Quite a lot of activity this week, so this track is what felt achievable with the energy available. This one uses $60 Univox hollowbody in Bb F tuning, so it lends itself to fingerpicking and barred strumming. As I've been doing lately, I've tended toward phrasing with a rest or natural fade at the end. It's a bit sparse in places, and in two of them...it was a bit too sparse, so I added a some duplication of notes in the editing, copying one snippet and delaying it by a sixteenth note or two.
The world's a mess, particularly my country, and writing this doesn't directly fix any of those problems, but I hear a kind of hopefulness in this music, despite our surroundings. Let's find hope where we can, enough to keep ourselves going, so we can make things better.
No inline effects, but there's the usual convolution reverb and a bit of compression/eq on the stereo mix.
The title comes from the river in Ireland that in some places runs alongside the R579.
This is more of a technical challenge this week than a musical one, although I'm happy with the result. I wanted to try to get the OP-XY to make Pigments soft synth and my M8 make sounds via MIDI, and I accomplished that goal. I also built the drums in the Syntakt and used it's song mode this time to give some variance to the drum beat throughout the song. The OP-XY is outputting MIDI into Pigments via USB-C and via the MIDI out to the M8. What's fun there is that I can effectively 'double up' the channels, meaning one sequence in the OP-XY can play both instruments.
I started with the 'bent strings' preset in Pigments, just playing around with melody until I found something cool. Then I added the drums and bass. Finally I added the M8 to the mix to have more sonic diversity. I was going to add some guitar via the ZOIA to the mix on this one, but couldn't get a recording I was satisfied with.
I would personally wear headphones to listen to this one, due to the lyrical content (referencing the torture scene from casino royale). If the mods or site owners have an issue with the lyrics I will make a clean edit but I promise the edit, too, will be memey.
Outside of this streak this week, I have been working on a cover of a Louis Cole song. However, trying to figure out good and NEW chord voicings (as opposed to just copying his voicings note for note) was hell. So I decided to use my weekly beat to practice jazz chord voicings so I may suffer less next time I want to learn a jazzy song. As a result, this week is more an exercise than a song, just some disjointed phrases. I did put it to lyrics though, with a vocal synthesiser. this was mainly just to motivate me to actually finish it, by having something kind of jokey and silly in my score while i was working on it, but i think it also did direct the chords and voicings somewhat. so that was pretty fun!
I think alternating between simpler pieces with busier arrangements and smaller but more planned compositions is working quite well in terms of allowing me to practice both and not get burnt out on either, but I won't hold myself to a rigid schedule with this.
This has truly been a creative wellspring of a challenge and it has been a joy to tune into everyone's tracks every week. Even if I only make these four pieces, I am now on track to compose more music this year than ever in my life. Thank you :)
Missed last week as I was having a nice long weekend away, and this week has been hectic,.
I didn't have time to put the percussion I wanted on this, maybe later.
Anyway, After a lot of VCVrack recently I am going back to my main love: Renoise.
recorded by night - it was raining - and i was close to the river
I started 2 other tracks this week but they would not go anywhere. So I just decided to start again from scratch and just play with textures. Actually I prefer this new track. Short but evocative at least.
