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i think being in shape, working out regularly leads to better music. that, just, subjectively, i've noticed i've done much better stuff when i've been spending time dancing, recently but my foot is mostly better, to the point where i'm starting to be able to -- ohhh, thank heck -- start to exercise a little more normally again; not feel like a tense bundle of miswireds. then, though, this matters even more to hardware music, where, like... i've the gear arranged in a very dense little U-shape based around, like, where it's easy to reach the maximum amount of stuff without having to really strain the abs too much. that i would cite the ideal shape as a hemisphere of gear kind of floating around in front of you, and slightly up above. i remember sitting in either a mock or retired apollo capsule at a museum, once but really, the prompt for this topic is: i was dancing about a bit, not even in the studio, and i'm like: my arms are not in good enough shape for that yet. i won't be fast enough. i'll be too fumbly and full of sandbag and i wonder if anyone ever thinks about this? like, how your physical conditioning impacts your musical abilities |
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Definitely. It's well documented that exercise is one of the better deterrents for depression-- though some people probably make better music when they're depressed (Trent Reznor certainly comes to mind). Your stuff in particular seems rather hyper and energetic and you probably get a massive boost to clean energy levels that you can put right in the track, on the fly. Also probably overlooked is that, if you exercise there's a good chance you're listening to music while you do it. There's a good Stephen King quote from On Writing. Slightly paraphrasing: "If you don't have the time to read, you have neither the time or tools to write." I think the same goes for making music, need to listen to loads of it to stay in proper shape. |
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I say all that while my personal impulse is to pour half a glass of vodka and chain smoke while hammering out musical details/cleaning up a track. |
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It's well documented that exercise is one of the better deterrents for depression-- though some people probably make better music when they're depressed (Trent Reznor certainly comes to mind). that, really, no... not really. that, oh, , i wrote this just after my dad died, while living with my mum and we're not getting along, then the rest, it's in the songs quite clearly. and it's some of the best, most, i dunno, drukqs-y stuff i've done, and it's in fucking milkytracker, which... yeah. and it was because: every time i stopped working on these tracks i would just start, like, seriously sobbing. and that was a lot at once and i'm not usually that bad without that much help (anymore). but in retrospect: that was very focusing. every time i stopped concentrating furiously i was punished for it. and it gave me some subject matter but the whole "misery = art" thing is horseshit. it's just that misery is very focusing. there are more pleasant ways to be focused Your stuff in particular seems rather hyper and energetic and you probably get a massive boost to clean energy levels that you can put right in the track, on the fly. this is more on the mark. my posting flood here, recently... sorry. i haven't been able to exercise, or write music, and so it's gradually built up into a dfjhgkdfg manic streak, which will gradually subside as i get back into shape. |
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i was thinking of ansel adams. his stages for, like, breathing while taking a photo, just habit for me now. but i forgot: he did, like, hand exercises to hold the camera more steady too, didn't he? that i could probably get deliberate about this hardware music ~ it's about being able to get to one of literally 200 knobs fast, and turn it precisely in a quantized manner, push a button exactly at the right time, nudge a fader precisely the right amount and then it's somewhat to do with dance music, and so dancing... training your arms to move to music... both conditions them to move faster, more in rhythm... but the body has a memory of sorts, and the rhythms are just, like, in you as you do the track and that's more what i mean. though the ansel adams thing is a nice thot -- any ideas? -- i more mean, dance every day if you do hardware music |
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I say all that while my personal impulse is to pour half a glass of vodka and chain smoke while hammering out musical details/cleaning up a track. stereo to disk, no backsies has been my religion for a few years now, tangents into milkytracker aside. if you are literally unable to clean up a track, you're more likely to get it right in the first place, and it sounds like it'd also bypass your vodka/smoking stage |
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That's a neat track you posted. Computer vocals in the 2nd half are smokin. Yeah both methods (lots of editing vs going on the fly) both have their pros and cons. To reference Stephen King again- the man writes hot, off the cuff and then shelves a book and edits a bit. Compare it to like Patrick Rothfuss (name of the wind)-- constantly tinkering, moving whole bits around etc. I'm more the latter. But both ways produce something cool. re: ansel adams-- never got into his work, mainly cause my house is an hour from Yosemite and I can just see the shit for myself. |
