Monday, October 18, 2010

Day 348: man this is cool-fun.

Cool-fun. A word from my childhood reserved only for the activities whose pure fun you believed in with the most fluid, natural and unthinking energy; a word reserved, today, for making tunes. I have just finished (reluctantly) another evening of tune tinkering. I literally could have gone on for as long as my eyelids would carry me, but alas I have a job to get up for tomorrow morning (actually, having a job is in most ways a good thing, so I'll retract my alas). Anyway, this is starting to get seriously fun. Making music has never, ever, in any way seemed like a chore to me. Sometimes it's seemed like hard work, sometimes an emotionally and physically exhausting exercise, but I have always actually loved the doing of it. I remember when a friend came down to the studio one time when my last band was recording, late in the evening of an all day session, and wondered at how we could stand having been in the underground, windowless cave for so long. All I could think was that I never wanted to leave, and was there any way I could manoeuvre things so I could be somewhere like this all day, every day. I absolutely love the sensation of layering things up and discovering magic pockets of total coolness as you create and jam stuff out and fiddle around. It's writing, but a very serendipitous kind; the combinations of sounds and notes come together apparently quite by chance. A different mood on a different night could bring out entirely different combinations, so the sounds you happen to get down on any one occasion are really kind of miraculous. So tonight I laid some new parts down and learned a few new things as I twiddled different levels and opened unfamiliar windows and menus. And I think it's starting to sound okay. Little by little I am learning how to smooth out rumply parts and sand down the shrill edges. I'm inching towards birthing something aurally pleasing from this crazy-arse technology. And with any luck I'll have that something ready to play for y'all before my time here is up. I will keep on working. But right now I really must go to sleep.

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