This Entry by Dave Matney, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Breathe. I can finally breathe again. And sleep, at least for a little while.
I don’t remember much of this weekend, to be honest; starting Thursday at 7:00, I spent almost EVERY waking hour on music. Fifty three hours, to be exact. Seven to ten Thursday at practice, ten to one after that on composing, six thirty Friday morning ‘til ten playing guitar behind my friend Perko for a local news show (we played probably less than 5 minutes on air, and even then the sound was pretty awful; we sounded great live, and on air you couldn’t tell), then after a quick lunch I spent the next six or seven hours troubleshooting my computer so I could then stay up ‘til one again working on music. Saturday was straight through; seven AM to one AM.
Sunday I played guitar at church, then went home and had an unplanned break (my wife –who was in Idaho 2 hours away from me– was in the ER the night before, nothing major, and she was pretty much dead to the world in pain and on pain meds, so I hung out with my son. Then I was so exhausted I couldn’t stand up from laying on the floor; I don’t remember going to bed.)
Back to work on Monday, at 8 am, and when I got home at six thirty, I started pounding away at music, until 3 am. 3 out of 5 songs finished, and that’ll have to do. 1 song completely scrapped, and rewritten twice in the previous week, the last time started just before one am.
That was last night; back to work at 8 am this morning, and I think my body realized when I was done with my morning appointments that, hey, I don’t have an immediate deadline looming. I don’t have anything that’s forcing me to keep going, so now I must rest.
And rest I will, just not yet.
So… what all came from this?
Churches – New York
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This track, I feel, is the best track of all the ones I worked on this weekend. I feel I need to clarify that this isn’t the production track; I cut apart and spliced together a different version to go below the film, and later I’ll clean this up for my portfolio. Just not yet.
I wrote, programmed, and recorded everything in this track.
Churches – Florida 2
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This track was built over the weekend, using an idea I started six or so months ago. Everything within it was written by me, except the drum march; I don’t remember which Gershwin tune I took it from, but I found a few MIDI files of Gershwin marches, took one, cut up the snare part into a loop that I liked, layered another snare part on top of it, and threw a kick below it. So… TECHNICALLY Gershwin wrote the march… but only as much as the original photographers design elementary school collages.
Churches – Florida 1
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With Brandon throwing out ideas left and right, I wrote and recorded this song in two hours, with the first notes being struck just before 1 AM. It’s intentionally sloppy. The drum parts are Midi loops by Groove Monkey.
To write these, I used Sonar LE, various parts of Native Instrument’s Komplete and their Kore Player, Line 6′s PODFarm, and Make Music’s Finale.
Please, critique these. And I’ll let you know when the videos that they’re for make it online, if they ever do.
