Offerings to the God of Speed
By Kedbreak136 on December 27, 2020 11:19 am
A few weeks ago, I was in this little grill restaurant lost in the middle of nowhere, with a volcano looming at the horizon and dense forests surrounding everything. Apart from myself, the other patrons were mostly bikers. As I went to the John, I noticed a very peculiar altar in the aforementioned John. Engine blocks, cylinders, set as an offering, and on top of that a little plaque that read "Offerings to the God of Speed". What a wonderful track title.
Hence this track. Another weird one that did not start at all like this. It started as a poppy song, kinda inspired by Let It Be. But then it morphed, changed and, as riffs got discarded and replaced by other riffs, this turned into this weird hypnotic song, propulsed by a bass sound a la Lemmy. Offerings to the God of Speed, how appropriate. It was quite a laborious effort but I kinda pulled something decent I think in the end.
So that was the last track of Weekly Beats 2020. Thanks to my friend @hent03 for introducing me to this wonderful community! This was such a precious time especially in this weird year of 2020. I was reminded so much of this wonderful book called Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland.
Quoting:
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The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
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This is so true and weekly beats, with its cadence and inspiration and support from the community really helped to get into the discipline of creating, is the perfet framework to accept that not everything will be perfect but continuing to work on the craft. I started playing quite a few decades ago and amassed a few songs but never had the confidence (or was too lazy) to record things properly. Now, with Weekly Beats, I got the opportunity to really go deep and accept no excuse. There is still a lot of things to learn and improve, I'll continue in 2021 and will be back in 2022!
The community and its creations were really inspiring. So many hugely talented musicians, everyone with their different voices, styles and aspirations. This is what's beautiful about music. It's like cooking really and Weekly beats is like a huge banquet with cuisines from all over the world, ranging from the avant-garde cuisine to the simple and delicious barbecue, exotic tacos, raw fish, octopus, thai curry, etc. Everyone can express their own dreams and mysteries, can practice their own voice.
I'll be missing the community! Fortunately, there are so many tracks I did not get to listen to in 2020, so maybe i'll spend 2021 listening to 2020 tracks I missed. 
I hope to see you all again in 2022!
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
Regarding transitions, I was watching this video on youtube about adding or removing elements of a track by pairs during transitions, as well as thinking in terms of changing the dimension of the song (in this case for instance adding hard panned guitar and keyboard). It kinda worked!