you will not get your finisher medallion if you do not enter the race
So if you’re a regular reader, the one thing you may not know—or maybe you do know because I’ve said it, if you happened to have read—is that these entries are largely improvised. If it’s bad, I just throw it away, but if it’s good, I go with it. I dictate it, the editor cleans it up, and then it’s off.
The whole idea is that if I don’t have one interesting musical thought a day, should I really be—or call myself—a musician? I feel like I have to prove it every day in my life. It’s my own psychosis at work, whatever.
The point—and why I’m thinking about this today—is that an OP-1 contest went upon YouTube. The OP-1 is definitely one of my systems of making music. I can easily make music on it in a certain systematic way, BUT there are rules and restrictions for this particular contest that are way outside of what I normally would do.
Basically you can just use the OP-1. No mic, no input, no nothing. I use the OP-1 as a modern 4 track, which really works for me.
The question I’m left with is this: do I put effort into this and do it, or do I just go on down the road and keep doing what I’m doing?
I have like three or four systems that really work. One is MPC, which I use the least, but I keep it. Then there is OP-1—plugging guitar and bass in—that typically happens in the kitchen early in the morning. Then I have my electronic setup, which is the Push, usually my computer, the Minitaur, and my lead synth, most definitely the Grandmother. I also have another area that’s modular/Matriarch.
That’s it. Those are the places that most of the music gets made, and I try not to change too much stuff. If I do, I change it very slowly, over months.
But what I arrived at with this contest is that I totally should do this. I always look at these different areas as cross-training. If I’m working on the MPC and I run out of a way to do it, I think of it with an Ableton brain and then figure out a way—and vice versa. It keeps you constantly thinking.
At the end of the day, music is nothing but problem-solving. Number one problem: no song. So the solution is a song.
There’s so much to these little systems and thinking thru them. How do I put the push set up mindset to making an OP-1 track? That was my whole drive to the office, which is really cool. Instead of listening to some podcast or video, I was using my pea brain.
So the answer is a definite yes. I’m going to try it. I hate not to win. I doubt I’ll win—it’s a different world—but you absolutely cannot win if you don’t participate.
Which is the whole basis of my musical existence: participation. Stick around long enough, do good works, and something may happen.