Waiting First Final Draft / Hamilton x A Man Without a Country
So another year has passed. This week also flew by. Finished my first draft of Waiting:
Took about a month and a half to get to this point. Towards the end of the month I was burning out a lil listening to the same song over and over and over again so I’ll leave it for now and let it marinate. Overall happy with how it came out for the first finalized draft.
Definitely worth finishing it up to this point.
A myth I subscribed to earlier (and still sometimes believe) is that perfectionism will push my songs towards greatness. But lately it seems like the opposite is true. I really think that pumping out songs on a regular basis (to a level of quality I’m happy with) is the key to improving.
The act of finishing something is in itself something to be practiced. Someone once wrote somewhere that everyone has shit songs within them and the best artists wade through the bad ones to find the good ones. But (I think) you can only wade through the bad ones by finishing them.
Now that this song is at a certain level of completion I think it’s ready to stew in its own juices. The slow cooker approach of assembling all the base ingredients, letting them simmer and allowing time to meld all the flavors together. Give it a few weeks, pop the song back in the DAW, adjust a few flavors here n there and I’m that much closer to actually finishing and releasing the song.
Anyways, for the next few days at least I’ll be participating in this songwriting challenge. It’s a forum I found where a buncha producers have a little less than a month to create a song based on a randomized prompt and genre. Past examples include:
prompt: how are you / genre: lofi hip hop
prompt: spread the love / genre: contemporary pop
prompt: there’s a pogo on the dance floor/ genre: ska
And so on. Each month a buncha producers compete and vote for their favorite submissions. The top three get to choose from a pool of prizes.
The prompt for this month is a little different. I’m allowed to produce any genre I want but every sound in the song must be generated from a predefined set of samples. It’s like the musical equivalent of Chopped where they give you a set of predefined ingredients you have to make a song out of.
So far it’s been pretty cool. I’ve been learning about some sound design stuff. Playing around with granular synthesis (through Omnisphere) which is kind of like playing different slices (or grains) of audio to create a new sound from the source sound.
And spectral synthesis which is like selecting certain frequency tones from a sample and warping or replaying it to create a new sound from the source sound.
Besides that been biking, reading, and watching some TV over break (on hiatus from my media purge over the holidays).
Finally watched Hamilton and it lived up to the hype.
Read Kurt Vonnegut’s short autobiography A Man Without a Country. Pretty interesting read. It was written in 2005. He mentions living through Dresden through WWII and talks shit about the greed of men that causes wars in modern society. He talks about the degradation of the planet and the foolishness of the Bush administration and all that. He talks about luddism and how the world is moving too fast. He talks as if the world is ending (or at least very well on its way to ending).
First thought as I read—wow even back then people thought the world was kinda crappy. You always look back at “simpler times” as better times but even back then people were dissatisfied at the state of the world. To be fair there’s a lot of good stuff that’s happened since then and now BUT it also feels like we may be on a downward slide (even without Corona).
Second thought—it’s been a while since I’ve wanted to improve the world. Reading someone talk so much shit about 2005 and realizing 2020 is worse was a bit of a wake up call. The last time I felt idealistic about changing anything was back in college.
Back in college I thought education was the cure all. The more you educate people the better their lives become—especially now when misinformation seems to have caused so many problems. Anti vaxxers, anti maskers, global warming deniers—doesn’t that stem mostly from ignorance?
The more information you give to people the better society becomes. But that’s complicated when people choose to ignore the information you give them. But why do people choose to ignore the information? Probably due to mistrust or fear—both of which is stoked by the people that have the most to gain by doing so.
But end of the day education will never not be a good thing.
Anyways I’m tired and rambling. Goodnight!!!!
p.s. definitely want to read the biography that inspired Hamilton and also the Power Broker while I’m at it.