More On Mistakes (who are our friends)

I love Bauhaus architecture.  I mean droolingly love it.  And one of the things I loved the first time I went to Ikea was that I could afford modernist design.  Having grown up on a diet of faux American colonial Ethan Allen furniture that my parents loved, finding Ikea was like heaven.

The only dent in my love of modernist design came from my best friend in college, Jiannis, who pointed out that it doesn't age well.  And he's right.

Jiannis is from Athens and having been there, I can really appreciate his perspective.  The thing about classical buildings and all manner of complex, organic, intricate, and ornate architecture is that it ages really well.  When you look at the Acropolis, battered and crumbling, it's still so beautiful, not "was" beautiful, "is" beautiful.  The marks of time only seem to enhance the design, not detract from it.

I don't know if you've ever seen the Guggenheim up close (in my home city of New York), but it's not been aging well at all.  Over the years I've seen small cracks drip rust onto the smooth white facade, completely spoiling the utopic icon of a building.  When rust drips into the detail of a neo classical building, the colors enhance the design, they don't destroy it.  So the question becomes, given that rust is going to form and roll down a building, is rust the problem, or is the design the problem, or is it a question of craftsmanship?  By which I mean, are the older building methods not better, but just better at hiding weakness and age.

These are important considerations for artists and lead right back to my previous post about mistakes.

The neoclassical model of architecture accepts the inevitability of rust and change and makes it a feature, not a bug, in the design.  But what it also does is give cover for mistakes, because, in a way, the rust is a "mistake" imposed by nature.

And what I mean by "cover" is that a more organic working mode allows more mistakes to be hidden and incorporated into the work than tight/robotic/anal retentive and yes, bauhaus styles do.

Mistakes in Kraftwerk's music would stand out, because it's a music which is about perfection, cold, calculated, machine-like perfection.  There is no room to be loose in something crafted that way.  Just as there is no room for rust on the facade of the Guggenheim New York.

I'm not actually arguing with the post I made previously.  I believe this whole subject is very nuanced and a ready field for many shades of gray.  But there is a point.

Mistakes can even be beneficial, as long as you work in a style that lets you capitalize on them.  It won't help your bauhaus building to have undulating lines, but if you can take the unintended results of your endeavors and incorporate them into the work, the work will grow and be better for it.  And sometimes, mistakes even communicate, telling you you're on the wrong path to start with, encouraging you to go back and take a different route.  Mistakes are your friends.  Welcome them and treat them as such.

Don't Offend the Gods

This Memorial Day weekend was very productive.  I managed to lay down two more tracks on the retro project, with two instruments for each track.  I decided to start making a video document of the recording for use in a videoSong of I C U.  It could be entertaining to watch the rapid bounce from synth to glockenspiel and back again.  The production is really shaping up and sounding nice.

I also laid down several more instrumental tracks for the Orange album.  Because of the rapid work style, I plan to organize that project on the shotgun approach.  I will create 3 or 4 times as many tracks as I need, and then pick the best ones for the album.  I love that I have a whole music production studio in my pockets right now.  Granted, I'm wearing cargo pants, but still, I can really make music anywhere, lol.

One thing I noticed working on the retro project is, it's going to be almost impossible to record without making any noticeable mistakes.  Not because I couldn't do it, I mean play the song without noticeable mistakes, but you can quickly get to a point of demising returns, literally.  Each time you record and erase the tape, the quality is suffering a little bit, so, you want to record and erase as few times as possible.  Eighth inch cassette tape is much less forgiving than half inch reel to reel, so I don't feel like I have the luxury of doing as many takes as I want.  Obviously, if I lose my way in the course of recording the song, and can't remember what to play next, that take is shot.  Similarly, if I make some glaringly bad note strike, I have to start over.  But there are at least three mistakes in each track I've laid down so far for the retro project and I'm okay with them.  They are not glaring and I worry if I try to go back and make a better take, I'll never get one as good as the ones I have already.  So I rest with what I have.

