The Pre-Dawn Machine + Trust the Process
"I did do my morning set as discussed yesterday. I tried to be more conscious of what was happening as I was sitting there."
Daily track here.
At first you kind of sit there and set aside your random thoughts. I try to clear my mind, and I grab the guitar for a second, but then I put it down. I just sat there and kind of after about 30–45 minutes, it overcomes you in a way (or at least it does me), and I’ve gotta grab it and pick through some chords. In that process the chords came out—D minor / A / G, and then this A / G / F kind of thing.
And so it also occurred to me that today was an MPC morning. I’ve done so much on the OP-1 and that’s working so well, and kind of this tag team approach is really freeing in my mind. I also wanna make a preset for the Push 3 so I can do that independently with Ableton.
But the general point is: something really cool came out—kind of an intro lift track—and then it was obvious that it had to be put in and slowed down. I was going to try to run it through the modular, but that was really going to take way too much time to kind of figure out the routing, so I abandoned that immediately. Which again, the mindset you’ve gotta have for this month is speed and production.
I didn’t use a mastering preset. I threw some stuff on that I knew would work together. So the process absolutely works.
And I do want to say here: it’s like you can’t just have no ability and expect the process to work. This is years and years of playing guitar, playing bass, learning MPC in the 2.0 environment, which is confusing. If you’re unable to use it, there’s just some things that were so hard to get your head around, and every used MPC I’ve ever owned is from somebody who can’t get their head around the workflow.
MPC 3 is much easier. I don’t know if it’s any better. It has lost some of its charm, and part of the charm is it can only do what it can do, and it’s at its heart a sampler even though it’s trying to act as something else. But that’s a whole other entry.
So: trusting the process gets results. This is probably the happiest I’ve been with a track so far.
And incidentally, I did listen through days 1-7 in the car yesterday. I had a work trip that I had to go from Austin to Allison and back. I’m really happy with the results so far. It’s clearly going to be a record of kind of this a.m. black-and-white and the themes, and whether I call that or not, it’s kind of this hazy pre-dawn listening experience that I was hoping for.
We’ll see what comes up tomorrow. Who knows. Lord willing.