Day 284: In a Hurry, as Always

I hate rushing.  I hate not having enough time.  Today is just another one of those days due to constant interruption.  By constant, I mean every two minutes or so, literally.

Lyrics:
grinding your teeth all night long, 
unable to remember the words to a song.  
You're gonna die.

REFRAIN:
Plastic Faces behind the clouds.  Empty minds, away from sound. Talking out loud.   

head full of china, 
pocket full of speed, 
hands on some pills, 
hands on some weed.

REFRAIN

missed your flight, 
missed your spaceship, 
now you're stuck here on earth.

REFRAIN

none of us will be looking for you if you get lost.

Day 283:Ranrdomean

Random patches by FGL.

Day 282: Short

Didn't see Sigur Ros.  I'm not happy.  Not happy at all.

Day 281: Birfday

I didn't even think about making it to my birthday when I started this thing.  Well, here we are.  My youngest son is sick today, tonight I see Sigur Ros perform, and we have 282 days of music.

I think that's pretty damn cool.

Day 280: Newer than New

Suggested that you listen to this one with headphones, rather than a set of speakers.

Day 278: PARTYTIME!

A little bit of a departure from my normal fare.  It's a happy times party song:

Lyrics:
The lights are on, 
nobody's here yet.

We want you to come on over.  
We want you to come & have a good time. 
We want to show us how to love
We want you want you to us how to fight tonight.

Put on your best party dress, 
Bring your sense of adventure.  
Bring your happy mask and contagious smile.  
We're just waiting for you.

We want you to come on over.  
We want you to come & have a good time. 
We want to show us how to love
We want you want you to us how to fight tonight.

The lights are on, everyone's arriving,
We'll be waiting on the door step for you.

Day 277: Walking By

Vocals are intentionally buried in the mix.  Trying something different with routing and with Tritone + Thor.

Lyrics:
She walked her ass on by with her head in the clouds.
She turned to look at me,
I turned to look at her, 
We both moved on.
She walked her ass on by with her head in the clouds.

Day 276:SH-32 New

From the old comes the new.  From the new comes the even more new.

Day 275: static

Another project for the Disquiet Junto.

I wanted to take two REALLY disparate pieces, kind of like I was surfing between college radio and pop radio, so one piece is something done with an iPhone in Garageband, the other is using Forester, creating a synthy mash-up.  The white noise was a little trickier, so I created a patch with three different kinds of static, two of which could be "played", for lack of a better word.  Ultimately, this ended up not mattering at all, because I used resonance and frequency tweaking via a LP filter to create the changes you hear.

More on this 90th Disquiet Junto project, which explores the sound of a radio caught between stations, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/09/19/disquiet0090-betweenstations/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Associated image found via http://goo.gl/nM4pOz

Day 274: Playing in the Forest

Using Forester and Tritone on this track.  I automated Tritone randomly to see what kind of result would occur.   Thought it came out ok.  There was a little bit of editing also.

Day 273: Making the Olde Music

Tritone + SH-32 + 707 + me = this music.

I know what you're thinking and yes, it IS a complicated formula.

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Day 272: Tritone + SH-32

I wanted to try and push the distortion to unmusical level using Tritone.  I simultaneously wanted an excuse to use the new SH-32 refill by Patrick Sharpe.  I don't think the distortion sounds unmusical, but it does sound awesome.

Day 271: Dark, Noisy, and Not Sure how to escape

Still beta-testing Tritone.  This piece was done using some cool software by Leafcutter John.  The name of the software is Forester. Tritone is doing the additional coloring.

Day 270: Mr. Big Brother

This past week or so, in American media, people have been absolutely loosing their minds regarding Syria and whether or not we are going to go to war with them.  As I listened to all the talking heads and politicians trying to justify their positions it really started to seem like people were, to some degree, opposite robots.  That is, the president says left, they say right.  If he says up, they say down.  When they do the opposite of what they expect him to do (like say, be pro-war) they kind of lose their minds a little.  It felt like I was listening to and watching a real life example of doublethink, the idea proposed by George Orwell in 1984, that is two opposite ideas can be accepted and neither thought wrong or false simultaneously.

Lyrics:
Can you deal with the loss, 
Can you deal with the rules? 
Can you deal with the fools who run this thing?
Can you deal with all the scratching and clawing up?

Just be ready to lie, roll over, beg, and be fooled.  
Double think is real.

Can you deal with the right?  
Can you deal with the left? 
Can you deal with the empty space
Where nothing was actually said? 
Can you show us how you deal?

Day 269: Good bye, Voyager

I was listening to the radio and they did a story about Voyager entering interstellar space (that's the space between the stars) and played two audio samples during it.  As soon as I heard the samples I knew that it would be the Disquiet Junto project for that week.  Sure enough, Thursday night, there it was.

This was my third attempt at using the samples in a musical way.  The first was very canned and uninteresting (to me at least), the second was very experimental and weird.  Finally, I thought Why don't I make it musical and make it a good-bye song?  And this is the result.  I took the two samples and made them into a playable patch, then spun those two patches into a third one for bass (only had to drop it three octaves).  Finally, made the melodic content very sparse and a little sad, but still in a major key.  Kept the form simple (ABA) and did a small amount of mixing/mastering to balance things out.  And...

Voila!

Space Music.

-Enjoy.

Day 268: Along these lines

I don't really have a lot of experience with people involved with heavy drug use, so the lyrics to this track are completely baseless.  Just some words I made up basically.

Lyrics:
We all know you're a liar, 
We all know you're a fiend, 
We all know you're a piece of shit junkie.

