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i haven't made a lot of music in 2024 so far. i've spent a month interstate and another month counting the days until i got put on the payroll again.
however, i've finally finished a proper track of mine in my usual way. i haven't even played songs my main synth, really, with the exception of an open mic i did the other week. it was really cool because i met a lot of like minded people who were all brilliant in a different way. they loved my songs even if that was the first time i touched my synth all year, so my playing wasn't too good. but open mics aren't about playing good.Â
i have also been messing around with DAWs and programming my own VSTs... FL studio is where it's at with DAWs. really really fun to make a song and get it done. my boyfriend has been a huge helper with it, i love making songs for him to slow and reverb as part of his music. i made a song just for him to do that on valentines day <3
programming VSTs is really cool too. ive always been interested in making synths, but there are many many roadblocks with hardware synths... i approve of free software even if there's really big drawbacks to it. like weird undocumented stuff that comes to bite you on the ass.
i recorded a song properly today, which i havent done in quite a while. it's quite fun, i miss working with my digital recorder. for me, everything with hardware like that Just Works. one of my cables broke but ive managed to bend it back in shape and it works(tm) for now. awesome 😎
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Throughout my whole life, I had awful music teachers. I had a piano teacher that made me sit on my hands because he was frustrated with the way I played scales and a music teacher in primary/middle school that gave me so many anxiety attacks that my doctor finally gave me a note so I didn’t have to go anymore.
I was told so many times throughout my life that I had no music talent, discouraged from going further than scales but all of those people (teachers!!!!) were wrong. They just couldnt fathom that I had a different musical brain than them.
When I was 23, I ended up having to move back home from LA after my job rescinded their promise to sponsor me for a visa. I was depressed and heartbroken and lonely. I went to school for writing but didn’t want to write anymore so I ended up opening GarageBand on my iPad.
I was inspired by all the things I could do on it. I suddenly felt like I was entering a new world. After making a couple beats, I started moving everything over to the laptop version of GarageBand. I bought big headphones, a cheap usb mic and a keyboard off of a guy from Craigslist and continued to tinker. One of my favorite things to do at the time was to download karaoke midi tracks of popular songs I loved, import them into GarageBand and change the instrument until I felt like I was making something new. I would then use my shitty mic to wail on top of it.
I used GarageBand for years after that to make tons of songs that I just uploaded to SoundCloud without thinking about it much. Eventually I got a controller/sampler and access to Ableton and thats when the fun really started.
My love for music making snowballed after that, I amassed more gear and skill and eventually made an album after a couple years. I was obsessed with making it and while I feel really whatever about it now, I don’t feel whatever about the experience.
Music has allowed me space to express parts of me that there are no words for. The best thing I can impart is to take advantage of this. There are some things that you can only explain with a kick drum or a sine wave or a really hard bassline.
Music is still a huge part of me! I made another album after that first and now I’m working on my next project. I recently reincarnated myself (everyone in the ~industry~ advised against this but I’m a different person now) and I’m excited to see what’s in store for me. I don’t expect to make money or become famous but music feeds my soul in a way nothing else can.
Have fun!!
May 4, 2024
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after compiling my tracks and getting ready for a gig i'm doing this saturday (at a houseparty - im "DJing" too - meaning im subjecting everyone to the album it's my life by talk talk), i've realised i have about 15 tracks or so. album recording time? yes indeed!
on my digital 8-track, where each track is in mono, my setup was originally thus:
tracks 1-2: 3ds (yes i use a DS for music)
tracks 3-4: synth
track 5: vox (via boss voice fx pedal)
i ensured the 3ds and synth were in glorious stereo, but not the vox. bad idea. unfortunately i didn't know better, something something muddy mix something something don't mixdown stereo reverb effects to mono. i'm not an audio engineer, i'm an electrical engineer student who dropped out because every "job opportunity" is making weapons... i was in it for synths, come on now...
i've removed the vox tracks on stuff ive put them on so far (about 6/15 tracks), and i'm going to redo them again in glorious stereo (tracks 5-6) when i'm ready... awesome 😎
Mar 14, 2024
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started in middle school wanting to be skrillex and made some heinous dubstep, got way too heady about music theory and wanted to be machinedrum for a bit to flex that I knew other time signatures than just 4/4, then i went to college to study music and realized music theory is actually dumb and 4/4 is sick and I wanted to be kaytranada and make the simplest lil house tunes to dance to, then a friend from college and I shared our love for 80s new wave music and John Hughes movies and we made some fun synthpop to play at an 80s prom night as our senior capstone project, then that friend and I graduated in the pandemic together and made depressed synthpop that we were way too heady about because we needed to prove that our music degrees were valuable and that we didn’t waste our time in undergrad and that we weren’t failures as artists, then I moved away because having a music degree in NYC in the pandemic got you no jobs and shelved music for a while because I felt like a failure, got into early digital production from the 80s and got sick of working with plug ins and switched to synths and drum machines instead, figured out what post-music degree life looked like for me and moved again for grad school to get an MBA so I could actually get jobs on the business side of music, then I covered a Todd Rundgren song with a friend that I met at grad school to represent establishing a healthier relationship to my music now that it wasn’t tied to my self worth/career and just generally being on a better path in life. now I just make weird synthy stuff for fun and only release music when I care enough about a song to finish it
TLDR I listened to skrillex once and now i’m studying finance because I’ll never live out my fantasy of actually being him
May 4, 2024
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i do not like being percieved
Feb 16, 2024
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after compiling my tracks and getting ready for a gig i'm doing this saturday (at a houseparty - im "DJing" too - meaning im subjecting everyone to the album it's my life by talk talk), i've realised i have about 15 tracks or so. album recording time? yes indeed!
on my digital 8-track, where each track is in mono, my setup was originally thus:
tracks 1-2: 3ds (yes i use a DS for music)
tracks 3-4: synth
track 5: vox (via boss voice fx pedal)
i ensured the 3ds and synth were in glorious stereo, but not the vox. bad idea. unfortunately i didn't know better, something something muddy mix something something don't mixdown stereo reverb effects to mono. i'm not an audio engineer, i'm an electrical engineer student who dropped out because every "job opportunity" is making weapons... i was in it for synths, come on now...
i've removed the vox tracks on stuff ive put them on so far (about 6/15 tracks), and i'm going to redo them again in glorious stereo (tracks 5-6) when i'm ready... awesome 😎
Mar 14, 2024