Lazy Weekend
This weekend was somewhat lazy, ended up watching a ton of movies. Saw Rambo, that movie I think has the most kills per minute in anything I’ve seen for a while, very gruesome and over the top. Yet somehow hilarious. Jackie wanted to go see “Final Destination” in 3D, which was sort of a giggle fest as well, with all of the “hey look this is 3D” sort of shots.
On the music front, I worked with Reaktor some more. Building a few things to learn, and exploring how snapshots and such work. Last night I actually spent some time creating myself some material to ‘jam’ on and had a blast. I’m not sure the track I created was great, but I sure had a great time creating it, which is worthwhile. I think with some polishing and more precise editing it’ll be nice.
links for 2009-08-29
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Haven't check these out yet
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Max 4 Live is going to be awesome
I’m on twitter..
I avoided it, but now it seems fun.
follow up: Productivity
A friend emailed me regarding my productivity issues with Music making, so I thought I’d make a follow up post.
What I feel is necessary is that I simply hit the record button during all of my ‘testing’ and ‘experimenting’ ideally one explores these thing with a sense of play. Currently I earn -zero- income from playing with sound, that’s why it should remain firmly in the play world. Remember this, self.
Saying this I mean that, perhaps I’ve been taking it too seriously. Like, “I need to finish x number of tracks soon, or no one will ever care”, it needs to be “Is this fun? Do I feel this? Am I just doing this to get something out?”
The last point can be addressed, but really I’m in an explorative process. Deep in sounddesign wrapped in envelopes, lfos and recently modular environments. Down in the weeds as I like to say. Note to self, keep playing, go even deeper, but record it so you can use it when you need to be productive.
links for 2009-08-28
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Nodal is a generative software application for composing music. It uses a novel method for the notation and playing of MIDI based music. This method is based around the concept of a user-defined graph. The graph consists of nodes (musical events) and edges (connections between events). You interactively define the graph, which is then traversed by any number of players who play the musical events as they encounter them on the graph. The time taken to travel from one node to another is based on the length of the edges that connect the nodes.
NI Komplete purchase
I’ve been taking the past couple of nights to go through all the new stuff I have with my purchase of Komplete. Amazing possibilities all of it, however must not let the potential exhaust me. Tonight was a tour of the Reaktor user library up on native-instruments.com. Impressive, that.
Music making productivity
It seems my productivity on music making needs some work. It’s not that I don’t work, it’s that I get nothing done. I can easily chalk that up to too many influences, no clear direction, etc. At the same time, for me, it’s play to a large degree. How to focus play energy in a productive way? That’s the challenge. Part of that challenge may be deciding what I like, and want to make.
Last night I explored NI Massive’s presets, all of the percussive loop ones, and it was decidedly fun, I learned a lot about the tricks that one can do to create rhythmic loops with that program, which is pretty deep with the performance modifier and the step modifier. This could be handy for live performance if it doesn’t kill my laptop in the process. Turning down the quality would make it managable.
My neatest discovery last night was the ability to send program changes in clips, this could be super handy in future, since I have no external hardware I haven’t had a need to do this. Massive is not a VST you want to stack up in a bunch of Racks, it’s pretty beefy. My solution will be to use program change messages. Yay.
links for 2009-08-26
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A book on understanding Algorithms designed for those without a CS degree