Matt Bowen's minutes of music, photography, et cetera
This may be the deepest bass tone I’ve gotten so far — that part I’m very happy with. The guitar parts could use some work, and the mix itself is pretty rough, but I mostly just wanted to get my ideas down; we’re planning to rework this one for vocals over the next week or two. It should be interesting to see how it comes out.
This track is more like my stuff I had been doing in reason and record. It was fun to put together, but I don’t feel like it really gels as a song; several of the parts make me happy, but they just don’t play together correctly. But, maybe I’ll be able to reuse some of the ideas.
It’s been a whole year! The format of my Minutes of Music has evolved quite a bit (this one is more like two minutes), but I keep loving doing it, and I’m so glad to have the opportunity. I’m hoping in the coming year that these can move from “whatever I can manage to put out in time” to “sketched for a coherent album of music.”
As for this one specifically, I’m starting to really love playing guitar, and I think this reflects that. We’ve got vocals again, only this time I didn’t write the lyrics, which feels like an improvement.
It’s a full song! Not just a minute of music, but nearly six minutes of music, with multiple verses and everything.
The lyrics veer surprisingly (if you know me well) close to praise music, but that’s not the intention; they’re inspired by a visionary art installation, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, which is a 180-piece collection of objects made for the second coming by WWII veteran James Hampton. Hampton spent 14 years making the throne room out of old furniture, cardboard, craft paper, and foil; it’s really quite moving — if you’re in DC, go to the American Art museum in Chinatown and give it a look. We wanted to be respectful, so I wrote from what I hope is an empathetic position.
The music was put together in Ableton Live, using Absynth, Battery, and Guitar Rig from Native Instruments’s Komplete 6; AAS’s String Studio; me on guitar and bass; and my regular mystery vocalist. The mix is not perfect, but it’s as close as I’m going to get it any time soon; I figure I’m going to be revisiting several of these later once I have a large collection of songs anyway. I hope people enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed writing it; it has pretty much made my last few weeks to work on it.
So I wanted to make something like “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio. It didn’t turn out. I should have played the bass with a pick, and probably should have done something different on guitar. I’m honestly not sure if I want make things that fast anyway; I may go back to chilled out music. Also, this one came in at two minutes, which isn’t for the best; however, I got carried away playing my bass and then wasn’t able to chop it up cleanly. But, there’s always next week.
This one’s a milestone; there’s a vocal track. It follows the same basic construction of other minutes of music: it started with bass (me on my Schecter, slightly distorted) and drums (mostly a loop, but I did add the crash cymbals myself), then I added the lead synth and real guitar. But then, I had one verse of lyrics I’d written, and I convinced «name redacted to protect the innocent» to sing them over the instrumentation. The vocal tracking took about an hour from warmup to mixdown, which seemed pretty good, considering this is the first time I’ve recorded vocals for one of these. Now, hopefully there will be more to come.
This one is much closer to the music that I’ve been listening to (mostly Blue Sky Black Death) than almost anything else I’ve made. I started with the guitar, then added drums and changed from a chord progression to an arpeggio, which definitely gives the whole thing a certain sound. Strangely, I had intended to do something much more string heavy, but somehow the strings ended up coming together last, at around 1 in the morning. There’s definitely some mixing problems here; the whole thing sounds almost like nonsense over my laptop speaker, but it’s pretty hip over headphones or better speakers.
I think this one will become a longer song. It started out with me fiddling around, looking for instruments for next week’s minute of music, and ended up getting little additions all weekend until it was written. I’m not entirely sure of the arrangement, and I think the individual parts would need to be reworked a bit if vocals were going to land on top, but I think that’d probably be a fun afternoon or two anyway. I’m thinking of trying to keep better track of my instruments and effects, so here’s a rundown:
It doesn’t feel like I haven’t written any music for a month, but that’s because I have written music; it’s just been longer stuff that’s not ready to post yet. However, I finished up something short late last night. It has me playing a guitar and a bass, and plenty of effects. I could definitely use some work on the guitar, but that’s why I do this anyway; to help motivate me to practice. Because this one relies so much on bass, it’s much better with headphones or speakers that are more detailed than a laptop speaker.
