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 longer posts similar to those I first share on Mastodon.
My plan to start posting on Fridays did not work out. That is just a bad day to try to fit in time to craft a blog post. I am not certain what the better option is, but I am thinking I will try Wednesdays now.
I posted this track a couple of weeks ago. I had all of these samples I found on BandLab Sounds, but when I went to work with them I just couldn't make anything happen. So, I started searching in my Ableton browser for samples in the same key and found many more that I liked. The song ended up going in a much different direction than it started. It is a typical quick arrangement for me building up with two drops.
The following week was my second late upload of the year! I have had ups and downs over the past nine months, but even during weeks where I experienced serious health issues, procedures and even a surgery, I was still able to get a song uploaded. So what pushed me to the brink after all of that? My daughter's birthday party. Man, I knew it was coming, but I still underestimated the time and energy it would take up. Not just on the day of the party, but leading up to it during the week. And I was just helping my wife who did most of the planning! (Yeah, she would probably tell you I didn't help that much.) Anyway, now that I have been through it, I don't think I can do Weekly Beats again as long as my daughter is of the age where she has birthday parties, because I will always have this one week where I have too much going on!
It sure didn't help that I procrastinated and failed to start the track until later in the week. And it was also a very poor choice on my part to work in an odd time signature for the first time this year. That was dumb. But it is a cool beat! It builds up in a 7/4 pattern, then there is a breakdown in 5/4 and it comes back into 7/4 until the end. Last week's track was called "Next Step" because I stumbled upon a podcast from a couple of years ago that analyzed the album In Rainbows by Radiohead. I was reminded about how much I loved the song "15 Step" and I wanted to work in an odd time signature because of it. I couldn't work up the energy to do it last week and that submission is in 4/4. So, I stupidly started down the odd time path this week. For some reason I thought I could write parts in 7/4 and 5/4 and come up with parts with 12 beats and divide them by three to create parts of four... what was I thinking? That was way too much to take on in one week and I overdid it. But in the few moments I spent on this track it was fun and I liked it.