I've heard it said that South American Blanket weavers always insert at least one mistake in their work, so as not to offend the gods by trying to replicate the gods' "perfection".  I can't say I'd ever consciously insert a mistake in my work, but I do like a loose and gritty feel.  Perfectionists might call this kind of loose style "mistake riddled".  But to me, it just seems more human, which reminds me again of those blanket weavers, being consciously human and consciously not god-like.

In these digital days, it's so easy to produce a "mistake free" performance.  When I say easy, I mean, you don't really have to know how to play at all to deliver something that sounds "perfectly played", depending on your level of patience and dedication.  Of course, things that seem perfect also sound robotic (to these ears).  Overwrought is another way of putting it.

And I like plenty of music and art I'd put in this category, Boston and Beethoven for example, pretty tight stuff.

I'll even go so far as to say I can be as guilty of it as the next person.  It's kind of easy, if you don't know what to do, to work really hard at making indecision look intentional by making it nearly machine like in its precision (try saying that three times quickly).  In fact, getting "loose" has been very hard for me for most of my life.  I was always very tight knit, when it came to my endeavors, and had to be broken of my "perfectionista" ways, become less anal retentive, more free to fail.

I'm not a perfectionist - and have not referred to myself as one anytime in my memory.  I don't think I've ever produced anything where I couldn't point out a bunch of mistakes, going all the way back to high school and further.  I do my best to incorporate those mistakes or gloss them into unobtrusiveness, but I'm usually aware of them.  In my experience, "perfectionism", as practiced, is usually not anything like "perfection", because I can often detect mistakes or in-congruencies in the work of "perfectionists", which seem very imperfect to me.  But, maybe I'm misunderstanding the term "perfectionist".

My own attitude is that imperfections are unavoidable, so better to discover an acceptable level of them and keep working, than live in denial.  Working too hard to smooth all of them over can suck the life out of art.  Because life is a messy affair and art, to me, should be more like life and less like a robot.*

*with a few exceptions.  Take Kraftwerk, where the intention seems to be for robotic perfection.  I have a hard time finding any thing in Kraftwerk that seems out of place.  Those guys seem "perfect", in terms of their art.

Juxtaposition, continued (sort of)

Back in my student days, I used to make these surrealist movies (I did say I liked surrealism).  Mostly they were short, like 3-6 minutes.  I had to make at least 6 per semester, but there were no other requirements, no assignments, no specific hoops to fly through.  But if I start the story there, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first video I ever made, with a borrowed video camera, contained music I borrowed too.  Better to say, music I stole.  Jazz, Classical, Avant-garde Electronica, all blended together with the "live" sound thanks to a borrowed mixer.  It was okay.  The first version was way too long at 18 minutes, so I had to cut it down to 6 minutes and it was almost watchable at that length, just don't ask me to watch it now, lol.

What I noticed though, was that the music really carried the thing.  Take away the stolen melodies and the whole thing would fall flat on it's face.  There's a quote which I first heard attributed to Kubrick, but which I've never been able to verify, "Film is 90 percent sound."  I keep that quote close because I agree so thoroughly with it.  I would also amend it to say, "And film is 80 percent music."

If you have ever seen the 1984 production of Dune, Produced by Dino De Larentis and compare it to the 1980 production of Flash Gordon with the same producer you can kind of see a petri dish of this phenomena.  Without getting too far into it, I consider Flash Gordon to be a successful, if flawed movie, and Dune to be a failure, without flaws.  I'll go further and say Dune is a much better made movie than Flash Gordon, but Flash Gordon is much more enjoyable to watch.  The reason the better film is not as good, in my opinion is in the scores of the two films.  Queen's score for Flash Gordon improves a weak film and really drives it forward.  Toto's score for Dune brings the film down and wrecks a superior effort.

Recognizing that the strength of my first video relied so heavily on music, music that I didn't produce, I decided, if I was to make any more video, I would have to start producing my own music.  So, with no training at all, and no clue, and being kind of tone deaf, I started to make music.

