When Your Own Song Puts You to Sleep
Yesterday's song here. Today's song here.
When you’re doing a blog — especially a daily one — you’ve gotta keep asking yourself: is it interesting? It’s a good question musically too.
I set out to do Jamuary synthwave again because it was successful in the past and I know it’s something I can do. Which is fine. But you don’t want to get trapped in “this worked before so I’m just gonna do it again” nostalgia. That was not my intent, and it’s not my current intent.
This morning I made a synthwave song on the Akai and… if it was boring me, God knows what it would do to a listener.
After messing around with the amp in the OP-1 yesterday, I went back and listened to that song and it’s better than I thought it was. It captured the feel.
So after the Akai track this morning, I made an entire song on the OP-1 and I’m really happy with it. I came up with the chords randomly while I was having coffee — my favorite guitar in my chair in the kitchen where I do my reading. I’ll just practice and noodle around, and I landed on some cool chords. When I got a second, I grabbed the OP-1 and played them directly in — no preamp, no nothing — and it sounded good. Maybe not pristine (Still some work to do), but the feel was there.
The OP1 amp sim is wonderful. I run it super hot and then back off the volume, and this morning that basically gave me incredible fuzz bass. I’ve got a jazz bass, and my mentioned favorite guitar is a Stratocaster, so I played those two.
I really worked on the drums too — spent some time with the OP1 drum sets, got it right with a primary set and some percussion. Dialed in a good lead synth sound and ended up being really happy with the whole thing.
Complete change of direction 3 songs out of 31 in. Not only that — a change that I said I wouldn’t do. But I think I’m just going to run with this for a while and see what happens.
That’s kind of the magic of making a song a day: you don’t have to worry. I mean, I’m not sending it to the record company. (I don’t have a record company.) I’m just making jams here.
But it gets me thinking… what if this was my own micro genre of lofi? It fits the theme: a.m. / black and white. It fits the theme of reading music. So it’s kind of--it’s kind of working.