productivity

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

Relativity

One month. Four weeks. 28 days. 40,320 minutes during which the 30-odd Song-A-Day participants that gather on any given year write music. A lot of music. More music than many of us might have thought we had in us in total, much less annually. And yet, here we are with thousands of songs and recordings behind us. A famous quotation about the theory of relativity, often attributed to Einstein, but probably just a good anecdotal joke by a reporter goes like this: When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when … Continue reading

You Betta

This is far and away the most complex and involved track I’ve done this month, and I doubt I’ll top it in the remaining three days. There are 20 tracks for the drums alone, and another 13 for the synths and samples. With all of the additional control faders, submasters, and effects sends, it would fill up a 48 channel SSL console. It is also another great example of music that I love, but never tried to write. I’ll leave it to the musicologists to classify, but it has elements of breakbeat, jungle, techno, house, rave, gabba, and trance. Had … Continue reading

Going Under

Ok. Forget what I said yesterday. Today is the day I get two of these done, because I already have a huge headstart on one, and I’m starting around noon, an hour or two after getting up. My plan is to work on this track until about 6 pm, post it, then get tomorrow’s track written (probably another ambient piece) and be in bed by midnight. Remember when I talked about gremlins yesterday? Well, in typical gremlin fashion, XO works just fine today. Multi-channel out is working. Stem export is working. Holy crap, I might be in bed by 11 … Continue reading

Doxastic Truth

With only about 5-6 hours of sleep for the last couple of nights, I woke up with grand plans to knock out two tracks today. I even had some rough ideas of what both were going to be. It ended up being rabbit hole day, with each one taking me a tiny bit farther away from my plan. The first two tracks this month were written, and initially mixed, on headphones. I’ve done this before and gotten reasonably good results, but both sounded pretty bad to me the following morning, and I’ve been spending a bit of time each day … Continue reading