That early stuff is worse than any video I ever made.  It's not just unlistenable, it's downright annoying to hear, it grates on the ears.  The event I credit most with helping break me out of the terrible musical rut I was in was learning about John Cage's compositional process, casting sticks using the iChing.  His process was completely random.  It liberated me because it made me believe I couldn't make any mistakes, if random chance could be used to write music, then mistakes were an impossibility.  As soon as I wasn't afraid of making mistakes, I got more adventurous and the music I produced became more interesting.

I continued to do my little musical experiments (that's really what they were), and record them to tape.  I produced hours and hours of material.  On rare occasions, I produced something I liked, and anything I liked would be cataloged on a series of "Master" tapes I began to make.  By the end of this way of working, I'd produced three 90 minute "Master" tapes containing music of various lengths, tempos, and moods.  I would describe most of it as Avant-garde Electronica with contemporary classical ambitions.  There were a few pop oriented tunes as well, but not many.

The only time I have ever visited a large film production facility, one of the more interesting things to me was the music room, essentially, a room with a sound system and two walls filled with CDs (this was a while ago).  The room existed so directors and producers could go find music for their projects.  I always wondered how they picked which CDs to include in the room, if it was dependent on some licensing agreement.  The only time I tried to arrange legal borrowed music for a video I was producing, the record company sent me a large package of CDs from their second tier artists.  Artists who would love to be included in a movie sound track, even for very little money.  The exposure is often invaluable to them and hence they are willing to come cheap.

The three "Master" tapes I produced became my "music room" for my videos.  Each time I finished editing a new video, I would peruse my music tapes looking for something interesting to include.  Very rarely, I would score a specific music work for a specific video.  Going back to that first video I made, using "found" music seemed to add depth to the work and I liked that process.  The difference was, now the "found" music was music I had produced earlier, at another time and place.

And this gets back to the idea of juxtaposition.  Taking music recorded months earlier in a different emotional state, different time, different place and adding it to a just completed video creates a moment of juxtaposition.  Similarly, I have taken my own writings from years in the past, poetry and essays from high school, for example, and used them, word for word, to make new things, videos, songs, etc  . . .  Once I was doing this series of miniature photographs in my apartment.  Obviously, I couldn't include a "real" sky, because I was indoors, but I remembered this series of cloud paintings I'd done with pen and ink, years earlier.  I scanned those and used them as the "sky" in the miniature photo series.  I once wrote a poem, years later, made an art book of the poem, years later, made a video based on the art book, and am now considering using the same poem as lyrics for a song in the retro project.  I wouldn't call it a good poem either, but I like it, obviously, since I keep returning to it.

I think it's often the case, that our own creations from the past offer the easiest and most personal means of creating juxtaposition in current work.  You could even say, past work is a treasure trove to be mined for value in the present.  It enriches and adds depth.  It's like working with an independent clone of oneself.  All the benefits of "design by committee" with none of the negatives, after all, you can be a dictator over your past self, but I would say you, and more importantly, your work, benefit by being a benevolent dictator in that relationship.

Juxtaposition?

I had this incredible idea.  I mean, thought it was an idea for something new and different, by which I mean, an idea for a new and different song, or the starting point for one, but then, something else happened.

I'm still working on the Retro Project, which was originally going to be a single song for a compilation of 80s inspired/produced songs without guitar, but it's looking like it will be at least an EP and maybe a whole album.

In addition, I'm working on an album called: "The Orange Album, Kaossilator + Kaoss Pad".  What's different about the orange project, from everything else I've done, is, it's all improvisational.  There is no plan for any tune, just an unscripted jam using two instruments.  I may later add vocals, but that too will be improvisational.  The real beauty of this project is that it takes 3 minutes to make a 3 minute song.  If I add vocals, it takes 6 minutes to make a 3 minute song.  You can do the math for songs of other lengths.  But the point is, it's a very fast way of working.  And, like the retro project, it takes me out of my comfort zone, and uses process to redefine the way I make music.

