Music

Here's The Wizards' Enlightening Conversation. (The name of the song is The Wizards' Enlightening Conversation.) It's a version of Two Robots Loitering at Guitar Center from before I figured out I could get a decent guitar sound in there. I still like it, too.

This is Two Robots Loitering at Guitar Center.

I wrote it via this script, which picks progressions, then modes, and fills them out with riffs and lead phrases that fit those modes. (I tried out sometimes doing some Slayer-style chaos soloing, but I learned you need a human to do that. Or better programming.) It took way longer to get working than I expected, derailing my Synthruary a bit.

Once I had the midi files generated to my liking, I put them in NanoStudio with guitar and bass virtual instruments on them. Even though I know all synths that try to sound like guitars with distortion are terrible, I gave them a shot.

Then, it occurred to me that clean guitar synths are OK, and I could use renderings with those synths as direct input to an amp modeler. It worked! It doesn't sound totally human (but I could get closer with some changes), but I now have a way of making generative guitar music.

This is Winding Down. I didn't use the Synthruary prompt because I was short on time. Basically, I wrote a tool to graph this into midi. Fun fact: It does not actually slow down.

My second Synthruary song is Message from Afar. It's another low song. I made a simple instrument that shifted the pitch by amount depending on the note in the sequence. It also delayed by an amount based on its position in the sequence. So, it was quite chaotic, though I didn't feel it was completely unrelated to what I was playing on the guitar. I did want a more complex sound than some offset sinusoids, but I had enough trouble as it was.

This is Energy Ladders, a piece that I recorded by triple-tracking myself playing an FM synthesis patch (the "twist" being that it has an extra cosine applied to the modulated signal) written in Pure Data.

I need a push to reactivate the music writing after having to spend all of my time on other things, so I'm doing this as part of #synthruary, one of those things where you wear yourself out trying to do a thing every day of the month.

This is called Inchoate Burbler. It uses a lot of low, low frequencies. I actually played this on guitar, thanks to Pure Data's MIDI integration being really easy, despite my fears that it'd be a configuration nightmare.

This is 2022-01-01, both the song and today's date. We thought this phrase was catchy in our house, so I developed it a bit, but only slightly.

Fun fact: I typo'd the file as 2021-01-10 at first.

This is another dungeon synth piece, though it's a bit different from the previous ones in character. It's called Reconsidering Your Destiny, and I was thinking of the kind of thing Basil Poledouris wrote for Conan's downtime scenes. The main melody is actually a riff I wrote a really long time ago, but slowed way down. I tried to stick to just that and some chords, but didn't. Future versions of this will probably have less sections.

This is Searching the Bogs, a song I wrote in response to a Junto prompt about gradually changing between two chords. I wrote a Pure Data patch to do this fairly literally with a bagpipe sample.

This is Centipedes of Many Sizes, intended to be a theme for a creepy situation. I almost iced this one because while I think I did hit the theme goal, I wasn't sure if this was something I'd listen to on its own merits.

Then later, I decided it's fine to make single-purpose music sometimes. I guess I'll see in a few weeks if I enjoy it, even when I'm not trying to get into a spooky mood.

This week's dungeon synth jam is called Walk Around the Pond Three Times, a name inspired by the guy, who said it sounded like music for walking around a pond. (It's not too far from my initial idea about it being about a magic pool.) The main arpeggio and vocal chords came really naturally, and I didn't have to dig that hard for the B section, either. I had it ending with some more complex chords at some point, but I felt like I was throwing away a pureness I usually can't write, so I dropped it.

Here's another dungeon synth piece, albeit a more upbeat one: Midnight Feast. I consider this one "composed ✔". There's stuff that needs to be cleaned up and some decisions I'm not sure about (there's four muted tracks that seemed to muddy it up), but I don't think the bones will change.

This is a dungeon synth piece named Illuminated Corridor. This is a rare-for-me made-it-in-one-day song. I came up with one of the riffs today while working on another dungeon synth piece that I had started yesterday. Then, I switched over to filling this one out.

I could have, of course, worked this over for weeks, and I may yet. There is one part of it that is controversial in my own mind, but since I've been out of composing for so long (necessarily), I thought I should just get one out there.

This is called Europa, and it was mostly made on buses to and from the airport and on a grounded plane. I worked in samples recorded at my parents’ house. I mixed it with earbuds, so that might be rough. This is one of those things I didn’t have enough time to judge, but I’m glad I am keeping the composing part of the brain from rusting.

This song is called You Must Explain the Delta Variant to Your Parent and Reschedule Your Flights. (I drew from life experience.)

I wrote it in response to this Junto challenge, which asks you to play a theme as yourself, then as two other identities.

