ben's posterous

18 Jan 2011

Song Fight!

I've recently been participating over at Song Fight! which has been fun to fuel and kickstart the creative spark a little bit. Here are the last three songs I did for it. Most of them were done very last minute and I have major issues with them, but again, they provided the opportunity to be creative when nothing was coming to mind, and it was fun. All the titles are provided, and then you have a week to make a song to go with the title. Here's some notes on each song:

Look at the Sky - I really don't like the chorus in this one. Also, there needs to be a bit more variety in the song. However, I like my verses, and I also like my "noise solo" and the little falsetto bits.

Susan - Got the idea for the subject matter from my sister-in-law. I didn't want to sing about a woman, so I thought it was pretty brilliant. Another song that stretches a bit too long perhaps and needs more variety. I kept wanting to try and fill it up a bit, but I couldn't get away from the sparse arrangement. All the sounds are midi, and shows a bit of my obsession with chiptunes during that week.

Looking at the Sea - I like this song. It is pretty sad/sorrowful though. I went into it saying that I would NOT simply use the Omnichord as my main vehicle for the song elements....and then I went ahead and did exactly that. :( Has the same drumbeat as Look at the Sky....oh well.

(EDIT: Oops, looks like I didn't properly label the metadata in iTunes or whatever for these songs before I uploaded them. It should be fairly obvious, but the first song is "Look at the Sky", second is "Susan", and third is "Looking at the Sea.")

(download)

11 Jan 2011

Late night pizza

8 Jan 2011

hello again

I figured it was time to go ahead and update this thing. I haven't been very good at keeping up with it. I think I'll try to do a better job though. If for nothing else, I will be able to look back over it in months/years time and that's pretty cool.

Most of this will be rambling. I'll keep this blog primarily about my personal hobbies and thoughts, and try to reserve the family stuff with the wife and baby to the other blog that we don't post to... (I'm going to try to get to that too though.)

My most recent hobby is a bit of songwriting and music making. I've done 3 songs now for Song Fight!, and I'll probably attempt FAWM again too, not to mention songs here and there as I'm inspired. I'm having a hard time nailing down the specific style, genre, or influences in which to draw from for my music from song to song. I keep assuming that something will naturally emerge the more I make music, but I am constantly finding my attention drawn to different styles and distracting from any kind of progress in learning or creating something consistent. For instance, I recently got into chiptunes a lot more, spending some time over at 8bitcollective, and I already want to go get a copy of LSDJ and start tracking on the gameboy. Otherwise though, I've been using my new Akai midi controllers, the LPD8 and LPK25, along with a PreSonus USB Audio Interface and an Omnichord 200M. It is all quite fun, but I realize that especially concerning midi controls, I need to spend more time learning the nuts and bolts of things. I'm the kind of guy who just wants things to work, so until I look into some of the more technical details, I will severely limit the capabilities that these devices have. I have two DAWs now, Garageband and Studio One Artist, but I think I'm going to switch over to Reaper. I don't feel bad about it because its ridiculously cheap for what it does, and I got Garageband and Studio One for free.

Other than music stuff, life is very busy and I feel like the Lord is teaching us quite a lot. It is hard to adequately describe the process and details of this work in our lives, but I can say without a doubt that His hand in on our lives. We are trying to learn to hear Him better and receive his instruction for our lives. It is exciting but sobering, especially concerning the times we are now living in. But I know that we can trust Him for our lives.

I'll try to make a small posts from time to time more often if I can. I hope to share some of my ever changing interests, maybe a few songs, and how the Lord is teaching and guiding us in this time. Laters.

8 Nov 2010

Hannah walking

(download)

7 Nov 2010

original song and video

19 Aug 2010

Oswald Chamber, August 19th

http://myutmost.org/08/0819.html

6 Jun 2010

enemy

22 Mar 2010

Ben and Hannah

Second day after moving into our new place.

25 Feb 2010

Gmail is so awesome.

Saved me from terrible embarrassment and having to send another email.

31 Jan 2010

fawm

So I'm starting FAWM tomorrow. I decided not to clutter my posterous with all the FAWMish antics of this next month, so I decided to start a little record here: http://www.cutthenoise.com. Check it out throughout the month if you so fancy. (The link explains what FAWM is as well.)