high, but I have come to accept that I need to treat learning it like learning any other musical instrument. When I first started working with it, I would say I spent 80% of my time being frustrated, but the other 20% of the time my mind was blown by the possibilities I saw. I am closer to 50-50 now and an upward trend as far as learning how to use it.
As far as music and other media consumption goes, I finished an excellent audiobook by Questlove called Creative Quest. I often say Questlove is my favorite drummer, but he is really just one of my favorite people in many different respects. I learn so much from him when it comes to music production, performance and history. He touches on so many of the areas that interest me in his various publications. One of those suggestions from this particular book was to explore avenues of creativity other than the primary one a person currently pursues.
My primary creative activity is making music, but there are others that I recently put on hold in favor of making music. I did not like stifling those other areas of my creativity and I ultimately I don’t think the pause helped in any way. I feel like each practice compliments the other right now. The other areas that I’m exploring our poetry and photography. I have a profile on Medium that I restarted with Haiku poetry after other attempts on Wordpress and Mastodon. I’m going to try and write one every day based on a random stock photograph from Unsplash. I also converted my black-and-white photography portfolio from Pixelfed over to Unsplash so I can contribute to that community as well.
Speaking of communities I also posted a couple of my very first field recordings on freesound.org. I’m looking forward to contributing more there because I have used sounds from freesound.org in some of my music and I think that it is a very interesting forum and place to go for sounds.
Well, I wasn't sure what I was going to write about with no new music since my last post, but it turns out I had many updates to share!
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