Wal-Mart Parking Lot
By license on February 18, 2018 11:45 pm
First off, no disrespect intended to creators or fans of certain genres of uptempo music with snares on the 2nd and 4th beats. OK, now that's out of the way.
This is an ode to my terrible time management skills. The song's title comes from where I was right before I made the beat a couple hours ago. My wife wanted to go and instead of saying no, I need to work on my beat, I said yes because I wanted some Old Trapper Peppered Jerky. And of course I was anxious and not really there, thinking of shortcuts to cranking out a beat by the rapidly approaching deadline. The feeling of the Wal-Mart parking lot is like so many things in life right now: not really wanting to be there, feeling rushed on the one hand, and on the other, obstructed by a hundred stupid little things.
My participation in WB has been waning progressively. I apologize to anyone listening and commenting for whom I haven't returned the favor. There exist a handful of somewhat valid reasons, also known as excuses. I almost didn't do a beat this week but I came in under the wire, even if I did phone it in. About an hour and a half on this one. On the occasion I dip in and see what everyone else is up to, I notice others digging deeper in, putting more life and autobiography into their beats. Even if their music isn't always my cup of tea, it's humbling to hear someone bare their soul however they can.
This is not what I've done here. I'm not sure if it's just that I'm an aloof schizoid, unable to expose my true self, or if I just need to hunker down and put more elbow grease in. Maybe it's not so much being consciously touchy feely or even honest as it is putting the time in until sincerity is natural. There is so much I want to do with music, so many ideas and possibilities. I don't know what's stopping me from executing on them other than that on a weeknight it's so much easier to sink into the couch with Netflix, a snack, and a glass of bourbon.
Anyway, I did try a couple of things on this track that I haven't done in a while. First, I decided I wanted to have at least a couple parts that weren't made on a sequencer, so all the keyboard parts were played by hand. Second, I decided that with the limited time I had, I would just quickly jam on some stuff into Reaper. I'm not usually a DAW guy but I didn't want to mess with editing on hardware with the minimal timeline. So here it is, a couple of Volca FM tracks run through the OTO BAM (the character of this thing is right up my alley), and a 3rd-rate drum n bass beat slapped together on the PO-32. Mixing nonexistent.
It's a 3-day weekend so maybe I can commit some cycles to something better tomorrow. We'll see.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC0 Creative Commons Zero (Public Domain)
