what is going on in your musical life

when i'm playing punk songs slowed down by .75 it really refocuses me on obtaining an evenness (and relaxedness) in my stroke and trying to fight against how much my hand/arm/entire body is tensing up when i'm playing fast, so: yes, otm

the ball bouncing analogy is good and one i haven't heard before. man it's just dribbling

Yes, great discussion all around.

man it's just dribbling

It really is! I'd often heard it described this way, but if your stroke is fucked up, then the dribbling effect doesn't happen and you need to figure out how to force it in order to play. Which leads to limits on what you can play, pain, etc.

Not saying I've mastered it all of a sudden, but the physical feeling of it was immediately exciting, like "ohhh, this is what they were talking about."

You start watching Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, Joe Morello or Buddy Rich videos on the tube and it is just freaking voodoo how those guys seem to have infinite speed out of that match gripped snare hand.

Drums are the instrument I've let slide the most over the years to the point where I just can't play anymore, but this thread has inspired me to crack open my Buddy Rich rudiments book, get a metronome app, and start doing a bit of work on my practice pad.

That's great!

It's always 1 step back, 2 steps forward with this technique stuff. One thing will click into place and reveal what else isn't working properly, like I realized I wasn't letting the stick move enough within my grip, I needed to allow it to have more of a vertical angle. Hard to explain but I was missing out on a bunch of kinetic energy, and things are feeling holistically much better now.

Had a nice day yesterday mixing down a new dance music single, and going over to the practice pad whenever files were rendering.

It's always 1 step back, 2 steps forward
This seems to be the rule with everything, any kind of real learning. The trick or challenge is find to the, um, zone where one is pushing forward but not so much that one is overwhelmed and can't remember anything.

my main problem is taking 2 steps backward and one step sideways, first as a mistake and then as the only familiar way that i can use the stairs of life

I believe our old pal Momus has something to say about this last:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIfdtkE6UBY

here's a fun little tune built from minibrute, modular, pigments, roland tr-8s and more

https://soundcloud.com/moodlesmix/moodle-melodie

happy house techno. nice one!

thanks! is major key techno even a thing? I was a bit stumped what to call it

happy not-so-hardcore

slow gabber

lol, sounds about right, happy mildcore

Latest weak-hand technique breakthrough is that I got bogged down focusing on the minutiae of the hand itself, I started concentrating on keeping the tip of the stick at the same (high) point even as I speed up, and all of a sudden that gave me the hand motion I've been after. Still haven't crossed the 82 bpm barrier (ie 16ths for a minute), but doing 8s and 16s on a hand feels relaxed and proper.

I was talking to a jazz bassist in town who felt similarly about not being a 'natural' and still trying to figure out things that others had together in high school, and he's one of the first-call bass players in town and is on plenty of recordings, so that was reassuring.

Can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but my mate created a drum practice app called Beat Balance - there's a free version and a subscription version, would be interested to see if you drummers over here found it useful.

Intending to check out your label stuff soon, Jordan - I loved that Chants album from last year and I also love "freedom through limitation" projects.

Aw thanks Emily. <3 Looking forward to getting other people's records out on the label, next month there's a classical guitar + breakbeats album that I'm excited about.

That app looks insane, I will check it out.

New practice routine: practice 8th notes to LCD Soundsystem's 45:33. Now that my stroke is finally feeling good, this is great for locking it in and building endurance while staying relaxed and keeping me honest with slower tempos (113 - 135).

Practice diary: a work trip brought the revelation that practicing with a *mirror* is exactly what I needed. It's insane how different your hand & stroke look from above than from the front, and a mirror will tell no lies about the differences between your hands. Can't believe what a massive effect it's had in a couple days (just in time to play some serious snare drum at a brass band festival in Asheville).

Also expecting to get the masters back on a dance single that a label is putting out. I think it has the most of my own drumming of anything so far, which is satisfying.

I recently upload this to the IA along with a lot of other stuff https://archive.org/details/organic-beats-mike-hanley

I ordered a Korg Opsix during that big sale. Came out of the box with a dead screen (was pretty common in this batch). Finally got it back from the shop (fixed under warranty).

this thing is cool to play with, but i'm having trouble getting sounds that are actually usable not just wacky knob twisting, so many different parameters i don't understand.

Cool! Let me know when you eventually decide to sell it! ;)

Haha will do

How beginner are you with synths? Envelopes are the most important thing to understand when starting IMO

Pretty beginner, I have synths but only really used the presets

lets hear some blues on those synths

FM synthesis is a whole other thing though, you can't follow the normal subtractive process of oscillators etc.

I like the black box nature of FM (unless you really know what you're doing obv), just messing with operators until it sounds cool. That's why the hands-on aspect of the Op Six seems very appealing.

