It was a bit of a surprise when an old song I had written way back when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth came into my head yesterday and wouldn’t get out. Much to my amazement, when I pulled out the guitar, the chord progression and rough playing style came back to me almost instantly.
For a bit of perspective, the song, “May Faire” has never been performed. So, it’s not like I spent uncountable hours rehearsing the song. I may have toyed around with it whenever I could not come up with something new for a few years, but it was not on the forefront of my thinking.
The song below is not a new song, but one I posted a short while ago. I am trying to create a reusable set of Gutenberg blocks in-post to borrow from for future audio-oriented posts to make the songs/spoken-word stand out better as an audio file.
I have a few other formatting ideas that I want to play with, but if you have an opinion, please let me know in the comments (on either music or player design). Let me know if you are having problems rendering. If so, let me know the platform (WordPress Reader/web), device class (mobile/laptop/tablet) and browser (default for your device if you use the WP Reader app) .
Thanks!
[07 dec 25 update:]
Yesterday’s attempts didn’t have the intended appearance when it comes to viewing on WordPress Reader,. I can still leverage what I learned, but I’m going to attempt a new approach here and see how it looks dark, (stack on mobile, header large font not H4, copyright no-call):
Yeah, no matter how you tweak it, the appearance is the same on WordPress Reader. A bit broken with “no-stack” on mobile, but looks good stacked. Seeing as it matters not at all for WordPress Reader, I will just decide on a favorite when I set it up later (and avoid using rows on the copyright line, because it breaks in feeds and WP Reader, but I’m just trying to be fancy there and the fancy isn’t required).
I’m leaning towards the dark variant above (using “media and post”), feel free to pipe up if something absolutely does not work in your mind.
It’s been a spell since I added a song to the series of posts that was originally intended to look backwards to look forwards for music discovery.
I was disappointed with the discovery process, which either sent me to bands I already knew full well or directed me to bands that sounded nothing at all like my “seed” music.
Rose Chronicles, copyright status unknown
After yesterday’s post quoting an opinion piece writer who has essentially declared that we have settled for the enshittification of our culture via the monetization of everything artistic thanks to the internet, I was left thinking about the last time I really enjoyed most of the music I was discovering. I can safely say that started to wane at some point near the end of the 90s.
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.”
As I mentioned yesterday, I was needing to get out of my writer head, who wants nothing at all to do with writing (for whatever reason). So I have.
I had previous mentioned my intentions of buying virtual synth and maybe upgrading to the subscription model for my DAW. Then I read the fine print: that subscription price on the DAW was only good for a year, and then the price would double. Great deal at the half-off price, terrible at the standard price.
Well, the last thing I want to do is lock myself out of my own music when I decide to no longer subscribe, so I opted out of that plan and redirected those earmarked funds to the second virtual synth I had my eyes on, thereby saving myself some money in the process.
One of the things I have been considering is futzing about with music again. Like creative writing in my previous post, that also has a well that dries up, especially as I don’t usually have collaborators to bounce ideas off anymore. And my tooling around is more for the purposes of learning new recording, engineering and playing techniques than it is for performance. Much like publishing my writing, I am more interested in the joy of creation than I am in the idea fame or profit.
[Trigger Warning: Musician-speak ahead and I don’t explain the terms I am using. Enter at your own risk.]
Well, that would be two recent projects that just don’t have what I think is needed for prime time.
First, the song I was working on as an experiment where folks write the lyrics in a certain genre to a song of mine they never heard… I tried to make something of that last week and the initial takes just felt awkward. It’s not for the lack of Chris and Sandy’s lyrical talents; rather, I just couldn’t find a way to make either of them work well. Close, but no banana, as they say. It ended up feeling as if I should be doing less, rather than more, on the lyrics front. And my mind is blank for what would work, if you can believe that crap.
As an experiment, it was fun, but I don’t think anyone would thank me for putting the result out with their name associated. So, I’ll let it rest a bit and see if I either get a better sense of rhythm and flow to the lyrics, or if I come up with some of my own.
In my post where I mentioned I will be busy this summer with things that take me away from posting here quite so frequently, I alluded to a lack of connectivity for a spell as being one of those reasons. Well, those plans are starting to firm up and I will be incommunicado near the end of July for about 5-10 days.
I was trying to locate some old files to see if I could recreate a song that I never finished to… get around to finishing it.
The only problem (if I could find the files) is that they were possibly recorded using an obsolete DAW (digital audio workbench): either a much older Cakewalk or via Sony Acid (which I abused and made into a DAW when it was really just a loop manager) file. It was a song that was mostly done except for the vocal tracks and some management of song structure, but it might be lost and I’ll have to recreate it from scratch if I can figure out just what the heck I did ten or more years ago [Update: Found it! It is only six years old and I have the compatible files. Now I just have to decide if I want to modify it or keep it as-is.]
