Category: Music

Music, Thoughts

Once More Round The Sun

minceandskirlie

It was my birthday last week, another lap of the sun completed. I don’t really put much stock in birthdays any more or get really excited for them (though I did have a great time with family and a lovely meal out with my wife on the day itself). In fact I find myself now spending most of the year struggling to remember exactly how old I am now. Am I really 43? Or is it 42? Once I hit somewhere around my mid twenties I think I mentally felt like this is my age and I’m going to stick with it. Anything above that doesn’t really count. Just no-one told my haggard, ageing, body.

I fell down a synth laden black hole this week. It all started a few weeks ago when I dug out my Korn Volca Beats and was determined to learn how to use it. This magnificent piece of procrastination coinciding with the start of my latest Open University module of course. Then I started liking and following loads of synthy accounts on Threads that just post chill, ambient beats on hardware synths. I was scrolling for hours just checking out loads of cool sounds.

That led me to browsing hardware synths on Amazon for a while until I came to my sense and decided I should just use the toys I already have. Rooting around in my spare room, I dug out my Akai Miniak synth that I bought over a decade ago and also never learned how to use. I managed to switch it on and play around with some of the presets but it really needs some proper time put in to it to get the best out of it I think.

Time I don’t have it turns out! As my procrastination caught up with me after I had a birthday weekend and I suddenly found I had dropped behind schedule a bit on my uni course and needed to get my head down to catch up on some reading and go hug some trees on the first dry day we’ve had at a weekend for a while. I really went out and hugged some trees, as the course had us out measuring the circumference of local trees with a tape measure. Surprisingly, I didn’t see any posts on the local nosy neighbour facebook group for our town wondering why someone was hanging around all the trees taking pictures and measuring them.

That out of the way, I returned to my synth distraction. Which led me to building quite a wishlist on Amazon of some cheap hardware to do some DAWless synth jams. But I think that should wait. For now I have a drum machine, a beastly Akai synth that I just need to learn how to use, and access to Reaper and loads of software synths that I could use to find my feet with first. Yes, that sounds much more sensible. So instead of a new expensive synth that I won’t get round to learning, I received my dopamine hit by ordering a small USB midi keyboard controller instead so I can control software synths on Reaper and figure out what I’m doing.

My big plan is to use the synth stuff as a backing track to do some live jamming with my guitars, but lets see how that works out. If anyone out there has any VST recommendations or even some budget hardware recs, let me know. It would be a good basis of some music streams on Twitch I think if I can get the hang of it. If it works it’ll be pretty satisfying. But first I need to stop procrastinating and get back to some studying!

Music, Thoughts

Beats and Beaks

minceandskirlie

I’ve been busy with uni, work and then a family holiday this month. But I’ve still found time to procrastinate spend on a couple of lapsed hobbies.

10 years ago I picked up a Korg Volca beats just after they were released. A dirt cheap drum machine, with simple workflow, and a sound harking back to the classic modules of the 80s and 90s. I was full of good intentions of incorporating this in some low fi folk compositions. Then never really learned how to use it properly. It still sits on a shelf by my desk, unloved, to this day. However, I picked it up again the other week, when I was probably supposed to be doing something much more important and had a play with it.

https://www.threads.net/@folkedoff/post/CylKp5fL1CG

https://www.threads.net/@folkedoff/post/CynzhKmoace

(One day Threads posts will embed seamlessly into WordPress. Today is not that day. Click the links to hear the results)

Both those basic beats were drummed up (hah!) in just a few minutes. It’s so easy. I really need to spend more time with it. Frustratingly though, I don’t have a way to hook it up to a speaker at the same time as my guitar or my hardware synth (which I also should spend more time with). But if I can solve that problem soon I should start using the Volca more often while writing on the guitar and practicing in general (always was bad at practicing with a metronome).

While on holiday this week I also picked up a hobby I’ve tried starting loads of times over the years. I keep buying sketchbooks, pencils and pens, then carrying them around with me and never use them. Well, this time I spent a couple of nights sitting drawing in the holiday lodge then colouring the sketches with some pens. Mainly to try and impress my daughter really.

Blue tit (Cyanistes Caeruleus)

Goldfinch (Carduelis)

I love birds and wildlife and have always been jealous of people who can draw really detailed pictures of the birds and animals they see. Whenever I’ve tried in the past they always look really wonky. But I’m pretty chuffed with how this blue tit and goldfinch turned out. The blue tit is still a bit strangely proportioned, but the goldfinch is just about right. Think I just need to practice a bit more to get some consistency. I’ve never been a tidy artist and struggle with detail, which also comes across in these.

I might try some different pens next time or maybe even using some acrylic paints for a chance and see if that helps me get the details right.

Anyway I’m pretty happy with how both these bits of activities have turned out. Less happy about how much I’ve procrastinated from what I should have been doing instead, but that’s a whole other blog post!

Music, News, Video, Writing

This week I have mostly been…

minceandskirlie

I’ve thrown myself down a few creative holes recently and had quite a busy week for putting work online in some form or another.

I recently began publishing articles on Medium to try out that platform and give myself another outlet for some writing which I think would be unsuitable to host here. I think I would like this site to become very informal and just be personal reflections rather than anything too serious or professional.

At the end of last week I posted an article there about how I try and maintain self-belief in the face of anxiety, depression and the mental issues which these conditions inflict on me

Then at the weekend I presented my parents with the gift I’d made for them to congratulate them on their ruby wedding anniversary. It’s a drawing of the family tree which they planted the seeds for forty years ago, along with a short poem I wrote for them
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I’m pretty proud of it as someone who is really, really bad at drawing!

After that it was back to music and a project I’m working on throughout 2017 – recording 50 tunes throughout the year in a mix of video and sound recordings. This is an effort to get me learning and writing new music as well as building confidence in myself as a musician again. On Tuesday I posted a video of two tunes played on mandolin – Road to Banff and The Spey In Spate.

Once I’d recorded the mandolin set I left the camera set up and decided to do an impromptu poetry reading. I entered some poems into a major competition towards the end of last year and received confirmation that they’d not made the shortlist this week. Which, while disappointing, does mean they are now free to be entered elsewhere and shared with the world again. One of those poems is Leaving The Woods, which I wrote around the idea of leaving your childhood behind and based on some memories I had of the woods we played in as children.

I also published it via Medium with a bit of background on the poem itself and the stories told within it