The idea I had over the weekend was to apply some of the process of the Orange Album to the Retro Project.  Since I am using the Casio VL-1 as a drum machine for some of the Retro Project tracks, I thought it might be a fun challenge to incorporate the most boring rhythm included in the machine; "March".  BTW, you cannot program your own drum beats with the VL-1, you are limited to the pre-programmed ones.  To make them interesting, you have to filter.  The "March" is a 1-2 pattern of a bleep and some noise.  It sounds like this: bleep, crunch, bleep, crunch, bleep, crunch, etc . . .  Not very interesting, unless you can filter it to make it interesting, which is exactly what I intended to do.

In a previous post, I mentioned the Classic Albums episode for Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album.  One of the more interesting songs, in terms of how it came about, was The Chain.  It started life as a heavy up tempo jam between John the bassist and Mick the drummer, but that all it was, there was no intro, or opening.  Stevie Nicks offered a song she was working on, to serve as the intro to their jam.  If you listen to the song, you can hear where her contribution ends and the jam begins, but, if you don't know the story of the song, it flows so naturally, you can't imagine the one part existing without the other.  They feel organically linked, even though they were authored by different people at different times in different places.

This is kind of what I was referring to, in the title, juxtaposition.  When you take to completely unrelated things and put them together in a work of art.  The surrealists did this most obviously, but their version of juxtaposition makes no attempt at reconciliation.  Unlike The Chain, where the two parts are seamlessly tied together, in surrealism, the unrelated things maintain their distinctness.  It's often compelling, and can be used to make very interesting arguments using metaphor, but one could also call it lazy.  I'm not suggesting surrealists are lazy artists, but relying on shocking juxtaposition for the sole value in one's art certainly seems lazy.

One of my first experiences in "Art House" cinema was attending a documentary and retrospective of the collaborative film work of Dali and Buñuel.  Based on my fuzzy memories, it seems Buñuel said they should make a movie together and Dali was up for it.  Dali described a dream of Ants walking on his hand and/or a razor cutting open an eyeball, but complained it wasn't enough material to make a movie with.  Buñuel dismissed his fears and said it was plenty to make a movie with.  Watching the film right after that interview, I have to conclude, Dali was right, those two shots do not justify the whole picture, but Buñuel was right to think that they were enough of a starting point, because both images were very strong.


What the filmmakes completely failed to do, in my opinion, was to develop ideas springing from those images and incorporate them into some disturbing, but more logical whole.  They might argue with me, that incorporating the images "logically" would undermine the whole point of surrealist film, and they might be right.  But I think they would have a much stronger film if it could be both logical and surreal.  I think the American filmmaker, David Lynch has got the mix of logic and surreal right a few times in his career, to very strong results.  But I digress.

So I opened up my music software, Logic, to start a new project, an improvisational one, using the VL-1's rhythm section, but whenever you open Logic, it opens the last project you were working on.  In this case, the first song from the Retro Project, which I have, for the moment, titled, I C U.  And then it dawns on me, maybe, instead of doing this on a new project, maybe this with be the winning rhythm for I C U.  And it was.  So, something I was intending to use for a different song, wound up being incorporated into the current song, and making it so much better.  I got rid of a bunch more temporary tracks in the sketch version of the song, and figured out what the bass line would be.

I finally was able to lay down the first layer on my old cassette 4 track, incorporating, VL-1 drums, Synsonics drums, and the bass timbre I described in the first post about this project.  Listening to the playback in analog was so sweet.  I hope it continues to go this well.

Going back to "less is more" vs. "more is more", if it's more of the same, then less is certainly more, but if it's something different, an inspiration from another place and time, more is more. I always try (but often don't succeed) in trying to have three distinctly different inspirations for each project.  Putting them together, in the same project, is what I think of as juxtaposition, though I try to really integrate them, opting away from the surrealist model.  But I love surrealism, though, that's a post for another day.

Editing

I think it was in the first month of my freshman year of college that I first heard "Less is more" in a creative context.  But I'm usually a "more is more" kind of artist, especially when it comes to music.

