Messing around with orchestral programming this week. Not great, but I learned a bit about adjusting expression/modulation to make things sound more organic. I need to examine how songs in soundtracks do transitions. I missed the deadline because I thought it went to 11:59 EST, but it looks like it's earlier? I shouldn't be running this close to the deadline anyway, so I'll submit earlier next week.

A last minute thing, more than ever. Having a festival at the theatre I work in means 12 hours shifts day after day so not exactly time left for music. It's a great pressure, but it's not a totally negative one. To me it feels better to stress for art than for a product I would never even give a damn for. Anyway, needed to vent some pressure so just recorded some metal guitar with the looper. With drums, bass and whatnot it would be more of a track, but in this form it's still a core and able to make a statement. I'll let you imagine what that is :)

I took an old project and tried to fix it. Not sure if it worked.

High quality on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/trent-hawkins/20190323-v2

I somehow managed to put out a complete song with vocals in a fully-packed week with even less time than usual. I wouldn't want to do this every week, though.

I used the now usual lineup of Digitone, Spitfire Audio LABS' drums and Valhalla Supermassive, amongst a handful of utility plugins and Izotope channel strip / mastering tools.

Soundcloud for better audio: https://soundcloud.com/user-493253580/black-ooze

Ambient music on the Eurorack modular, though in practice this might actually be more drone than ambient. Recorded live, took two takes and about 1h 30m total.

Streamed live here https://twitch.tv/emeraldarcana/ With respect to streaming, it was actually a pretty good day since I got a pretty big raid (of about 24 people).

Here's a speedtrash. This started as a slightly funky track with bass and drums and then took a weird turn at a dimly lit crossroad into industrial/electro territory.
The core is around the bass, with only one take per riff, which explains the mistakes, the creatively inaccurate rhythm and just general amateurish sound.

I could use the excuse that I started a new job, was busy, was thinking of something else. But the truth is that I'm just lazy. Alright, will do better next time.

I also realized my numbering in my filenames is off by a week. Oh well.

Almost abandoned this one mid way, wanted to try an ambiant, reverb drenched, eerie song but I stumbled on multiple issues while building my sound set, samples were out of tune, wouldn't loop well... Also had a hard time building different sections. In the end I think I salvaged part of it. Trying various melodies over the chord progressions was fun with this single note mellotron piano lines. Added some noise to add to the broken sound of it all. I wanted to go completely DAW/PC-less on this one, so it's all done on the Polyend Tracker, hooked to my phone to grab the wav and export to mp3, then upload here, preparing for future weeks where that's all I'll be able to use for a while. ;)

I really didn't know what instruments to use but I still managed to create something

Forgot to submit my creation for last week so I'll do that hopefully tomorrow.

Started this and I am trying to use nicer sounds, though I do struggle with them. Currently comparing the sound without versus with the sustain pedal on the piano, thoughts?

(I have now fixed the issues with the reverb on this. For some reason the plug-in I was using was glitchily 'gating' the tail)

One of the things I love about living in the UK is we get interesting weather, sun and rain at the same time, varied clouds, drizzle, damp sunny days. I couldn't live somewhere where it was sunny all day every day, would drive me mad.

Another rather busy week and weekend, so this one came together in a few quick sessions: one to come up with some drum beats, one with Danelectro baritone guitar for all guitar parts (three tracks--bass, rhythm, lead), and one to arrange/mix.

Drums: Ableton Drum Rack, using the Towel Kit preset rack--there was a slightly dead thump to these that I liked. There's some Max Humanizer on the drums as well (30ms).

All guitars are Danelectro baritone. The bass got a little EQ-8 to roll off extreme lows, and the lead got some Glue Compressor to control dynamics.

Sends: one Echo, one convolution reverb, and one Valhalla Supermassive.

The title comes from there being several religious sites and traditions mentioning 72 temples. There's kind of a road-trip vibe to this one, I think.