Metronomica.blog
Jamuary 27, 2025
There have been multiple days now where I come up with something, listen to it, think to myself “what in the world were you thinking,” but then push on and make something else out of it.
I imagine this is a learning experience. I think to the hundreds of abandoned project files over the years, the songs that felt stuck and were left to gather dust. I think I mentioned that earlier this month. It must resonate with me on days like this, when the wall must be broken through:
It went like this:
- I made another moody piece with a few plucky synths, a glockenspiel, drums, and one of those nasty whole-note bass lines that bite at the track from below. I coated the drums in Rymdigare as an experiment.
- After bouncing the track and throwing it into Bitwig, I realized that the experiment failed. It was illegible, falling off time in a bad way, grasping to make sense. It was legitimately bad.
This was the inflection point. I could start over, yuck, or push forward. Starting over would mean throwing this failed track into the dustbin, which I didn’t want to do this month. So:
- I cut off the few seconds of ambience at the end of the track, after the drums had been turned off.
- I pitched that small bit down and looped it.
- I threw Arturia’s EFX Fragments, a granular effect, on it, and played the effect as the track went on.
And what do we have here? Something! I don’t mind how it came out, and I’m thrilled that even this could be salvageable. All it took was a willingness to blow things up.
I’m leaning more towards the blowing things up philosophy, and away from the “well it was fun while it lasted but it sucks too bad to use” philosophy. I think this bodes well. Anything can be valid, useful. You just have to get used to recycling.
// tags: making music jamuary