[linux-audio-user] Homemade music

[Steve D]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 03:44:31PM +0100, Thorsten Wilms wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 07:15:56PM -0700, Steve D wrote:
> 
> > OGG format:
> > http://www.xscd.com/pub/music/audio/ogg/thorsten-wilms-and-steve-doonan_gnomes.ogg
> > 
> > MP3 format:
> > http://www.xscd.com/pub/music/audio/mp3/thorsten-wilms-and-steve-doonan_gnomes.mp3
> 
> 
> So I listened to it on my brother's pc with bad speakers due to my alsa breakage ...
> brought a smile to my face right away. It's quite sweet, more so than I would 
> have dared to make it, but I like it very much :D

Well, I think that anything I do is bound to be stamped with my
character. One of the things I have enjoyed about working with your
percussion tracks is the difference in style and feel between your
creative technique and my own. Perhaps because they are disparate, they
each add something to the other, making a richer whole. (Or, maybe
that's too philosophical.) ;-)


> It's very fluid, airy, joyful. At places I would have liked a more strict rhythmical 
> alignment, but perhaps that would have been harmful (and hard to do).

--Hard to do. Your track has so many small quirks to it (which I like),
that to design some other musical elements to accompany it precisely
would require a much greater amount of thought and time (and I do have
other things I need to do). ;-) So, after importing your track into
Ardour, I changed the tempo Ardour associates with the piece until it
more or less precisely matched most of the main rhythmic ques in your
track. Then, instead of listening *too* closely to all the minor
variances, I composed the additional tracks as though there were a
strict metronomic beat (which there was, at the most macro level). The
small rhythmic quirks then became spice, interesting details to the
overall composition. That's how I approached it.

> The part after the break, about 1:15 is especialy nice. You picked up the build-up 
> /roll before the break to silence very well, respect!
> I think the flute gets a bit in the way of the fade out, but i'm nitpicking now.

I did that (re: the flute) because your percussion track ended just
about a quarter measure sooner than the rest of the composition, so I
had to do *something* to distract from the fact that the percussion
track had already stopped. ;-)


> It's great. Don't listen to a glass half empty person too much ;)

The problem, as I see it, with being too critical of oneself or of one's
creative products, is that if taken to extremes (and critical people
seem to often become "perfectionists"), eventually *nothing* is good
enough: everything is seen to have a flaw, and the flaws are viewed ever
more closely, and magnified in the mind of the critical person, until
they become for all practical purposes "fatal flaws," which make the
entire piece or project or track not "worthy" enough. One then discards
the flawed material and sometimes gives up in frustration, because it is
so hard to make something that is "perfect."

I personally believe that there is no such thing as perfect. Instead, I
think that there is only the external realization of an internal
creative idea/ideal, and the closer we can come to making the external
version like the one we create inside, the better generally the creation
will be.

> 
> Steve, I would love to see this added to ccmixter.org. Best with your parts also 
> in separate files added to the mix (additional files can be 'associated' with an
> upload afterwards).

I'll check out ccmixter.org Regarding the individual tracks I recorded,
some of them are very brief (only a few seconds long). There are quite a
few tracks, for a piece that is so "airy." ;-)


> Hey, I thank you, Steve, for taking one part and delivering back a most enjoyable 
> whole :)

Thank you Thorsten. By the way, what kind of musical elements were you
thinking of to accompany that track. If you give me an idea, I may be
able to make an alternate composition using the same percussion track.

Thank you everyone for your comments about this collaborative
composition.

best wishes,

Steve D
New Mexico, US
-- 
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--From a church newsletter-- Miss Charlene Mason sang "I will not
pass this way again," giving obvious pleasure to the
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