Progress & Experiments
Some Updates
Well, since last I wrote, many exciting things have happened. We had some family visit. That was great. It wasn’t quite like the days of old, where every day was committed to the various activities, but that was always too much anyway. We managed to squeeze in a solid amount of visit time. The weather cooperated well and we spent a lot of time in the pool at my in-laws’ house. Much Rosé was had, along with the usual refreshments. At times, it was frustrating, as I did end up doing a lot of kid-wrangling and not as much chatting with the adults. After a year and a half cooped up in this box, it was nice to be able to actually see some people other than my immediate family. The “boy cousins” are all way bigger than I remember. They’re all really great kids. They did great with my kids. Naturally (haha) my daughter was insanely popular. I guess it pays to be two. Something tells me, though, that her popularity will be a feature for a long, long time.
More recently, we finally, finally took the kids and went to visit our friends who live a couple minutes’ walk down the road. What was somewhat surprising was how awkward the two oldest kids were with each other. Luckily, that didn’t last too long, but I guess it was to be expected, given how long it has been since they played together. I’m sure they’ll be fast friends again before too long (as long as we try to hang out regularly).
Latest Musical Activities
There hasn’t been that much going on the music front lately. Part of it is the general business of life lately, but part of it is also a little lull in my creative drive lately. Fear not! Through a discord channel I’m part of, I found out about a call for submissions to a compilation album and decided to put together a track for it. The theme of the album is “Experimental Music”, which can mean a lot of things, as recognized by the record label themselves. I already had an experiment of sorts started on my trusty Digitone, and it turned out to be just the thing to kick start this project. For some reason, the Octatrack seemed like the perfect dance partner for this project. Before long, that hunch was confirmed, and I was able to put together an arrangement that I liked. I recorded it jam-style in one take, straight off the outputs of the Octatrack. The idea there was also a bit of an experiment. Lately, I’ve been toying with thoughts of downsizing my gear setup. My thought is that, if I can get a good enough recording straight off the main outputs of a device like the Octatrack or MPC, then I can consider selling some of the mixing and other gear used to record a new tune. For now, I’m not making any drastic changes to the setup, but I have yet to find out if I made the cut for the compilation album. I promise to update the blog as soon as I find out. Until then, keep on jammin’!
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