Oh right sorry I forgot the op six was their fm synth. I was thinking of the poly six

this is what I've done so far this year

https://archive.org/details/2022-system

Worked really hard on transcribing this little Tony Rice intro and felt like I really had a breakthrough in terms of speed, fluidity, articulation, etc. Really enjoying this process

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ck2MGjUjjHF/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

So nice!

what do you do for listener fatigue for something you're working on? i have to keep listening to these recordings bc i want to finish them but also i feel brainfried by them and like i hear something new that needs adjusting every time i listen. i know the answer is "take a break from the songs and come back with fresh ears," and i did take a break over the thanksgiving week but even just the past few days of getting back into work on them has me feeling burnt out again. usually i'm pretty happy just to get something "good enough" and move on, i don't know why i'm feeling the pressure this time.

i kind of want an outside opinion (not on the songwriting but someone to tell me "hey the vocals are too loud here" or "this bit sounds weird") but i'm not sure who i would ask for that and i feel intimidated by bringing in an outsider. my bandmates are too nice about everything since i'm doing all the recording/mixing/arranging, i don't think they want to give me that kind of feedback.

ugh, remember that feeling. I do feel like an outsider is best, but it has to be someone you really trust.

can you reference it against a track you like that has a similar sound and arrangement?

that's not a bad idea. i've seen that as advice a lot but i don't know that i've ever tried doing it.

I don't do it enough either, but when I have it's been extremely helpful for general balance (ie is the bass present enough or too overpowering, is the kick drum coming through, is the vocal loud enough or too loud).

Also my favorite bit of mix advice is that all good mixes have one element that's "too loud" (or else they're just boring).

yeah it's taken me a while to figure out that "you can hear everything equally well" isn't necessarily the same thing as "a good mix"

i know i'm the one complaining, but i think something else that has helped was going back and listening to older stuff i recorded and mixed to remind myself of my personal mixing pitfalls to avoid. eg i tend to mix vocals too low and the bass too loud, so i'm making myself mix the bass a hair quieter than i think it should be and the vocals a hair louder than i think they should be.

Isn't it wild how loud the vocals are on most big pop records? Vocals and drums extremely high in the mix, everything else much lower.

I'm also guilty of wanting everything at the same level in a mix, which isn't really a mix (unless the arrangement is extremely minimal). If I find myself burying something in the mix, I usually just take it out entirely.

I think this comes from listening to New Orleans brass band records so much, where I really do believe that each element is as important as the others.

If I end up liking too many parts (which I usually do) I will wiggle the volume envelopes so that they come into and out of prominence at different places.

I am notorious for never quite thinking there are enough different guitar parts, and the result can get mushy. Like, there's an acoustic all the way through, plus an arpeggiated electric, plus a power-chord electric. They can't all star at once, so I try to give each one a chance to step out a bit and then go back into the general mush.

I used to also do a lot of panning trickery - one ear would have a strummed steel-string and the other ear would get fingerstyle nylon. Then have them ever so gradually switch ears, so that now they're on opposite sides.

I used to do more of that stuff too, but it started to sound distracting and 'fake' to me, I'd much rather have as few instruments as possible with each one able to take up more room.

feel a lot better about this project now. i mostly probably just needed to step away from it that day bc i was not in the right frame of mind, but ultimately what i decided is i would focus on one song at a time and make sure each one was "perfect" before moving on to the next one. i also pushed my bandmates for more input and they made some helpful suggestions. 10/12 songs are basically finalized now but the last two are going to take a bit longer.

That's absolutely normal. I don't know why, but there are always a couple of songs on an album that take much longer to get right than all the other tracks.

yeah and one of those is a song that we're totally changing the sound of in midstream, so it involves rerecording parts. that's going to be the lagger.

I've always found listening to mixes in mono as a good perspective on relative loudness of tracks

Feel like if it hangs together in mono, doesn't have to be perfect or anything, you're on the right track

And isn't it weird how your perception of what the best songs are changes based on which ones turn out to be the best mixes (which is in turn likely rooted in which ones have the best arrangements)?

I'm featured on a terrible song and now the artist wants me to promote it on social media, he's a very friendly, kind of lonely person who promotes his own stuff incessantly

I want to help him but I'm honestly ashamed of this collaboration

I'm not good at saying no

I made this in August with Logic (and Audition to edit the samples). Might do more of this in 2023.

https://soundcloud.com/burningambulance/grawlix-pushing-the-boat-out

From the practice diaries, I think I'm on the verge of a real breakthrough in terms of drumming technique. But I'm now fully convinced that it's about physics and not raw finger speed (which I don't have). I had gotten away from the 'bouncing ball' feeling in my weak hand, because every time I accessed it I was relaxing my entire hand so much that I would lose my grip on the stick (it would slide back so that eventually I would just be gripping the tip). Basically my fulcrum (thumb and some portion of the first finger) was falling apart.

So now my approach is to not care about wrist vs fingers, but to access that weightless, bouncing ball, travelling with the stick feeling in my back three fingers WHILE maintaining enough of a fulcrum (without squeezing) to keep the stick in place. It all seems a bit obvious in retrospect, but had just never clicked until now. I haven't totally internalized it yet but I can tell that it results in a level of speed and relaxation (and control, and sound) that I wasn't sure if I'd ever be able to attain.

Weckl talks about this exact thing here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdeqV0hz05E

But the weird thing is that it doesn't really look that different compared to bad technique (like if you have a too-tight fulcrum and you're forcing everything with too much tension), it's just a radically different feeling in the hand.