Making your own drum sounds from a synth is a good way to teach yourself some basic synthesis. I hardly have a clue. But I’m doing progress and a goal for January is to learn the Microbrute better.
Microbrute Drums
Author: Carl
Nicole
I met Nicole in Mannheim, Germany. It was April 1994 and I had just left my military service in Northern Sweden and gone straight to Southern Germany to learn the language. It was a drastic change of scenery. From living in tents in -35 degrees Celcius to long warm nights with a drink outside.
Nicole had a Swedish boyfriend and wanted me to teach her Swedish, in return she would teach me German. It sounded like a great idea, so we began to hang out in cafés, biergartens. Nicole was a sunny soul, full of life. She was a few years older, drove an Audi cabriolet and showed me the scenery outside the city. For 20 year old me, it was a blast. Riding on the autobahn cabbed down with the warm summer winds blowing. Just having been released from a uniform – it was Freedom.
Continue readingWeek 53 – summary!
It’s been a pretty productive start so far. Since last Monday I have written four new songs, both lyrics & music and finally finished a lyric for the song Sail Away that has been lying around for … a little over two years. Great!
I’ve also completed two Jamuary entries exploring my Microbrute synth. Jamuary is a challenge to create something small every day during January. No great compositions, but still something finished. My plan is to get as acquainted as I can to my Microbrute, making it both a creative and learning challenge. There’s no Jamuary2, so far. I didn’t manage yesterday, although I finished an acoustic scetch of a new song “Every Day is New Year’s Eve”.
Silly has a place
From the capital of puns, here’s today’s silly lyrical exercise:
Don’t you forget it
Good things come to those who wait
Tables. A tip of the iceberg from an eskimo
Whose vocabulary of snow
Would impress a yeti.
Don’t you forget it.
Chop wood, carry water
I stumbled upon this sentence the other day. Apparently it’s a famous old Zen-saying. “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” And I take it as advice to focus on the process, not the results. If we just focus on our running and our breathing – the finish line will come.
It’s a piece of advice I’ve seen in many forms. Focus on on the verb, not the noun. Just do the work.
Another saying I remind myself of is “work gets done in the time available”. It’s all the time we’ve got, so if anything is to be achieved that’s what we need to use. I’ve often wished for myself to have more time for my creative endeavours, but it has often shown that once given days of free time I’m often not in the mood/position to make use of it.
I find it comforting to know that in creative work/art/ five minutes on fire can outdo weeks. So for 2021 I need to make the most of the “loose minutes” that can be found every hour. A quick strum, a few jotted words.
Getting ready for a new year.
2020 has been challenging for many and devastating for some. Personally, I’ve been spared so far. And I haven’t had to sacrifice much but my convenience. A skiing holiday. The Ableton Loop conference in Berlin was cancelled. The Way out West-festival in Gothenburg was cancelled. And I don’t get to meet or hug my elderly parents as much as I’m used to. I meet friends less, haven’t been to a show, gig, theatre, cinema, restaurant. If I focus on the negative it obviously was a year of disability, but I had a lot of fun in my head.
2020 was the year I started swimming, learning to crawl. I did the Vasaloppet Öppet Spår cross-country skirace 90 km. And I took a University course in Electronic Music Production. The course turned out very well for me. The weekly assignments gave me a focus, as I had to hand in a song every other week during the fall.
So for 2021 I’m full of lofty goals and stratosphere ambition when it comes to my creative output. For Christmas I got Jeff Tweedy’s new book How to Write One Song. It’s a lovely and inspiring read, full of pep-talk and support and clever techniques and games to make songwriting fun and rewarding instead of difficult and demanding. I finished my first song using these techniques yesterday and hope I can keep the ball rolling.
My idea for 2021 is to continuously keep sharing creative work on this site every week. Snippets, songs, haikus or whatever. We’ll take it from here.
Easy Wins Vol 1 – eight track EP released.
On Monday this week I released a selection of eight tracks coming straight from the daily habits of the last six weeks. Releasing and letting go was an uneasy experience, a slightly nervous/self-critical feeling. But I had a deadline set for September 30 and was committed to hold myself to it.
One song may hide another song
During my years studying literature at the university I was introduced to the poem One Train May Hide Another by the poet Kenneth Koch. I read a lot of poetry at that time, so I’m not sure I recognized it more than any other poem. Over the years though, the underlying thought or insight of that poem has become a gem that I keep in my pocket.
The idea that everywhere in life our view might be blocked, that we’re at a given moment are not seeing the full perspective, the full opportunity we are given – and that new events/dangers/possibilities might be just around the corner. Well, it can seem like a trivial thought. Yet in his poem Kenneth Koch makes it obvious how profound it actually is.
So the poem has remained with me.
I try to remind myself of this in my songwriting too. If I stay forever working on one song, there will be other songs that won’t be written. As someone said, art is never finished only abandoned.
The Gentle Kind 