Bird droppings

I'm learning to write music. I think I'll document my education here, because why the fuck not?

Messing Around: Here was the first thing I put together. Just a silly thing as I learned the interface. It kinda sounds like part of a military video game background music. Just 24 seconds of stuff.

Anxiety: The first real "song" type thing I put together. It's short, but it's a little more complex and involves more stuff... I also felt like this was some sort of video game background.

Mechanical Savior: Don't ask about the names. Whatever. This song was my first "full song." I put together some loops and then composed them together. I also soloed over them at the end, and honestly, while I like some of the ideas there, I'd want to clean it up or remove them entirely. I do like where I was trying to go, but I don't think I got there, and didn't want to put in the effort to make it all the way. I wanna come back to it though, because I think I can improve it. Some bits in the solo really make me wince. Ugh.

Dark Rave: Seriously, don't worry about the names. They're mostly random, tbh. This one is probably my favorite so far. I really like several parts of it, and I could actually see myself listening to it.

Bridge Song: Aborted. I tried to take the Final Fantasy Bridge song and do something with it, but my lack of skill with the tools rapidly got in my way, and I couldn't figure out what I could do about it. It was really frustrating.

Project B: I decided I wanted to try making a fast song. OMG is this hard. At first, I couldn't figure out how to make fast drums, so I watched a bunch of videos online to see how they do drums, and I see you use cymbals a lot more. I learned while working on this that they're called hihats. I also learned what BPM meant! LIke, I knew it was "beats per minute," but I had no idea what a "beat" actually was. How many bass drum notes there were? I had no idea. Turns out, it's quarter notes! OR really whatever notes are at the bottom of the timing thing.

After this, I continued to work on trying to get something to go over those drums, and was finding it nigh impossible. I took a break to work on my scales, and found that my fingers remember all of my white key major scales, which is nice. I'm working on relearning the black key major scales and moving onto minor scales.

Today at work, I'm listening to a tutorial on how to use ableton to make EDM, and discovering a lot about how to think about music. First of all, a strong drum beat is more valuable than a fast drum beat. You can get good dance music without it being breakneck fast. I might abandon Project B to try some of the ideas I'm learning from this. I also found that I might be able to get that cool synth the dude uses, Xfer Serum for $10 a month from something called Splice

Avery thinks I shouldn't bother with a paid synth right now and just try this free one. We shall see.

I wanna listen to more music to learn this stuff, but I also want to look at tutorials to get a better sense of how to "see" the music. My symbolic library for representing and understanding music is so poor, I don't really understand the structure of what I'm usually listening to. It's just this mass of nice sounds, but what is in there doesn't make a lot of sense to me. God, there's so much to learn here.

Wow. After less than a week of practicing playing my keyboard, I've already reached the point where I can play simple songs by sight alone. A simple song is one where one hand is playing a single note at a time. I am improving my speed on figuring out what notes to push on more complex songs, where I play more than a single note at a time. And of course, I still have the theme song to Star Trek: The Next Generation memorized, and that's a decently complex song. Both hands playing multiple notes simultaneously.

My rhythm is still completely and utterly foobar right now. I push the notes in the right order, but fuck all if they come out in anything even beginning to approximate the right rhythm.

Luckily, theragtagpoet has offered to give me lessons to educate me on the ways of playing the piano.

Gaia Consort has put out a new CD. Everyone with money go pre-order it!

Go here to read lyrics and listen to songs.

Perils of Poly is a rather amusing and true song about some of the realities of being poly.

And who can't love Turtles all the way down?

Goodnight's lyrics seem to strike home with the very heart of why I'm poly.

Epica: Cry for the Moon is a REALLY neat music video. Check it out!

Polly Wally is just funny.