hmmm, what an uneventful day!
this post should be interesting, since it's the first time i'll be writing on this blog outside of Weekend Mode. i spent all day at my 9-5 doing things i wasn't interested in!
- to make this post more fun to write, i'm going to structure it into two parts which take place BEFORE i write in my musical journal and AFTER.
- naturally, this here is the BEFORE portion, where i complain about my day a little bit (sorry! this is the personal blog of a bored salaryman, you have to have known what you were getting into!,) and then think out loud on how i want to tackle my journal. so, it'll be neat to compare and contrast my initial keywords with my post-creation keywords! play a game in which you determine the meaning of my actions. that's what being an "empath" is!
- haha, sorry. i'm just being snotty.
- today actually wasn't so terrible, but the evening and latter afternoon have been marred by the publishing of the tone glow article (read here).
- i am the 20th blurb on the list, FYI. they should really implement a table of contents, a dropdown, or hotlink system into substack. it's a little tedious to manually scroll through over 40 personal essays on What Music Means To Me without being able to skip around more easily. you have to feel bad for the writers crammed into the mushy middle (comme moi) - i think just about anyone's attention span is compromised after at most 10 or so blurbs, after which one definitely starts skimming to the end [hey, but am i just projecting here? maybe so . . .]
hold on a second. i just put on some music you might be interested in. let's catalog this.
Olson - The Holy Face of Luca
i kind of hate when people upload art to their bandcamp releases that isn't square cropped. what's the point of that?
this is a nice EP-type release of breaks & techno-y stuff that i encountered while trawling around bandcamp's new releases section. i bought it, but i can't quite remember why -> i will usually try to spend money on anything i find on bandcamp that is intriguing or at least a little cool to me, because i enjoy supporting artists when i can. so, i guess i thought something about this was cool when i first discovered it. i don't consider that a waste of money or anything just because the tunes aren't quite clicking now. maybe my purchase made olson's day! it's the little stuff like this that can keep an artist invested in the process.
^hm, this is self-aggrandizing. anyways. cool release. worth a listen!
- uhm. what was i saying? right. my story about being down in the dumps. it's not worth drawing out any longer. basically, i got bummed that my tweet linking people to the tone glow article didn't get much engagement. only 4 lil' likes, which is pretty disproportionate to my following (not a humble brag, seriously - just an observation). a lot of my fellow writers got much more engagement on their tweets about the article, so i got down in the dumps about silly stuff, like, "oh, i must not be talented! i bet people hated what i wrote! ohhh, i must be the worst writer on staff!" now, all of those things could be true, but they certainly wouldn't have anything to do with my mediocre promotional tweet getting a low-keeled reaction.
- in general, it looks like my engagement on twitter is falling off over time. but, eh, social media websites are such fickle creatures. it's not a thing to worry about, especially not at my young age. i'm not hinging on any job opportunities or sources of income based on my presence, so it isn't at all consequential.
- i guess, in general, i just want to feel like i belong at tone glow, and the events this afternoon were warped into an extension of that insecurity. selfishly, i want someone in the tone glow discord to reach out and tell me, "hey, good job on that writeup!" i'd like to make more friends with the writers there.
- yeah, see, such concerns are unrelatable and make me look like a metrics-social-ladder-obsessed dillweed. ee-yuck. let's get on to the journal, huh?
journal: pre-assembly
- i'll make this short and sweet, i've been typing for a while and i'm running on fumes. my target words as i approach the exercise are sharp and quiet. I don't necessarily have to adhere to them, but they should be on my mind as i put this together. i'm going to use a short snippet i just recorded from the album i linked above. here goes!
journal: post-assembly
- have to be honest, i didn't really wanna be there in the DAW so much, and i can feel it in the track. not so keen on this one, but i have to accept the product that my state of mind was able to deliver. it may be valuable someday.
- as far as our target words go: hmmmm, i didn't much keep to them. i wasn't even thinking about them. this was my first time trying that as a compositional strategy/exercise, and it failed miserably. hehe
- i grabbed pretty listlessly at my samples, and didn't go for much of a complex arrangement. i did, however, gain some more understanding of my main tool, soundhack pitchdelay, so all was not lost.
let me extoll the virtues of soundhack pitchdelay for a sec.
ahhh, such nostalgic vst interface design . . .
oh, i actually don't have much to say about it. it's just a very good, very versatile plugin if you're someone who works a lot with samples. you can carve them into unrecognizable shapes pretty quickly once you get a handle on what the different knobs change. i've been studying its applications for probably more than 1 1/2 years at this point, and i'm still not a master, unfortunately. but, pitchdelay is an integral component of EVERY release i have made as secat (those are over here, by the wayyyyy~).
anyway here is the journal entry for today.
ok, i gotta call it here, droogies. it's been a strange, dissatisfying day - hope this post finds you, dear hypothetical reader, in a better mood than me right now. swish swosh,