I decided that I needed something to shake up things a bit, some incentive so I didn’t keep dithering around when I was creating music. I often catch myself playing around and never actually writing anything while I was horsing, so I said to myself: “Self, you need to have some motivation to do more than press buttons and listen to sounds.”
“Oh no, what are we going to do now, Boss?”
“I want you to pull a They Might Be Giants and give yourself some constraints.”
“Yeah, how so, Boss?”
“Self, I want you to write something at least 30 seconds long within the same time as allowed for MTV (you remember Music Television, don’t you?) to showcase alternative bands back in the eighties. I want you to write a song in…. 120 Minutes. Just like the program… And… TMBG’s Dial a Song…”
“But… they didn’t have to write songs in that time frame, it was 120 minutes of music videos and the Johns from They Might be Giants were two guys and they assuredly took more than—”
“A song… In 120 minutes.”
“Hoo boy, it won’t be exactly great when I do. And I am not going to try to add vocals in that timeframe. And it won’t be a full song.”
“Ok, then… a songlet. Without singing.”
“Sigh. You are such a slave-driver.”
“Chop-chop, Minion!”
So here is tonight’s little songlet. I’m not sure how often these will pop up in a post, and it’s just for funsies, okay. A challenge to myself from the big guy upstairs.
For those who care about such things: We have here a sampled drum track that sounded like something I could work from. I tossed on some prefab synths consisting of a moody saw wave as the basis of the patch, originally constructed around G2, but then bumped up to G4 later on in the development of the snippet to brighten up the sound a bit. Set up a sequenced set of keys that followed the key of Gm relative to the key being pressed. Got in the mood for some power chords to crunch things up, so plugged in a electric guitar and crunched things up. It didn’t really need more bass at that time, but I wanted something to add some punch, so I grabbed a patch for bass with high chorus and some pop to it and played high on the keyboard in the style of Peter Hook from Joy Division/New Order (around G4). After deciding the low end was too muddy, I bumped up the original keyboards to ride along with the bass to give it some brightness it was missing, slipped in a few effects, mostly reverb (some compression, some echo, some EQ) did a bit of copy-pasta to bring out to 48secs of your time that you’ll never get back. Added a fade out to make up for the lack of a fade in and… had 10 minutes to spare out of my 120 minutes.
I’m not entirely happy with the equalization and some of the muddier nature of the song, but what can anyone expect in a mad dash to record five instruments in two hours in and attempt to make something that almost seems like it might be a song? If burdened with more parts (e.g., chorus, bridge, intro, outro)?
And no, I had no idea what I was going to have it sound like when I started. I just started making it up (actually, I had originally considered doing something more Cure-like, but those power chords took over and wouldn’t leave the room when I let them come in for a gander).
As always, I appreciate any comments about the results. Realize before you do so, however, that I set myself impossible limits on purpose to drive creation versus perfection, and I recognize there are shortcomings in the result. So, be kind, please. This is for fun, not to be a serious songwriter.
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