i dig it
i’ve been writing a lot of songs lately. here’s me improvising over a little section from something i was writing yesterday, with some harmonic digressions
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my audio doodles never get past this stage
i have thousands
it rules
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i have some fruity loops savefiles that are old enough to purchase alcohol in america
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Thanks for getting this started @meauxdal ^^
This is a half-finished track I’ve been really excited about but haven’t made progress on in several weeks because of all the craziness going on in Lily’s and my life right now. I was putting together an album before all that stuff got going—when it all blows over hopefully I’ll have the space in my life to finish it off, 'cos it’s like 80% done all together or something.
Anyway, this track is in the alternate tuning of 53-EDO, which supports diatonic music very effectively (as you can hear) but allows for especially piquant leading tones and strong, warm resolutions as well as thornier harmonies than are available in 12-EDO, and more distinctive changes in key (and 53 different keys instead of 12 
)—it’s like a diatonic space with more options for each interval (like there are three different minor sevenths, four different tritones, etc. kind of depending on your opinion) which you can take advantage of for voice leading purposes and harmonic color and so on. I had this kind of epiphany a couple months ago about how I could create an interface for my softsynths to allow for composition in this tuning within the limitations of a traditional DAW, and this is kind of the first piece where I’m really putting it to work. The track starts to gets sketchy around 1:53; for example the bass and drums there are just to mark out the chord progressions and basic rhythmic structure, they’re going to be more energetic and syncopated ultimately, and there’s no lead instrument yet, etc. etc.
Very pretty 
Reminds me somewhat of Bill Evans.
Now you’ve got me curious I wanna say “share 'em! share 'em!” but I don’t know if you feel like it…if you do though I’m definitely curious.
Here’s a Fruity Loops track I made with my friend Sasha when we were in high school, which is almost that long ago. I wonder how many other people have things like this lurking on their PCs.
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track_10.ogg is cool af. very complex, dark, inhuman vibes. i particularly like around 1:11 where shit goes off the rails into a very aggressive and kind of scary energy. intense. i actually kind of like how 1:53 draws back a little bit, maybe there actually could be some kind of breath moment before the syncopation and lead come in there
this is also pretty cool, though a very aurally aggressive, sharp mix with lots of high frequencies. i like the rhythm and harmonic implications
all my stuff from 15-20 years ago is already released on meauxdal.bandcamp.com so i have nothing new to share from that era. let’s be honest tho, i know y’all ain’t listened to that shit (
) so here you go anyway
here’s one i like from mid-late 2007
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Years ago I had a pirated copy of some Baby’s First Tracker (fake edit: eJay!) with a bunch of samples and playing with that was so good. And the music bit was my favorite part of Mario Paint.
I should mess around with something like that again
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Thanks! That’s interesting that you would call it, like, dark and inhuman, or like aggressive and scary—I don’t know that I necessarily intended it to have those kinds of qualities, but if you think it’s fun on that basis, then obviously that’s cool. 
I think I did want it to be intense, but kind of more in a thrilling, rollercoasterlike way. But, yeah, I guess that could easily come off in a lot of different ways depending on how you take it. I think I’m happy as long it sounds exciting.
Something I will say on that basis though—the piece before this on the album, which this piece is specifically designed to follow, is kind of dark and ominous perhaps, although that too I think depends on the listener probably, but that definitely had an impact on my thinking—I wanted something intense enough to come after this:
(This is also in 53-EDO; with sawtooth waves like this you can really sense the character of the tuning, because the great closeness of intervals like fifths and major thirds to their equivalent harmonics leads to distinctive slow beating in the upper partials which I think is quite pretty. You can actually see that pretty clearly in the spectrogram here.)
