Disquiet Junto Project 0576: Casual Resolution

[disquiet]

Disquiet Junto Project 0576: Casual Resolution
The Assignment: Get a musical New Year’s resolution out of the way.

Step 1: Think of something, recording-wise, you want to accomplish musically this year — something you can attempt to accomplish now with the tools you have on hand and a little bit of time.

Step 2: Give the goal you set for yourself a go right now. Take a first stab at something that might, of course, require concerted effort over the remainder of the year to really make progress on. The first step is often the most difficult. Why not get it out of the way now?

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0576” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0576” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0576-casual-resolution/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Set a short-term goal, not a lengthy one.

Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 16, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 12, 2023.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 576th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Casual Resolution (The Assignment: Get a musical New Year’s resolution out of the way), at: https://disquiet.com/0576/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0576-casual-resolution/

[disquiet]

The project is now live.

[markrushton]

One thing I’d like to remember to do throughout 2023 is to regularly remix the voices and noises in this song, maybe once or twice a month, and release every version as they’re made.

A few years ago, a friend left me a voicemail, part of which is included here. It was kind of a “performance art voicemail” for lack of a better term. I saved the voicemail and have been altering and doing a “cut up technique” on it ever since.

While I regularly reuse certain ideas and loops in my work, I’ve never thought about doing it to such an extent. It might be a fun idea to worry to it’s natural conclusion. I can’t imagine that I would run out of ideas by February. I’ll add a calendar reminder and see what happens.

More about me at markrushton.com

[leonclowes]

I’ve had this year’s project in mind for, ummm, over 30 years… in my teens to early 20s I was a prolific writer of cabaret and electro pop. For the latter, I would borrow my friend’s Elka synth and Roland drum machine, and record the tracks on a Tascam Porta One. This song, ‘A Love Divine’ was the first song I wrote on a synth, and it set the template of what I would write afterwards.

These songs have existed only in these cassette demos for a while and I made MP3s of them a while back for posterity. They capture a time of me being a gay teenager growing up in a world of moral hysteria around the AIDS crisis. I also think I have an excellent set of songs which are worth revisiting and recording properly. I’ve re-recorded this song using the basic Garageband set up I’ve got on my MacBook and recording my voice. I’m quite pleased with it, but I’d greatly value the Disquiet Junto community advice on what might be a good investment (low cost please) that can up my game on this kind of material (eg 80s electro pop songs). Thanks in advance to anyone who can help on that.

[DeDe]

Hello @disquiet and everybody, happy 2023!
Fist 2023 junto for me. I do take a break every year’s end to re-think about my career and music life in general, and I do take and write down some New Year’s Resolutions that I try to follow.

There are two I made this time that could be the source of this junto, but I went for this one:

Stop cumulating pointless “groove” tracks that end up unfinished for years .

As I need to write ad record music all the time for my day job, I need (in case of lack of inspiration) to have some ideas that could spark a final track ready to go. So I do write down stuff in a music note book or record demos that I keep on hand to be used as the basis of any new track I need to create on request. Thanks to that I never suffer (or suffered in the past) from the “blank page syndrome”
I have two kind of “ideas” hanging around me: the “musical ideas” (chords, melody, both) i write down on a piece of paper or just demo on piano or guitar, and the “groove” ideas: a basic rhythm track I records to be used as the basic track for something else.

i noticed that these grooves take ame a lot of work to record properly to eventually remain unused and lying there in my HHD for ages, while the “proper” musical ideas are the useful ones.
So I decided to stop cumulating grooves, start mixing the ones I have and sharing them on my Soundcloud just to get rid of them and do some clean up on my “ideas” folder.

I’ve been mixing and “letting go” some grooves on the past few months already, but I’ll do more clean up this year.

This one have been there for ages, a nice 5/4 time signature bass groove, a good drum track (I did the snare+cymbals live drumming over a sample kick drum performed on my drum pads), then I doubled the bass on a Rhodes electric piano, and left the master there waitressing for a melody or "theme " that never came. Added lots of synths FX to give some life to it with no luck, it’s still a simple “groove” track, but I like the overall sound and feel and the piano/drums/bass are properly played and recorded, so I let it go and share it with you.

[ray_cobley]

[pesky_human]

Awesome vibe going on here…

[disquiet]

The playlist is rolling:

[bassling]

@leonclowes That’s great material. I didn’t like much of the pop from that era at the time, but it has aged well and this must be interesting for you to revisit. There’s so much scope in whether to aim to recreate sounds or update it with newer electronic instruments. If you can send the MIDI out, then you will find it’s fun to explore presets on secondhand synths. Even cheap options like the Korg Volcas will work, but I should warn you that it led me to buy way too many instruments last year.

@DeDe I found it interesting to learn about your creative process and it answered something I’d wondered why you can sometimes quickly work up the production on so many instruments for a Junto project.

[xiiixxi]

Hello to all.

I am not offering a piece this week (at this point in time) but do have an ultra-related New Year’s resolution.

Over the past few months I have been working with a motley collection of commercially available software plugins to develop a compositional technique I have been calling The Euclidean Rhythmicon. My New Years’s resolution is to learn C++ and turn this into a fully fledged sequencing VST/AU.

I have already started the process using the Juce library to address the background Audio integration - which is way too complex to learn from the ground up at such an early stage - but the actual coding of what I want is now well on the way - I have coded for many years in low level languages such as PHP, Javascript, ActionScript etc so the nuts and bolts of it are very familiar.

I will of course be using it as I go on here and will keep you posted as to how it is going … I’m sure, as with everything, resolution to keep to the resolution wanes over time so to actual let people know what it is you have set your mind on can only help with sticking to it later on in the year.

