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.
After a late upload last week, I am back on track and getting this one up early on Sunday. I had fun working in 7/4 and 5/4 last week, so I started this track in 5/4 and stuck with it. I gathered most of the samples from BandLab Sounds and imported them into Ableton Note on my phone. I did a little sample manipulation on my iPad, but if I am going to chop up a sample, I would much rather do it using a Simpler in the full Ableton DAW and playing the slices on a MIDI controller. In this case, I waited to chop up the vocals until I was in front of my Push 2. Normally, I only use vocal samples to create nonsense, one-syllable percussive elements. I cannot recall the last time I left vocals in that sound like actual words and phrases. It is still nonsense to me. I cannot imagine the context in which someone would say both, "take me down to the ground" and "never hold me back." But it sounds cool.