Notescast

Made a chill loop for me to have on while I do things like putting away dishes.

Guitar mistake minutiae!

I meant to try to fix my mic, and I finally did it! Actually, it turned out to not be broken. To find that out, I first had to find it, which took 40 minutes because I stuffed it in a bag labeled "headphones". Then, I spent some time searching for my preamp before I concluded that I probably threw it away. When I plugged it into my mixer (which I probably got because my preamp wasn't working), it...

I (laboriously) jammed up a couple of riffs last night, then rerecorded (and revised) them this morning for the Junto prompt where you make a track that other people can add to. Here it is with a beat behind it. But if you want a guitar track to mess with, go at it on SoundCloud .

This is Middlesex Fells. The song, not the forest preserve. It was made using a two-second sample I recorded there last weekend, though, along with a version of my graph-controlled granular synth tool that I added a delay feedback loop to . ( This is what that ugly character looks like. ) This is my response to the Junto prompt to use a field recording and feedback.

I have a decent start on a space adventure song.

This piece is called In a Bomb. I wrote a crude granular synthesizer (a thing that plays piece of samples, usually fast enough that it doesn't sound like the sample anymore). It lets you draw graphs that control how many pitches to play, where in the sample it should start, how much of the sample should be played, and how long each event should last. So, all of these things change over time in the...

This is The Sound of Carrying On No Matter How Terrible It Gets. That's the name of the song! The latest Junto prompt asks you to do something out of tune, so I put my phone next to my amp and started recording myself playing these two riffs and detuning the A string every so often. I listened back to a version of this the other day and hated it, then listened again today and hated it again. Then,...

Here's Pressures Accumulating, a piece for (synth) strings, trumpet, and drums. The solo was put together partly via guitar and via this script . I think it turned out fairly heavy for a string piece.

I came up with this riff, which I think is pretty good, but then I realized there’s only about a 20% chance I’ll actually get it into a song. Sometimes the idea of recording metal guitar just wears me out before I even start.

I recorded this sick riff I thought while walking in Davis Square. I thought no one could hear me, but some guy looked at me.

I had to go to Nashville for work. There’s a bird outside my AirBnB that sounds like it’s saying “thirsty thirsty”.

I implemented sliding between pitches instead of ending an event and starting a new one with the new pitch in Flooding. As you may know, the more complex a program gets, the hairier it gets to add things to it, so this one took a day. And as I suspected, the change does not really work with the piece. It is hilarious, though, and I'll probably do something with this later.

So, this is Grow Together with the Miasma. I put it together for this Junto challenge about evolution . I worked on the web app that generated it to and from the train to New York and felt like I was almost done when I sat down to "finish" it Monday night. Very very predictably, I was not almost done when I sat down to finish it Monday night. I ended up finishing it at 5 AM. It is a fork of Floodi...

The train hut man

Here is some Sunday comfysynth for you. It is called Rabbit's Shop. I had to give up on some things to keep it comfy! The NES-style RPG dialogue wouldn't fit in, nor would the harp glissando . I also had tempo changes that sounded good but would probably prevent people from moving this to the background part of their listening.

This ending was Too Much.

I figured out how to make something like NES dialogue sounds, and I spent a while trying to fit it into a song, but it just wouldn’t go. So, to assuage the part of my brain that was really into it, I’m posting it here.

Assumptions about house occupants

Finally generated some low end for Flooding. Here's a sample, though I don't know if it will end up like this.

Here is Landing. Parts of it were originally made for a client, but they found it to be too intense for their needs. Since it no longer needs to be a chill podcast intro, I have added a couple of middle sections and made it a touch more intense.

I tried it out, and I think strings and drum kit can work together.

This is Eighth Gear, for which I brought back my robots . This time, I directed them to change keys every four bars for a total of eleven key changes per this Junto challenge . This time, there's two guitar parts and bass, along with a concrete theme that I had them come back to instead letting things be all random choices within patterns.

A live look at what’s in Alfred’s Basic Piano Library Lesson Book Level 1B. Also: the true Frere Jacques.

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...