Notescast

This is The Uneven Staircase, which I did for the Disquiet Junto challenge #567. It requires you to write a piece that uses 5/8, 6/8, and 7/8 time. I did that by writing a riff that has a 5, 6, and a 7 part glued together so that it has a total of 18 eighth notes worth of time. So, the drums just play in 3/4 most of the time (9 quarter notes or 18 eighth notes can fit in three bars of 3/4.) I also...

The classic sounds of Lego sifting

I started working on metal riffs again. The problem is, you have to come up with more than one.

I fit one more loop into Looptober: A Ninja Weighing the Pros and the Cons, which you can loop as many times as you want. I'm pretty sure that it is in some part derived from Ninja Gaiden, which is hard-lodged into my brain. You can listen to it if you are a ninja that has some hard decisions ahead of them of if you just want to think about a ninja in that situation.

This didn’t fit the song, but I liked these chords.

Tech talk: Pixels and subpixels. Tried to make a Small Findings segment, but there wasn’t enough time.

Sometimes, I think I’ve come up with a riff, but it is actually a riff I used to listen to all the time that I just haven’t listened to lately. In the case of this one, in the midst of voice memoing it, I realized it was the …And Justice for All’s verse riff.

This Looptober loop is called Outcropping of Death. Wonky end-of-day chugging and chaotic drums.

Today's blatantly Metroid-inspired Looptober loop is Corridor. It was done relatively quickly. It's an ambient one, and I don't really know if it works for a long time because I didn't have time to listen to it a lot, which can be a problem, but who knows, maybe it'll hold up. I think it does work for four reps, though.

Today's Looptober loop is Preparing Lapsang Souchong. It has a sample I recorded while making tea.

This is Stockholm, which I made for Looptober. It's actually three 3.5 second loops repeated 25 times. There's two dryer parts and one bass part. It's one of those attempts to make the irregular seem regular through repetition.

I spent quite a bit of the day trying to make a FFT decomposition tool with JUCE so I could make a particular idea I had for the Wikimedia jingle contest happen. I basically got as far as getting the buffer chain working, with no FFT, and I figured out a problem I had with nested vectors. So, at the end of the night, I did a cheap version of my idea by manually applying bandpass filters to a chord...

I’m going to enter the Wikimedia audio logo (AKA jingle) contest. This first attempt is too staid and un-modern, but it’ll work as something someday.

I'm trying this out as my exit music. I think this will be heard less often because people often exit all at once, so I went with something slightly more dissonant and attention-getting. (It's an adapted outtake from Tower Climb.)

Unfortunately, I have to use Zoom several times a week, like everyone else. So, I might as well take advantage of them supporting entrance and exit music. I'm trying this out as my entrance music.

At one point, I got the idea to put the kind of grunting exclamations you find in arcade beat 'em ups from a certain era into Tower Climb. I wasn't quite able to pull them off, and even if I was, I think they might be too obstrusive.

Here is Tower Climb, a song that may help you if you are ascending platforms while beating up foes. This is one of those songs whose first 70% comes together in couple hours, then the rest comes together in three weeks. Part of it was that I feel that a solo like the organ solo in that song must go a Certain Way, but I don't play enough solos to know exactly how to describe that to myself, so ther...

Blind taste tests: Not a silver bullet!

While trying to come up with the solo for another song, I made this commercial jingle for a Cool Breeze Product.

In some ways, I liked this “just put in whatever you got solo” but had to cut it.

Ever think you remember a song, then don't realize that you don't until you start playing it?

Imagine some dialogue about time crystals or something going on during this riff.

I think these chords are EmDim7+6, F#mDim7, G2, E4. But also it might not be worth naming them.

This keyboard solo is too busy, but it’s getting there, I think. Even though it’s far from improvisational, which he’d hate, I’m a little inspired by the Jan Hammer interview on Heavy Metal Bebop.

Via a bug, I accidentally generated this monotone, which I think has interesting textures. It's sort of like Taps, if it only had one long note.