February 3rds

Black out lyrics, with the rhythms in the words driving the music:

 

 

2/3/2022

The fact that there is a lag of several months between the genesis of songs and when mixes are made compromises the integrity of the idea of one song a month. Concepts are like working with oils, or paint that never dries. That's typical of conceptual thinking, i.e. the appearance that the ideas remain loyal to the original intentions, but in reality change hundreds of times, a moving target basically. Concepts can be problematic sometimes because you feel you have to adhere to them religiously. Same thing with lyrics: I've found that every singer needs bespoke words. Freddie Mercury was a good singer because his vocal apparatus, overbite, etc. made certain words possible. (Every singer needs a "word wardrobe" ("wordrobe").

2/3/2024

After I’ve finished an album there’s a period where I’m not doing music at all–I’m rather getting ideas and I’m jotting them down, but I’m not intensely focused on music at that point. When I’m promoting an album I’m doing things that are more visual. What I’ve noticed is that when I take a break from anything and come back to it I use a different approach. For the past couple of weeks what I’ve been doing is practicing bass and I’m discovering new things about fingerings, especially my right hand fingerings, experimenting with different ways to attack the strings. In the process you lose sight of the way that you used to look at music. This goes all the way back to when I first started to play. At that time I was just playing patterns. But once I went to music school I couldn’t remember how I played by patterns, and the same thing is happening again with how I forgot how I used to play. I’m playing things in a new way and that’s probably the case with all musicians: when they come back from a long break, maybe even years, they must experience a kind of memory loss of how they used to play or their playing has evolved in a certain way and they can’t play the way they used to. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. #riff 

2/3/2025

“AI” is now a trendy soundbyte, and has become a catchall for things that are barely AI, such as macros and other algorithms. Even LLMs are not really synonymous with AI as has been defined going back to the 50s. Now it’s a bad hype to get swept into. Perhaps umbrella terms make it easier to refer to, as opposed to other things the general public might not know about—now even “macros”, which go back to the 80s. AI is also a form of “washing”, as in “green-washing”—where everything has “AI” branding, like “Low Fat” was at one point. 

Ran some AI generations for Movin’ To Montana. Nothing worked. This is the broken promise of music AI. There are simply some lyrics that will not work.