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2004 > January

Rewriting the past, dancing with the present >>

Sunday, 11 January 2004

Another 7.5 minutes ::

I came across Sir Millard Mulch while browsing around on CD Baby last week. The guy completely embodies the spirit of “nothing exceeeds like excess.” And I like excess. He’s just finished a 300-song, 3-CD album—I was fascinated to follow the last stages of his effort to finish it. “4 minutes to go,” “2 minutes left.” My dad had written me from Thailand around the same time, mentioning that he has been working on a new edition of one of his books, writes about 1000 words a day, and at that pace can project that he will finish on time. So I had two sources of inspiration in resolving to try to produce a minute of music a day this year.

Monday night, I decided to let the last piece sit for awhile and start in on something else. When I visited my oldest collaborator, Pat, in Woodstock right after Thanksgiving, we recorded some jams where I was doing rhythmic synth loops with Reaktor while he played heavily-processed Stick and MIDI-triggered synths. Most were short, but one was 6 minutes and had some moments that clicked. After working with previous pieces played in free time, getting started with this one was much easier, it only took a little while to determine that the tempo was 144 bpm and line up the audio tracks at the beginning.

Several long evenings later, it too is close to being fully composed and just needs a few more hours of fine-tuning. It should be challenging to create even a rough mix, there are around 12 tracks (including 7 Absynths). The trick is going to be to keep the synth parts from forming a giant blob of atmospheric pudding.

References:
Drum programming ( 5 October 2004)

<< Making loops in Logic

2004 > January

Rewriting the past, dancing with the present >>

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