Week in Review: December 26, 2024-January 1, 2025

Image by TheoLeo from Pixabay depicting a recording studio in black and white with a microphone in the foreground and a drum set in the background.

Happy New Year! 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.


And that's a wrap! Wow, what a journey Weekly Beats 2024 turned out to be. It was hard to believe that this was actually the final week. I ended with another wacky, sample-based, dance-style track in an odd time signature. I am happy I discovered this sound and I think I will stick with it, along with the ambient-loop style I found mid-way through the year. Weekly Beats has been a fun experiment and helped me learn a ton, but I'm looking forward to getting back to making music on a less rigid schedule in the new year.


This week's Disquiet Junto assignment was to create a sonic diary of the past year using short audio segments, so I decided to make this project about the 52 tracks I completed for Weekly Beats 2024. I dragged the final audio file for each one into a single audio track in Ableton and picked a spot about 2/3 of the way through the waveform where I normally build up to in a song. I then trimmed down the sample at that spot to fit within the Ableton grid at whatever default spacing it gave me. That happened to give each track a little less than two seconds for this recording. It is interesting to hear all of the songs pass by so quickly, because it really felt like a slog at times to get through all 52 weeks. This was a nice opportunity to reflect on the project overall and to make something that can represent it in a shortened format.

 

John Wright

John Wright is an independent music artist. A rock drummer and electronic music producer, his solo project is inspired by the driving beats of Detroit-area dance music clubs with organic textures honoring his rock band roots.

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