Music Journal

This is a place for me to just dump what I’ve been working on on a daily basis. Good bad or otherwise, it”s a way for me to make sure I keep banging along. These aren’t tracks, but short experimentations. Some of them may later be used elsewhere, but for now, they’re just rough ideas.

March 23: Exactly 3 months after my last addition. I guess I’d call this “Dub Techno”, which is kind of what I'm leaning toward making. I’ve been working with Max, but I needed a bit of the ol’ instant gratification, so I fired up Reason for 90 minutes or so and put this together.

2003

December 23: I’m visiting the folks for the holidays and I saw an excellent techno show this past weekend. I’ve only got the laptop, so this is all in Reason (pretty much why it got “recorded”). I tried to make something more purely techno with this – a bit of the swedish touch.
August 27: Now that I’ve got real gear, I find it’s a lot harder to get stuff up here. I have to record it all now, not just click “export song” in Reason. On the other hand, I find it easier to make music, which is good. This is the first loop I’ve recorded from my EM-1. It’s an excellent toy, and I think it’ll be accompanying me when I travel, as a sort of one-box show. Oh, and here’s some random knobbing on the pattern. Man, I need more controllers. Also, to emphasize the non-trackness of these things, I’m cutting them down to 96 kb/s.
August 4: I don’t really know how to categorize this. It starts out crazy house-like, but then some industrial elements come in. Whatever, I had fun.
July 12: My first piece using “real” gear. I just got an 828mk2, and this is the first thing I’ve done with it. I used Logic on the PC to sequence the MIDI, which controlled two outboard synths (Ensoniq ESQ-M and Casio VZ-8M) as well as Reason on the Mac. With the 828 I can now mix and record things. It’s amazing. I also used Sound Forge for some mastering (ie, maximizing the volume). Unfortunately my Oxygen 8 got short-circuited just days before the 828 arrived, so my newfound audio abilities are countered by my lack of any controllers. Ah well, it’s all coming together.
May 9: This is a little thing I worked on for the afternoon. I was having fun and did some nifty things. However, I saved it as an audio file and then closed Reason without saving the Reason file, so all is lost. This is the only vestige of what might have been.

2002

2002 November 6: Pretty lame, I know. Just playing around with loops still. This is what I did as I was reading the manual for Dr. REX. I then added some samples, synths, whatever and pulled it all together with a fantastic ending.
2002 November 5: This is really nothing. Me playing with Dr. REX and wishing I had ReCycle (release an OS X version already). All I did was make a stock REX file stutter. Impressive, eh?
2002 November 3: What? Is that a link? On the weekend? Woah! So, anyway, this is just a sample file for my first synth patch, a bagpipe. The patch will probably change/improve at some point, but this is my first attempt. I’m especially happy about the drone (this is a monophonic patch, the drone is not a separate voice). By the way, the patch is for Reason’s Subtractor. I dream of one day putting out my own ReFill.
2002 November 2: Yeah, so that thing about the weekend being better, that was all a lie. Apparently, on the weekend, nothing can get done. Some law of nature or something.
2002 November 1: So, tonight the guys dragged me out to Organix. Consider it field reseach. Everyone loves goa, right? Right?!
2002 October 31: It can’t possibly be done any slower! This is a 90 BPM bassline track. People have complained that my stuff is too slow, so this is my way of saying, “Oh yeah?” The bass is one of the new patches I downloaded. I like it a lot. Anyway, it’s rough finding time to update this during the week. Expect more from weekend tracks.
2002 October 30: Well, I said I’d put something up, no matter if it sucked, and here’s the proof. This is crappy, and I was feeling lame tonight. Don’t have much to say other than I downloaded a bunch of cool ReFills that will probably make tomorrow’s sound a lot better than this one.
2002 October 29: Trancy bit. Fairly random melodies. I felt like John Cage sitting at a prepared piano. Fun, but I don’t think many people will like it. So far the melodic stuff has all been just me playing. I don’t think I’ll bother tweaking the piano roll unless I start polishing a piece for production. It’s mostly a waste of time. Same with automations and stuff like that. Just knob it. If I decide it’s good, I’ll clean it up later.
2002 October 28: My first day doing this stuff. I’ve got a cold right now, so blame any suckiness on that. Just a simple loop and drum pattern with a couple synths doing a cheesy line.