2 days later. I just hit 34 voice memo ideas and I’m stopping now. Between the guitar, piano, bass, acoustic, and pre-existing ideas, I feel my instrumental faculties have been well explored. And I’m really excited to pour through these for my 12 favorite seeds. Might do tonight, idk

Initially I was shooting for 6 songs/records. But I think I’m going to be choosing from like 40 starting ideas. So I’m actually going to shoot for 12. I’ll pick 12 ideas and develop them into tracks. Btw STILL listening to Pavement’s ‘slanted and Enchanted’ every day. What a great frickin album

Also in the jam room there is just a bunch of percussion toys, xylophones, synths, pedals. A shitty mandolin. But I’ll save their joy for building on top of preexisting patterns. I feel like I’m almost at the most fun part, where it’s just as much fun as it is work. Lyrics and vocals, for exampl

The bow is for messing around on all 3 guitars, electric acoustic and bass. We also have a fretless bass on loan from Brendan’s dad and I love playing it, so will mine for ideas there as well. Might the bow sound insane on the fretless? My favorite fretless thing is sliding a two-note chord.

Then I was just fumbling around every day for finger shapes and chord patterns. In this time I’ve taken down almost 20 recordings of raw ideas. Mostly guitar, but I switched to bass for the last few ideas. This weekend I will catch bass ideas, piano ideas, and I have a violin bow arriving in mail

It’s 10 days later. I held myself to playing guitar every day. Both bass and guitar, but really focusing on electric guitar for the first time in foreverrr. I dumbed down the tuning, tuned the two highest strings up a half-step, so that the whole fret board is pentatonic like a bass guitar.

…and enchanted’ but I would like the round of demos to reflect a bunch of the 90s indie I’ve loved from modest mouse to slint to duster to my morning jacket to pixies to neutral milk, just whatever

Then do vocals. Either work backwards from words or work forwards from scratch mumble vox. Layer and pan appropriately.

Then add the final instruments and sounds.

Do a rough master with ableton plugins and bounce the demo.

This focus on real instruments inspired by Pavement’s ‘slanted’

So, catch an idea, develop it into a progression, track some drums, and track the progression over the drums.

Track a new instrument. Or two. Whatever makes sense. Bass, guitar, keys, rain sounds. The goal is to want to do vocals by the end of this step.

I’m shooting to bounce 6 demos within 3-4 weeks. These will be ableton projects I can develop into finished songs. They’ll start as ideas for bass, or guitar, or piano. I’ll develop the ideas on their original instruments, but I’ll build the demos from the drums up.

2.5. Make sure you’re fleshing out the loop to be higher notes, as you’re likely to pitch everything down in a second.

3. Process this loop through the gauss tape looper app at 1.5 tape speed. Manipulate the loop until satisfied. Port the gauss loop back into ableton.

4. Chop/arrange on Mac.

Process (work in progress)

1. Get on brendan’s kit and track a loop- tight, short, and specific, with personality.

2. In ableton, flesh out the loop with DI guitar, DI Bass, ableton instruments, vocals, and aux percusssion from around the room. Make it sound like a sliver of a song.

Compared to how things have gone, I want deeply to be prolific.

The band will pick up again at some point, but that’s not up to me. It’s really just gonna be when Evan is ready. My song ideas will still be there.

I can’t keep having these weeks where nothing gets made.

I’m still going where my enthusiasm takes me. I really feel a desire now to finally figure out how to make beats/loops I like.

I want to make loops like the ones in Earl Sweatshirt’s ‘Some Rap Songs.’ Dynamic, off-kilter, processed, in the pocket, organic, snappy, haunted, short.