Pretty Busy

I've revived my music. I've been playing and singing and making up little snippets of music all the time.

I've re-started old projects, long-abandoned and almost forgotten. Some stuff I made almost 25 years ago is now being the basis for some re-writes. I've begun to make new arrangements of my old "home computer" compositions that I made in my teens, just before having chosen to give up music as a school subject (they gave me a choice between music classes and art classes, I had to pick one, and I am now professionally in the graphic arts field).

All the stuff I picked up along the way is now coming together in a rather chaotic and unfocused effort to compose music. I am hoping to hone in on "something" in the near future, for now, I am just re-familiarizing myself with my trade tools.

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Comment by Christopher on July 11, 2011 at 12:42am: It does not matter how many projects you start.
A good beginning is always to finish at least one of them.

Organize the way how you expand and step-by-step fill your projects with stuff, knowledge and process; thus you will be able to acomplish them, without evolving them infinitely. And remember, that sometimes, old things have old modality, and don't fit to nowadays of you. Remembering the past is nto the same as being attacheded to it.

Good luck!

Comment by Dan Zimmermann on July 12, 2011 at 7:41am: I think that helps.
I've not been very prolific in the past either, so re-arranging my old stuff is a matter of re-mixing three or four songs. These were at the time meant to be re-visited at some point to polish the sound quality either by making a multi-track of synth or sequencer or to lay out for a band or solo piano for example.
I began by programming the original melody and bassline together, then adding slim arpeggios. Since I was working with a 3-voice software synth, I couldn't do much else, unless I made another 3 voices, recorded them separately and then mixed them with the recording of the original three voices. But dude, that was the 80's and equipment cost a lot of money and I was like 12 or 14, so all I had was a dubbing tape cassette player that could mix a tape with a second input, like a walkman, but the speed of that was not in sync with the other deck, so it never worked. I digress.
In short, it just fell wayside, even though I did over the years teach myself how to play a bunch of the parts on the keyboard. Now, I finally have all the technology to actually realize these unfinished projects, so I will.

Comment by Dan Zimmermann on August 20, 2011 at 7:46am: Well, practice is coming along nicely. I'm getting better at listening and finding notes. I've now successfully transscribed about 80% of the old song... When I finish inputting all the melodic data I will assemble the blocks into a song and then tweak with patches until it all balances. After that, I have a refreshed HQ version of my hissy old tape recording that I can then embellish with beats and such. The old song had 3 voices, all mono, so no panning. One voice was all bass, one was all score, the third had arpeggios and harmonies, no beats at all.
I decided against trying to incorporate rhythm and drums into the song deliberately. Some of my idols in this kind of music making (Rob Hubbard, Chris Hülsbeck and Martin Galway) use different synth patches within the same bar of a voice, i.e. two notes bass, then a snare, then more bass, then a kick, etc. Or even within a 1/32 note, where the first half of the note is a kick, the second half (after decay) is a melodic pitch and has a different synth patch. Genius, really, if you are trying to fill all the empty note slots with sounds and are limited to 3 voices. But the drums don't sound natural. At best, I could do a fast pitch-arpeggio with filtered white noise, and that sounds sort of like a snare drum, but without the drum content that the skin makes, just the snare... and the kick drum was just a zero-attack bass note that decays quickly and drops in pitch. So rather than sounding half-assed, I decided against "drums", thinking I will add them later, when I can add good sounding drum samples.

And I did at one point use a Yamaha RX-11 drum machine, programmed some beats and cut them into the song, adding much hiss and losing a lot of fidelity... I even sang a poor attempt of vocals with lyrics to it. A recording exists, but the lyrics sucked and I sang bashfully and too quiet, so it's really bad.

See, this has been a project since as long as I can remember. The first song I made with my own synth patches - long before I knew what "patch" meant or what effect filters and pulse phases have...

But I really should get back to it and finish inputting the harmonies... or I may never finish, lol

Comment by Dan Zimmermann on January 2, 2012 at 8:12am: I went back to it once more, even rebuilding the project from scratch once because I had lost track of how I had set up my patterns and the song structure got really messy. I decided to listen to my recording and reverse engineer the track with at least similar diligence to the original build. I got a good way further along this time, but I find that I can't seem to find the same progression again and lost interest again. And that is a little unfortunate, especially considering that I had xontacted the original author of the songs I had "ripped" scores and motifs from and acquired permission to use them. It appears he had not worked on them further than the demo-songs I had used back in the 80's, unlike other projects of his, on which he has extensively elaborated over the years, so it wasn't a big deal to him so long as I credited him. In itself that is a huge deal to me and I feel very honored.
I've just been too busy with life in general. But the other day, I played with my sequencer and just spontaneously created a loop track from scratch and posted it within 15 minutes. Felt good to just gung-ho some music like that and pump it out public again. http://snd.sc/vq1HZx It's meant to play as a loop.

I did get back into my old habit more of recording whenever I practice. I have produced many minutes of samples and I am sorting through them now to make clips to post. When I listened to some of the takes, I got a chance to compare them to some of my older posted takes. I myself think I can definitely hear improvement, I can't wait to share soon.

Gonna be a good year, I just know it.

Comment by Christopher on January 4, 2012 at 8:08pm: Olympus LS-100
- will be handy multitrack/field recorder (2 channels recording, 8 channels playback, many other options, including phantom 48V for external mics) - should be available this or next month.

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