cinematic

Convocation

Rather than immediately jump into writing today’s track after finishing yesterday’s, I decided to take the night off and hang out with the neighbors, go to bed early, and get some more sleep. While Mary’s gone, I’ve been trending more and more toward doing the bulk of the work on the day it gets posted instead of doing most of it the day before with only a quick polish in the morning. Part of my reason for working ahead is that it takes some of the pressure off – I always have a little slop time at the end if … Continue reading

The Gathering

Wow. Full disclosure – I’m writing this entry on February 15 (and will be doing so for the next few). Mary was on business travel for a full seven days, so I’ve been taking care of our new puppy, Olive. She’s currently nine months old, and I’ll be writing about her more extensively in a later post, so just suffice to say that I’m behind on the blog. I’ve also given up on trying to also write entries for 2024… that will have to wait for March. I really enjoyed writing Lights in the Mist and, after posting it, the … Continue reading

Apert

Note: This post was written in 2025 and backdated to appear on the day I wrote and published the track. The only concrete thing I remember about this track is that I wrote the entire piano part first and in one take. I’d been noodling for a bit with the lovely Piano in Blue sample library and had come up with the general pattern you hear. While it was still fresh and enjoyable, I improvised the entire track, not really paying attention to bar numbers, but with the metronome going and an occasional glance at the elapsed time. As with … 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

Quixotic Intent

Another day where participating in this challenge forces me past that inner slacker who convinces me to give up when I have no inspiration or, worse, my initial experiments just aren’t working. I was already in hardcore procrastination mode, finding all sorts of stupid things to do to avoid opening up that blank page. Like what you ask? Like going back and transcribing lyrics to my older Song-A-Day tracks. Not all of them, obviously, but several. There was some thing in the back of my brain that I was trying to find, and I started poking through these older tracks, … Continue reading