We all know you'd kill us for your next fix, 
We all know you don't give a shit about any of this.

Lick the floor to see if you can get high.  
Lick the walls and sell your blood SO YOU CAN get high.

Restitution is a joke now, 
We all want death for you. 

It was nice knowing you.

Day 267: Computer Distortion Machine

Can you feel the drygs tonite?

Day 266: Electronic Swirling Madness

Still beta-testing tritone and trying to find places it fits nicely.  I'm making combinators using it and trying to make patches... lots and lots of patches.

Lyrics:
You've got your foot stuck in the grate.
Your time is finally up.

Day 265: It's Your Wedding Day

Another day of testing.  The difference that this plug-in (Tritone) makes on the drums alone is pretty incredible.

Lyrics:
it's your wedding day, don't try to figure it out.  
You've got all the time in the world.

Nearly everyone is waiting on you, 
Nearly everyone has their eyes on you.

It's your wedding day, don't try to figure it out.
Don't despair.

Day 264: The Beta Continues

The beta-testing continues and, while I can't really talk about what the device is, I can say that it adds warmth to things.  I'm really liking it thus far for that reason alone.  I have some other similar tools that will create a similar effect, but this one is a little more powerful than those.  And I might have found a bug or two, so I got that going for me.

Lyrics:
You got the magick in your fist, you can't believe this. 
No matter what you do, 
It's gonna happen to you.

You took the holy vow,
 all the way down town,
 Then you missed your missed, 
caught a comet Rode it all the way out of this place.  

You thought you knew what I said, 
but you turned around to found out you're dead, 
You won't remember your name.

Day 263: Alpha

Here's my feet-first attempt at trying to break the Rack Extension that I'm beta testing.  No luck making it crash.  On another track I automated every button and it all worked perfectly.  A testament to good programming.

Lyrics:
tie your shoes, get your hair ready to go.

We got a dream to live, 
no one can see or give,
We gotta compromise, 
no one can estimate or try.

tonight, we fly, never to land

We gotta live the truth, 
it will probably bother you, 
we gotta show the light, 
otherwise everyone will die.


REFRAIN 2X

Just when we thought the water was under our feet the ocean showed us it couldn't be beat.

Day 262: Beta

Am testing a new rack extension for a developer.  Expect the next 30 days to have lots and lots of tracks with "Beta No X" in the title.  Today uses the rack extension, but isn't in the beta series.  That will start tomorrow.

Day 261: Don't know a 2 from a 3

Just figured out that I overcounted by a day way back at day 203-205.  So, rolling it back one.

Here's some new music.

Day 260: Disquiet 3D

In creating this piece I really wanted to create depth in every way possible, in addition to giving it a "human" sound.  The biggest challenge for me was depth.  Creating distance is quite a challenge and really requires skillful manipulation of volume and filters.  Since this piece was only 90 seconds long I didn't get to explore that portion as much as I would like, but there's a little of it there.  Past that, there's a ton of panning and playing with reverbs and a couple of effects that I don't use as much as I should.

More on this 88th Disquiet Junto project, which explores 3D sound, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/09/05/disquiet0088-3d/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Day 259: No, Yes, No, Yes, No, Yes

Here is another piece focusing primarily on Revival and Antidote.  They are the center pieces here, for sure, but not the only things that are going on.

The words were inspired by the children's book No, No, No, Yes, Yes, Yes.  About as simple as one can get, lyrically speaking (unless you want to just go with one word, but where's the drama in that?!).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy.  The experiment continues.

Day 258: Get Revived

Working with the Revival rack extension here.  Tried to use it for as many sounds as possible on this track.  If I get enough of the patches together I may create a free Refill for this.  Here I'm using 6 instances of the instrument.  Bass, electric piano, kick, snare, ride, and toms.  Getting the exact sound I want with this is a little trickier, but these results were definitely not disappointing.



Lyrics:
This is your first night alone.  
The dark is creeping up on you.
The children all remember your name.  
You have no escape.

Day 257: The 3rd Antidote

Here is the third piece in the Antidote series.  Turns out it works really well if you want to make some righteous ambient music also.  Starting to have my feet under me while using the device now.  After I get to feeling a little better with it you can expect a series of Revival pieces.  It's a little more difficult to use, mostly because of layout and interaction, but I'm hoping that those same challenges will ultimately lead to new and unexplored musical landscape.

Day 256: Amalgamaglama

Still playing with Antidote and seeing what it's good at.  So far, it would seem that any kind of "retro" sound it is perfect for.  In addition, faux 808, or other classic drum machines = also good.  This track is the first one where I've attempted to use it for anything "noisy".  I thought it came off pretty solid there also.  May have a series of industrial ambient tracks to explore that side of it more thoroughly.  My only stumbling block is the work flow on it is taking me a little longer to wrap my head around.  It doesn't seem laid out as logically as some machines, but it's also new, so that is probably just my getting used to it.

Day 255: More New Rock

Experimenting with this "new rock" style.  Still trying to pin it down.  Starting to wrap my ahead around some solid ideas now.

Lyrics:
The rain fell all night long,
Shadows lengthened, 
The moon sang its song.

My feet wet in the grass, next to yours,
Just us, alone.

Day 254: Ding Dong

Another project for the Disquiet Junto collaboration.  This time it's doorbells.

The type and order are: Daytime, evening, slumber, delicate, party.

More on this 87th Disquiet Junto project, which consists of five varied doorbell rings, at:

disquiet.com/2013/08/29/disquiet0087-entrymusic/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

Groups – Disquiet-junto