Monday, March 1, 2010
Um...new post?
I haven't updated this blog in, well, a little more than half a year. I'd like to say I got sick of blogging, which I guess is part of it, but the truth is that I hit a music-appreciation wall. I hadn't discovered any new music that excited me and I was becoming frustrated with my own musical pursuits.
I had set out with my friend John to make dark, metal-infused dance music. We decided to keep everything in house, so the work that would normally be distributed throughout a band rested on the two of us. Using Logic Express 7, a borrowed guitar, and my bass, we set out on our task and spent the better part of a year pounding away incessantly, hitting wall after wall. It was the most intensive musical education I've ever received and to say I understand more about song construction and the recording process would be a dramatic understatement. It was also completely and totally maddening.
We wanted our first songs to be perfect, and that's a tall order for any song. Nothing sounded right. It was not uncommon for me to sit in my room and listen to some unremarkable percussive sound like partially close hi-hat hits for hours, comparing them, layering them, EQing and processing them, etc., etc. The variations were endless and as long as I was convinced the right approach was still out there, I kept digging. I bought intensive video tutorials, read message boards, scoured Youtube for demonstrations, and would research bands that I like to learn how they produced and what they used. Towards the middle of the summer, with John and I disagreeing about everything via email, I hit a wall. Nothing sounded right, nothing was going to sound right, and I needed to stop obsessing over music. The blog dried up and I more or less stopped recording until this past Fall, when I resumed a modest pace.
I've been missing blogging about music. A lot.
Oh, and I started a Myspace page to post music. The Myspace player butchers MP3 quality, which is obviously very frustrating for anyone who puts time in their recordings but also oddly liberating. http://www.myspace.com/522484618
I had set out with my friend John to make dark, metal-infused dance music. We decided to keep everything in house, so the work that would normally be distributed throughout a band rested on the two of us. Using Logic Express 7, a borrowed guitar, and my bass, we set out on our task and spent the better part of a year pounding away incessantly, hitting wall after wall. It was the most intensive musical education I've ever received and to say I understand more about song construction and the recording process would be a dramatic understatement. It was also completely and totally maddening.
We wanted our first songs to be perfect, and that's a tall order for any song. Nothing sounded right. It was not uncommon for me to sit in my room and listen to some unremarkable percussive sound like partially close hi-hat hits for hours, comparing them, layering them, EQing and processing them, etc., etc. The variations were endless and as long as I was convinced the right approach was still out there, I kept digging. I bought intensive video tutorials, read message boards, scoured Youtube for demonstrations, and would research bands that I like to learn how they produced and what they used. Towards the middle of the summer, with John and I disagreeing about everything via email, I hit a wall. Nothing sounded right, nothing was going to sound right, and I needed to stop obsessing over music. The blog dried up and I more or less stopped recording until this past Fall, when I resumed a modest pace.
I've been missing blogging about music. A lot.
Oh, and I started a Myspace page to post music. The Myspace player butchers MP3 quality, which is obviously very frustrating for anyone who puts time in their recordings but also oddly liberating. http://www.myspace.com/522484618
# posted by seventeennightsinthecity @ 9:00 AM 
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