Notescast

Here's The Wizards' Enlightening Conversation. (The name of the song is The Wizards' Enlightening Conversation.) It's a version of Two Robots Loitering at Guitar Center from before I figured out I could get a decent guitar sound in there. I still like it, too.

This is Two Robots Loitering at Guitar Center. I wrote it via this script , which picks progressions, then modes, and fills them out with riffs and lead phrases that fit those modes. (I tried out sometimes doing some Slayer-style chaos soloing, but I learned you need a human to do that. Or better programming.) It took way longer to get working than I expected, derailing my Synthruary a bit. Once I...

The difficulty of figuring out what matters and what doesn’t.

I got a small mixer partly so that I can play my guitar through an amp modeler on my computer. I like the mixer so far and was able to get a few amp sounds that I like better than what I can get on iOS, but there are issues with it working at the low latency I need it to work at (hence the pops in this recording). I had to do a lot of poking around just to get sound going. So, I see why so many pe...

This is Winding Down. I didn't use the Synthruary prompt because I was short on time. Basically, I wrote a tool to graph this into midi. Fun fact: It does not actually slow down.

My second Synthruary song is Message from Afar. It's another low song. I made a simple instrument that shifted the pitch by amount depending on the note in the sequence. It also delayed by an amount based on its position in the sequence. So, it was quite chaotic, though I didn't feel it was completely unrelated to what I was playing on the guitar. I did want a more complex sound than some offset s...

This is Energy Ladders, a piece that I recorded by triple-tracking myself playing an FM synthesis patch (the "twist" being that it has an extra cosine applied to the modulated signal) written in Pure Data. I need a push to reactivate the music writing after having to spend all of my time on other things, so I'm doing this as part of #synthruary , one of those things where you wear yourself out try...

Mild garage caper

Porting code and Ship of Theseus-ishness.

Thoughts loosely related to the book How to Move to Canada.

How my heat saving is going.

I heard Rush at the grocery store. Also, I thought about the appropriate level of helicoptering in parenting.

This is called Inchoate Burbler. It uses a lot of low, low frequencies. I actually played this on guitar, thanks to Pure Data's MIDI integration being really easy, despite my fears that it'd be a configuration nightmare.

The audio entries for this blog are now available as a podcast! Point your podcast app at smidgeo.com/notes/deathmtn/podcast.xml ! Podcastification made possible by static-web-cast .

This is 2022-01-01, both the song and today's date. We thought this phrase was catchy in our house, so I developed it a bit, but only slightly. Fun fact: I typo'd the file as 2021-01-10 at first.

What’s actually real in Pikmin?

This is another dungeon synth piece, though it's a bit different from the previous ones in character. It's called Reconsidering Your Destiny, and I was thinking of the kind of thing Basil Poledouris wrote for Conan's downtime scenes. The main melody is actually a riff I wrote a really long time ago, but slowed way down. I tried to stick to just that and some chords, but didn't. Future versions of...

This is Searching the Bogs, a song I wrote in response to a Junto prompt about gradually changing between two chords. I wrote a Pure Data patch to do this fairly literally with a bagpipe sample .

This is Centipedes of Many Sizes, intended to be a theme for a creepy situation. I almost iced this one because while I think I did hit the theme goal, I wasn't sure if this was something I'd listen to on its own merits. Then later, I decided it's fine to make single-purpose music sometimes. I guess I'll see in a few weeks if I enjoy it, even when I'm not trying to get into a spooky mood.

Brain wastefulness

Rain and visibility

This week's dungeon synth jam is called Walk Around the Pond Three Times, a name inspired by the guy, who said it sounded like music for walking around a pond. (It's not too far from my initial idea about it being about a magic pool.) The main arpeggio and vocal chords came really naturally, and I didn't have to dig that hard for the B section, either. I had it ending with some more complex chords...

Some accidental industrial music from a not-quite-right Pure Data patch.

Here's another dungeon synth piece, albeit a more upbeat one: Midnight Feast. I consider this one "composed ✔". There's stuff that needs to be cleaned up and some decisions I'm not sure about (there's four muted tracks that seemed to muddy it up), but I don't think the bones will change.

Random school walk encounters