Notescast

This is my rearrangement remix of Subbubbling, which I crunched out a few weeks ago to submit to Music for Sleep. It has since been released as part of the compilation. I wondered if I'd like it with fresh ears, and it turned out I did not. So, here is a cut that I think leads better and has levels that are more balanced. (Cutting two tracks did half the work.) It's based on a field recording of a...

This is Moving Walkways. It's a tribute to moving walkways throughout the United States and all over the world.

Here is The Orb, Ascending. No one said ascending was going to be easy. (There's a lot of low humming in this, so it may be hard to hear without headphones or with computer speakers.)

Working up from the bottom

I didn’t quite capture it, the acoustics of the Tufts music building’s lobby is really great for ambience. Things like people walking and typing sound good.

Accidental stealth mission

This is Imagined Scandinavian Dance. I thought this sounded interesting, so I recorded it on my phone, then recorded backing chords. I thought maybe I'd develop and use the riff later. Arbitrarily, though, I decided I should keep some things spontaneous and picked this to fill that spontaneity quota! So, instead, I retrofitted a drum beat to it, and here it is. I have no idea what Scandinavian dan...

Cicada waves

I tried to continue the pump up downstairs with more of the Pikmin match, but it turns out that moment is over. He said he wanted to think quietly during breakfast, so I switched it to Baba Is You.

The guy has put on some Pikmin march to pump himself up for the first day of school.

The only thing I did for music programming today was get Scramble to handle mono .

This is Scrambled Plea. It turned out less musical than I would have liked, which was a known risk, but I think it's interesting for now. I wrote Scramble to make this.

Bonus is at the vet. A hard day for him has started.

On surly garage guy

Alex gave me a guitar. It’s a Fender Squier, so I feel free to mess it up. The first thing I did was change the strings and tune down to B. Kinda cool, but the floppy strings feel very awkward, so I might actually buy heavy strings. I might see if there’s some interesting cheap pickups out there. And I’m also considering cutting the body into another shape.

Impromptu soundtrack for reading about microplastics getting into your food .

Today in inappropriate beats

Shoe and cat pee

I wrote (most of) a song that’s mostly in 15/8 that I’ve been trying to play up to speed for months now. I still play it really awkwardly. However, this is still better than it was, unbelievably. (To be clear, it’s not the 15/8 meter than makes it hard for me to play. It’s that I’m not sure to playing two sixteenth notes at one pitch then immediately playing another pair at another pitch on anothe...

I wrote this on the plane while barely able to hear what I was writing. I don’t recommend that technique.

This is Ghost Banquet Speech and Award Presentation. It's a dungeon synth piece mostly, except that it has a beat. I started it around Christmas of last year or earlier, and came up with most of it in a a day. Then, I got stuck around January trying lots of solos. I've been stuck on two other pieces for a while, so I came back to this yesterday and edited the solo a little, and I thought it was go...

My looping tool is working enough that I can make obnoxious stuff like this now.

Music perception is weird and will always be weird. This riff sounded great when I came up with an hour ago. Listening back, it just sounds like Mandatory Suicide, except not good.

I tried to come up with some riffs via jamming, which is always ill-advised. I was going for something death metal and ended up with the kind of borderline-thrash death metal that was around in 1990. AKA, basically Slayer played through a Metalzone. I am ambivalent about this outcome.

Parents Just Don’t Understand Clapping. (Ah, I guess that was a little mean. Credit to them for participating!)