Very busy day at work today and my wife is going out to dinner with friends tonight* so not much chance for creativity today. I have been reorganizing my studio/office and decided to take a few minutes to look around for anything that might be interesting. You be the judge.
*meaning I will be spending time with my daughter, so creativity will be happening, but not so surely documented. Maybe I’ll update with some pictures of block castles or marker pictures…
My typical daily creative time is first thing in the morning before anyone else gets up, but on Mondays I have to travel 2 hours for work so that time isn’t available. The last 2 weeks I have made a point to stop along the way at Taughannock Falls to make field recordings and take a few pictures. It’s nice at that time because there really isn’t anyone else around, even if my recordings aren’t turning out that great. I still enjoy the short time I am able to be there. This week I also brought my Lomo Sprocket Rocket so hopefully I can finish the roll and get back some interesting photos soon.
Spent the morning with one of my favorite iPad apps — Soundbow. It’s: buggy, midi out doesn’t always work, and doesn’t run in the background. It’s also: beautiful and meditative and capable of generative wonders. I should send this to Fennesz for a finishing touch. Haha
We went to get our Christmas tree in the afternoon, and of course I came back with pictures of shape, contrast, and texture instead of pictures of people or trees. All in all a pretty great Sunday.
Left: MIJ project guitar (started life as a bass actually), norns, El Capistan
Right: Colorful can designs on surprise gift beers, courtesy of a thoughtful coworker.
Grabbed a Strymon El Capistan for a good price locally after hearing wonderful things about it for years and years. They had me at #disintegrationloops so I played around with a guitar and the looper this morning. Unfortunately nothing really turned out and I will need to play with it more to get the feel of how all the settings react. I can typically tell pretty quick if a pedal is something that will work for me, but the jury is out with this. It’s the type of pedal that needs more digging in to really get a feel for.
Anyway, here’s a clip of some moody electric piano I ran through one of the delay modes.
Left: The insides of old electronics remind me of tiny cities
Right: I’m at hospitals pretty regularly for work. There are always lots of glass blocks used in hospitals, which is very strange to me.
Dug into the unresponsive cassette recorder a bit more and found that the motor isn’t dead. That issue came from a broken bit of old plastic that was supposed to hold a switch in place to be activated by the mechanical buttons. It’s alive! Still doesn’t sound right though. Next steps: new belt and a thorough cleaning.
Shot this video on my iPhone on my way to work Tuesday. We had a heavy winter storm the day before and the lake was very moody. Made a few field recordings (used the other adapter I mentioned and it worked much better, but it’s still rather fiddly) but they didn’t turn out well due to heavy wind blowing the mic out. Watching this reminded me of some old sounds I made which always felt to me like treading water in the middle of the ocean. Tried my hand at editing them together with iMovie, and although I’m not quite happy with the quality and the fades, I’m pretty amazed at the tools we have bouncing around in our pockets.
I salvaged this tape recorder from my wife’s grandma’s house when we helped move her to assisted living. Unfortunately it doesn’t work and I haven’t been able to work out what’s wrong with it. I currently suspect the motor is dead, but need to dig into it deeper. Looked around the web for info and found they sell for like $20 which is sort of defeating for spending all the effort, but I still think it would be cool to have this old thing around and know I saved it. My daughter would get a kick out of singing her songs into it I think. They don’t make them like this anymore.
We got a lot of icy rain yesterday that turned to snow overnight. I have been meaning to try more field recording so thought this was a good chance. Was looking at hardware options last week, but since I don’t record much I decided to use what I already had - a Audio Technica AT2020 usb mic and my iPhone. The recording turned out fine for my purposes, but was very fiddly dealing with getting the app to recognize the mic via usb adapter. I will try another adapter I have laying around here, but it’s very likely that getting something standalone will be easier to work with. I was walking fast because I was on my lunch break…
I have a few small bells around that I would like to work into my music, so I thought it would be a good idea to try to find out what notes they ring. I started by trying a few tuner apps on my phone, but quickly found (surprise surprise) that there are so many overtones created that they couldn’t get a solid read. A quick google search led me to the amazing work of Bill Hibbert, specifically his program Wavanal, which let me record the bells and run frequency analysis to show the fundamentals and overtones. Turns out there are no sharps or flats in any of the the fundamentals, with each ringing in varying amounts of cents +/., There are a few picked up in the overtones, but not sure how present they will be to the ear. Will be interesting to hear how they sound against solid synth notes, or each other.
Something I have been thinking about doing for a long time but has always seemed over my head. It still might be.
Have recently been listening to the wonderful Sound + Process podcast series, getting inspired listening to many wonderful artists express themselves regarding what they do and how they do it. Life is very busy, and although we all do lots and lots of creative things, they are so quickly swept away that it can be hard to hold on to them. That is what I want this to be. A daily record of things done (big and small) not as a means to document productivity, but to document the process and spend a minute in reflection. I often find myself caught in the trap of things needing to be “good enough” or “done” before I consider them to have been time well spent. Here I hope to capture projects and ideas as they happen, without pretext. A means to actually see the things I’m doing with open eyes — a means of noticing.
Wish me luck.
An overview/archive of the posts can be found here.
