New Mixer -> DAW-less Jam
Posted 2024-12-18
After sitting and reflecting on the countless projects that I've let fall to the waistside - this blog included - I decided that I need to do some things to help escape the innate urge I have to start projects that I never finish and re-frame how I view creating things in general. Instead of striving for some imaginary ideal shifting my mindset to sharing what I have done instead of existing in some half-finished, hidden state. One of the biggest areas where I want to implement this new way of handling personal projects is with music.
I've been struggling a lot lately with the idea of "making a song". Sitting in front of a set of synthesizers, sequencers, and drum machines while trying my hardest to make something work. But I don't know how to make a song. My exposure to music theory is learning the bare minimum about the major and minor scales in order to avoid making things sound overly bad. When it comes to the idea of sharing fun sounds I've found it felt like the only option was to craft a perfect package with a super coherent song structure, lyrics, cover art, etc. Now I've come to the conclusion that I'm not at the point where this is within my skills and that's perfectly fine. Sitting around twisting knobs and pushing buttons while a loop plays has always been something I enjoy, and sharing something that I enjoy doing is the platonic ideal of a personal project.
In an act of impulsivity I decided to get a mixer that was on sale at Guitar Center - The Yamaha MG10XU. I already have a cheap mixer I got on Amazon that I had been using for a while but it just wasn't up to par with what I felt I needed/wanted. The mixing options were limited, no sort of effects and not enough inputs (which this new mixer also certainly does not have enough of but that's a problem for a different day). But the biggest reason for getting the mixer was for improving the overall state of my setup and to ease the struggles I was having routing audio, MIDI, and power on my office floor.
Once I got everything set up rather than try to immediately hop into "making a song", I decided to take the time to RTFM. After some reading, routing, and tweaking I felt excited to take part in one of my new favorite past-times of making sounds - but this time I didn't feel the need to write things down or save a patch or try to make a bunch of different sections. I laid out a chord progression, basic drum pattern, and a simple lead melody then started tweaking and twisting knobs - which feels like a return to what made me so interested in being on the maker side of music in the first place.
The result feels like a villain's theme in some anime a la Perfect Cell's Theme. In the future I think I will focus in again on having some sense of movement. The melody gets a bit stale here and I think it'd be cool to have maybe two sections instead of one to sort of break up the repetition. Anyways...
Here's the track:
And here's the setup:
