19 Jan
2006
19 Jan
'06
2:56 p.m.
On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 08:52:54AM -0700, Steve D wrote:
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 ;)
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)
You succeeded in distracting me, then :)
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.
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.
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&si…
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