[linux-audio-user] Homemade music

[Thorsten Wilms]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 08:52:54AM -0700, Steve D wrote:
> > 
> > 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.) ;-)
 
Hehe, that's the whole reason I offered 'This and That' to you back then:
your obviously high skills and quite different musical background 
I anticipated a good kind of tension. Same here, and it works out 
nicely. Always a surprise, though, and that's the context to see my 
remark in ;)


> > 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.

A valid approach, no doubt. 122 BPM, btw ;)
Would have had a hard time to create something to this percussion myself 
(and I don't feel like it doing it, other things promise to be more rewarding)

 
> > 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. ;-)

You succeeded in distracting me, then :)


> > 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 have that problem with my drawings. Especialy as teenager I started 
to hate older drawings of mine, because the flaws became more clear 
with time (and I concentrated on them). But it was part of the learning 
process, and doesn't happen with such intensity anymore, since I reached 
some kind of plateau.

I still like to listen to even very old music of my own, so it's different 
here. 
Looking closely at someones work is a matter of curisity and respect for me 
and I like to communicate what I see. That means risking to hurts someones  
feelings at times. But as an Artist I like constructive criticism or just 
some decriptive terms giving insight into someone elses perception, so I 
get more out of it. I try to act accordingly.
 

> 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.

I would agree. If only I ever had a very clear internal idea and not so 
much random influence. Stuff just happens!
Then again, I started with blind experimentation and now I often have a 
general direction, even some vague ideas, properties rhythm, melody and 
sounds should have. So in a some years I might start to pre-produce tracks 
in my head ;)

 
> 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." ;-)

Heh, I meant airy not like thin or hollow, but rather like light-footed :)
Most important to me would be having the track up there at all. All your 
tracks in one would be a nice addition, everything separately great, but 
I know that can be quite some work.

If you use flac, all silence in the tracks will be encoded in a most 
efficient way, taking up close to no space at all. Flac seems to be 
not well-known and is obviously not used often there, though.
Victor (site admin) wasn't too happy about the flac of that metronomic, 
somewhat cymbal like sound. ^^
http://ccmixter.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2090&cc_cfg_root=media&sid=a1983c414f744dc006a8fefa7fc391d4


> 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.

Never developed a concrete concept of that. But I would concentrate 
on the Gnomes. Gnomes that are not friendly, but also not evil. They 
might set up a trap for you, though. Would have to be gnarly/knabby/ 
knobbed/knotty/snaggy. Sounds that speak of earth and wood.


This shall not be the last percussion track I release. Only that I might 
do a complete piece at times :)


Cheers,

Thorsten W
Moenchengladbach, Germany