It's funny, when I was 17 and decided that I wanted to be a composer, I imagined I'd hopefully one day write music for movies, about made up feelings seen on screen.
I never imagined my own life will become so complex and hard to understand.
Now I'm 33 and I already don't have the notes to describe my own feelings.
It was my daughter's birthday today.

This week was busy, so I ended up reworking the intro part from our regular live stream.

Lossless on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/20210216-feat-tubular-corporation-live-stream-intro
Full stream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITwsutmml50

Busy week again, really didn't have time to do anything I am proud of. When I do get into production is trying to experiment with other things and not really towards any finished work. But I messed with a few bits here and it's alright.

Life happened this week and I could only pack a few minutes of music-making here and there, so no full song this time.
I've got more or less a verse / chorus song structure based on the guitar riff around 0:42 and not enough time left to come up with lyrics and record vocals.

Soundcloud for better audio: https://soundcloud.com/user-493253580/week-7

This week, I offered to create character themes for members of my Free Company (guild) in Final Fantasy XIV Online.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/community_finder/951e1b0cad05af75dcb102ebe05f188ab2fe9d2a/

What was I thinking?!?

Anyway, here's three of the themes that I completed this week. The first asked me for "Concerning Hobbits" with a side of horror, the second asked me for "a somber theme with a sense of loss" and the third asked for "something whimsical" (except that I knew that she likes ZUN).

Edit: Okay, I added a fourth which was BY FAR the hardest one to do because it was based off of the B section from Isabella's Lullaby (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTJjtSP-ORc) and I almost NEVER do super maximal orchestral stuff like this.

Edit 2: Fifth song came up. I added an Alter:Ego voice here (the request was creepy, yet upbeat), but Alter:Ego is pretty finicky and I don't really like how the voice ended up coming out so I'm redoing it.

This is a nice step forward for me as I used the voice as an instrument throughout the piece. I usually do instrumental pieces since I don't feel the need for lyrics as a lot of the time music can express so much more than mere words. On the other hand, the voice is one of the most flexible and emotional instruments, even without using words. So I made this ritual-like piece which starts somewhat melodic and evolves to be more floating or textural. There's an F minor vibe given by a repeated note pattern on the Magellan 2 synth and the acoustic guitar, as well as a wooden flute. The voice goes through an octaver which is used sparsely and there's ongoing looping provided by Gauss. The reverb and delay FX are from Eventide (UltraTap and Blackhole).

Edit (20/02/2021): with some suggestions, I updated it to a version without all of the percussion and a bit less energy. I think it's more coherent.

A little later than usual with this one, but...the timing of the challenge works in my favor here.

This week I (mostly) finished restoring a 70s (maybe earlier? but the pickups seem to be 70s) pedal steel, built from a kit, and out of commission for quite a long time before it came to me. I've put on new tuners, cleaned things up, made adjustments, and...it's a playable instrument! I've wanted to play a pedal steel for years, so it's nice to bring that to life. So this week's track had to feature it. (Inline effects: a bit of Auto-Filter for high-pass, and Auto-Pan for faint tremolo.

I did start with a couple syncopated patterns I came up with using Ableton's 64 Pad Kit Jazz, with some Max Humanizer. After tracking pedal steel and Epiphone bass (usual EQ-8 rolloff), added two tracks of home-built Res-O-Glas guitar (through the Balls Effects KWB and Vox Wah, then inline high-pass Auto-Filter and Cabinet for some air).

Sends: two Echo channels (Tape Reverb and Dark Fade presets), and two convolution reverbs with high-pass Auto-Filter.

There's Master Full-Chain (flat) on the stereo out.

The title comes from there being 59 stellations on a regular icosohedron.

For some reason I had this riff running in my head, with a strong surf rock vibe. It's usually a bad sign that I have probably commandeered a riff but until someone screams, I'll still record it.

I tried to go for the surf rock guitar sound. I do not have plate reverb but it's not that bad. Played on my ibanez with split coil, it sounds twangy enough. I added a live bass and then used samples from Slice for the drums and trumpets. And cars and radio and traffic sound. This was a fun one to make!