Matt Bowen's minutes of music, photography, et cetera
Minute of Music: Pivot
It appears that it’s time to stop posting music for a little while. The project started to get me thinking about music and writing music regularly, and that it did. However, I want units of music more than a minute now, and the self-imposed push to have something to publish is causing me to make progressively worse tracks — and lately, to make no tracks at all. It’s also preventing me from exploring creative avenues like sound and synth design, as I wouldn’t have anything to post, and I have a strong desire to post. So, the routine I tried to use to get me to write more music now has me writing less music, and that means it’s time to push pause — or more, to invert the rule that I publish what I produce and tell myself not to publish what I produce. The interesting lesson, to me, is that a good routine can be creatively liberating for a while and then become creatively stifling, and the important thing is to know when that’s happened.
Of course I noticed this while worrying about something ;)
I shot macros this afternoon downtown. Several came out nicely. Check out the whole set (a whopping five).
This is very much a draft of a song — I have a bunch of clips recorded in live that I arranged pretty roughly into a typical verse/chorus combo.
On the downside, it’s not really smooth, it’s missing bridges and transitions, and the only real mixing I did was to drop a master compresser on it.
On the upside, I write it to be playable by three people, it uses drums sequenced on the kaossilator, and the guitar comes from my neat new PRS semi-hollow. I have some ideas for lyrics bouncing around, so hopefully this comes back more fully realized before too long.
Tech Tuesday: Virtual Worlds »
On of my favorite former professors, Matt Kirschenbaum, was on Kojo talking about the archival challenges of video games. It’s a fun listen.
Having fallen off the music-making wagon because life just got too busy, I decided I needed to take this project less seriously for a minute. Thankfully, nothing kicks you back into fun mode like the kaossilator. I recorded it into Record, used some of the built in processing to make the sound a little richer, and here’s a 1 minute dance track like I used to post.
This is almost unbelievably geeky, but it’s also really neat that someone built the machine and that it works so well.
