Project planning




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Maple Dye, "Unloved"

Maple Dye · Unloved In the peak of the pandemic, when everything was uncertain and scary, two ideas for songs came to me. Or better said, two powerful ideas that lived in me asked at some point for expression in a musical way. One idea was "we'll get out of this shit, we always do. Hopefully the humans will learn something out of this. It will be worthwhile then, even if I don't get to see it". This idea, through the proper alchemies, turned into "When We Make It Through The Storm". The other idea was "we all have to die. If I win this nutty virus lottery, then so be it. The sad part is not that I have to die, but that, if I did, right now nobody would really give a fuck..." This idea was the kernel for "Unloved". I reflected upon my life and found a lot of love had been given by me, but not so much received. My family is not the most mentally healthy and, from year zero, everything under the "love" label was generally just hid...
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Road marks

A combination of cool features in my current DAW (Reaper) has allowed me to create something that looks a lot like the road signs you see while you're driving. It makes for a great experience, and also reduces mistakes and the time it takes to rehearse things. I'm loving it and I hope it lasts and I can build upon it. The features required are: 1) enabling the option that makes the playhead stay at the center of the screen (therefore the waveforms scroll when you play the song). 2) Creating a track for empty items with text. (I've customized this one so I only need a keypress, and each annotation comes with a different, random color). Once I've done that, I play the song and start to rehearse on top the track I want to record (in this first experience, it was a bass track). When I stumble at some point, I stop the playing (I "pull the andon"), and make a note of warning. Just as with traffic signs, to be effective, the note must be put a bit earlier, where I c...
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Captain's log #43

Got the keyboards recorded, courtesy of Yoshimi. As usual with keyboards, most of the time went to finding a good instrument; I always feel as if I were auditioning people for a musical; "Saw+chimes" -- "Thank you, that's enough". "Space Ethereal #9" -- "Don't call us, we'll call you". Etc. Once I got the sound, and the choice for the chord inversions, the recording itself was trivial. Got a hint of how my musical mind works in what has happened with the rhythm guitar; for more than 48 hours I've remained unaware of the fact that the track was still in a crude DI state, the recording that I used for the basic initial metronome demo. It's like, my mind knows the content is there so it doesn't care so much about the "dressing", it disengages. Although in this case it's understandable with so much stuff happening all of a sudden in the other tracks, with the new solos and all. Today I'll record ...
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