[tristan_louth_robins]

Towards the end of last year I got really inspired by what one of my oldest friends, Sebastian Tomczak (aka little-scale) was doing in SuperCollider. I’ve long thought of Seb as one of the most intelligent and focused people I’ve ever met and his work over the 20-odd years I’ve known him has never ceased to amaze and inspire me.

Prior to seeing/hearing what Seb was up to, I’d largely forgotten about SuperCollider and I think the last time I’d used it was when I was learning it as part of my undergrad somewhere around 2004. That’s a long time between IDE’s!

Had it not been for seriously getting my programming/coding skills up to scratch (via data science) these past couple of years, I’m not sure how enthusiastically I would have taken to SC again. It’s amazing what properly learning the principles of programming can do in terms of democratising virtually any coding language - i.e. using variables, arguments, loops and conditionals properly.

So, thanks to my data science work and Seb’s SC adventures, I decided to spend the last few days of my summer vacation relearning SC. I thought this fitted the brief for this week’s prompt since I’m really eager to keep learning and composing through code.

Because it’s the fruit of about three afternoon’s reacquaintance with SC, it’s certainly not mindblowing, but I really enjoyed initialising some Synth objects, bussing them through basic reverb and live coding the short composition.

The script’s up on GitHub if anyone’s keen to check it out: Supercollider/junto0576-sounding_out.scd at main · TristanLouthRobins/Supercollider · GitHub

Edit/addendum: I’d forgotten to include this album that Seb released at the end of 2022, which was composed and live coded entirely in SC. It was one of my favourite releases of last year.

And a screencapture of the Seb’s live coding:

We Do What We Can - SuperCollider Piece

[leonclowes]

hey thanks @bassling, kind words and sage advice, appreciate that. I think given the space I have (I live in London, UK, space is a premium) I’ll look at software options of those early 80s analogue synths that I loved so much (Prophet 5 springs to mind). I’m still relatively new back into music practice so I’m getting to grips with technology after 25 years. Next step I think is to get my head round Ableton Live or Logic Pro. Thanks for your help.

[lazenbeeindustries]

I have resolved to try and use the fretless bass I got more often - it is a difficult instrument to get the sounds I want. But I have been planning a sort of Frippertronics song with the bass, so I went and did it. I limited myself to four notes and two “sounds” - basically just thumping the strings. Sounds a little more menacing than I was hoping for.

[derangement]

One of my musical resolutions is to listen more and interfere less - be it tweaking knobs, patching, etc. This interpretation of the junto’s prompt is in the context of this resolution, with a recording of a 1hr session where I slowly add in elements, each time listening for ~3min without doing anything to the patch, just sitting there and listening - starting with the most fundamental, a pure sine wave, then adding in an envelope, pitch, etc.

I’ve cut down these segments in the recording for the benefit of the listener to a more digestible length, along with an ambience recording by the window, an artifact of what was happening in the world outside at the exact same time

[lazenbeeindustries]

Love this! Would love to add to it.

[DeDe]

Hi, for ages I tried to keep a morning every week for “research & development” even during busy times, just to keep my composer+studio-guy chops in shape.
When I started to participate in the junto I decided to make Friday morning R&D day, so I could take it as a real challenge and rush something original before I got to jump into real work (usually from 8AM to 2Pm) and I created many junto from scratch like that.
But yeah, sometimes I do jump into pre-existing demos and just tweak and properly mix it.
That’s the case this week, a track recorded during 2022 but never finished. To share it here I actually muted 4 tracks and mixed, didn’t ass a thing…
Cheers, dd

@leonclowes nice, so you started with an Elka, same keyboard instrument I ever had (a string ensemble, 4 voices). Jason’s advice is a good one, old midi keyboards like casio or first korgs, plugged on a little guitar amp made a Happy man out of me.

[pesky_human]

I have been getting these emails for a couple of years now and am finally submitting something. This past year I have put a lot of effort into improving my health and getting my workspace to a more inspiring level. I designed and built all of my studio furniture and got rid of lots of clutter, physically and mentally.

My musical energies have been spent largely on my weekly radio show, but now that I am done in the shop and am happy with my space and gear, it was finally time to get back in the saddle. Re-learning Ableton, troubleshooting hardware, etc. Good times.

I have resolved to get back to making music in general and to do some more ambient stuff. This track is an experiment with some ideas that I was playing with over the last 2 days. Some droney, warbly meanderings in the vein of Gas. I can’t remember where I read this, but he was talking about music that was like a walk through the forest but you could hear the steady techno off in the distance. That’s up my alley.

Production-wise, this is pretty minimal. 2 sets of pads. One from Abyss run out through the Gen Loss Mk. 2, and the clean version from Serum. Bass from the Moog Grandmother. A field recording of a babbling brook. Bells are from Pigments.

This was a lot of fun to work on and gave me a deadline to work towards, which is always helpful in ‘finishing’ a track. I feel like I could have messed with this for another couple of weeks, but that’s normal, right?

Enjoy, and thanks for having me!

(here’s to hoping I got the upload right in this forum…)

[DeDe]

I should make a bass&drum&rhodes mix without the synths, tha would be a great backing track for collab…

[leonclowes]

Thanks @DeDe - you and @bassling are quite right about that. I am making out that somehow I haven’t got enough room to fit in all that lovely kit into my London flat, and yet…

I’m pondering whether to sell the vinyl collection and make room (and raise some cash for instruments!)

[ossimuratore]

My musical resolution for 2023 is to come out with music whose overall structure is more smooth, inspired and engaging.

In this submission I’ve tried to make the development between themes more incremental and diffused throughout the track.

Made with NI Maschine+.