creative process

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

Me and Hank

After finishing The Gathering, I was directionless. No idea what to do. Also, the week has been getting long and while the dog has been pretty well-behaved and accommodating of my musical endeavors, I’ve been getting tired early. I came up with the basic hook of the song and then decided that that was good enough. It’s time for bed. I was asleep before 11pm, which is a rarity. Even better, Olive let me sleep through the night. Olive is a Berger Picard,2behr-ZHAY … Continue reading

The Sentinel

Mary left this morning for an extended business trip, so I’m a single-parent for the next week. And Olive, our 9-month old puppy is a harsh and jealous mistress. She’s matured a lot in the last few weeks, but she still needs a ton of attention and exercise. Now this may come as a surprise, but the writing music process doesn’t do so well with interruptions every 5-15 minutes. With this in mind, I figured I’d write something that could tolerate the interruptions and worked on another drone. I’ve been experimenting with various textures, and a lot of … Continue reading

Don’t Fight the Funk

I wrote fairly extensively about “Other Ray” in I’m Back (And I’m Backin’ It Up!) – the last time he showed up. I can’t say specifically what prompted this track, but I can tell you that I was procrastinating so hard. I really didn’t want to write any music. I wrote a blog post, I surfed the web, I looked at my archival process… With midnight fast approaching, I finally knuckled down and tried to find something interesting to do. I had a basic drum loop going and was futzing around with some synth patch when I correctly (and accidentally) … Continue reading

Falling

This was an “inspired-by-sound” song, which is strange since the sound was a piano. During the recent holiday sales frenzies, I picked up a sample library from Spitfire called Heirloom. The default patch is a piano with a fuzzy warm nostalgia to it. A bit out of tune, a bit creaky (a bit too much, actually), but giving all of the vibes of sitting in your childhood home playing the piano. I noodled for a few minutes figuring that I’d probably be scanning through the library to see what else was in there, when I came across the primary chords … Continue reading