I feel like there have got to be some musicians here. I thought it‘d be cool to have a thread where we share our stuff. Or just talk about making music. Or if you don’t make music but want to, this could be a place to help you get started. I'll start:
My band:
https://thebaddestbeams.bandcamp.com/
My _solo project_:
https://alanmarsdeniiiobe.bandcamp.com/releases
My silly _solo project_ about race cars:
https://saddestbeam.bandcamp.com/releases
My stuff: [URL=https://i.imgur.com/0WEU14r.jpg][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/0WEU14rh.jpg[/IMG][/URL] [URL=https://i.imgur.com/GHl46pT.jpg][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/GHl46pTh.jpg[/IMG][/URL] [URL=https://i.imgur.com/aUeGt3O.jpg][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/aUeGt3Oh.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
Wow nice guitar collection! Got a good bunch of pedals too.
It's crazy actually I was just thinking of starting this thread cause my "band" is about finishing up recording our EP of sorts and I wanted to show off.
We are called Samadhi. We used to be a real band a loooong time ago but the vocalist dropped out so now it's just a guitarist, a drummer and me on bass. We've stuck together as a jam band for funsies and have been laying down our tracks for the first time over the last few months. Here's a few links if y'all care to listen. The levels are a bit off, I know, but the music is all there. ;)
[The Only Way](https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/JCCZB)
[Jamba](https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/5wjGP)
[South of Orion](https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/Nr1QP)
[Written In Glass](https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/7SDZU)
Here's my current bass. Fender Jazz. It has a huge chip in the paint so I threw on a sticker to cover it then a bunch of other stickers.
And for Christmas I got a DIY electric guitar kit that's slowly coming together. I just finished staining the fretboard yesterday and it came out looking pretty slick.
I don‘t want to show my hand too much with how basic a question this is–and this certainly isn’t a question with one answer–but, for those here who make music, when you're recording songs/tracks/whatever is it a matter of just jamming until you find combinations of phrases/chords you like, then do the things you liked the sound of in a sequence that makes sense? When vocals are involved, do you prefer to hammer out the tone of the music before adding lyrics/vocals?
I don't know if this makes any sense to ask considering how different individual processes are. This is like asking how a writer decides what order to put sentences in.
When it comes to my band, one of us will usually introduce a riff or a chord progression that we've come up with, and then we just kinda jam on it for a while until we find a composition that sounds cool, everybody inputting parts together to build the song as a whole. Sometimes this involves jamming on the same riff for a looooong time until it really clicks. Vocalist might sit and brainstorm lyrics while this is happening. When we're ready to record we've usually got the song down pat and we take turns laying down the tracks (drums first, then bass, then guitars, then vocals).
@milo#16545 And then the next question, how do you go about writing down what you‘ve come up with for future reference? I don’t suppose you‘ve all got staff paper you’re marking up with tabs or notation. Do you just… remember the song? Or record it on a phone/computer and listen to it in the next session for reference?
@tapevulture#16535 Thanks. That was my stimulus check right there.
@captain#16546 I'm always humming little melodies into my voice memos on my phone. 99% go unused but when I'm trying to write a song, I always just scroll through my phone and find a random melody or guitar part I recorded and sorta just play around with it for a bit. Once it starts to sound like a real song, I'll record another memo to refer to later. Some ideas don't come together for months. Some are done by the end of the day. It also really helps to analyze music you really like. I look for the moments that really hit and try to understand why they really hit. Not necessarily on a theory level but what it's doing in the context of the song. What happened right before that moment and what happened right after. It's usually that context the gives those individual moments their meaning.
@well-adjusted-guy#16550 That did make sense! The idea of something not coming together for a long time or maybe making sense immediately translates well to making other kinds of art. I do have a little background in music theory and none in Getting Out There And Being In A Band so I feel somewhat at a loss regarding these in-the-weeds type details.
Usually when we land on something we like we record it on one of our phones and send it to each other to listen for "homework". The homework part hardly ever happens and the next session is a scramble of trying to remember what we did with one or two of us going "uhhhh how did this part go again?" But that's part of the fun! You might forget one part but come up with something better haha.
It really is an amalgamation of ideas, with a band or solo. Sometimes the music just happens like a magic spell and sometimes it's just a vortex of discordant sounds until you manage to dredge something out of it all. Honestly, my favorite part is the early sessions of jamming on something before the song is really set in stone. You can kind of let your ideas flourish and run wild before you have to reign them in for the final piece.
