Weeklybeats is a 52 week long music project in which artists compose and publicly release 1 song a week for the entire year.
Starting January 1st 2024 GMT each participant will have one week to upload one finished composition. Any style of music or selection of instruments are welcomed and encouraged. Sign up or Login to get started or check our FAQ for any help or questions you may have.

Noise Endeavor

By ViridianLoom on July 19, 2020 11:45 pm

A trend I've noticed over the past 28 weeks of writing has been that I'm often overly critical of songs that I either end up liking a lot weeks later OR maybe I just don't think it's as bad as I thought it was. So I'm trying to just let these things breath, let time tell whether the song was any good or a pile of shit. I get hung up on trying to write "good" songs every week and my weekends are often upsetting because I think the song is crap all the way up until submission time. Unless its one of those instances where I feel like I was on the ball that week, but then all following weeks feel even more pressured to outdo myself.

Anyways, about the song.

This last week I restrung my bass (way overdue, I have a bad habit of not changing strings regularly on any instrument), fixed the action on the low string because it was rattling against the 1st fret and then noodled a lot while I worked. I manage a lot of reporting at my job so sometimes I have downtime waiting for reports to generate. So my interest was with the bass this week. Additionally, I've been watching a lot of Adam Neely videos and I saw a Q&A where someone asked how he got tones for synth bass. Adam went on to explain it was a combination of gated fuzz and octave pedals. I figured I'd give that a shot in Bias Fx. I failed at generating any kind of synthy tone BUT I was kind of having fun with the fuzz pedal so I rolled with it. I'm going to continue to experiment with trying to get a synth bass sound though.

So that's the basis behind the why and how the song was written. I need to sit down and analyze music more often, sometimes I find myself struggling to come up with interesting and complimentary ideas on other instruments without just mimicking what another is doing. I often go into this things without even knowing what key the music is in. I often just recall guitar chords and scale shapes from my memory and whisk them around on the fretboard and see what happens. It's a fun and interesting way to come up with really odd structures but then its like you just drove off into the desert with a blindfold and now you have no idea where you are when you take off the blindfold and start looking around.

I'm with you about not being able to judge if a track is good until some time later. I was thinking this may be due to the fact that when one creates a track, we judge it against the ideal we have of that track at that time but later we listen to it more in isolation, in its current state and we may discover actually even though it's different from the original intent, it's not that bad.

Cool sound! I love the good sync of instruments with the drum. Are you using an octaver on some of these parts? Or is that harmonized instruments? Cool heavy progressive metal!

Kedbreak136 wrote:

I'm with you about not being able to judge if a track is good until some time later. I was thinking this may be due to the fact that when one creates a track, we judge it against the ideal we have of that track at that time but later we listen to it more in isolation, in its current state and we may discover actually even though it's different from the original intent, it's not that bad.

Cool sound! I love the good sync of instruments with the drum. Are you using an octaver on some of these parts? Or is that harmonized instruments? Cool heavy progressive metal!

Yeah for sure, the songs I end up enjoying the most are the ones that are kind of stream of consciousness without idealizing what I want the track to be, just letting it be its own thing.

Thanks! I mostly double tracked and harmonized the parts because the octaver wasn't sounding quite the way I wanted it to. I'm not as experienced with Fuzz or Octave pedals, need to play around with them more.

I really like this track. Wide and powerful. Like you said, very difficult to have enough distance with a track we just have written. Times helps, having break and come back to the track with "fresh" hears.

Excellent guitars works.

Loved his, especially the variation between the diff sections. 100% agree with your message too!

To me the whole point of doing a regular thing like weekly beats is to focus on process rather than results:     I improve a lot more when I don't care if the end result is good or not!

Won't take me weeks days or hours to recognize the awesomeness here! Sooo fun, and infinitely interesting with blends of synth and metal elements. Really cool!

Nice.

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