A Musical Thing
I’m always pretty busy but the nature of what I’m mostly up to date to day generally means I can’t share the majority of what I’m up to. One of the reasons I started this mailer was to catalogue all of the things I do that I can share, but for whatever reason gets mentally filed under ‘ahh nobody is interested in THAT.’ (see for reference my frankly electric previous post about the handle of my kitchen bin)
There’s a big interesting post en-route soon from December where I spent a week in bed with covid being strangely productive in a way that was new to me and which introduces some wild possible futures. Stay tuned.
Anyway. Yesterday I had a text message from a good friend that set me on a path to quickly writing and recording a piece of music for him. Some background - we often write dumb songs and send them back and forth. They are generally very stupid and a special treat for us, not the internet.
I will share the audio track with you though at the bottom of this page, I was quite pleased with how it came out and the fact that it took roughly an hour to make from start to finish.
When I first started making music (I’ve been playing guitar since I was a kid, I got my first electric guitar for my 13th birthday) writing a tune was very much like starting a drawing without knowing what I was going to draw. I’d noodle about until something sounded '“OKAY” and then I’d build around that. I did that for years. Now, I have a more definite idea of what I want it to sound like before sitting down with an instrument and then it’s more a process of getting that idea to align with what my hands are doing, and then doing sketching on top of it too. It’s quite enjoyable.
This track started with the drums and the baseline. I wanted it to start steady and rhythmic and then get 30% funkier (not full-on funky, cmon, I’m not that confident) at a certain point and then transition to something that played with the melodies of the rhythmic and the funky bits to bring it together. Then I used a couple of different guitar tones to fill it out a bit.
There’s also a small amount of piano on there but I’m an awful pianist. My fingers can make chord shapes, but the names of the chords they represent slide right out of my nose so my piano method is; 1. Record me smashing my palms into my midi keyboard. 2. Fix it in post.
It’s shameful really.
I’m working in GarageBand here because it’s really easy. I know there’s better alternatives but who cares, this took an hour.
A note for the guitar weirdos out there: The bass is a p-bass that was gifted to me in a broken-necked state from the fabulous Felt Mistress. The guitar I used is my Jazzmaster which is great for recording with - it’s got two wiring circuits so you can get radically different sounds while only tuning one guitar. A real lazy man’s guitar.
Like I said, it was a fun hour spent noodling about yesterday morning. I don’t share much of the music I make. I guess it’s because it doesn’t really have much of a purpose beyond being interesting to me. I’m looking through a folder of musical sketches at the moment and there’s quite a lot of stuff in there. It’s not all good, and I’d hazard a guess that some of it is actively bad, but it was all enjoyable to make.
The next post will have zero guitars in it I promise.
Anyway - here it is.
If you were thinking “I didn’t subscribe to this newsletter to get an email about some stupid song” well, it turns out you did. Just imagine what this email COULD have been if finally sorting out my underdesk cable management* problems was the only thing I’d done this week. Just imagine.
*so, so deeply satisfying to finally get all my cables sorted.
Came together in an hour you say? That must have felt magical. Very diggable.
That's a good bass line, real funky! Never stop sharing stuff like this :D