Slapdash

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Day 30: This might be it, for now. Improvised melody on the fake organ.

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Day 29: Can’t concentrate when neighbors play music. Do you know how boring hip-hop is when you can only hear the bass and the bass drum? I mean, not all of it, but this stuff, it’s just four minutes of DUN… DUN DUN. Anyway, here’s something.

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Day 28: “Lonesome Mammal Blues.” I’m playing the electric piano with my left hand here and the melodica with my right hand (and mouth), and holding the microphone between my legs. Classy!

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Music Every Day: the infrastructure

I’ve been making and sharing a new piece of music almost every day for nearly a month now. I love making the music, but the process of getting it onto the net has been tedious: Export an uncompressed audio file from my music software, drag it into iTunes, edit the title/artist/etc., convert to MP3, find the file, upload it to my web site with Cyberduck, rename the file so it has my name on it, get the URL, edit the URL because I haven’t configured Cyberduck to get it right, and paste it into a Tumblr post.

Over the last few days I’ve been working on a tool to make this all easier for me. Now I can run a few commands that accomplish everything after the initial export and before the Tumblr post. I’m planning to add one that will start writing the post for me, too. I’m pretty lazy. Anyway, I don’t think this is of much use to anyone but me, but I wanted to mention it here. It’s written in Ruby (actually MacRuby) and the code is on GitHub.

In other news, I think I’m going to take a break after I hit 30 days, which makes me feel kind of silly about having automated the thing I’m about to stop doing it. But I expect I’ll come back to it soon.

Oh hey! Guess I’d better get to work on tonight’s music!

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Day 27: “Moonwork.” Most of the credit here goes to various Ableton Live presets.

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Day 26: Kind of lazy, this one. In sound, not in execution. Sounds like Air, maybe?

2 / ∞

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Day 25: Dear God it’s hot. And hotter in the room with the recording equipment, so I sat down, played the first thing that came into my head, and shut the computer off as soon as I possibly could. With some orchestration I think it could play under the opening credits of a late ’80s cop show.

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Music Every Day bonus round! I figured out why the recording of Thursday’s “Always Bringing, Always Taking Away” rehearsal sounded glitchy: I’d imported it into Live and left it in “warp” mode, so Live was trying to make it conform to an imaginary time signature, and not doing such a great job. Anyway, here it is again, fixed. And still 20 minutes long.

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Days 23-24: I’m totally cheating here, because last night was Northern Spark, the amazing all-night art festival, and although I recorded something yesterday, who wants to hear another puppet show rehearsal? This performance was recorded around 2:30 this morning at Father Hennepin Bluffs Park, and I’m not up to creating anything new tonight.

The piece is an excerpt of Piotr Szyhalski’s “Empty Words (so that we can do our living)”, which featured musicians playing, or playing with, Erik Satie’s “Vexations” for nine hours while passersby read individual syllables from John Cage’s “Empty Words” and slow-motion dancers performed flag exercises. We played in shifts; this excerpt features Dylan Nau (synthesizer), Brian Rowe (bass), and me on accordion. And of course the passersby. Passersby passersby passersby.

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Day 22: “Amok at the Sproing Factory.” Exploring a big batch of new (to me) audio software.

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Slapdash

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