This is Scrambled Plea. It turned out less musical than I would have liked, which was a known risk, but I think it's interesting for now. I wrote Scramble to make this.
Bonus is at the vet. A hard day for him has started.
On surly garage guy
Alex gave me a guitar. It’s a Fender Squier, so I feel free to mess it up. The first thing I did was change the strings and tune down to B. Kinda cool, but the floppy strings feel very awkward, so I might actually buy heavy strings. I might see if there’s some interesting cheap pickups out there. And I’m also considering cutting the body into another shape.
Impromptu soundtrack for reading about microplastics getting into your food .
Today in inappropriate beats
Shoe and cat pee
I wrote (most of) a song that’s mostly in 15/8 that I’ve been trying to play up to speed for months now. I still play it really awkwardly. However, this is still better than it was, unbelievably. (To be clear, it’s not the 15/8 meter than makes it hard for me to play. It’s that I’m not sure to playing two sixteenth notes at one pitch then immediately playing another pair at another pitch on another string.)
I wrote this on the plane while barely able to hear what I was writing. I don’t recommend that technique.
This is Ghost Banquet Speech and Award Presentation. It's a dungeon synth piece mostly, except that it has a beat. I started it around Christmas of last year or earlier, and came up with most of it in a a day. Then, I got stuck around January trying lots of solos. I've been stuck on two other pieces for a while, so I came back to this yesterday and edited the solo a little, and I thought it was good that way. But again, it's probably mostly my perception changing over time.
My looping tool is working enough that I can make obnoxious stuff like this now.
Music perception is weird and will always be weird. This riff sounded great when I came up with an hour ago. Listening back, it just sounds like Mandatory Suicide, except not good.
I tried to come up with some riffs via jamming, which is always ill-advised. I was going for something death metal and ended up with the kind of borderline-thrash death metal that was around in 1990. AKA, basically Slayer played through a Metalzone. I am ambivalent about this outcome.
Parents Just Don’t Understand Clapping. (Ah, I guess that was a little mean. Credit to them for participating!)
I regret to inform you that I've started building another music ruiner so that you can hear stuff like Triumph turned into word salad. It is kinda cool to be able to hear all the MCs in the span of ten seconds.
Made a chill loop for me to have on while I do things like putting away dishes.
Guitar mistake minutiae!
I meant to try to fix my mic, and I finally did it! Actually, it turned out to not be broken. To find that out, I first had to find it, which took 40 minutes because I stuffed it in a bag labeled "headphones". Then, I spent some time searching for my preamp before I concluded that I probably threw it away. When I plugged it into my mixer (which I probably got because my preamp wasn't working), it registered signal right away. After some wrangling with Pulse Audio Volume Control, I was able to te...
I (laboriously) jammed up a couple of riffs last night, then rerecorded (and revised) them this morning for the Junto prompt where you make a track that other people can add to. Here it is with a beat behind it. But if you want a guitar track to mess with, go at it on SoundCloud .
This is Middlesex Fells. The song, not the forest preserve. It was made using a two-second sample I recorded there last weekend, though, along with a version of my graph-controlled granular synth tool that I added a delay feedback loop to . ( This is what that ugly character looks like. ) This is my response to the Junto prompt to use a field recording and feedback....
I have a decent start on a space adventure song.
This piece is called In a Bomb. I wrote a crude granular synthesizer (a thing that plays piece of samples, usually fast enough that it doesn't sound like the sample anymore). It lets you draw graphs that control how many pitches to play, where in the sample it should start, how much of the sample should be played, and how long each event should last. So, all of these things change over time in the piece. It's a response to the "surf" "music" Junto prompt . I originally tried to use water drop sa...
This is The Sound of Carrying On No Matter How Terrible It Gets. That's the name of the song! The latest Junto prompt asks you to do something out of tune, so I put my phone next to my amp and started recording myself playing these two riffs and detuning the A string every so often. I listened back to a version of this the other day and hated it, then listened again today and hated it again. Then, I listened to a different take and thought it was interesting. But maybe it only sounds that way if...
Here's Pressures Accumulating, a piece for (synth) strings, trumpet, and drums. The solo was put together partly via guitar and via this script . I think it turned out fairly heavy for a string piece.
I came up with this riff, which I think is pretty good, but then I realized there’s only about a 20% chance I’ll actually get it into a song. Sometimes the idea of recording metal guitar just wears me out before I even start.
I recorded this sick riff I thought while walking in Davis Square. I thought no one could hear me, but some guy looked at me.
I had to go to Nashville for work. There’s a bird outside my AirBnB that sounds like it’s saying “thirsty thirsty”.
I implemented sliding between pitches instead of ending an event and starting a new one with the new pitch in Flooding. As you may know, the more complex a program gets, the hairier it gets to add things to it, so this one took a day. And as I suspected, the change does not really work with the piece. It is hilarious, though, and I'll probably do something with this later.
So, this is Grow Together with the Miasma. I put it together for this Junto challenge about evolution . I worked on the web app that generated it to and from the train to New York and felt like I was almost done when I sat down to "finish" it Monday night. Very very predictably, I was not almost done when I sat down to finish it Monday night. I ended up finishing it at 5 AM. It is a fork of Flooding, hacked up to 1) make a stack of five riffs with random choices from a 15-limit tonality diamond ...
The train hut man
