Metronomica.blog
jamuary 30, 2025
This month, from a music-making perspective, has been full of epiphanies. So many, in fact, that I don’t remember most of them. It feels like every few days I’m putting together a sketch that affirms something about how I make music, or how I approach songwriting, or where my inspirations and desires lay.
If I’m having an epiphany every few days, though, am I having any at all? Maybe I’m just learning about how I make music by virtue of making about 100 times more of it than usual.
Either way, it sets me up for disappointment when a day doesn’t bring inspiration, or it goes sideways entirely, like today:
We took a long journey today, me and this 100-second song:
- I decided to start in Forester, grabbing some piano samples and wrecking them using the software’s colliding circles. Can’t say I failed there, but what I came up with wasn’t done yet.
- I moved a couple takes into Bitwig, stacked them, unstacked them, pitched one down, ran it through a granular effect, cut it apart, and so on, until I was left with a little loop — a lame appendage. But I didn’t want to let go of it!
- I moved it to my iPad, where it became a bed. On top I layered a few Decent Sampler Instruments, through Fugue Machine, and some drums.
There. A song. It’s not nothing, but it’s not much. What epiphany do I have today? Maybe there isn’t one. Today can just be a day. Maybe tomorrow will be just a day, too, and at the end of this experiment I’ll count my epiphanies like spoils, arrange them in a line, and figure out what I actually learned.
// tags: making music jamuary