It’s late February. The sun literally hasn’t been out in like 6 months I think. You’d think one would sleep more when there’s no sun, but it just ends up confusing me.. my preamble to being in a nursing home shadowing and driving the staff crazy (the one future pro). Some things just aren’t cool.. including today’s entry into the Throw Away Music Series. Thank goodness for LOST tonight. Until then.. sound effects.
I meant to get alot of work done this week, both on my own music and the projects I’m on.. especially as I’m signing a deal to do a new iPhone game. But then the Starcraft 2 beta happened and I lost my fucking mind and became the best low-level Zerg player the world has ever seen.
Then tonight, inspired by Jonathan Mann’s “Song a Day”project that he’s been doing for like well over a year now, I put myself back to work. While I doubt I can live up to a song a day with everything that’s going on, I aim to hit at least 1 Throwaway Music Series entry a week.
For my friend Ray’s birthday this past weekend, my apartment was scheduled to be the place of a mass celebratory gathering. Any time people come over though, I usually assume it’s because they just wanted to dance on my carpet (very soft and blue). And since most of Ray’s friends are really into the new generation of folk stars, I figured I’d remix a David Dondero song to be fitting for the occassion.
It’s February 1st, and it may be my first day fully sober since a week before New Years, which means 2010 has just started for me. My New Years Resolution was to try less noise for a few weeks, but like the standard-fare rapidly ballooning facebook women who LOL to everyone about the weight they promised to keep off while posting pic after pic of themselves birthing Heinekens, I’m finding myself making nothing but noise.
My first actual recording of 2010 features me losing my mind and coming to with a sander wrapped in a t-shirt resting on an acoustic guitar with an ebo taped to the strings.
I began writing and recording music at the tail end of 2006. I’ve spent the past year or two toying with the idea of putting out an actual album, but it never happened, mainly because I wasn’t confident in the material but also because when you first start doing anything you take it much too seriously in a weird kind of way. Or maybe that’s just me.
Why redo the work if it’s already been done? That’s often my thought when going for a particular sound. It’s usually easiest to take the closest preset available and tweak it until it is close enough. I still whole-heartedly support this mindstate, as the minutiae can easily sidetrack and destroy whatever vision was forming when you sat down to begin work.
I spend alot of time working on initial ideas that never end up evolving into anything usable for any project. Normally I just pack these quick one to two hour experiments up into a folder, where it then lays forever forgotten. I figured that instead of doing that, it could be cool to post them on a somewhat hidden blog instead. Here’s tonight’s throwaway experiment. It utilizes a source sound of the spring of the cup holder in my car (when you expand it to allow for a drink to fit in), with basic drum tracks and a very basic oscillator.
(effect chain on base drum and snare tracks)