I wrote something completely in Garageband

Goin' Nowhere by EmKeev


This is a pretty big departure from how I'm used to writing. I used to input every note by hand, which (I think) forced me to be more creative. Garageband lends itself well to loops and to material you can lay down in a couple of measures, then copy and paste. I find its score tool is pretty obnoxious and it hurts that I can't look at the score for multiple tracks. But maybe I'll change my mind as I use it, get used to it, etc.

There are so many many many things in Garageband that I've really never messed with before. With Cakewalk and mixing, I had a very basic handle on how to get certain notes to echo, how to change the volume level for individual tracks... that might've been it. Garageband has all these options and things that I don't even know what they are so I just play with them until I see what it did there. It's fun.

This little thing is repetitive and doesn't really go anywhere, but A) the intention was to mess with the software and B) the first eight bars really capture how the day felt. And for that, I'm glad. Music really expresses stuff I can't get out any other way and I really find that words are words and all but sometimes my sentences are just little prison cells for what I'm actually trying to say. The instrumental is more pure.

Soundcloud

Jumped on the soundcloud bandwagon so's to start uploading electronic compositions:

Refurbished MIDIs by EmKeev

50/90: The videogame connection

Every musician has founding moments.

One of mine was stumbling across a particular set of MIDI files, compiled by my brother. He'd downloaded hundreds of tracks from various versions of Final Fantasy. As I listened, I just got more and more entranced by the music.

At the same time, my honest-to-God prevailing thought was this: Pff, I could do this!

Nobuo Uematsu has a quote, which I can't find... he essentially believes in writing what sounds good. Which is a LOT LOT LOT different from what you learn when you study composition. Still, studying composition and music theory is really important. As a person who advocates music that sounds good - it's important to also write studies for purely academic purposes and to analyze other musical works.

Anyway, I took this memory and decided to draft ten ideas for short tracks for a made-up RPG I imagined in my mind. Here's the third track.

Click to listen to "Mischief."

I don't think I even like it entirely, but it was SO. FREAKING. FUN. to write.

I love this.

What am I doing, anyway?

I didn't feel like tacking this onto the other blog post.

I miss composing. I miss it a lot. There's nothing stopping me doing it, but I'm just remembering how much I miss it... we can forget sometimes about our original dreams and stuff, and become numb to them without knowing, but I have been messing with some of my old MIDI compositions and that reminds me. And then I heard this guy, John, play at the Palk basement show last night. He played a little on guitar and a little on piano, and it was all good, but his piano stuff was so influenced and inspired by harmonies and tonalities that you don't find in conventional music anymore, stuff from the music degree I worked so hard to earn, and it was like, man. WHAT THE CRAP AM I DOING ANYWAY!??!?!?!

My friend Alex has a shirt. He wore it sometimes back when we were both in North Carolina studying music and trying to beat Stephen at games of Pounce. It it black with huge white letters. It says "QUIT WORK MAKE MUSIC." He has been a self-employed music instructor and film composer for years now. Those big white letters haunt me sometimes.

As I was looking up his website just now, I noticed he has this collab up and it's in some kind of competition and frankly, it rocks, so give it a listen...

Anyway, give John's stuff a listen (especially "Paraphrase of a Dream"), and I'll link you to a couple of my refurbished MIDIs which I've been reminiscing over: Mystery and RAVE. I have literally hundreds of little thoughts like these two and they've never been out in the real world before. Jed's videogame was the first thing to ever do that, to get this stuff of mine out.

I need a better sequencing program - Garageband doesn't freaking cut it, like, at all - and I need to seriously go back and practice my classical stuff...