I've been mostly making music by programming and clicking on piano rolls for the last few years, but I feel like that gets you very diverse sounds, and my stuff doesn't seem consistent enough for an identity yet. So, I played the "self" part on guitar.

The other identities are a free jazz musician (I have no idea how free jazz works, but I had fun learning you can have a fast, aggressive trumpet sound) and a dumb computer program that takes rough directions for making riffs, then makes a bunch of random choices. (It's sandworm, a weird thing I made eight years ago.)

I made this altered soundscape, which I call "Closing" (you can see why in the middle of the piece), as part of this challenge, which asks that you add an imperceptible sound to a field recording, then make it become more obvious.

I found the imperceptible part really hard because I know where the added sound came from, and therefore can always perceive it. I did run it by Katt, and it didn't jump out at her, so I counted it as good enough since I didn't have time to survey a whole bunch of people.

I don't know if I'll think of this as "successful" in a month, but it was indeed a good exercise.

Barbaric Silence is my entry for the Disquiet Junto Isolation Room challenge. It asks you to take something you made in the past, isolate one aspect of it, then build something new around it.

I picked a primitive black metal song I made twenty years ago and used just the guitars. I tried to make something out of it with horns and strings, but it just wouldn’t mesh, and I only had a couple of hours a night out on vacation, so I had to pivot to something simpler.

I decided to make it even more barbaric. I added some tense strings and also several copies of the original guitar parts, manually creating delay. The delay creates the dominant rhythm for most of the song, but fades back to the original toward the end.

While I was at it, I made a more natural mix that's kind of how I imagined I actually wanted it back in the day. It's just guitar and drums, but the drums are more Bathory-like than in the original. Back then, I had to use 808-style drum samples, which sound techno-ish.

For completion's sake, here is the original 1998 version. You already heard about the drums. The vocals are awkward, and the lyrics are dumb. At that time, I felt I had to have funny lyrics that my friends would like. Otherwise, why would anyone listen to my music?

My 1998 self has a point, but things you make just because you think they're good make for better future listening. To flip flop back again, though, it's better to make dumb joke songs than to not any songs at all, and that was all I was willing to make back then because of weird ideas I had about how perfect and how trailblazingly original music had to be.

Trying to get back on the song-a-week horse. Here's Io Buggy, a stoner metal tune. It's a filled out version of this demo. The solos could be better, but I'd have to work for a minimum of weeks for them to be significantly better, so I'm just letting them go like this.

This week's song is called Advice and Healing. I used Animal Crossing samples and samples from a Jorge Luis Borges lecture to create custom "drum kits" (like those old Flash soundboards). At one point, I had a solo in there that I played on the guy's toy clarinet, but it was too terrible, even to be funny.

I made a dungeon synth song for this week's song. It's called Village's Edge.

I tried to do some extreme mood changing, and I wanted to do it without crossfades, which felt cheap. I exploited a riff that has some key ambiguity, and maybe a week later, I'll know if it worked. There is also a trumpet solo which feels very Western, but dungeon synth rules aren't written in stone yet, so I think I'm OK.

This song-a-week song is Sky Ghost Farewell Fugue. I was trying to make something with loose timing instead of the strict lockstep I usually use. I also wanted to shoot for something ambient and got about halfway there.

I don't know if I'm going to say this every week, but again, this was a struggle. Never challenge yourself!

The Adventure of Getting a Donut is this week's song-a-week. (The guy named it.) I tried to stretch myself by avoiding making the song build in intensity, which I do with pretty much everything I write, and sticking to a major key.

I had trouble coming up with riffs, and digging for them unsuccessfully cost way too much time. I also realized that my inspiration, game show jingles, aren't full songs. They're jingles! So they can actually be 1-2 riffs with a lot of empty space, unlike what we generally think of as songs.

In the end, it's a two-minute song that has parts that I left in only because I don't want this to go beyond today. (There is also half of a Carcass riff in there.) I think it was good for me, though. I just have to be better about settling for riffs earlier in the week.

I'm going to try Ludum Dare this weekend, so I had to do my song a week early. It is called Rumor of Robot in Town. I was going for a YMO/SNES JRPG kind of song.

This is my first song-a-week entry, called Get Up Eat Breakfast Get Dressed Go to School. I decided to mess around with low horns. As a result, it's not easy to mix as the instruments all operate in more or less the same range. It's not Professional Mix-a-Week, anyway.

I was reading something Laurie Spiegel said about being at a conservatory:

[John Duarte said] I should practice by writing a piece every day, no matter how short or simple. I did my best to comply…Later, at Juliard, I was shocked at how students were allowed to work on a single piece all year, while I was paying my tuition by composing an educational filmstrip every month.

Given that I have more convenient tools than she did in the '60s and '70s, as well as lower standards, I figured I should be able to write a song a week for a while.