Times fly

Today is all about time.

I have no shortage of things going on. In fact I had to get a bit ruthless to make progress. Multiple timers set with specific amounts of time allowed for me to get the assorted items on my list done.

Honestly it did help, but it felt aggressively regimented. Like being in the army or something! Also no guitar, drums, cello. So pretty much a "fun-fast". My first day of my fun diet lol. Oh well, needs must when there's stuff to get done.

Also, for the time spent on my DAW plugin project, my task today was a time signature controller. I completed it with just enough time to commit the code! Simple things, I wanted to show the time signature as a traditional fraction where you can drag left-right on the top or bottom to modify the numerator (number of beats), or denominator (value of each beat). It works and updates other parts of the UI properly! I am pleased :)

Sleepy Weasels

I've always been rather fond of this melody. Decided to give it a little bit of a sonic spruce up. I may have overdone the reverb but whatever, its a at least a small improvement. Sleep well!

DAW Plugin to help with audio recorded without a metronome!

Well this is happening then! I'm somewhat feature complete on a plugin that allows you record audio and curate it to make a timed loop that you can then use to build up your DAW session. Does that make sense? No, right? It's ok I'll try and release a video soon :)

Piano notes from the past

I wrote this when I was an angsty teenager. The other day I randomly thought to record it and share. Surprisingly I've had a couple of comments that were really nice. If teenage me knew people would apprecate my playing I may have turned out a different person. Oh well, still made it in the end :)

Wireless MIDI vs Drums

Newer MIDI instruments, such as drum modules and keyboards, are less inclined to sport a 40+ year old DIN plug for MIDI connections these days. An alternative has become necessary in recent years. The Alesis Nitro MAX only has a USB-B output for example. The lovely people at the CME Pro Facebook group were most helpful in identifying two wireless solutions to go from the USB Out to Wireless MIDI. I went with the smaller, apparently lower latency item. The CME WIDI Bud. Hopefully it will work out well!

Reaper DAW - community spirit

I'm still mulling over a really nice experience on the Reaper DAW Users Facebook group. I asked about peoples workflow in the DAW for capturing freewheeling audio to then loop/construct later. I got a dozen thoughtful/thoughtprovoking responses discussing and sharing their advice and approaches. Very inspiring. I'm pretty new to looking at Reaper in any serious sense so this was a nice welcome.

Metronome-free music making

For a long time I've had secret disdain for playing along to metronomes and clicks when exploring musical ideas. Idk, something about the inspiration kind of dies when you're exploring whilst also trying match a grid - which more often than not is a little too fast or a little too slow.

This was one of the pushes behind Muser Audio for iOS.

Even so, there's still plenty of room for improving the process of ideating music. I think this is the time to explore some more solutions (pun somewhat intended).