Posts
creative accountability, no fi
Monday, July 4, 2022
Here is no-fi-2022-07-04-2338.mp3:
I heard a song at Target and pulled out my phone to start up Bandlab's keyboard to identify some of the notes. I caught F-sharp, A-flat and some other notes from the chord progression and planned to try them out later. I didn't feel like taking the time to identify the scale and all of its notes by name (it's bluesy), but I used what I knew to noodle out some chords on Bitwig's Rhodes, and eventually ended up with the following:
To get there, I tracked the chords first, sequenced/tracked the drums, then tracked the melody (improvised a handful of times and used the best takes). The tracking is very loose, but I'm attached to the idea of avoiding quantizing everything (blame J Dilla) until I've improved my fundamental keyboard and drum pad abilities. I panned some of the drum sounds, ran the whole drum machine through a compressor for more punch, and mixed all the tracks into a reverb FX track.
After all this, the track still felt sparse. (I think that sparseness ultimately boils down to amateur musicality—seventh chords would sound fuller and more expressive than triads, for example.) I've been hearing a lot of textural components in songs that I like—samples or stabs or brief, shallow-sounding synth noises—and so I felt inspired to emulate that kind of approach to bolster the mix. After browsing through Bitwig's various FX presets and finding nothing appropriate (but many cool sounds for a different kind of track), I eventually settled on designing a bass noise in Polysynth. This was a really satisfying exercise—I liked the gravity it added, and I got to use Bitwig's automation feature to slowly raise the volume on the Polysynth's mixer track and bring it in relatively late into this short composition.
creative accountability, big polysynth
Sunday, July 3, 2022
Here is big-polysynth-2022-07-03-2308.mp3:
The main point of this exercise was to independently configure Bitwig's Polysynth after watching a tutorial video and reading some advice about how to beef up the sound on a synthesizer. I liked the results and hope to use this synth configuration in a more sophisticated composition.
While I'd count this as a sound design victory, not much went into the musicality—the synth drives a bland chord progression (only fifths). The chords I sequenced were little more than a means of testing the synth sound, but I did end up adding more. I sequenced some drums from an 808 kit and toyed with an arpeggiated melody.
creative accountability, organic house
Friday, July 1, 2022
Honestly, I don't remember much about making organic-house-2022-07-01-2232.mp3, seeing as I'm catching up on a backlog and writing this post weeks after actually working on it.
From the title though, I know that I was taking inspiration from the "organic house" genre, which I—as an old—would describe as calmer progressive house. (The "downtempo house" of my era was more lounge-y, less progressive-y.)
Anyway, one of the things I appreciate in organic house is a wider range of percussion, and that was at the core of this creative exercise.
creative accountability, lna
Sunday, June 26, 2022
Here is lna-06-26-2022.mp3:
I added a Rhodes-based instrument and noodled together some nice-sounding chords. I went back later and identified the key signature and chord progression; it's in the A-minor scale and is a i-VI-iv-v progression.
The chord progression reminded me of the song "Empty Streets" by Late Night Alumni, which was a staple on my college radio show in 2005.