Song-A-Day 2023

Dead Man Running

After a slightly inebriated evening with the neighbors, I wandered home to start today’s track. I’m not sure if I had a specific approach in mind from the start, but I quickly decided to try and adhere to what I (now amusingly) had planned to do this entire month: keep it simple. I had initially loaded up the synth sound that opens things up and created the riff that runs throughout the song. It’s strange to think that, more or less, the meat of the song was written in about 20 seconds. I doubled the synth bass with a full … Continue reading

I Can See What’s Coming

Almost immediately after posting Laika, I started a new project and got to work. My intent was to try an instrument or plugin that I hadn’t used yet. After scanning through the options, I decided that it sounded fun to do a chiptune track, and fired up Plogue Chipsounds. This plug models a bunch of sound chips from older computers and video games systems like the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and Nintendo Entertainment System. After playing around with sounds for 15 minutes or so, I found some fun, crunchy 8-bit drums. I set a tempo, hit record, and jammed for … Continue reading

Laika

It’s easy for Song-A-Day to become an all-consuming thing for me, especially now that I don’t have a normal work-week gig. Working a day ahead has definitely paid off in terms of stress, but now that I’m accustomed to the schedule, I find that I’m leaving things to “finalize” the next morning, but actually end up doing a lot more than intended. With this piece, I was determined to break that cycle so that I could spend a decent amount of time writing the next track. And when I went to bed, I actually thought I had succeeded. It’s about … Continue reading

Across the Plains

We arrive at the month’s first dodged bullet. My time management over the weekend, complicated by impromptu hang outs with our neighbors in the evenings, led to me getting a late start. It’s hard to go to bed at a decent hour when you don’t go into the studio before midnight, but I was generally happy with both Continental Transit and Mare Vaporum, so I had no reason to think this one would be any different. How wrong I was. There are now three project files on my computer dated 20230206, and that doesn’t reflect the multiple times I’d do … Continue reading

Mare Vaporum

Once again, going into the studio having already decided to do something instrumental took some of the pressure off. I loaded up a piano and a pad sound and started playing to figure out where I wanted to go. And then, I immediately went there. The piano part you hear is pretty much the first thing I played. Except that I wasn’t recording. Luckily, my recording software added a feature a version or two ago that’s always listening to what I play. With a quick menu command, the entire five minutes of improvisational noodling was safely in a new track. … Continue reading