Most of my music making has been to get out some sort of pain. I would play when frustrated, angry, wanting something else, etc. It was a way to get out the pain, express it, feel it fully, a way to let the emotions racing around my mind have some concrete form. And hopefully dissipate or come to some new understanding of them through churning through them in audio-musical form.
That was a healthy way to process negative feelings while they were happening/present, but recording and hoping to turn those painful moments into some sort of long-term art available for mine and others future consumption, led to a whole new set of problems.
The music I recorded was a great snapshot of a current emotional state–usually negative. But in order to take those raw recordings and sculpt them into a finished form I felt comfortable showcasing as art, I needed to spend a huge amount of rational time with those recordings. I needed to edit, mix, master, compile into an album and then master the album as a whole. I spent WAY more time processing the files than feeling the feelings.
* = time spent on live emotion
– = time needed to finish the recording
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I quickly became backlogged with content to process. The bottleneck felt stifling. I would sometimes not record more when I felt bad just because I knew I would then have even more content to process. What happened for a  few years was all of my freetime was spent editing content. I was swimming in a sea of content longing to have gems plucked for display….it got old.
So I stopped. I decided to go back to school, and focus on a new technical skills. I spent 4 years on an artistic hiatus while learning various areas of computer science.
So after graduating, 1 year of work in a start-up, and 1/2 year of time to figure out where I am now, this new project has come about.
What is it? In its essence the project has a few rules. The rules are there to keep things healthy:
-I record instrumental with myself or friends with a focus on solid, tight, clean, clear expression.
-Recordings are then put on a computer for that day, and listened to again later on. Usually while cooking, cleaning, or working on some project that doesn’t require all of my attention.
-While proofing the recordings I listen for long blocks of time where the music either sounds good, or some how feels good to hear. That is the art in the editing I suppose: Find the good stuff.
-This time though I am not ‘allowed’ to make edits or cuts within a single track. What is heard in the final mix is what actually happened in the live recording. This means sometimes technical perfection is sacrificed for the overall piece. I lean toward longer pieces (8-30 minutes).
-Edits that are allowed: dynamics processing: fade-ins and outs, overall normalization, minimal EQ (If there is a low frequency hum I can easily cut out, I will.), if somehow the mix is just off and I can boost or cut some area to help it out. I also may add some compression to level-out the volume of the piece.
That’s it.
-Once finished, the pieces are posted to the site about once a week.
-I try to post them in the order they were recorded.
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So far this has been great. I am free to record as much as I want. Minimal editing allows me to never feel backlogged. If nothing jumps out at me as being worth listening to again, I can always press delete.
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I’m not sure where this project will go.
I am happy to have a creative outlet again. I hope this organism lives by being allowed to evolve as well. Currently it thrives…in the form of fun had while recording, editing being fun, and sharing being close to real-time.
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Hopefully a listener gets something beneficial from this as well.