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I used to almost always start tracks with a harmonic or melodic idea from sitting in front of the piano. Here lately they've mostly been springing out a synth patch or some m8 table gimmick. (And eventually, I have to turn back to the piano to work my way out of the hole I've dug myself into.)

This one started with the little chimey-sequence at beginning. It was so pleasant and happy, and I thought it'd be sort of strange to put wild drums against it. So that's sort of what I did. At one point I intended to render a drum loop down and then chop it up breakbeat style. But the drums took center stage and I just kept developing them in place. More flexible and more natural to do weird tuples and stuff anyway.

Also, every time someone comments about how crazy my drums were, it just makes me want to make them crazier next time.

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So, good news -- My personal laptop is still dead, but I managed to get a copy of Ableton and a couple of my plugins up-and-running on another device. Like with my Week 12 submission (done with the CMI PianoHi sample in GarageBand), this week's is a couple hours' doodle session (on some organ preset in Ableton), getting expressive energy out and generating weird tone-cluster resolutions in the process.

"How did you write this, or what is going on in this piece?"

Structurally, from the top-down, this piece is three four-bar sections for a total of twelve bars @ 93BPM (and is looped once). The song was written section-by-section and the order it was written was [Lower voices of Section A] → [Upper melody of Section A] → [Lower voices of Section B] → [Lower voices of Section C] → [Upper melody of Section B] → [Upper melody of section C].

The upper melody in Sections A & B hews closely to the 'D#/Eb Minor' scale (because I was like, "Oh that's cool, Ableton 12 has the option to highlight notes of a particular scale"), with the occasional G-natural as a landing point towards the end of those sections. In practice I was mostly playing it as an F# Major scale. And then the upper melody of Section C was written with harmonic regards to the underlying lower voices as a continuation of the melodic energy up to that point.

To start, the lower voices of Section A were hummed into place (as one voice) and then I overdubbed that with the organ. All the emotional content in this piece is contained in the lower-voice clusters which vary between 3 and 4 voices high. The lower-voice clusters in Section A were written as clusters and not as single notes because I needed the security of additional stimulus, I guess. But for that section, each cluster does "represent" a single tone that has been tempered across three-to-four voices, therefore the lower-voices in this section remain a "melodic" idea written in celebration of a friend's birthday.

As the piece goes on through the lower-voices, I get increasingly agitated by both the stress of making music and of unresolved feelings toward the history and ongoing arc of my friendship with that person. We are on great terms but I'm uncomfortable with happy endings, either due to oppositional neurology of my own, and/or possibly related to family history of a parent who "chose" special occasions to blow up. At this stage of partwriting, my process and "goal" get a lot fuzzier. Phenomenologically it's something like an improvisatory flow state. Notes are sometimes stacked as a form of temperament upon each other, othertimes stacked to stand for intervallic units, othertimes stacked as rhetorical-melodic settling of momentum in anticipation of or response to other moments within the bar. I was pleasantly surprised that the lower-voices in Section B started out very strong, then went into more of a directional function, and then ended on a cheesy, vaguely jazzy/tropical/latin figure.

Section C (bars 9 & 10) is where the lower-voices got pretty high-drama on my end, so i went, "Okay, I'm gonna HAVE to carry the upper melody across Sections B & C to smoothen this all out". I guess that's why I broke from the melody's key when I hit Section C, because I wanted to take extra care to strike a compromise between the dissonant, confused honesty of bars 10 & 11 and my duty to the listener. The friend who was on my mind was into punk rock when we were growing up, so the rhythms in Section C are meant to callback to pop-punk electric guitar rhythms and (in the upper melody) backbeats & drum fills. A-natural is used all throughout the lower voices in this piece, but in Section C it specifically stands in for the 'Ding!' of a hotel elevator.

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its 9pm, you decide to have a shower. for reasons you don't fully understand, you feel a weird melancholy. sadness washes over you, and you cling to the warmth of the water, not wanting to leave it. but sadly, the hot water eventually begins to turn cold, and you must move on with your evening... :(

this interpolates a melody from my 2023 track ‘No Sky’. it’s probably my fav piece of music i’ve ever made, so i wanted to revisit it and take it in a different direction. if you listen to it, lemme know what you think in the comments

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Dark, brooding, lo-fi, washed out sounds.  Like yelling over the roar of a busy freeway or when a plane takes off - just what the lost+found fx pedal was made for.

Visuals uses train footage from a recent UK trip.

Performance Notes:

Deluge Resolv

Vermona saw16 saw8 eg:8:8:10:12 VCF 1:11 glide:10

  Thru shallow waters

Sh4d

Lost+found sw2:6:1:2:2 mix:11+ blend:12 right only

    Left Sw1:1:12:10 - at end,  l+r

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What am I going to say here? That I had tons of time to work on this week's submission and that's why I have such a complex and rich tune to show for this week?

No, actually the same thing that has been happening for almost a couple of months at this point: very little time to work on WB, so I just went with the safe route and did a fun little layered chiptune.

I did get a cool idea started, but wasn't able to finish it, so I'm putting it in the back pocket for a future week. It's a kind of country song where I'm singing about looking for a banjo instructor. Ironically enough, after recording the vocals into reaper, I could not for the life of me play anything on the banjo that would fit. So I'll just have to try again some other day with a little bit more time.

Anyways, enough about the song I didn't make! Let me talk about this piece! I only got about one hour's worth of work on this one, and it shows. But even though this is super raw, I'm so happy with what I landed on. The song is missing many things: a whole other section, some transitions, a proper ending, among many others. But one of the main things it's missing are some rap lyrics!!! I actually tried some freestyling, but most of what I got was just nonsensical grunts, oohs and aahs and some fun 1-2-3-4 counts, but nothing substantial. Oh, and cursing. Lots of on-beat cursing, hahahaha... After failing to add a vocal track, I instead tried adding a high pitch lead and landed on the theremin-style saw wave, and I'm so so happy with that choice. It lends the song a tinge of spookiness that I really like. That's the primary reason behind the title of the song - the rest of the instruments are more chiptune-sounding elements, but that high pitched lead feels rather ghostly and ethereal. I'm definitely going to have to revisit this one in the future. The M8 tells me I only spent about 1h on this one, so I'm looking forward to what I can do next time around when I get back to this one.

Also, for folks who were asking about the samba band I'm a part of, here's a cool video with snippets of our recent performances: https://www.instagram.com/batalahouston … g_--Hj6yA/

Thanks for stopping by, peeps!

Cheers!!!

Link to M8 Bundle

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You don't know what you're missing out on. 

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This came in a little after the 11th hour (one minute after actually).

I've got a lot of little tiny beats I've been making but haven't been super happy with any of them to bring them past the finish line so to speak. Hope this is good enough!

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short epiano jam made with virtual roland jv880 and sonic charge microtonic

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Had a few productive commutes with my m8 recently. Used a few of my own samples but mainly onboard stuff

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