It's like I think adding a few more tracks (instruments) will hide my weak performance on some earlier recorded track.  Sometimes that works.  Sometimes two shoddy performances of the same thing smooth the blemishes of each since you rarely make the same mistake twice.  I'll be the first to admit, I'm not the greatest musician from a performance perspective.  In fact, I have turned in some really weak performances in some of my recordings.  I didn't hear it at the time, but I certainly hear it now.

More than half my life I've longed for a good editor.  Someone who will tell me when I'm fucking up my creative endeavors, and help put me back on the "right" path.  I usually crave my editor most in the areas where I am weaker, writing and music making.

I remember finishing my first lengthy script and asking my coworker, Heather, to edit it for me.  She was an English Major, bright and witty in person.  She agreed and read my script.  She corrected some minor mistakes here and there, but, sadly, there was really only one part she felt could be improved:

I had a scene with a homeless man and a detective.  The homeless man had a stainless steel bowl under his hat, a fact I revealed early in the scene.  She suggested saving that for the end of the scene, allowing the detective to believe he was getting valuable information, only to discover later that he was talking to a crazy person.

Heather's suggestion was hilarious, and never failed to get a laugh when people saw the finished movie.  Unfortunately, Heather was a senior and moved away after graduation.  And I've only rarely been lucky enough to find a comparable editor in the years since.

Which means, I usually have to self edit, which sucks but brings me to the point of this post.

If you have ever watched the "Classic Albums" episode about Rumours, the seminal Fleetwood Mac album, there's a single line I really like in the episode, relating to music production.  "We build it up, and tear it down."  Talking about how a lot of the songs on the album had lots of unused instruments tracks, recorded and abandoned in the final mix.

As I'm laying down tracks for the Retro Project (previously mentioned here), I'm kind of going through a similar process, but in a totally backwards way.  Four track cassette recorders were designed as musical sketch pads for artists to develop ideas cheaply, at home, before going into the studio.  Though some artists, like Bruce Springsteen, recorded his album, Nebraska entirely on a cassette 4 track.  But what I am doing is using professional grade software, in this case, Logic, to sketch my the song for my retro project, which I will eventually record on a cassette 4 track, in a sense, not using it at all for its intended purpose.

You might ask what all this has to do with editing.

Well, I'm trying to plan out what I will eventually put on each of my limited 4 tracks.  At most I can get 2 or 3 instruments on each track, if I can play them simultaneously.  Some tracks will have only 1 instrument.  So, at the moment, I building it up to tear it down.  I have already laid down 9 individual instrument tracks of drums and synthesizers, trying to figure out where each one could go in the final recording and mix when I get to the 4 track.  A wonderful benefit of only having 4 tracks is that I had to edit and remove some of the stuff already, and each time I did it, the song got better.  So the 4 track has become an editor to rival Heather in my mind.  It's forcing me to acknowledge "less is more" and forcing me to be a better musician.  I don't have two tracks to smooth a crappy performance.  I just have to deliver a good performance, every time.  As a result, I can say, this retro project is going to be my roughest in years, not nearly the level of polish I'm accustomed to, but it will be much more honest, and I hope, in the end, better all around.

Writing Challenge

This is a follow up to my post:

The Retro Project

Originally, as I was thinking about this song, I imagined I would sing, as I often do, for the majority of my songs.  But then I had another thought.

I was thinking about Kraftwerk and how much I like when they use speech synthesis in their songs.  While I would not be breaking any rules using a speech synthesizer (since they existed in the 80s), I didn't have one, so I'd be breaking my own rules, to only use instruments and tools I had in the 80s.

While I didn't have a speech synthesizer, I did have a Speak 'n Spell.  I was a terrible speller, so my parent's bought it for me in the hopes it would improve my spelling, and it did, but not nearly as much as auto correct has in the days since.

Now, you cannot dictate language to a Speak 'n Spell, right?  I mean, it won't say whatever you want, it will only say what it is programmed to say from the factory.  With one exception.

