songwriting

In Time

Today’s song started at a reasonable time. I was reasonably successful in not procrastinating or finding things to distract me. I still went to bed at 2:30 am, but I’m almost adjusted to the shift. Actually, I really thought this track was going to be ready for final polish and export by around midnight, meaning I’d get to bed by 1, which would have been really nice. In a way, it’s a good example of scope creep, but it’s also a good example of knowing that something’s not quite finished. The bulk of the day was spent writing entries for … 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

Agnostic Prophet

To quote one of my songs from last year, “here we go again….” For the last couple of years, and this one was no exception, I tried to talk myself into starting my writing on January 31. I typically write in the evenings, normally finishing and posting my track in the early hours of the morning. 2:00 AM is routine. The problem is twofold. First, and this is just a bit of ego, people have missed a lot of my tracks because they don’t show up until the next day. While having other people listen to the music isn’t a … 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 posted by another Song-A-Day participant during the month, and it was kind of just supposed to be a joke. But the more I thought about … Continue reading

A Tiny Thing

Clearly, my mood had shifted from yesterday’s production. Despite setting the project tempo at 132, thinking maybe I had another upbeat song in me, my initial exploration of sounds and drums had me quickly dropping into half-time mode. This is one of those weird times where I’ll open a project later and see that the tempo is double what I identify it as, but it ends up being six of one, a half-dozen of the other in terms of what comes out.  As I noodled around, I  found that I was feeling fairly introspective and contemplative. The origin of the … Continue reading