creative process

Caconym

It’s been a tradition for Song-A-Day participants to hold some sort of get-together wrap party. In recent years, this became a virtual event because more and more participants weren’t in the San Francisco / Oakland area. Typically, this happens a week or two into March, but this year it was held earlier today. On the one hand, it’s nice to talk to everyone while things are still kind of fresh, but at the same time, … Continue reading

509

I’m really torn about what to say about this one. It’s difficult to discuss the writing process for it without getting into what I was writing about. And what I was writing about might change how people feel about the song, despite the fact that the song definitely went way beyond what I had originally planned for it. I guess I can say this much: this started off as a response song to a track … Continue reading

The Wire Heart

An area of sound that I’ve been really enjoying for several years now are “broken” things. Normally, I do this with distortion or granular synthesis, or sometimes by adding randomness to some element of a sound. A few years ago, I bought an expansion pack called “Beautifully Broken” and many of those sounds capture exactly the character I’m talking about, even if I haven’t used the patches in many tracks that have gone beyond the … Continue reading

Pigeonhole

Ok, here we go, another song with vocals. I had been in the studio for only a short time when, for some inexplicable reason, I started singing the old “The bear went over the mountain” song from my childhood. That started morphing in my head and I fired up the text editor. I think I may have a genetic ability to rhyme couplets. It’s something for which my mother had a strong talent, and she … Continue reading