S+A Cycles

Gold Obelisk

Remember two days ago when I waxed poetic about Stepic, the amazing new step sequencer I got? Remember how I was fawning over those 80s Tangerine Dream soundtrack bass lines? Remember how I said that you’d likely hear more tracks with that kind of thing? Well, here we are. This is darn close (if not massively over the line) into pastiche territory. If I played this without comment for a Tangerine Dream fan, I suspect they’d be trying to figure out which album it didn’t make it on. Now, amazingly, I only used Stepic on two tracks in this piece, … Continue reading

Infiltration

This piece started off largely as an attempt to come up with a dance, techno, or drum-and-bass type of track, which it still sort of is, but clearly pivoted mid-journey to become another visually-inpired bit of underscore. Instead of the juxtaposition of a slow, forboding piece of music against images of destruction I had in yesterday’s track, Infiltration is pretty on-the-nose, at least when you take the title as a literal description. I started this one with drums. I used a factory preset in XO, but started playing around with replacing the default sounds. In particular, I replaced a jazzy … 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

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

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