composition

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

D-13

With yesterday’s production requiring a bit more time in the morning for finalizing, I didn’t get started on today’s track in earnest until the early evening. There were a couple of false starts, mostly because the lyrics were awful, and then I decided to go ahead and use the song prompt provided by a friend after hearing day 1: “I would like to hear how you destoy the enemy.” Initially, the lyrics you hear were only going to be an introduction or chorus, and I’d planned on some kind of sarcastic take on Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and other … Continue reading

Destroy the Enemy

Well, so much for the plan. While I hadn’t really imposed any constraints for myself in the lead up to this year’s Song-A-Day, I sort of had a loose plan that I’d be cutting back a bit on production work and doing simple arrangements. My hope was that by stripping things back, I’d work more on writing actual songs. This track originated in a quick drum and bass sketch I came up with a couple of days ago while exploring the amazingly awesome Superior Drummer 3 library I picked up over the holidays. While I love Stylus RMX, I kept … Continue reading