Tag: songs of two minutes or less

  • Darkwave songlet

    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.

  • On the Hobnob with Gilly

    a songlet written in 120 minutes or less

    Picture of an audio soundboard
    Photo by Anthony Roberts on Unsplash

    For new visitors: I occasionally set myself up with the challenge to write, record and produce a songlet (not a full song) in the space of 120-minutes, starting from scratch. I try to limit the song to about a minute in length.

    As a result, quality varies greatly and I don’t promise that there are any hits that will arise of this personal challenge. The quality over time will vary dramatically, depending on how my creativity level is faring for the day.

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  • Songlet — 28may25

    Picture of an audio soundboard
    Photo by Anthony Roberts on Unsplash

    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.]

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  • Songlet — 13may2025

    Picture of an audio soundboard
    Photo by Anthony Roberts on Unsplash

    One of the things I like to do to break up the creative cycle is to noodle around with music. As some of you may recall, I’ve played music in several different genres on a number of different instruments — bass, keys, guitar, 12-string guitar, mandola, drums/percussion (short-lived at the throne), and generally anything that comes my way (tabletops, trash percussion, violin bow on electric bass, vocal experimentation, etc.).

    Below is the product of my noodling around last night.

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  • Songlet — 06 apr 25

    Listening to some of the post-punk/darkwave/synthwave music I’ve been listening to these past few weeks has inspired me not only to pick up the bass once again, but to get back to playing around with some songwriting and DAW recording as well. [DAW = digital audio workshop, a home studio option for the modern era].

    Picture of an audio soundboard
    Photo by Anthony Roberts on Unsplash

    As I was discussing this direction in comments with Chris, I began to think that it might be interesting to at least some of you to share with folks the general thought process and progression of how some of us — or at least I do — get about to writing music.

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