@captain#16555 One thing I also like to tell people when they are starting is that literally anything you record/perform and present as a song is a song and it is a song because you say it is. If the combination of certain sounds affect you in any way, that's a success as far as anyone is concerned.
I think being an artist is just allowing yourself to be affected by things and the process of trying to understand why those things affected you.
I highly recommend listening to these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ki08oLDeek&ab_channel=JadFair-Topic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khtmNFvSlUM&ab_channel=BeatHappening-Topic
By someone's standards, you could say there isn't a whole lot going on in these songs musically. But I can't deny that these songs made me feel a certain way when I first heard them. I'm willing to bet anyone who listens to these songs would be affected similarly (if they allowed themselves to be). I'm not saying you should aim to make music that sparse or simple but if you are able to understand how these songs affect you, then you will be able to understand how your own ideas affect you.
I don‘t know if this is the best place to post this, but I have to share it with someone, because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I saw the original tweet, and it sort of tangentially relates to @tapevulture's post about Yuu Miyake.
@well-adjusted-guy#16527 I listened to a bunch of your stuff tonight while I did some work, I liked it. I live about an hour away from the race circuit you reference on that saddest beams album!
I guess it's been almost a decade now since I was recording stuff, here's the last thing I made:
A lifetime ago I was in a band that put out a couple of records and my claim to fame is that John Peel played our single on one of his last radio shows. I was beyond elated until I later found out that our UK distributor had manufactured one side of the pressing with a 48khz digital master but the plant assumed it was a 44.1khz file. This means the song as played normally at 45rpm was about 9% slowed down, a very noticable difference when it comes to music. So the single from our band that the legendary John Peel played on his quite influential radio show sounded as though it was on a Walkman with dying batteries. Somewhere in an English warehouse there are slightly less than a thousand copies of our defective record which the label insisted for years that we owed them for and used to send us invoices for on annual basis. Sometimes I lie in bed, alone at night, and feel anxious about this literal ton of carcinogenic plastic that will eventually end up in a landfill or float out to that massive island of garbage in the Atlantic, and that I am somehow responsible for. Anyways remember to cut up your six pack rings before you throw them in the trash, save a turtle.
I appreciate this advice. I'm on board with the idea that music isn't bound by any particular set of songwriting rules, but that kind of freedom/lack of instruction is in some ways overwhelming to me. I would say if I'm struggling with the idea of what music or a song "is" it's as much to do with the process of... writing it down, recording it, _realizing it_ as anything. I'm asking questions about this like how a person asks what they're supposed to do in an open-world game. "You can do anything!" "But what do I do?!"
And I guess you're right, thinking about what I like to listen to is the first step in answering these questions.
These are my guitars. I have too much music stuff for not being good. The schecter I got a couple years ago. For the first year I didn‘t like it because it because it’s fender scale and heavy but now i'm used to it. i love the bigsby for extra expression on like really nasty harsh sounding chords or slow blues type stuff
I got this First Act Sheena on Reverb for like $130. For some reason playing something that everyone thinks is a piece of shit is appealing to me. However the fretboard is unfinished so it makes it harder to bend
The acoustic is something my friend gave me who knows a lot about guitars. It's a 70s MIJ Ibanez. Due to being a huge idiot I take poor care of the things that matter most to me so these are just crammed into a closet and i bump the acoustic on stuff daily when I get it out [URL=https://i.imgur.com/UTkTcqF.jpg][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/UTkTcqFh.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
For amps I have an orange micro terror, which I don't really like because it's so vintage sounding. A lot of players I like say they get their sound by slamming the front of vintage-voiced amps with a lot of signal, but trying that hasn't really worked for me so it's just sitting around. I have a Peavey Ultra which I LOVE but it's disgustingly loud and I have two little kids so I never play it. 99% of the time I just use a practice amp which I imagine is the case for many of us on here
I haven't played so much recently. I only have this acoustic guitar with me at the moment. The rest is in storage though I've been meaning to pick up a new keyboard. Maybe that'll get me playing again. The last thing I recorded is this cover I guess you could call of a Mario 3 song. I was re-playing it, and that scene with Mario falling down from the skies holding a scepter felt so nice to me. I didn't know what else to do or add to it, so I suppose it's done.
