transients are thoughts (with Laguna)
By colorful grey on March 13, 2016 7:13 pm
This week is special because I'm posting a track I did together with my man Laguna in Spain. He is clearly a gifted producer and I am super excited that I got to work with him, and that we were able to pull this off.
From my end, I had these three lute tracks that I had saved as "urgent." I had messed around with them in Logic last week and didn't quite know what to do with them. The lead voice was a lot like one of my submissions last year, but my playing was a little tighter. I sent them to Laguna. He sent me back this super tight groove thing. I understand it took warp points in Ableton. He's just good with that stuff.
I loved it but also thought that my part -- the lute -- was not enough to carry the tune. I thought about it more and realized that I struggled with the concept of the loop. I've been working more towards non-grid locked, freer flowing musical expression recently. (To be honest, I'm not very good at it. My teacher and I have had long discussions about it, and it seems that my musical upbringing with quantized 4/4 music didn't exactly prime me for stellar renaissance music performance.) So I loved this track, and at the same time, I had strong feelings about loops. Tuesday morning before work I had about half an hour after the kids left, and I sang this stream-of-consciousness lyrics about loops.
So I do neuropsychology for living, and I'm pretty Buddhist. I think the lyrics are about the psychological reality of samsara. There you go.
Lessons learned:
(1) Collaboration is fun
(2) All my friends in Europe use WhatsApp
(3) As Laguna said, "it's difficult to make a song so further away. We could discuss this in minutes being in the same room!"
(4) I don't know how to normalize tracks in Live anymore
(5) Don't send your collaborator a total remix last minute :-)
Thanks Laguna! Hope you all enjoy.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
