Hello.. yeah, yeah, it’s been, like, a billion minutes since the last thing I posted, and for that I have to say…sorry? Maybe? I don’t know. When I started this newsletter, my hope was to share the comings and goings of the various art and music projects I was wrapped up in. Unfortunately, hope is a piss-poor business strategy; being clear-eyed and level-headed about what you want and where you’re going count waaaaay more. What started as a biweekly letter morphed into a monthly, to a whenever-I-have-anything-to-share, to finally “I have a Substack?? REALLY????”
Ugh..
If you dragged this letter to your email’s recycle bin and said “SEEya, wouldn’t wanna BEya..”, well, you could easily be forgiven. If you’ve made it this far, awesome! Let’s keep that good mojo going with a little introduction to my latest track, “Lullaby for the Faerie Queen”!
This track is composed of various guitar samples I recorded a couple, three years ago — samples I’ve used on previous songs like “Left-Right-Center” and “Five”, both of which can be found on my YouTube channel. I have a couple of sets of samples, one done in standard tuning and the other with the G tuned up a full step to A, and these sets hang out in Koala Sampler where I abuse them with Koala’s effects — filters, bit-crushing, pitch-shifting.. fun stuff! For this particular track, it started when I had Koala opened with one of those sample sets, I had the Launchpad hooked up to trigger Koala at a keypress, and I just started banging on the pads until, lo and behold, a melody appeared! Well, sort of a melody, more of a rambling chord progression but that’s splitting hairs. Anyway, I did a bit of sequencing, threw in a bunch of space echos and sparkly, jingly stuff and voila! Like stealing candy from a baby!
Except it wasn’t. If it was, you would’ve heard this track maybe a year ago, because that’s how long it’s been sitting in the kettle.
So why the delay? Why so long without a word? Fair questions, and again my apologies for leaving it late like this. The answer is… well, I don’t have a reason. Not a good one, anyway. If I had been hit by a bus and was laid-up in a hospital with tubes ‘n’ shit sticking out of me, I guess, yeah, that’s probably a good reason. Or if I was in jail. Or I stumbled on some super-secret spy document that the feds knew about and wanted me dead so I’m on the run.. nope, not me, nothing cool or interesting like that. It was me buying more music gear — new keyboards, new effects, a lot more choices of putting music together; my sudden interest in watercolor painting; my returning interest into computer graphics (yes, I know, AI is absolute shit and has tainted just about any “art” rendered on a computer, but I’ve been using POV-Ray since the early 90-s, hand-coding all my animated projects and stills, and probably always will!).
And then there’s life itself, with sickness and funerals and graduations and weddings and vacations and all the other things that human beings do beside chain themselves to their music/art studios, and that’s just the way it is.
Oh, and we all can’t forget about the stupid social-media-induced distractions, our current political maelstrom of fecal matter, work, bills, blah blah blah… you get the picture.
Death by a thousand cuts, I think I’ve heard it said, and that’s probably accurate. Or close enough. Whatever.
What does this mean future-tense? Well, once I severed that Facebook-spawned demon known as Reels — by deleting, not deactivating, my FB account haha! — and taken..other steps to reduce distractions, I’ve actually got a queue of finished/almost-finished tracks to share! Three more tracks, actually; I’m working on the videos for them and hopefully next week I’ll have at least one ready to go. There are other tracks that are 80-90% of the way there, so we’re in good shape. So hang tight, more stuff is on the way!
I have a whole ‘nuther newsletter in draft to discuss the art side of the house, and how there may be changes in how I share those. For one, since I’m no longer on Facebook, I’ve been posting the doodles on my Tumblr using my domain, dbdoodles.net. Go check it out some time. But, yeah, changes are coming.
Anyway, sorry for the long blurb that should’ve concluded about four paragraphs ago, but thanks for sticking around.. and check out that track and let me know what you think! As always, I wish you peace — stay safe, my friends…
Dan
