Notescast

I tried to do a song really quickly using my homemade vocoder and some haikus. The vocoder is still rough, and it didn't come together. Here's some French horn with a haiku, though.

I tried my channel vocoder out on more signals, and I'm pleasantly surprised that it was able to make this out of this bassoon snippet:



And some talking:

Oldness

Some instinctive genre policing thoughts from me.

This is called Europa, and it was mostly made on buses to and from the airport and on a grounded plane. I worked in samples recorded at my parents’ house. I mixed it with earbuds, so that might be rough. This is one of those things I didn’t have enough time to judge, but I’m glad I am keeping the composing part of the brain from rusting.

This was a good bus speech.

This song is called You Must Explain the Delta Variant to Your Parent and Reschedule Your Flights. (I drew from life experience.)

I wrote it in response to this Junto challenge, which asks you to play a theme as yourself, then as two other identities.

I've been mostly making music by programming and clicking on piano rolls for the last few years, but I feel like that gets you very diverse sounds, and my stuff doesn't seem consistent enough for an identity yet. So, I played the "self" part on guitar.

The other identities are a free jazz musician (I have no idea how free jazz works, but I had fun learning you can have a fast, aggressive trumpet sound) and a dumb computer program that takes rough directions for making riffs, then makes a bunch of random choices. (It's sandworm, a weird thing I made eight years ago.)

I made this altered soundscape, which I call "Closing" (you can see why in the middle of the piece), as part of this challenge, which asks that you add an imperceptible sound to a field recording, then make it become more obvious.

I found the imperceptible part really hard because I know where the added sound came from, and therefore can always perceive it. I did run it by Katt, and it didn't jump out at her, so I counted it as good enough since I didn't have time to survey a whole bunch of people.

I don't know if I'll think of this as "successful" in a month, but it was indeed a good exercise.

Coming up with things sometimes sucks.

Barbaric Silence is my entry for the Disquiet Junto Isolation Room challenge. It asks you to take something you made in the past, isolate one aspect of it, then build something new around it.

I picked a primitive black metal song I made twenty years ago and used just the guitars. I tried to make something out of it with horns and strings, but it just wouldn’t mesh, and I only had a couple of hours a night out on vacation, so I had to pivot to something simpler.

I decided to make it even more barbaric. I added some tense strings and also several copies of the original guitar parts, manually creating delay. The delay creates the dominant rhythm for most of the song, but fades back to the original toward the end.

While I was at it, I made a more natural mix that's kind of how I imagined I actually wanted it back in the day. It's just guitar and drums, but the drums are more Bathory-like than in the original. Back then, I had to use 808-style drum samples, which sound techno-ish.

For completion's sake, here is the original 1998 version. You already heard about the drums. The vocals are awkward, and the lyrics are dumb. At that time, I felt I had to have funny lyrics that my friends would like. Otherwise, why would anyone listen to my music?

My 1998 self has a point, but things you make just because you think they're good make for better future listening. To flip flop back again, though, it's better to make dumb joke songs than to not any songs at all, and that was all I was willing to make back then because of weird ideas I had about how perfect and how trailblazingly original music had to be.