Henke

I had the pleasure of seeing Robert Henke perform at the planetarium this past week. You can tell he is a genius in his field by listening to him babble for a few minutes about the simplicity of his experimentation. Quite amazing.

Of all that he spoke of in those brief moments at the show, it was his grounded take on the material he comes up with that struck me the most. For him it truly is a trial and error process. How refreshing for him to treat what he has accomplished as nothing more than years of doing it the wrong way in hopes of finding what does work.

His approach although not entirely new is a good reminder as to what is really important. What Ableton does is give you a platform from which almost anything is possible. Though, the paradox of choice is something Henke has touched on in the past, and certainly is a hurdle I am having to overcome.

His chance appearance in Denver solidified my intentions of using a fully midi template for performance/production so that everything I do is recorded. It doesn't have to be perfect, yet, the foundation I have laid will prove to be something totally unique.

What I have started now, will evolve and grow with me as I seek out new sounds and emotions.

-Dave

Back in Action

It certainly has been awhile.

Making progress, albiet quite slowly over the past few months. The new job has been kicking my ass a little bit but the itch to create something has taken hold again.

I have been outlining a midi template for my mixer recently and finally began work this weekend. For quite some time I had this mental stigma about going full midi with the mixer. Having so much functionality built in made me determined to take advantage of that fact, but not being able to really save my actions or use sends has had its drawbacks. I have settled on a system that makes use of the send/return section of Ableton and right now I am making use of a drum rack and 2 instances of Alchemy's performance section as well as 12 send/returns and a few other channels.

So far I have been making mostly hip-hop rhythms and dub tones. I think I will continue in this fashion exploring deep/dub/soul tones but experiment with tempo. As always I am forcing myself to program a lot of my own sounds from scratch and while this is challenging at first working in the framework of my live performance template is making this process far less overwhelming. Hopefully By building a sound and song library this way I will be immediately ready for live performance of the material.

One foot in front of the other.

-Dave

Writing it Down

Having ADD has made writing things down very tedious in the past, but I've decided to go through a few tracks and write down what I hear.  This of course has proven to be very useful since I already have the ability to identify certain sound design elements as well as possessing knowledge of basic song structure.

My goal is to eventually go through 5 songs that I find to be quite musically relevant, and dissect each one.  I think I'll make something like 2 songs a piece with each format.  In the mean time I will be building out a library of sounds and religiously going through some sampling tutorials from www.nickstutorials.com to achieve a lot of this.

Start a new job on monday...sounds like i might be getting worked to the bone.

Live PA

It took me a little while, but after a few weeks of realizing where I wanted to go with this I finally laid it down.  Six channels of audio; two for track edits, four for building tracks.  I still have a lot more I want to do, but this is a start.  A beautiful warm-up set, I hope you agree.

 Tech-wut? by d.j.r. 

Just The Beginning

As I begin to pour my thoughts into this blog it almost has a soothing feeling.

I think I secretly love to write.

Music is...so many things to so many people.  For me, now, it is just the beginning.  It started as an interest in DJing over 3 years ago and became a life devoted to the possibilities a computer creates.  Aspects like production, sound design, field recording, live performance and now Max/MSP/Jitter have all captured my imagination.  

I have realized like many of my peers, that the one place to maximize your understanding and development in all of these different aspects is simply to start writing music.  So after 3 years spent discovering my sound, my scene and the means with which to fully express myself, I am eager to share with all of you my progress and my passions.