Disquiet Junto 0578 Rabbit Spirit Ally

 

The Disquiet Junto this week takes inspiration from the Chinese lunar year of the Rabbit.

My piece appreciates how this invasive species seem to quickly go from zero-to-one hundred, but I also wanted some moments of reverie for their productivity in reproducing.

Then again, I've never seen a rabbit copulating, so that might be over in seconds.

I've been releasing music

naviarhaiku473 – sudden breeze

Why don't you like classical music?

 

Disquiet Junto 0577 Make That Money Shaker

The Disquiet Junto prompt this week is to record with improvised percussion, like a shaker.

It brought to mind a line from a studio owner about leaving percussion lying around as a way to generate business.

Their reasoning was that everyone knows percussion improves recordings, but not everyone understood the skill of great percussionists so it'd end up creating time in the studio to create a satisfactory result.

It's a kind of shrewd understanding of human nature that makes me feel like consumers of music are pathetic and maybe I can't help buying stuff.

Anyway, I have an ample supply of percussion and indulged the Junto prompt by improvising with a matchbox.

I gave it two takes and then thought to record with some commercial percussion I had at hand.

Then I mixed the percussion with a guitar track that I recorded the day before yesterday using the gated effects.

It took a little while to export the video, so I ended up having a late night and working until 10pm.

Now it's morning and the Disquiet email has arrived with the instructions and I'm reminded to annotate my process and reflect.

One observation is how the matchbox recordings are lost in the mix, while the canned percussion (a Christmas gift from my sister) can still be heard.

It's funny how things change in mixdown, particularly mixes at the end of the day.

DJ Grand Moff

naviarhaiku471 – Evening sky

New Years Resolution

 

Disquiet Junto 0576 Casual Resolution

The Junto prompt this week felt like one of those moments when a significant other asks what you're thinking about it and your mind goes blank.

Does that happen to you?

As it happens I've been plugging in an effects chain that I like to use with guitar.

This seems to happen around this time every year and, when I go back over Junto projects, I can see I've used these effects at this time previously.

Some people relax over summer by putting together a jigsaw, I tighten bolts and move things between racks.

It's one of those cycles I can observe in my recordings, like switching between acoustic or electronic instruments or contact mics and synthesisers.

Anyway, usually I get an idea to change things and it inevitably stops working and I cannibalise bits during the year.

This year it stopped working very quickly because I tried a lot of things that didn't work.

I cursed myself a few times for breaking it before recording anything.

Then I realised the mixer was central to sound I wanted to hear, as well as which effects pedals were essential,

So now I've just recorded a short jam -- which starts to work best after a minute or so.

My resolution is to keep the gated guitar effects rig running all year, even if I end up putting synthesisers and contact mics through it.

J.R. Patterson on why kids hate music lessons

Music treads a fine line between the loose creativity of art and the rule-bound framework of sport. Education should be open to exploration yet demanding enough to meet a high standard; a good lesson, in its push for something always a little beyond the capability of the musician, is an act of creating desires that remain unmet. Perhaps technique must not be seen as an end in itself, where learning to play properly is the same as learning to play beautifully. There is no “proper” way to play any instrument, just as there is no “proper” way to create any art. The greater measure of skill and control of an instrument is the ability to convey emotion rather than emit a flurry of notes. We love our favourite music more for what it makes us feel than for its technical difficulty.