January 9th, 2011
Up early again to make it to set on time. We’re filming at Universal Studios now and it’s funny to see the tours pass by. People riding the tram snap pictures of me as if I might be somebody of importance. It was another crazy day of running around on set.
At the end of the day I was beat. I left the set at 8pm but I had to go by my office to meet up with my friends Steve and David. Steve recently finished a wonderfully inspiring documentary on improvisational musicians and David produced it. They got the film accepted into a film festival in Montreal and they needed to do an output of it to tape.
We had some technical difficulties and the final output didn’t begin until nearly 1am. I decided I’d better just spend the night at the office rather than drive 40 miles home at 3am just to have to wake up early to get to set.
While the film was outputting I worked on my creative thing until it was time to pass out. I opened up my song for the latest Monome Community Remix project. On Day 302 I had really great results using this new monome app called Grainslide. I felt really good about the song I’d produced on that day so I wanted to jump from there as a continuation point.
I decided it was time to create some kind of beat that could possibly complement it. It was not easy and I don’t even think I really accomplished it. Because of the un-quantized nature of my original track I found it tough to create a beat that sat well with it. It needs to be almost more textural than straight kick and snare.
I’m unsure of which film the sample I used is from but its basically just the sound of someone running around causing a bit of a ruckus. I pulled little hits here and there and created a drum rack of it in Ableton.
Unfortunately, I must now refrain from letting you hear the song as it progresses because I think it is beginning to have an identity and I don’t want to spoil the reveal before the deadline of January 21st.
What you can listen to is a snippet of the beat that I created. It’s not much but it’s where I ended up before passing out on a sofa.