I recently decided to take the plunge and get a hardware synth to stop my dallying and futzing around with software emulation of synths.
For several years now, I’ve intended to lean less on pre-loaded patches and work on an understanding towards how a patch is created from the basic soundwave (sine, saw, square, pulse, etc.) and massaged into the sounds you hear in music — whether it is someone like Depeche Mode or cinema’s Vangelis.
I have played with the software synths on my digital audio workbench (DAW), and purchased a few other software variants in an attempt to find something that “clicks” with this wee walnut I store where most folks store a brain.
“I’m not a Beatles fan, but I am a John Lennon fan.”
I'm sick to death of seeing things From tight-lipped, condescending, mama's little chauvinists All I want is the truth Just give me some truth, now
I've had enough of watching scenes With schizophrenic, egocentric, paranoiac, prima-donnas All I want is the truth, now Just gimme me some truth
No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of Tricky Dicky Is going to Mother Hubbard soft soap me With just a pocketful of hope Money for dope Money for rope
Amazing, isn’t it, how topical this song is 50 years later?
Stuffies doing their cover of the Lennon song.
That song was always a blast to busk in downtown Minneapolis around 1989.
Did I mention I occasionally did “air guitar performances” while singing (sic) with an empty guitar case? I took great efforts to carefully put the “guitar” back into the case when I was done with my performance.
Okay, singing was probably a bit strong of a word to use here. You get the idear tho’, right?
I recently upgraded my DAW and have been meaning to play around with it AND get more familiar with synth soundcrafting rather than using the synth presets.
Some of this is crafted sound, some of it is presets, about half-and-half.
I’m just playing around, not sure if this will end up as something.
Detail free description: I was looking for a mid-speed darkwave sound that was upbeat enough to dance to with an emulated classic Roland 808 drum machine sound (although I may modify it).
Slightly more detail: The arp and one layer of the pads are crafted sounds and the original bass sound was as well, but I wanted something punchier and livelier than what I was getting, so I went with a preset and tweaked it. The guitar is a great preset I live for guitar, so I did almost nothing with it. 134 bpm, for the curious.
This is two sections, repeated. If I were to flesh this out, I would add some bridges and empty space between. But this is something just cobbled together in about two or three hours and, while it was interesting to play around, I’m not sure how much mileage I can pull from it (it would need lyrics, singing and full engineering work to make it sound better). We’ll see. I can already hear the arp levels were lower than I intended. And there is zero panning.
Anyway, another one of my songs in less that two minutes thingies. This one clocks in currently at around 65 seconds, so you’ll only have around that much of your time to demand back from the timelords.
Too scared to join the military Too dumb to be a cop Citizen I.C.E.
This is an old song of theirs, formerly called “Citizen C.I.A”, and lyrically reworked to reflect current events. The rest of the lyrics are in-video.
I have to admit, I should probably listen to more Dropkick Murphys than I do, and that will probably change in the coming weeks. Every time I encounter news about the band, I see them in an increasingly positive light. I don’t have to like every song a band writes to know them to be stand-up folks that deserve my support.
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.
I’m probably overlooking quite a few artists, but it sure seems like the vast majority of them these days are very serious about their music.
That’s not to say that I didn’t listen to and work with musicians in the past who were very serious about their music, but it seemed there were more folks in earlier eras who were a lot less serious about it. Or, they were serious musician who leaned into satire instead of saying things like, “We are artistes, not baboons. Go away and baboon elsewhere.”
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.
As I hit publish on the piece falling yesterday, I was visited with the memory of recording my very first song which, of course, had very little to do with the piece written yesterday.
Honestly? I’d forgotten the event entirely. But fragments of the song came back and I couldn’t figure out until this morning why the song sounded familiar.
I haven’t heard John Denver’s song in multiple decades (until today) and yet… It comes to mind for whatever reasons such things come to mind when I started to think about my impending road trip beginning about midweek. It doesn’t even fit with the theme in which the song was thought to be written for, which is generally how these things work. I’m not going off war, nor standing outside the door of a young beau looking for a last kiss before I leave, and I plan to be back home by the end of next week (so I know when I’ll be back again).
