My first time doing the weeklybeats thing, I have been coerced by people in the local music scene finally after it was suggested for years...then I found that weeklybeats are only even years....then I found streak.

I am setting the intention to be on time.

I didn't get as far as I wanted to on this one but I am excited to hear my process develop.

Made from scratch in Ableton Live 10 suite.

This is a redoing of The Cats Got Into the Rocket Ship (https://weeklybeats.com/arcana/music/the-cats-got-into-the-rocket-ship) from WeeklyBeats Week 51.

There are still a lot of the same elements, but much of the arrangement is different and I'd like to think that the harmonic changes are better in the second version than in the first one and that the musical ideas are a little more developed. I am still not quite happy with the arrangement. I think I need to give myself a rest and look at it tomorrow.

As with most songs where the arrangement isn't great, I haven't concentrated too much on mixing and polish, so expect some mud/bad timbres/etc. I am trying to improve in this area too but I'm focusing so much on arrangement, composition, and harmony/melody these days that production/mixing/sound design is taking a back seat.

I'll tag anything that's an ongoing work as "WIP" (work in progress).

Back to weekly music after a year off, haven't done any recording and not a lot of music in the last year. Back to trying to find my sound somewhere between acid and detroit techno, where things are a bit weird dark and not 100% in scales, but melodic and funky enough to be able to dance to. Kinda the territory i find interesting. Didn't exactly hit it but happy with the synth patches that came together in the process. Got like 8 variations of them now, heh, this is a couple of them ... akwardly put together in a jam, recorded on my zoom recorder straight off the hardware: MPC1000, Korg MS2k, and Mog Slimphatty. Composition sucks but did about 20 takes and had to call it ;D Going to try and work on composition this year!

This is my first song ever, mostly made on the Digitone and finished with vocals in Ableton Live.

This was a really really quick track that I made to test out a generative plugin/rack I built for Ableton Live.

I put this thing on the rhodes, guitar and bass tracks, let it play for a while then recorded some drums.

Basically what I want to say is randomness is a great thing for kickstarting your insipiration if you are stuck. I hope you find this tool useful. :)

After an abortive attempt to familiarize myself with Terry Cavanagh's tracker, Bosca Ceoil, I instead retreated to the more familiarish surrounds of FL Studio Mobile - A program I bought like 8 years ago and barely ever used. I immediately fell into a lot of the bad habits I learned through years of "teaching" myself Fruity Loops, but did at least get a feel for the touchscreen interface.

Anyway, I got a bit carried away futzing with filters and resonance in an attempt to make it sound more dynamic and now I hate the drums. But, oh well, there's always next week.

This is a track that continues the sonic explorations I've made last month on Weekly Beats, so a theme of "Forward" is very adequate.

The song started with playing acoustic guitar with an iOS looper called Gauss which has loop decay and a really long delay time so you are basically able to improvise with your own self, or with the music you've done 30 to 40 seconds ago. Over this I layered a bass guitar part then a keyboard pad made with Magellan 2 (also iOS). Finally I designed some flute and violin like tones in the same synth and added a very simple drum pattern.

Listening to a lot of chiptune lately and wanted to try again. My last attempts were very very bad, this one is.. okay.

First track of the year is some click-n-cut action.

This is the version of the tune I meant to put on WB week 52. It’s very fusion-ist. I loved playing fusion in the 1970s back when I could still play fast. I still love playing it. There aren’t many folks around me that will play fusion though.

i'll be sticking to voice memos this year so sorry about the quality

I've been loving the Spitfire LABS strings so very much, I decided to try writing a semi-conventional piece, intended to be a little modern in structure ad flow but also directly referencing some of my mom's favorite Vivaldi when the second solo kicks in.

Welcome to 2021's challenge! And apologies for the date/time confusion! (Looking on the bright side, those of us who've been working toward Sunday evening submissions...now get a chance to submit first thing instead of right before the deadline.)

I started this track late in the week, having a few rhythms in mind, but not much else, I put up some MIDI loops in Ableton's 64 Pad Kit Special (with Max Humanizer), and then responded to them with two tracks of guitar (home-made Res-O-Glas, direct into the Focusrite, with some Ableton Auto-Filter for tone-shaping). The initial thought around the guitar line was related to Miles Okazaki's weekly scale-shape project for 2020 (on Instagram), though the scale I'd started with...I ended up moving away from. Ultimately, I ended up filling in some spaces with reversed clips.

I used the usual Epiphone P-J bass (with low-end EQ-8 rolloff) in response to those guitar lines, and...really, that was about enough. I just needed four tracks.

Sends: Two convolution reverbs (one large, one smaller), one Ableton Delay, and Valhalla Supermassive. Full-Chain multiband compression on the stereo mix.

I'm picking up last year's naming scheme (number of week for the year, starting at 53). The title comes from port 53 being the port for DNS services.

I am starting the year with a speedtrash! A short haunted track, maybe more appropriate for Halloween than for the new year but I did not have much time last week.