An exploration of textures and playing with dynamics,

I had some fun playing drones from Arkhis, Pharlight, Straylight. It lacks structure a tad too much but it was good changing my workflow.

Time for some light hearted doodle. I did a simple little beat on the drums, which to be honest would benefit from being improved a lot. But it was a better learning experience than just using a sample.

I played some guitar riffs here and there, added some arps. The last part with the distorted synth "solo" was birthed by just the fact that i pulled a big midi keyboard that I had bought 20 years ago, put it on a stand next to my computer, and just having this tool made it fun to play some random solo. I am definitely not a keyboard player but i really enjoyed playing instead of programming!

More playing, less programming, this may be a theme for this year. I'm enjoying it.

A track inspired by watching the introduction of the game Clair Obscur Expedition 33. The atmosphere and the music are really inspiring. I was listening to the soundtrack and tried to study how some of it was made, learn a couple of lessons and try to make a track based on a similar approach.

This track was an exercise on doing beach music, inspired by a youtube video by 8bit music. So it's very bossa nova inspired, and I had to dig deep into marimba, flutes, steel drums, etc. And yet I could not really make it sound like beach music.
It's the "goths hiding in the shadows while at the beach music", as it just cannot fully leave the slightly nostalgic territory. But that was a fun exercise all the same.

This is a track that is at a stage of development where it would benefit from taking a rest and getting a fresh listen to at a later time. I think there are a few good ideas, but the execution is not great and there is still much that would need to be worked on. But it's Sunday night on my side of the planet, time to submit.

I am quite happy with this week. Not necessarily about the final product but more about the process. I usually am the person who uses only the default presets in plugins but I spent some time working on the bass sound using different effects in Guitar Rig 6, aiming for a heavy bass sound a la Muse. This was inspired by getting to see Iggy Pop in concert this week. The bass tone was nasty! in a good way.
And also inspired by Iggy Pop were the horns and keys, hence I added some there.

Another thing that was a good exercise was working on programming drums that sound realistic instead of relying solely on loops. I think the result is not bad and should get better as I continue to practice.

Overall, a good exercise for a good aggressive punk rock track.

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.