I didn't see it...WTF how did I not see it. Great work BC! I messed around on frooty loops a few years back and had like 5 seconds of something that sounded dope to me. But producing is difficult stuff! To put so many complex sounds together into something that is beautiful. Much respect. How long have you been doing this? Haven't listened to them all yet. But Weather Channel is my favorite, and I'm latching onto it with bias that will make it difficult to beat!
Thanks! I appreciate it! I've been making music since college, nearly 20 years now. I have three albums from 2001-2003 that I recorded but never released (they're really rough sound-wise), one from 2008 (very ambient but not terribly interesting musically), then the three I did this year after discovering Logic Pro. Jazzy Jeff is my favorite non album track; I like a lot of the album tracks.
It shows. I was trying to ballpark how long you have been doing it and I was guessing somewhere around 1-1 1/2 decades. I also guess that you had a musical background before that, like playing an instrument as a kid. I took piano lessons as a kid for a year or so. I was okay but wouldn't have gone anywhere further than a hobby on the Piano.
And Jazzy Jeff is good but Weather Channel is still tops. A lot of times when I listen to music I think about how I would use it in a movie (One of my dreams is to write a book about my life, and envisioning that shit winning an oscar. Dream big FAMS!). Anyways back to this song - It's like the timeline of life. When you experience life you really feel the highs and lows, but if you look at life in it's entirety it's like this song - Very routine. I guess routine is the key word here. Using the movie idea I see this song in a montage where somebody is doing their daily routine. Waking up, showering, going to work, eating lunch - then at :58 you get off work and are hitting the pub and cooling off...
Thanks. I played alto sax and drums in various school bands, and started playing bass in 9th grade. I never learned piano but that's kind of what this music is for; just learning how to turn sounds into piano key presses.
Yeah I suppose it has that pace to it huh? It was a warmup track, something to get out in an evening to get my mind right on the album I was working on, so it has a lot of repetition in it
I love music that takes something small and stretches it into something vast. One of the reasons I love hip hop so much is because of how artists take a 2 second sample and turn it into 2 minutes of hot shit. Repetition in music is very much an art form, if you don't do it right it can become obnoxious. No such thing as too repetitive if done right!
Yeah I love well-done instrumental hip hop (Pete Rock, DJ Shadow, J Dilla, et al). That reminds me, I have a response to your post in the Flavor of The Moment music thread, but my phone ate it because all the youtube links caused it to run out of RAM. I'll respond in a bit.
Interesting. I just watched a video on youtube of somebody making music using a tracker. It seems very tedious. Seems like it would take a long time to make a song using a tracker, I bet not a lot of people use them unless that is primarily what they know. I am interested in how they work, maybe I'll fool around with one some time.
Chiptunes use trackers (look up LSDJ, which is literally a tracker on a Game Boy cart); primarily, the craft came from the Amiga and Atari ST games of the 80's and 90's. They used a format called Module (.MOD), which allows for a lot of music, with more realistic sounds than chips could provide at the time (since MODs are sampler-based), but keep the file size small. Like computer demos (demoscene), they are a cul-de-sac of tech geek culture, where the effort is its own reward. A lot of great electronic acts of the 90's and 2000's started out by making tracker music. Moby, Daft Punk, etc. It absolutely is tedious, but you have a TON of control over an interesting instrument.
FastTracker, or ImpulseTracker... I don't have a ton of experience with either, but they were the popular ones back in the day.
