music production

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

Revenant (White Vapors Mix)

Day 2 of trying to write music alone with a 9-month old puppy. I’m pleasantly surprised that I’m getting anything done and, in part, it’s because we took our first trip to an off-leash dog park yesterday. She got to run around, and then she slept a lot while I worked on this piece. I haven’t gotten much sleep so far this month, so I hoped to get this done in a reasonable time. We’ll come back to that. While I was cleaning up my project file for Don’t Fight the Funk, I found a stray instrument track with a … 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

Flip Six Three Hole

After the marathon of Falling, I didn’t have the energy to write a song. Not that I wouldn’t have changed my mind about that if any lyrics had shown up while writing, but there’s a level of stress-relief involved when I’m starting my session with the intent of doing something instrumental or ambient. It’s not so much that writing songs is stressful, more that I’m eliminating the stress of feeling like I have to write a song. This is a big… huge… massive benefit of having participated in Song-A-Day. Not only have I largely gotten rid of the preciousness of … 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