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Yeah both methods (lots of editing vs going on the fly) bothhave their pros and cons. To reference Stephen King again-the man writes hot, off the cuff and then shelves a book and edits a bit. Compare it to like Patrick Rothfuss (name of the wind)-- constantly tinkering, moving whole bits around etc. I'm more the latter. But both ways produce something cool. you want henry david thoreau vs ralph waldo emerson. that i was tasked with reading both 20 years ago, and thoreau was utterly so much more fun to read. emerson was like being force-fed very boring cotton. but since this was school and i had to, i wound up thing thoreau was a polite moron and that emerson was vastly better but he couldn't be arsed to clean up his output. both have their pros and cons stephen king blasting out cujo on a cocaine binge, i'd argue, is a third, entirely different approach. |
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the piece you're missing -- just to understand why i've gone with that lane; trust your own process ...is how much time i spend doing take after take. it's not tedious like you'd think, that i'm basically jamming for a bit and resetting, changing some things, and that's half of my composition process: oh, where do i go when i get to this part? i'm going to replace that sound with... then... now that i've replaced that, i'm replacing this other one too that i'm probably through a few dozen takes that may have been alright, that i haven't even recorded, because i'm still messing with it all. that it'd sound like i was doing it over and over in the short term, but if you dropped in a half hour apart, you'd hear it was like... it was going one way, then that part collapsed, now it's something else then the worst is, i have to record this before i get too tired to do a good run. because i've been taking breaks to exercise in between all of this, or go have lunch, or whatever. if i go to sleep, i have to start over and build up for a few hours again tomorrow. so i start doing takes a bit early, and then i'm most of the way there and dfgjkdfg not quite, so now i need to go on a walk and actually after i've been dfgjkdf for a bit and i go on a walk, just sit back down and nail it, that's not guaranteed but common |
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e.g. i have put the time one might spend editing, into: live takes, used to write the track, the live takes practice the song, and overall you're just after that 10,000 hours etc. and you won't get it editing |
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i guess it's also: exactly what you said, editing just being this bad-binge kind of gurn sometimes. that i got into hardware stuff, and it can be just so impossible to edit that, and so shortly after: alright, no editing it took about ten years for me to be sure it was the right move. |
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"YEAHH let's mess with synths ALL DAY" vs. "let's play with synths for a few hours and then edit the recording until we're a destroyed crab with a permanent slouch" |
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i mean, this is just if you're thinking about you, however. the real rubicon for me was... oh, 2004 i think. i'd been writing tracks with a mouse in cubase sx entirely with VST plugins and they'd become these massive 12-part MIDI tapestries and i had to go four hours before i felt like i wasn't repeating myself. then i got an MPC1000 and an MS2000 and a Prophet VS and some other bits and i'm just like... this is even more fun than cubase used to be that someone literally then came out of the woodwork and yelled at me after a few months: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OLD NEVENEN THIS IS CRAP and i was kind of, like: "oh, yes, it's just getting going, hang on a moment" that by 2012 that guy was back on board again and i think at this point it'd be like "oh god fuck no don't go back" but i haven't heard from him in a bit |
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That's a neat track you posted. Computer vocals in the 2nd half are smokin. i realized there's actually a damn good continuation of my previous point, which is subsequent EP, and the first track, q qq qqq. that the letter q, long-running joke between a few friends and i, and i was thinking it sort of like the shulgin scale. +, ++, etc. and i start off with q and build it up, then i take a sliver of q and build it up into qq, and then qq into qqq, and you get a taste of qqqq but i end the track there because qqqq is too much for the human mind to handle. that track nearly destroyed me, and i loved every minute of it. i was not in a terribly good place in life, i was literally driving for uber -- and i liked the ones that just disappeared into their fones because i could just go off in my hed and keep working on this track, in my hed (can't you?). i was -- to steal another rdj word -- chuffed with how it turned out. but then i looked at what had gone into this, that perhaps i could have gotten my life back together much faster. that milkytracker has me wandering around the house mumbling about hex codes, i'm literally pacing around the carpet and arguing with myself about 0x0A vs B and my eyes are shot so i'm just lying on the bed listening to it and getting up every few minutes to stop and change a few hex codes i kept it up a bit after that track. but it was kind of like: this will put me in a mental hospital if i keep going and, after all that tldr, here is my point: it kicks the piss out of that other EP i linked, that i made when i was defcon-1 grade miserable, as opposed to just mildly fucked. it's focus that makes it good. and, like: i should quit milkytracker because it makes me so focused it will suck the rest of my life down into it like a singularity |
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but if you want "this kind of does what drukqs does" the defcon-1 miserable EP is more what you want. |
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~ as indicated in the video description. vsnares is far worse. the man needs help |
