A project that I worked on in 2023 — composing a song each weekend. This amounted to 52 tracks that dabbled across a variety of genres: lo-fi, dance, techno, rock, post rock, experimental, and a mixed mash of notes that sounded interesting. Only one of them contains vocals (Shakespeare fans should recognize it).
I uploaded them all to YouTube as five albums: one for each quarter and a “best of” containing 16 of the tracks that I thought were the best. Each quarter album is 30 to 35 minutes, and the Prize Picks album is about 50 minutes. Feel free to listen however you’d like.
- Q1 – https://youtu.be/35DVLDgb55M
- Q2 – https://youtu.be/H3PxfKosYQU
- Q3 – https://youtu.be/Fqf72j_YEtw
- Q4 – https://youtu.be/VFMeKyt35oU
- Prize Picks – https://youtu.be/Nt7N_K90lQo
I hope you enjoy listening to the songs as much as I enjoyed creating them.
For those that are curious as to how I did this, I used virtual instruments and loops/samples (which are prerecorded snippets of music) in Garage Band (Apple’s basic music creation software). You can either drag the loops or compose notes on a digital piano roll. When I did compose notes, I did plenty of googling about scales and chord progressions and majors and minors, oh my. Some instruments you can customize with guitar pedals, amps, and other fancy effects. A professional audio engineer will probably give me the stink eye for my mixing skills, but whatever.
Some days I had an idea, whether that was a particular sound or feeling, and there were other days where I just fiddled around until I got something I was satisfied with. Some tracks are goofy and there are some tracks that are personal.