GRcade Musician's Club - Do You "Do" Music?

Thanks man. Yup, that's pretty much what I do.

Recording a loop. Add a beat. Layer it up, copy and paste, soundcloud. I'm not a professional musician. Never have been, probably won't be. Yet its my most learned exercise as I've probably put in 1000+ hours. It's just something I do for me and if I make a nice product, great. Most of it is madness.

Literally 200 or so gigs of stuff I've never released though, because mixing/mastering is real work. I guess you could say I'm more of a performer. I produce almost nothing.

Shame live music is impossible at the moment, but should stream some stuff. It's literally illegal to play in a band so, well, strawberry float.

For me music is more an art practice than something with a defined goal to it. It's a mode of being. I really enjoy interacting with others mostly in my group TBS but they're all over the place at the moment. Hopefully we can get together before too long because we really have a dynamic. Haven't seen my drummer in years though, he disappeared off some place selling LEDs for cruise ships. True story.

I rediscover my music on a regular basis, play for a few days, release some old jam tracks, still got 10+ year backlog to get through. It's harder when you record everything in a group and try to make that the project. Some really good mashed up tunes in the moment that never see the light of day.

You can see this in professional musician's output though. A jam/riff/thing gets released 10, 20 years after it was written and becomes a hit. And the musicians are like, lol, we wrote that 20 years ago. I think this is probably what will happen to me when I give up with design/art and just teach guitar, play at weddings, and live in somebody else's house/shed/cave. I jest, but I think it's going to take a long time for me to finish and commit anything properly to tape, especially the way things are at the minute.

Really enjoy playing with my Arturia Minibrute 2 though, I've got some ideas going on there just stored in the sequencer. That was a good buy, and its there for when I need a sonic escape from my design job.

Green Gecko wrote:Literally 200 or so gigs of stuff I've never released though, because mixing/mastering is real work. I guess you could say I'm more of a performer. I produce almost nothing.

You should just give them a quick mix and chuck them out bud. The amount of bands I like that I'd listen to them live through a horses arse is in the hundreds. Modern day if you got a half decent recording and a half tidy mix you could at least chuck them out for people!

Load wave > normalise > Waves L3 Multimaximiser on master channel set to -0.2dB lol

You're right. I might just say strawberry float it and render out entire 2-4hour long jam sessions. The Internet has caught up, so you really can upload, and stream an endlessly long track/session, completely uncut. It's better than nobody being able to listen to / hear it, even me because often the levels are way off and I have to do a +4-8DB boost in VLC just to listen to it . Better than it clipping though. A high noise floor is workable, whereas hard clipping is not. I was good enough a sound engineer to avoid that most of the time.

Maybe that's what my group needed, to just have the technology available for people to scan through waveforms at their own leisure until they find something they like? I've had ideas of building a website/app like that, where it's basically just a sound dump. Go to this website, explore a waveform, find some 1 minute sequence you like. Maybe even give visitors the ability to select out and edit the bits they like at their own leisure, and then they determine what "track" is?

Now that would really change things...

You should definitely get the jam sessions out there. If you look at musicians like James Ferraro, he released a metric gooseberry fool ton of his early music online. I downloaded a huge torrent and amongst the 30+ minute tracks of pure noise there are moments of genius - finding it is half the fun, and it shows his progression to his recent music that follow the typical 'album' format i.e. 40-60 mins, 3-6 min per track, thematically cohesive.

Probably 90%+ of my music is just stored on my PC too. I jump from genre to genre depending what I feel like making so I've started grouping off tracks based on that, just to try and eventually assemble a selection of tracks that work in a sequence.

I do wish there was a Soundcloud alternative that leaned more towards music discovery rather than the culture of self-promotion in the hope of getting likes and followers. I find it quite hard to discover new music through Soundcloud unless its tied to a very specific genre. Plus its full of bots.

Holpil wrote:You should definitely get the jam sessions out there. If you look at musicians like James Ferraro, he released a metric gooseberry fool ton of his early music online. I downloaded a huge torrent and amongst the 30+ minute tracks of pure noise there are moments of genius - finding it is half the fun, and it shows his progression to his recent music that follow the typical 'album' format i.e. 40-60 mins, 3-6 min per track, thematically cohesive.

Probably 90%+ of my music is just stored on my PC too. I jump from genre to genre depending what I feel like making so I've started grouping off tracks based on that, just to try and eventually assemble a selection of tracks that work in a sequence.

I do wish there was a Soundcloud alternative that leaned more towards music discovery rather than the culture of self-promotion in the hope of getting likes and followers. I find it quite hard to discover new music through Soundcloud unless its tied to a very specific genre. Plus its full of bots.

Yeah, I had kind of hoped that's what Soundcloud would be for me but it's basically twitter for so-called "drops" now.

That reference is interesting, and yes, that's exactly what most of my group's music is/was like. 45 minute long epics of total horribleness and in 5 minutes or 3 minutes or even 30 seconds there's moments where I genuinely feel like, wow, that right there is special.

When I get around to my own personal giant sound dump, I'll of course share it here. I think the idea of crowdsourcing the determination and selection of "good stuff" is itself a pretty novel concept...

Edit: wait, wait. How about this. You have a platform where the fans get paid a fee to find the good stuff, and then release it as a track. Every time that track sells, that fan gets a kickback for selecting that track as a track.

Then the fanbase literally gets rewarded for doing the hard work for the artist, filtering through all the stuff and deciding what's "good", because afterall, it's up the audience what's "good", no? That's kind of anarcho-capitalism.

I'll check this post back in 10 years and I bet some other band has done it.

I think I've registered my absolute distaste for mixing before. It annoys me most of the time.