Notes for March 22nd 2024

Song of the week:

• Next week I'll be in Las Vegas for the first time. I'm at a conference which will be chaos in terms of how busy I'll wind up being. I'm excited, but it will be tiring. Not least because it means being in the air on planes for just shy of 30 hours for the week. Sounds weird but making a connection through LAX sounds pretty interesting en route home!
  • As a result, I may be quite delayed in posting anything here.
• I'll be absolutely delighted to see the back of March. It's been a shit month. Work has been door-to-door busy, and life has gotten some bits n bobs in there too, which has made things even more hectic. No one individual thing spiked up, but the collectivism of everything happening together (seemingly) has been stressful. I've absolutely lost some follicles of hair after this one.
  • Q2 will be just as busy, but there's a more evident path of what's busy or not; so I can plan accordingly. I'm also hoping we get better weather, so that I can spend some time in our holiday place in Dunmore East to chill by the ocean a bit.
• Musically I've been trying to ramp up the music I put together. The way I arrange music is absolute hot garbage and I've a bad process. I seem to gravitate to making drum sequences that are overly complex and hard to quantise. When in my head I actually go with lead synths or guitars first. Ironically, I never write lyrics or consider the singer. Which is often how I listen to music (probably to the chagrin of you, dear reader).
  • Which is to say I'm still on the song-a-month jam with my mates. We didn't do Jan, Feb saw some sort of bizarre chiptune thing I put together with my OP-1 and a pocket operator. March has more boombap from the KO-II sampler with OP-1. I want to mess around with the Lossy plugin (I can't justify the cost of the Chase Bliss pedal, though I'd love it) too, so will keep low BPM's and vibey stuff going.
  • I've convinced myself that I need a multi-channel mixer. Namely the Teenage Engineering TX-6 (why switch brands?). I have a beautiful pre-amp for guitar but it's not quite the same.
  • I've also switched my workflow from Logic Pro to Ableton Live, and though on the surface they're very similar, particularly for what I tend to do in a DAW, Ableton is so much more intuitive. And I worry Apple will pull the plug as they become Google 2.0.
• I drove to work today because I’ve to lug around equipment. On the first beautiful cycling day of the year! First time I’ve had to drive in months & months. And my god, it’s awful. I do not understand why people do it daily.
• Tried to use Instagram again to share photos. Wound up being bombarded with quick hit videos to consume on things I like (F1 and such). So much so I deleted the entire thing, again. Really want photo sharing to be community-based. Flickr just isn’t hitting the right notes, and I don’t know why.