Polaris
By ViridianLoom on September 13, 2020 10:48 pm
Not much going on here with this submission. I finally got a proper weekend after weeks of overtime and I had a migraine all day yesterday which really put a damper on any motivation to work on music. Then today I had quite a bit of chores to take care of out in the real world, but luckily I recorded this improvisation during my last brainstorm session with the band at the beginning of the week. One of my band mates has been writing riffs in harmonic (or melodic?) minor but often using root notes that would indicate different modes of harmonic minor. I haven't studied them too much so I still don't remember the names of them all, but I thought one of those modes sounded particularly evocative so I did a one shot take of piano improv, just kind of exploring the sound.
So this isn't really much of a song, more of a foot note, and more so that I can listen to it later and find snippets that I like that might inspire me to explore that sound more. I'm still just in the "learning" mode lately. Been messing around with Reaper to customize it to my workflow. Stuff like setting up folder templates so if I'm going to record acoustic guitar then it'll load a choice of "dominant" or "background" acoustic settings with sends to reverbs and EQ's loaded etc. etc.
So hey, I've been looking at a lot of midi controllers online that I think I might get for myself as a celebration for writing 52 songs this year and I'm a little torn between what I want. On one hand, the Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S series looks super awesome (admittedly, I love the LED lights above the keys and I hear it feels great) or a Nektar P61 because it's cheaper and also is seemingly integrated well with Reaper. I'd say the highest on my list of priorities is a decently sized keyboard (61 keys or greater) where the keys feel super nice because I'd like to put more time into learning piano, but I also want to be able to control parameters in my synth vst's without having to go to my mouse too often. As far as controlling the entire DAW, I don't necessarily care about that as much, mostly just expressive performance. Anyone got suggestions or feedback?
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)