Let’s post our sketches here.

It’s a place for quick recordings, ideas and exercises that probably don’t quite meet the criteria of demo.

So take the pressure off yourselves! Please don’t worry about quality, originality or completeness. It’s the quantity over quality thread Vs the quality over quantity of the two demo threads.

Edit for clarification : The content here isn't specifically royalty free or non-commercial. To avoid getting yourself in trouble always assume rights belong to the respective posters unless they expressly state otherwise.

As I started the thread I guess I should show the gumption and post

So here’s my last ten sketches in reverse order :





















They’re all excellent failures I’ve been learning from.

Some background - total amateur, very basic keys, really terrible voice (only started inflicting that on the world recently, but I need to inject something there sometimes) can just about work out the right end of a guitar though after a few years of that. I’ve been doing a quick sketch a day after work for the past seven or eight months that I call a “noodle challenge”, mostly a couple of hours work sometimes more or less.

The rules I’ve given myself are simply - record, upload and post something daily. Doesn’t have to be good, complete, original, better or even different than the night before, doesn’t even have to be music (though it usually is music-ish).

My aim is creative outlet. But also to get better at all aspects (playing, production etc) although often go backwards as much as forwards and I am scatterbrained focussing on totally random things each time.

Alright, here's todays sketch from me, listless result from a listless day, thinking about an earlier conversation. Absolutely didn't go where I wanted or expected. It's just plain nasty in this state. However having said that I definitely learned a few things, such as just how damn loud a bass signal goes if there's any popping or slapping in there and how little an audio interface likes it (very little).

Anyhow hopefully as this is evidently incredibly roughshod it'll will embolden others to start posting.

Hi Per,

A few thoughts as I'm progressing through your list:

• masterman
  Reminds me of what a friend of mine makes, see this for comparison. It also contains quiet pianos, drama, the Western atmosphere, etc. I have to admit it's not my thing. Too many ideas in one track. I like it simple
  
• monday-morning
  This one sounds just like one of the tapes I used to play until it was all worn out. A copy-of-a-copy-of-a-you-get-the-idea. Very nice!
  
• spiraling
  You're not half as bad a singer as you think you are. While the style is entirely different, it does remind me of Amon Tobin's "attempts at singing". Probably because you're aware of your limitations and don't try to overdo it. Nice drum solo at the end!
  
• capability
  Nice track for in the background. Not very noticeable otherwise.
  
• endless-lie
  Your guitars usually have way too many effects, but your voice really takes the track in the direction of dreamy shoegaze, which I like.
  
• full-moon
  Nice organ in the background! I like this one a lot.
  
• special
  Sounds like another one of my 1980s tapes. Do you use an effect to compress and dull the sound like that? Your rock tracks rock! Very nice guitar work.
  
• you-magnificent-bastard
  A bit rote. Some of your tracks sound a bit boomy here, like this one and masterman. I like the break in the middle - I'm still working on getting ear candy like that right.
  
• concurrency-totem
  Not a very big fan of this - the break for the guitar solo after the intro is a bit rough and it's a bit all over. Can't get them all right every day.
  
• archtop
  The guitar could be a bit clearer, it misses the highs and could use some sparkle. Otherwise, crank up the piano a little bit. It's lost in the first half.
  
• Dandelion
  I really like the atmosphere of this one, but the start of the guitar solo is a bit too fancy as an entry. Very nice!

If those are your failures, I'd like to hear your successes!

Here's what I made yesterday.

It's a dark track with an ambient style bass soundscape and a simple beat. I messed up the mixing yesterday and the track was uploaded empty to SoundCloud, so sorry to that one listener It's fixed now

The purpose of my one-track-per-day is to learn. So all the music should be regarded as experimental (experiment is the goal) and sketches.
I call this "One Track Per Day v2". Until 23 April, I made 40 tracks and got more and more lost in the sideshow, i.e. making a YouTube video for it etc. v2 is all about the music, only. I'm using ZenTracker and it has a nice button to share to SoundCloud, which is the only thing I'll be doing.

