Two Hour Track Sunday Track originally (submitted here)[http://compo.thasauce.net/rounds/view/2HTS363#entry-17685].

I was learning Shreddage 3 Jupiter, which I had upgraded to after not using Shreddage 2 in about 8 years. There's a bit of a learning curve - it has a lot of articulations and so forth that I didn't manage to get into so the guitars don't really sound real, but that's what happens when you do a compo.

I've been kind of slow on music projects recently. I got caught up in learning a DAW for Windows (Studio One 5 trial, so far) and I'm learning some voice (still a beginner, so no real recordings yet) and am writing more on my blog.

I'm not on my main computer so I don't have my project files, but this is something I made recently as a test for a potential commissioner.

This week, I started with a 2-tracks chord progression on the Digitone that I used as the base for this song. I added a live bass, IK MODO Drums and vocals.
I noticed irreparable sound issues halfway through and had to redo some tracks (learned some stuff in the process). Other than that, not much interesting happening in the creation of this piece.

Lossless on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-493253580/before-the-storm

This was an experiment from January that I did not finish back then. It's really minimalistic and uses a lot of randomness and two PG8X VSTs (you can get it for FREE here: https://sites.google.com/site/mlvst0/pg8x-2/). In the end I just added some random drums from Yamaha DTX12M and recorded some minutes of the output.

Lossless here: https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/20210116a

I started off working on something like "Cat Stevens does dreampop" but that was simply outside of my grasp/skill, so I started over and made a punk rock song about Ben Franklin style debate club in the modern day of equal rights and human dignity.

(it was actually a really interesting rabbit hole, if you like that kind of thing- Junto club -> dry club -> heretics of the lantern, etc. pretty progressive concepts, especially for the 17th century but obviously there's a need to explicitly update inclusion)

Continuing the exploration of the melo-ambient style I feel that this week I've been better and giving the track a better sense of form. There is a now a much stronger build-up and climax of sorts and I'm very happy that it got to this since the process is still based on improvisation. There were three takes to this, one which consisted of the looper-based performance of 12 string acoustic, chants and percussion (from Novation Circuit) over a pad with LFO driven, self-oscillating filter coming from Arturia MicroFreak.

The sounds of the feddbacking filter somehow led me to imagine a mystical garden, along with the slight oriental theme the improv took in the later part. The second step was adding the bass and the third some synth lead patterns (also from MicroFreak).

This week has been very stressful and I could not focus properly. Here is a synthwave like track, with some Japanese percussions on top. Not my favorite track but at least I got to experiment with different sounds and textures. If I spent more time on it, there are a few lines I would modify as there is some dissonance in this track but this is as far as I'll go this week on this one. Time to focus on next one.

More VCVRack sounds, nothing spectacular but every patch I make adds to experience, that's my philosophy.

This one started as a kind of dub rhythm, which I did in Ableton's Drum Rack (with 64 Pad Kit Special), against a couple different Echo sends. Next I added a few accents with acoustic samples from a Yamaha CP-70, and initially melodica (which I then replaced with Operator, replacing all the parts). Instead of a regular guitar part, I went with the no-name pedal steel through Moyo volume (and ultimately high-pass Auto-Filter with drive, Cabinet for air, and Utility to bring the gain down). Finally I tracked Epiphone P-J bass (with EQ-8 bass rolloff).

Sends: in addition to the two echoes, I added a couple convolution reverbs: one a spring, and one a regular room.

Inlines: there's also some auto-pan on pedal steel and keyboards, as well as Max Humanizer on the drums. There's full-chain multi band compression on the whole mix.

Title comes from the fact that the rings of Saturn, if compressed into one thing, would be about 62 miles in diameter.