Speedtrash!

I have been playing some Ghost of Tsushima lately and youtube took me then to some reviews of the new Assasins Creed game, which takes place in Japan. The prologue ends on a scene that is very reminiscent of Sergio Leone movies. As a group of grim samurai appear slowly from the mist, one is directly taken back to the intro of Frank and his gang in Once Upon a Time in the West. So I decided to do a Japanese inspired version of an Ennio Morricone track. After all, we are just closing the loop since a Fistful of Dollar is a remake of Yojimbo by Kurosawa.

I was happy with this track! It's the most time I have spent on a track in ages and I enjoyed the process. I need to go back in the habit to start a track earlier in the week than the weekend.

I am on a trip so I installed GarageBand on my phone and spent some time in the bullet train to figure out how to use it to make a track. It’s hard to change DAW and I miss a mouse but managed to do something. A track is a track.

Life has ups and downs, we cannot control nor know what's gonna happen tomorrow. But one thing is for sure, this too shall pass.

A track that I enjoyed making and that was pretty painless. I have a jam session on Sunday where I'll be playing bass so I dusted my bass and got to play a little, which prompted this track and the main bass lines. I like the mix of funny vibe and slightly melancholic lines.

A quick and dirty fun track where I just plugged the guitar and recorded some silly simple melodies. And I spent the Sunday on the ocean shore as we had 20 degrees Celsius. The ocean recording is a recording of the Pacific Ocean. There were some Hawks as well, but I could not capture their sound and had to resort to a splice sample.
It's light and silly, but a track is a track.

Another track that is more experimental than anything. One take guitar for each track (and that is indeed easy to figure out). Some wind foleys, horse foleys, whispers, and a heavily distorted guitar, to try to capture the eerie sense of being lost and confused in the strong in the wind in the dark in the middle of the great plains.

Or how to milk a 4 chord progression in so many ways.

Maybe the soundtrack to a super accelerated movie of how silicon life started on another planet.

I tried something a bit different this week. The youtube rabbit hole took me to watch the corridor fight sequence in the movie Old Boy. This inspired me to try out scoring that scene. So I used the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwIIDzrVVdc , removed all the audio and then added music, beat and sound effects.

This was fun! The hardest part was setting a consistent beat that would work with the scene, as of course it that scene was not shot to a click. I am quite happy with the result as it was a fun experiment.

I suggest starting the video above at the same time as the track if you are curious to see what the result looks like.

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.

I was out of the country for most of the week and had to try to find something this Sunday. Some arps, a chord progression, a loop, and here you go. Hey, I actually don't dislike it but it would really need more time and polish to go beyond. This feels more like a teaser trailer track. :)

It's a bit of a speed trash - I could not allocate enough time to develop the ideas in this track further. Not a bad start but this is really just a raw draft.

I started this track wanted to make a mix of Sergio Leone music and 80s Chinese kung fu music but that ended up being a strange trip hop synthwave track with koto. I kinda enjoy it but it took quite some time to make something somewhat coherent out of it.

This is not exactly the track I wanted to do. I heard a song that mixed good rock, electronic, and shamisen and wanted to capture that. But I struggled with it overall so this ended up being a half baked shamisen/synthwave track. A track is a track, that still counts!

Happy new year 2025 and thank you OneZero for creating the streak this year again.

Last track of the year! I went back to good old breakbeats and glitch!

For those who join on Weekly Beats 2024, see you there! :)
For the others, hope to see you around!

The title is from reading Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe. Where science is more mind blowing than the wildest SF.

Not unhappy about this track, which goes into weird wild directions.

I am changing a bit my workflow to reignite inspiration. I decided to start finding some riff on guitar and build from there. I kinda like the result, and I like that it was a fresh approach for me.

By the way, unfortunately, no - large sauropods could not whip their tail at supersonic speed, even though some paper of 1997 claimed they could. This is fortunate, as the aforementioned tail would have snapped. Have no doubt though that a good tail whip could still hurt unreasonably well.

Latest paper about this important subject

I was pretty good this week at finding good excuses not to work on a track. I spent a grand 44 minutes on this one, and it does feel like it. Ok, especially for the upcoming Weekly Beats 2024, I need to get back to start a track early in the week, put more love and inspiration in it rather than a quickly produced simple track.

This started as a music about mazes, then kinda went into trip-hop territory before going back synthwave. A dog cannot be a cat, however hard they try.

A baroque vibe for this track inspired by Castlevania. I ran out of time and could not really clean up this track. The structure and the mixes are pretty raw. It's missing some frequencies here and there, some transitions are abrupt. But hey, time's up for me this week.

Synthwave + electric guitars + fx samples! Kinda inspired by the anime Akira, but not really at the same time.

I had to scratch that metal itch.

An Halloween themed track for this week.

A rather lazy track but at least thematically appropriate for the season.

Ok back on my feet and with my DAW. I worked on this track this Saturday mainly. It would fare better with a few more hours of work. I think it's like 70% done of where I'd like a track to be, but i kinda already enjoy it more than a lot of tracks i have done over the past few months.