My current setup is very limited. I have 2 oscillators in my modular (Plaits and bOSC, a CEM3340 analog) as well as noise (Feedback Static) and a drum machine (Squarp Rample). So I am currently not capable of bringing about lots of variation and ear candy. I may experiment with multi-take recording at a later stage, but as it is now, I record everything in one go.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback @ Arrandan ! In answer to some of your questions, yes sometimes I use a tape sim to push things into a more retro vibe but sometimes I just suck at mixing :D

With regards your track, listening on crapmac speakers here at work so I can’t talk about overall mix and balance, but I dig the dark 80s sci-fi synthwave vibe going on with its gating. The pad is great, maybe look at building up your library of lead and brighter tones (the cowbell and synth that comes in around 50s that’s almost telephone like, might have been cool to actually sample a telephone for that part), as they’ll be the focus you want them to sparkle, and also doing some more automation of their volumes to enhance dynamism would be super cool.

There is no automation in my setup. If something goes up or down, it's me and a button I've been active in the DAWless thread as well. Not out of principle, but it's a good way to keep the perfectionism in check. Thanks for the comment! I was happy with the pad as well. I'm starting to find a balance between dark bass and clear synths. Before they were all in the same register blurring each other :-)
Here's today's:

Interesting track @ Arrandan , reminds of quite a few old school games with their sequenced music so mission accomplished!

Alright tonights one from me. This is a real doozy. For some reason my subconscious seems to be in an exceptionally masochistic mood right now.

I think the initial concept was to explore more sparse arrangement, and there was some sort of 70's NY folk concept thing then for no reason what-so-ever that I can recollect my brain said "hey lets go 80's". And so now I'm covering two territories that I'm waaaaaay out of my depth and comfort zone and so damn far beyond the reach of my chops... and I'm sinking and there's lights far out and... oh wait that was another thing, but let me tell you it felt just like it.

While the result is excruciating, I think there's a part of me that realizes I'm being very lazy and risk averse, and that extreme measures may be required to get past the ego and improve. I've gone through this sort of thing before, and I'll feel crappy for a few days because my output is just "gun, foot" repeatedly, however it usually ends when enough bad ideas have been shed with some useful realization and a success of some sort. So something to look forward to

Haven't been able to listen to your track yet, but here's my track of today:

I've been listening to a lot of witch house and Crystal Castles lately and I wanted to do something haunted. It's a bit more sparse than I had in mind originally, but here it is.

Some really great sounds in there! I love the atmospherics. Again brother push that lead sound some more! I wanna hear it scream :D Imagine if you placed a good triggered LFO for the filter and some distortion to give it movement, then slap that against a heavy beat, hmm yummyness. Nice job!

Hey Per,
It all goes pretty well for about 40 seconds and then it just stops and I'm waiting - ok…? What now? :-)
I learnt a lot about long-term learning from playing the game of go. There, too, you hit plateaus sometimes, and spells where you seem to be doing the same thing game after game (track after track). Or silly mistakes that you know you should be able to avoid. You know what top players say? Those boring and irritating periods are where you actually learn. Everybody thinks you learn when you suddenly get that level-up feeling and are capable of things you never did before. But that's just the confirmation of the hard work you put in before. This track is the work, man ;-)

Thanks @ Arrandan good way to look at it and you're probably right. I'm on the journey and will only find out where I end up when I get there

Tonights noodle. So retreating back to the comfort and safety of retro prog rock and noize guitar, I'll have to force myself forward in more painful ways on other days.



One thing I noticed on this one, I seem to be settling for less and less on the mix and master side these days, here I only bothered to compress the bass, no side-chain, and do a tiny tweak to the guitar eq, and then everything else is raw unprocessed tracks with a tape stop effect on the master bus before an instance of capitol chambers and the 88rs with the lightest touch of compression and a slight hype on treble and bass. I think I actually might prefer the sound even if it exposes more of the failures in tracking, vocal pitch and timbre etc. So the solution there is easy, I just need to git gud. Of course I am blessed by the fact that modern VI's come with "as if it were pre-tracked by a great engineer" sounds. I need to work on the bass sound though more still, it's just I think a tinge too much distortion.

Here's the one I made today. I call it a celebration track and I had Vangelis in mind when I made it. He has these sweeping build-ups that I have been, of course, unable to reproduce in a short session with limited equipment. Time and equipment being the main differences with the real Greek!

As soon as I have some time I am going to listen to all these and post some of my own. Fair warning.

Cool industrial sounds in there today, I hear what you're getting at with Vangelis so good job. I'd love to hear the drums more, I really like that you've got the lead sound punchy in terms of sound design vs your background it's all about that contrast, but I would lower it to sit in the mix more which will give it that slightly military jody vibe I think you're looking for. Great job!

Excellent, looking forward to it!

My madness seems to be continuing, hrmph, hrmph I say!

