happy 52 y'all! catch you on the flip side.

Rudimentary 4 track sketch. Sort of Johnny Cash meets sludgepunk?

quick little sketch

a quick quasi-ambient joint

forgot to upload Sunday, but i did this over the past weekend.

someone talked me into doing some hip hop beats over the week, it was interesting and fun. I seem to fall into the "dark trap" category most easily,

(ack, had this cued up Sunday and never hit submit)

Back on a sorta synthpop kick. I also finally downloaded Valhalla SuperMassive, wonderful reverb and echo for free!

two layers of crappy finger drumming (one ezdrummer, one ableton stock "blueprint kit" plus a four count shaker loop to tie it together
bass through camelcrusher as always
guitar through guitarrig5 plus ableton stock reverb and delay for the "lead"

i went camping this week :)

here, have a golden apple
¯_(ツ)_/¯

finishing up my little EP sized collection of vaguely "early industrial" homage tracks.

one has a bit of maybe stoner metal in it, and the other was probably influenced by my partner spinning a Cure playlist the other day (the arp at least)

lyrical nod to Murder, inc in "subliminal prototype"

it seems this week's episode of "crimes against beloved musical genres" targets early alt-rock

(my phone's music detection feature agrees, in so much that it basically accused me of plagiarism but hey...)

doubling down on my early 90s industrial vibe experiment. this one is a riff on a Robert Frost piece.

another "twofer". the first one seemed too much like a sonic rut i'm stuck in so i tried something consciously different

I ended up working on two tracks this week, and was trying to decide which one to use; then I remembered one of the advantages to this site during alternate years is multiple attachments!

(this really helped me during 2019, because like music, I may not be very good at graphic art but I enjoy it)

The first one is another throwaway industrial joint, but I started getting story vibes while I was trying to mix it into being listenable. I had a vague but coherent character development and plot integration for my weird space opera project (conceived on weeklybeats in 2018 and given life here during 2019, thank you @onezero!)

The second I had named as a jab at myself because I had started out trying to make something starkly different from my usual (threw a random scale at myself among other things) and then it turned out to be one of my most "repeating myself" tracks in a while. My bag of tricks is limited, I get it- but damn you universe/ego/whatever!

The upside is, the story vibe picked up with both of them and I realized the characters and scenario didn't work as well on the moon as they did on earth, so this week marks the official beginning of my third and final album in the Red Rising project. I have decided to embrace the fact that I am the kind of person to start the sequels before I finish the beginning so.. woot!

Also, I have never been able to tell if this site notifies you on comment replies and because I've regretted not commenting / replying more;

@Kedbreak136 thank you! the drums are EZDrummer. It's awesome. Pricey (by far the spendiest thing in my "rack" but it has some of the deepest and most convincing samples I've every heard, and in multiple flavors (I think I was using "tape filter"). On top was a little CamelCrusher for distortion and compression. Before I picked that up, I was using a free plugin was really damn close to that good (especially for the price), MT Powerdrummer which I highly recommend.

@Arcana Dude. Thank you. Your feedback in the past has been pretty influential for me and this time you hit me with the double whammy of; Critical ear but also positive feedback specifically on areas I was trying to improve.

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)

it's been a tough month or two of loss and challenges, but as part of pushing past that feeling, I made myself sit down and actually finish a track the other day.

I stuck to my easiest comfort zone, which is generic industrialish rock with some random lyrics forced out using whatever was on my mind or in my eyeline at the time (in this case; politics, crypto markets, and the horrifying realization after shaving for the first time in a decade that I look a bit like a certain politician)