It says all the letters of the alphabet, and the names of some letters can be combined to make sentences:

I C U

And this created a very interesting challenge to me, could I write song lyrics like that, only using letter names to make sentences.  The answer is yes, but I'm not going to reveal what I came up with (after all, there should be some mystery, even as I explain how the sausage is made).  It was both challenging and cool to be forced to write this way, but I cannot see getting more than a single song out of this method.

Set in the present. Inspired by the past.

Though everything I do (creative wise) is grounded in and fully aware of the awesome present, it’s also completely rooted in the past.

Whatever I liked as a child or teenager or somewhere in between, is far more inspiring and instructive than anything encountered recently. This is only partially a choice, actually. I trust younger me much more than I trust older me. Younger me did not have ulterior financial or political motives bending taste and aesthetics to meet some other aim.

I’m not saying culture today is not as good as it was when I was younger. In many, many cases it’s so much better, TV for example, I can barely watch the shows of my youth and I love a lot of current TV. However, old stuff has the chance to put deep roots in you. If you can get past the nostalgia and see the thing with fresh eyes (almost impossible, but one must at least try), you can start to reverse engineer it and see what made it work so well. You can also use it as a building block to create something fresh (without violating copyrights, of course).

I can't say for certain, but according to my high school English teacher, Shakespeare did not write a single original story.  Not only were his stories adaptations, they were adaptations of stories his audience already knew, and knew well.  Therefore, his genius was not in creating fiction, but of adapting it better than anyone else before him had.  Are you familiar with any of the previous versions of Romeo and Juliet?  Me neither.

And it was none but the master himself, of many trades, Da Vinci who said you should always copy when you endeavor to make art, but only copy from the old masters, never from your contemporaries.

Time is an insurmountable arbiter.

The Retro Project

A long time ago, between 2005 and 2007, when I was starting to make music again after a long hiatus, I thought it might be fun to do a song (or two) only using instruments I had back in the late 80s.  At the time, I actually had to re-aquire some of them, like a Synsonics drum set:


http://www.burnkit2600.com/synsonics-drums/


After a little poking around the web, I abandoned my idea.  Here's why.  What I was planning to do was to use only vintage gear to make a song using a modern DAW (digital audio workstation), but what I discovered were people going much more extreme than what I was planning, making my effort seem pale and moot.


What I did do, though, was use some of those old instruments to add flavor to my "modern" recordings.  Flash forward: last week.


Last week I was surfing around, reading tutorials about creating complex bass synthesizer sounds.  It's something I've been working on for a few weeks.  Trying to create "live" playable versions of popular contemporary bass timbres.  But I stumbled on something very interesting, to me and I wish I had a link to share (see comments when I find it), but someone had rediscovered their cassette 4-track recorder in their attic, and decided to make a recording with it, and had posted said recording on soundcloud.


I was so curious to hear this track, and I was so happy to hear a modern recording done with something so completely obsolete.  I didn't imagine I'd ever follow in that guys footsteps . . . but,

I had also recently dug out my own 4-track (see above) because someone who once performed in a video of mine asked to see the finished video.  Nothing sexual, but the video wound up being a little to personal to post on the web, so no link, but I digress.  I had long ago lost the finished edit of the video, so the only way to share it with my friend was to make a new master.  I located the edited video and then set about marrying it to the 4-track audio tape containing the music and narration.  So my 4-track has been set up in my studio for months.  But that alone didn't get me interested in actually using it to make music.  Perish the thought.  What a pain it would be, to use that old thing to record a song, to say nothing of the crappy quality of the output.  Read on,


I could not get that guy's retro track out of my head.  It was so cool to hear the sound of tape again, the kind of warm smooth sound digital can only aspire to, with its crisp precision and perfect replication.  I started to think, it might be interesting to try and record something with the 4-track, just to break the monotony of the way I normally make music now.  But then I remembered all the trouble my 4-track was having when I stopped using it.  The erase heads don't work as well as when they were new (meaning, you can't fix mistakes you might make while playing), and how the machine will not stay in record mode without some strong packing tape.


