Look. It just doesn’t make sense for me to be hurrying to get something up on Saturday. Saturday’s a busy day. It’s D&D night and it’s one of the days when family events keep popping up. Sundays on the other hand – completely free. So Thing-a-Week is switching to Sundays. No, this isn’t just procrastination. This is practical.
It’s a short one this week folks! A nice, easy, two minute read.
Greydon Square has been a favorite of mine since I first heard him on “The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.” He’s a rapper that uses music to promote a scientific and atheistic agenda, and that’s balls out awesome. Anyone promoting science is almost instantly a friend of mine, but doing so through hip-hop is exceptionally cool. On top of a great message and lyrics that actually carry content, the music’s good too. I recommend checking out the new single, Stockholm Syndrome.
On that note, Greydon has asked his fans to submit stories for potential inclusion on the new album. To make it interesting – and related – the stories had to be based on the album art. Below is my take, a short story called “The God Machine.” I spent as much time on this as I did on my previous story, since I was really trying to stay within a word limit while simultaneously making an interesting story. Check it out after the break. Continue reading
Back to chiptunes this week! I really enjoy making songs in MilkyTracker and I think this one came out really nicely. I’m starting to get a good feel for how to put together drums and I’m forcing myself to branch out into new sounds instead of using square waves all the time! Anyway, listen below. When I listen to this, I think of a carefree sort of field. So it’s called “The Field”
Yes, another insanely clever title, I know.
I was really busy with music this week, as well as a few big writing deadlines, so I didn’t have as much time to clean this up as I would have liked. It’s a quick little story that was actually inspired by a series of posts on Facebook. Seriously.
The thing that’s really been bothering me is the ending. I’m not sure there really is one. If there is, it doesn’t seem justified by the text preceding it. Another day or two really would have helped this one out, but that’s not what Thing-A-Week is about!
Anyway, I call it “The Diner,” and you can read the full thing after the break.
Yes, Skulls. By the Misfits. If somehow you’ve never heard it, then please, educate yourself.
On Wednesday night, I asked my roommate/producer/whipping boy/engineer Joe to help me set up for vocal recording. I went in with this version of Skulls laid out on my keyboard and a general vocal style in mind. The plan was to throw down some scratch tracks and then play around with the recording program a bit. Plans never go right.
After getting the main vocals down, Joe asked me to throw in some backing vocals and it took off from there. I threw in ‘doo wops’ as a joke, but I’ll be damned if they didn’t sound fantastic. So we kept working until we had what you can hear in the YouTube video below. It’s the result of a few hours of work on Wednesday and a few hours of work on Friday and I’m incredibly happy with it.
Had I known what the end result would be in the beginning, I would have done a lot of things differently, especially since the song changes tone pretty dramatically from beginning to end. The chorus could have been a little happier. Still, I dig what we were able to throw together.
This is the first song that I’ve recorded for Thing-A-Week that actually has vocals in it, but it’s not going to be the last. I’ve got a few ideas in mind for more covers and I might even throw up an original every now and again. We’ll see!
I’ve got a fascination with the fantastic becoming mundane, and that’s sort of where this story goes. It’s sort of based around the feeling I used to get when I was a salesman. You know the one. When you work really hard to close a sale and then in your celebration you find that just a little bit of your soul has gone missing. I never did the door-to-door or direct sale thing, and I rarely sold anything I didn’t stand behind. In retail you’ve got to push what you’ve got, and sometimes that ended up being crap. The worst was my limited time at an EB, where I had to act like trading in games was a sound financial plan.
Anyway, without further ado, here’s a story I’m calling “With Every Sale I Make.” I’m happy with parts and unhappy with others, but as it stands now I’m ten minutes away from my self-imposed deadline and I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss it. Right now this looks like one of the “Thing-A-Week” stories that I’ll be going back and revisiting in the future. Hit the link for the story. Continue reading
What can I say, I like pretty music. This started off in a much different style but eventually just evolved this way. From a writing standpoint I’m pretty happy with it. It’s peaceful and not overflowing with instruments. I’m very guilty of throwing on more layers when they’re not needed, but this is at most three layers deep.
From a technical standpoint it could have gone a lot better. This was my first attempt at using my Netbook to record from my JV-1000 and there are still a lot of kinks to work out. Still, I’m pretty happy with this.
Week one down! I wrote a story that I’m calling ‘Bar Night’ because I’m rubbish with titles. I’m not entirely happy with it as a whole, but there are some parts that I really dig.
I was originally going to take ‘Bar Night’ in a much bigger direction, but when I did, I felt the story getting away from me. It also had some plot problems initially, but it was greatly benefited by some peer review from Molly Laich, whose blog is filled with great stuff to read even if it’s not updated as often as it should be. As if I’m in a position to talk. You can find the full thing after the jump. (I’ll also attempt to make these available in .doc format for non web-based consumption, but that’s something I’ve still got to figure out.) Continue reading
As most songs I write do, this one started out completely differently from where it ended up. You can still hear the inner framework of an epic in the making, but damnit, I’m a happy guy so I wrote happy music!
I feel like I’m really getting the hang of Milky Tracker, which is great. Songs still take quite a while to create, but I’ve managed to tweak a lot of the little things that were bothering me.
This week is the beginning of my personal project to foster creativity as well as productivity by producing at a regular and silly pace. The idea is that it will force me to create, which is why I’m making it so very public. I will be working with both fictional story writing and songwriting. The fiction will range hugely to altered accounts of personal events to completely off the wall sci-fi and whatever else I end up getting down. The music will come in a variety of styles I’m sure, but most will revolve around the 8-bit style chiptunes that I’ve become so fond of. At least I think so. Only time will tell.
I’m basing the idea off of the thing-a-week project undertaken by Johnathan Coulton back in 2005. It’s a bit of an experiment in creativity, but I’ve got the time, the ability and the willpower to act on it. At least I think I do.
The goals
- Push myself creatively
- Self-enforce deadlines which leaves no time for slacking or worrying about writer’s block
- Get people reading and listening
The rules
- I will be producing one work of fiction and one song every week. I’m not limiting myself on length for either, but each must stand on its own.
- Both pieces will be published on Saturdays on both this blog, my Facebook and Twitter accounts.
- I will encourage feedback and attempt to improve and explore new styles.
- The project will last for 52 weeks, starting this week (Sunday, July 4th) and ending at this time in 2011.