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Yeah both methods (lots of editing vs going on the fly) both have their pros and cons. To reference Stephen King again-the man writes hot, off the cuff and then shelves a book and edits a bit. Compare it to like Patrick Rothfuss (name of the wind)-- constantly tinkering, moving whole bits around etc. I'm more the latter. But both ways produce something cool. that, actually, there's some deeply interesting stuff in here. i realized: we're comparing novels to doing tracks. these are entirely different mediums. sure, it's not like a painting and it's all there at once; there's still a time-domain aspect to it... but these don't exactly fit together perfect, right? that i was talking about how thoreau revised to death and thus is a great read, while emerson was ultimately far more interesting and a nightmare to read because he blasted it out worse than i did. then my next tldr: instead of spending a few hours on synths and the rest driving yourself insane editing, do repeated takes as the songwriting process and tinker it into existence. this way, you also put in the 10k hours on your synths much more quickly, and... the written word is always, always an off in the corner thing. despite "livecoding" inexplicably being something people care about, "live novel writing" is really, utterly NOT a thing and, oh, yeah: being better at playing instruments is not like getting better at writing is it? and how do you view music composition? are you very intricately composing this to unfold like a novel? in which case, you want to go on about words like motif and very tactically pick your synth sounds. and i have done this; i still sometimes. it's lovely. but live hardware music like i've been chasing, you have to be able to dance the machines with your fingers, and there's no comparison for that in writing |
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heh. maybe it's like how charles dickens always sold out his book tours with rabid fervor because he was really good at respinning them aloud. fascinating how flexible it all is |
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here, working on brevity. four-word summary of livecoding livecoding, keywords: bushwick, cocaine watching someone write computer code live to generate music, or whatever. that, like, can we count the number of obstacles in between you and the audience, impediments to this actually being a moving form of art? that, like, i am a software engineer, and this will actually ruin it for me simply because they use a lot of functional programming language shit i usually don't and i'm going to be standing there in space and trying to adjust to the code i'm not used to reading. then this is a live thing and you're expecting people who are not even as bad as i am to follow along and feel some sort of personal communication from it -- no, this is just "hey mom, look at me" in front of your friends. i'm open to other interpretations much more interesting that... charles dickens wrote good books to read, but no small part of the reason you know the name is he'd show up and retell the book aloud in a shorter way, dialed in for the house, and just blow the doors off of the place. that we can split apart being a good storyteller and having a good story to tell and you need both. |
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i suspect i know how livecoding happened 1) start with the videogame concept of a speedrun. most people know this. that, back when a speedrun was something you had a) watch someone do in person, or b) download a 200mb video of quake on your 56k modem 2) apply the speedrun concept to writing software -- a distinct one i remember, at computer camp when i was 11, was "i can write a paint app in java in under a minute" and this is fun. like, alright, do it. and that's a good 56 seconds; guy barely made it. and this is a small group of nerds in person and everyone knows at least some java and can follow 3) something something you're 36 and on stimulants as a bunch of people pretend they deeply appreciate what they're seeing on the projector because no one wants to be the dolt asking what the fuck is any of this, some loft, bushwick but let's just stick with my thing about needing both from the previous post. i think that was probably one of the better insights i've wandered into here, but i'll need some distance to be sure. |
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reznor, right. let's call him exhibit A for: both a good storyteller and a good story to tell that he addressed this in interviews, with, effectively: i was quite going places with sound design but i wasn't terribly sure what to write about, so i just started doing up my diary entries because it seemed honest -- and, poor bastard, now people get mad if he doesn't song up his diary entries every few years |
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that reminds me, there's a very strong giggle that keeps me going somedays: i can sample anything i want simply because no one will notice. you can blam me for some individual sample, but, grand scheme of things, i am. free. and you can either put up with this or make me someone |
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ahaha. oh, i sampled quite well with... the "what happened to the old nevenen" gentlemen, he was the first one. really the only one to catch me: "Nevenen, NVN, you wanted it to be like NIN didn't you" guilty as charged i read his advice on "if you still like it a week later, it's a contender" and nevenen is a middle english word meaning ~ to say, tell, express, esp. the truth, to give a name to |
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oh, while i'm just throwing out free advice |
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i botched this. it was 2007. because it was definitely almost on the nose around when i recorded this hardcore puppets [tldr ~ all the thought that went into it was that i was doing hand motions with no real intent other than sheer enjoyment and i noticed the light was hitting the floor particularly well because of where the sun was at that time of day and the hardest part was, as always: "i need a camera here, at this point, in 3D space, angled precisely like this" and my memory is not good enough to remember precisely what i improvised with to get it to the proper spot] |
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