Gye Greene's Thoughts

Gye Greene's Thoughts (w/ apologies to The Smithereens and their similarly-titled album!)

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Weather and music

The weather over the last three days has been great: very Seattle-like, with soothingly cloudy grey skies. Drizzle on some days, pouring rain here and there, and just over-all grey-ness the rest of the time. Good stuff.

The only annoying thing is that at one point the wind blew hard enough -- the rain was 30 degrees -- sometimes 45 degrees -- off vertical -- to wet the misc. open-topped boxes on the porch. Dangit.


Still going thru my ''suitcases'' of tapes. Information Society (with the ''Pure Energy'' song) on the way in to work, and A Flock of Seagulls on the way home.

Given my fondness for '80s-style new wave-y synth-pop (Human League, Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, later-era Devo, Yaz, Kraftwerk, InSoc, Flock of Seagulls...), it's interesting that all of my songs thus far are in the ''guitar-rock'' genre. No sequencers, no MIDI. Most have a drum machine, but that's out of necessity, not stylistic intentions. And no synths -- at least not that carry the weight of the song (on two or three songs I have a synth as a melody instrument -- but it's not a synthy-sounding synth, if that makes sense).

Part of this is because the process of sequencing is too fiddly for me: I'd rather just **play** the darned melody. And partly because the stuff I write requires a certain ''swing'', or ''feel'' -- which is **really** difficult to enter in by hand, step by step.


--GG

2 Comments:

At October 11, 2007 11:28 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

MIDI is just a data format. Granted that if you are programming individual notes by hand, it's hard to capture that "swing", but when I'm using MIDI instruments, I usually start by "recording" the sequence that I play on the instrument, then tweaking the bits that I don't like. So MIDI is not in itself a limitation.
-GC

 
At October 11, 2007 12:14 PM, Blogger Gye Greene said...

Good thought.

Part of it, I suppose, has to do with the level to which you set it to ''quantize''. But, you're right: most of it just has to do with my inexperience with the medium. :)


--GG

 

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