I then remembered, the last time I checked, you could buy a new cassette 4-track for about $80, so maybe I should just replace mine, if I was serious.  However, a little sleuthing clued me in to the fact that production of these machines ceased several years ago, and the price, has, of course, gone way up as a result.  The cheapest "new" one is now about $240, best I can tell.  Way out of my budget for something I may use only once or twice.


However, I became kind of obsessed with seeing if I could find one cheaper and wound up discovering a lot of people who, beyond being nostalgic for these old devices, were actually waxing about the benefits of using them, today:


http://yearoftheboy.com/2011/04/03/4-track-cassette-recording-a-few-thoughts-on-why-older-recording-techniques-are-sometimes-better/


I started reading more and more about analog 4-track recording, it's history, demise, all the while, thinking, I really want to give this a go, at some point, feeling like I was just getting the dominoes lined up for some future knock down show.  Until I found this:


I am attempting to create a compilation of like-mi...


Simon Holland (a.k.a. Carrillion) is creating a compilation audio project of music recorded on or using the techniques and instruments of old cassette tape 4-track recording, with a single rule, no guitars.  Now this is a little different than anything I'd been contemplating before, as my retro track plans always included a spot for some guitar.  But I'm totally up for this challenge and it changed my future looking into present action.


As such, last night I dug out both my old casio keyboards, a VL-1 and Casio MT-540.  I had an idea to lay down a click track using the built in rhythms of the VL-1. If you are familiar with the Trio song: Da Da Da:


Trio - Da Da Da


You already know how the drums on this little synth sound.  Here's what it looks like:

I connected the VL-1 to an old delay unit from Roland/Boss and started to created the feel I was looking for.  I ended up adding a flanger to the loop too, to give the synth sound a little more dimension.  I also had an idea for a "sequence" type melody.

Recently I've been trying to get a handle on being able to actually play all my instruments, especially the synths.  I was recently working with my Korg Kaossilator:

And noticed it was set to "Ionic" scale.  I was not familiar with "Ionic" scales, so I consulted my friend, wikipedia and wound up also looking up pentatonic scales, which I had heard of before but never bothered to learn more about.  On reading about pentatonic scales, I thought they would be very useful for a novice like myself, because it's very hard to get discordant in that mode.  

After coming up with a nice sequence melody.  I set about making a good bass timbre.  Remember, learning how to make cool bass timbres was how I wound up going on this whole retro journey in the first place.  I took the Casio MT-540:

Blended the Brass Ensemble (an old favorite) with the Funky Clav sounds but ran it through my old Roland Boss Octaver, which creates bass sounds one octave lower than what you put in, and the sound was fat and rich.  Now, I have no idea what the eventual bass line of the song will be, but that timbre is going to be great.

I have yet to decide on a voice for the main melody, but there will be additional drums provided by the Synsonics (and maybe a 'real' tambourine).  And I started to develop some lyrics, though, given the retro nature of the project, I'm tempted to grab some of my old poetry instead, and edit it to fit the song.  Time will tell.

First Post

Few people know that Van Gogh became famous not, initially, for his paintings, but for the letters he wrote about his paintings to his sister.  It was only after the letters became well known that people wanted to see the images he'd created.  He was a most unsuccessful artist, in his life time, hardly known at all.  Now of course, his paintings fetch among the highest prices in the world.  But what's important about this story is not that his writings made his paintings famous, but that his writings made paintings (which no one had seen) be interesting, compelling.  There was something in describing the struggle of painting that was compelling in it's own right.

Thinking about that, I'd long thought it would be nice to document my thoughts as I work on things, as I make stuff.  Not to become famous, lol, but, as much to see if writing about the work might actually improve it, or motivate me to work faster.  There's nothing like publishing the fact that you started to work on a new song and realize, 4 months later, that you never finished it, a fact easily missed if you don't write it down.

So, with any luck, I will write down the things I'm up to and describe the struggles in interesting detail.  You'll be the judge of my efforts.