I probably will do something like that, yeah, at least for a moment there—I don’t want it to be monotonously intense, I think in some ways it even brings the intensity out more if you have little moments to breathe like that. A bit later after this actually I might briefly return to the starting material; I’m kind of thinking of giving it a structure inspired by Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments—not so much in terms of the constant abrupt changes in time signature and rhythmic feel exactly although obviously I do some of that, because I’d like it to have a more straight-ahead high octane feel by comparison, but more in terms of like, the sort of cellular approach of like lots of these different sort of bits of music ideas that you arrange into a tapestry in a sort of sundry formal structure that’s, y’know, more variegated than a traditional classical structure, or something like that.
Very cute! ^^ It’s not exactly the same obviously, more dancy/twitchy , but it reminds me a little bit of Kuedo’s Severant.
With enough creativity you can make cool music with like, any software that makes sound! Even software that’s not necessarily intended for making music with.
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Okay, more guitar! This is really a lifeline for me right now creatively.
Since yesterday I’ve been experimenting with a distortion pedal again after months of just playing clean. This is also using a tape echo pedal. Of course the sound of big chords through it is very nice. I think this might make a pleasing film soundtrack.
For whatever reason I’ve found it kind of challenging so far to get more lead-ish sounds out of the distortion pedal that I’m pleased with, especially without accompaniment, but here I feel like it went well.
This is clean, but with the same settings on the tape echo as with the prior recording. Without distortion, the “beat” of the tape echo delay is more apparent, so I played more to that.
This one is without any effects at all, just straight into the amp. Probably the duskiest of all of these. There are certain moments in this I’m really, really pleased with. (I’m not entirely sure where that ~120 Hz. hum came from, but please forgive it. 
)
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this is so fascinating to me
i do get some darkness, maybe even a little dirge-like, funereal quality perhaps; but to my ear there’s also definitely hope there. a certain belief, or serenity.
it’s really quite beautiful
apparently so!
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Awww thank you so much! I partially said “kind of dark and ominous perhaps” because when I played it for Lily, she thought it would make a good theme for a character like Grahf in Xenogears. Just to me personally, i think it sounds like, portentious and dramatic, but not necessarily portending something clearly good or bad—something maybe with promise, but also some danger, etc., portentious in a mixed way. I have to admit though, I don’t really think much about stuff like that when I’m composing usually unless I’m scoring something; I just thought those chords sounded nice together, I did it very by feel like I thought about the voice leading and stuff to make the progression work, the shapes of the voices and the like, the different intervals making up the chords, etc., but all of those things are kind of just like, totally technical musical things—I ultimately just went on a visceral level in terms of like, “oh that sonority sounds cool” or whatever, as opposed to composing towards a specific concept. Anything I would say about its overall atmosphere is kind of like, after the fact because of that. In any case I’m glad you like it ^^
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for a little bit i was making these videos about my process doing stuff in a tracker but i actually haven’t really made any new music in a while because i’ve been working on visuals (some of which were posted in the music thread)
there are a couple of these on my youtube channel but i’ll post this one here
for context i’m working on a much more involved album than i’ve made in the techno form before, experimenting with more “composed” patterns and toning down the improvisational nature of my “normal” livesets to try and Say Something with techno. something about the distance between me and my family and how it’s hard to reconcile because they went through a hugely traumatic event that they’re probably still processing and i can’t really expect them to have the language to understand my political leanings but sometimes i still wish they did?
it’s hard to say this kind of thing in abstract music! the reason why i’m taking so long with it is because i’m trying to figure this out - currently attempting to do live visuals along with the music and will probably have some spoken word pieces that play out as well, but it’s all new stuff to me so i have a lot of learning to do
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a cool thing to do is make some bullshit every time you steal a new plugin, using that plugin
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my version of this is using an entirely new tracker/program every time. i have a problem!!
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no, that’s just sensibly exploring a new platform
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pretty 
I like the whooshiness
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finally got around to recording some of the raw material for some tracks i want to work on.
here’s a slice of a 909 and 303 being processed live through a ‘cybernetic’ system gating the output
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i did an impromptu cover of 100 Watt Horse’s great tune “On The Way Down”