Ok so tonights noodle started out with this set of semi atonal open chords. I tend to associate this sort of sound to a countryside scene in my head, it's got straw practically sticking out! So naturally that got me thinking about countryside folklore and thus we end up here with the theme of this sketch.

Don't feel obliged to listen to everything! We're caught in a passage of time and before you know it, you get bogged down by a backlog, instead of just going with the flow. I was going to post a number of past tracks to give the thread some content, but I'm way beyond that. Forward, on to the next song/track/whachammacallit

Unfortunately, for the first time since March 14, no track from me today. I went to a workshop on modular synthesizers which went way over time because it was so interesting to see each others' gear. And to listen to people's visions and approaches. This workshop continues until June, so when this happens, I will repost an older track. Yeah, I promised not to do that. But I don't mind contradicting myself, as this is my viewpoint now and the other is now in the past. Just to give you an idea, here's a guy who had a modular kit with him that he completely designed and built himself. As in circuit design, PCBs designed and ordered in China, soldered himself, component selection, everything. Completely unbelievable! And it sounded pretty good, too! BTW, Gearspace rotates the thumbnail for some reason - click on it for the regular view.

Alright, for me at least this is more of a success. As in finally I can show that I am capable of poppy ish stuff not just depressed sounding prog rock.



Of course being from the mouths of babes (also the name of my prog rock project) the story isn't all rose tinted spectacles.

It actually came about because of the thread on "chords for choruses" and I was thinking how can I abuse the notion of a chorus. I really tried to get it to just be verse chorus verse with no transition bridge, no pre-chorus, no resolution bridge back. But I couldn't quite manage it. It still resolves, there's still a very short pre-chorus hook. It's just at the edge of being so short that it's in bridge territory, it almost doesn't resolve, but it definitely remains a chorus to me.

Here we are again! Today I went for a new wave style track. I have a module in my rack that I can flash different firmwares on (Versio) and I flashed a distortion on it, which you can hear on the guitar. The input is a physically modelled string and I find it rather hard to control, particularly with lots of distortion. Anyway, listening back to it, it came out OK.

It sounds like a new wave (less gothic than mine) song from the 1980s. Do you know Feargal Sharkey? If your voice was a bit edgier, you would be him. It made me smile because it's right there into that "we're new wave so always a bit dark but we're still trying to be poppy" territory. Very nice!

Cool, good balance on this one. I'm getting quite industrial Factory Records vibes, a few voice synth/mellotron choir sounds and you'd be in New Order territory! String modeling is definitely challenging to keep in line (ah ha! no... no not the band, just the... never mind you had to be there) but it gives a great organic texture that's well worth it.

Thanks. I'm afraid I don't know that band (or individual maybe?), but it sounds like a compliment so I'm taking it :D . I'm afraid the slightly melancholy parts of my music probably come from general britishness. On the plus side because it's easy for wistful to overpower and become saccharine the denialist stiff upper lip fight to overcompensate and avoid that fate can result in much of the kinds of music that I like.

Tonights noodle. Psychedelic experimental stuff. Exploring some sound design pastiche things for the sort of track I'd use as a mood setter bumper on an album.



Of course the title has to be extremely long for two reasons. Firstly it's an extremely short track, therefore needs much more explaining to do. Secondly... well... because :P

I like the title! About the song... Just kidding, it's nice to hear something more experimental from you. The organs waving in and out, the guitar just before we hit the first minute. It's very film noir and has a certain Tom Waits smoky bar atmosphere.

About Feargal Sharkey - I thought he did Shadow On The Wall for Mike Oldfield but turns out that's somebody else. He's most famous for his solo single A Good Heart. But check out Never Never, a song he made with Vince Clarke under the name The Assembly. Instantly recognisable, if you ever heard it before, and a good demonstration of his voice.

Today I had some time in the afternoon to work on a new track so here it is already. It's highly experimental with evolving sounds, a randomly generated rhythm that I painstakingly synced to the bass and some random voice sounds.

The fun thing about this randomly generated noise beat is that when it randomly stops, it builds up a sense of anticipation for the next beat. Which in my opinion comes across as very human. Weird, but I had no hand in when it actually triggers!

Cool stuff and observations @ Arrandan . I’ll check out that guys stuff later

Ok todays sketch from me. Trying to go for the attitude of some 60's/early 70's pieces. Not sure if I'm edging towards the territory or not but it was fun to be let off the hook by my brain and allowed to do a nice short one.