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So right now I have six songs that are basically finished as far as composition goes. They are:
Not that listing off their titles will do you any good, but bear with me here :) There are also 2-3 other incomplete songs that may or may not develop into full compositions.
Anyway, as far as the album goes, I have a few problems developing that I’m trying to fix. The first is that Emotions doesn’t fit with the other music. Like, at all. It just sounds like this weird crappy emo tune that doesn’t develop. So do I remove it from the album, or do I continue to hack away at it? Or should I go radical on it, fork what I have now, and completely rework things?
The second problem is that the mixes for Tweak and Occupy still don’t sound like I want them. It’s something I tried fixing the other night but, much to my dismay, I actually made them worse. So I’m not sure how to handle them right now.
The third problem is that I can’t seem to come up with anything really good lately. Every time I try writing something it comes out sounding cheesy, super depressing/emo, or both.
Perhaps I just need to take a break from music for a few weeks :)
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I didn’t expect this to happen quite this soon, but the new Partition 36 album is now about 25% finished. This is the same one titled 63 that I mentioned in my last post. With two CDs, intro tracks, and an accompanying art/writings book (yikes…), this album will likely be my most ambitious project yet. And if the tracks I recently finished mixing down are any indicator, also my best sounding one.
The idea of the two CDs came about because of the thematic and stylistic differences between the tracks I have both written and planned. Although Inside The Beat turned out really well, I was never all that happy with how it wasn’t that cohesive. The title track was a banging industrial-inspired song, while the song right after it was influenced more by jazz, synthpop, and J-pop. But by splitting the new album into two CDs, and throwing on a few extra tracks, things should sound like they belong together, and the overall theme will be much more apparent.
As far as releasing it goes, this one will definitely be available for purchase, but I’m debating if I should have both digital and physical releases. If I do end up doing just a digital release, the art book would just be a downloadable PDF. But I also like having that physical copy in my hands because then it feels that much more real. I guess we’ll see how things go.
Last night I finished a new song that turned out… interesting. It starts off moving in one direction, then takes on a different character once the melody comes in. Yet all the parts work together to create a weird orchestral-synth vibe. It’s nuts. The song is titled “Emotion” (this might change) and will be on the new album. I’m going to work on mixing it down today and giving it some tweaks.
Speaking of the new album, I forgot to mention that it now has a working title: 63. I’ll leave it up to my listeners to decide the meaning behind it.
It’s been a while since I’ve given an update, so I thought I’d drop in and let everyone know what has been happening.
Work on the new album is progressing, but it’s been slow since I’ve been working on side project stuff in between writing new material for Partition 36. The album also started to go off on a tangent where it was going to include tons of lyrics and have a more industrial sound to it. But this isn’t where I want to take Partition 36. I’ve been doing a lot of digging through my music collection lately and have been getting back to my original influences that inspired me to write music, like Enya (raise your hand if you’re surprised about that one) and classical music. These have reminded me that Partition 36 is all about that dark synthpop sound combined with contemplative tracks to create interesting and beautiful electronic timbres. Ok, maybe that’s a bit too artistic sounding, but whatever. My point is, the new album is going to sound more cohesive and be the closest thing yet to how I envision Partition 36 to sound. Also, don’t take this to mean my previous post mentioning whispered lyrics is now being thrown out the window. It isn’t ;^)
I’m also looking at fixing up the Partition 36 website a bit to make it more minimal and clean. The current site works but it just feels cluttered to me. But I’m also no web designer by any means, so if you would like to volunteer some time to fix it up, please contact me. I can’t offer you anything except maybe a signed copy of Inside The Beat and the upcoming album once it’s finished.
This is a downtempo track off the upcoming album, now tentatively called “63”. It was heavily inspired by Boards of Canada, Jean-Michel Jarre, Metroid Prime, and some of the Serial Experiments Lain soundtrack.
About six months ago, I wrote about a Python script I made that made my life easier when it came to encoding files. Well I made some simple changes and updated it to v1.1.
Changes include:
The big one is probably the ability to override tags, which is what I was needing specifically. Eventually I’ll add the ability to check date stamps on files and only encode files older than what gets specified. But not tonight :)
Again, this is just a small bit of insight into how I handle my music. It may not seem like much, but having this script actually saves me a lot of time and headaches. You can download the script here (right-click and Save As). To run, you need Python 2.6 or 2.7; and lame, flac, oggenc, and id3v2 all located somewhere in your PATH.
I run this on Slackware Linux. I highly doubt this script will run correctly in Windows, but you can try. It should work on Mac OS X, but I haven’t tested it.
My studio is set back up! Ok, so “studio” is a bit of a stretch. It’s really just a computer desk in the corner my basement with some synths next to it and some studio monitors. But hey, whatever works! Being back and working on music feels great. It’s always been a creative release for me, and so not being able to work on music usually leaves me feeling bottled up. My first two priorities since getting things set up are working on treeFungus stuff (the joint project my friend started), and finishing a new Partition 36 song tentatively called “Alice”.
The new Partition 36 song is part of the new album, which I briefly talked about back in this post. As I mentioned there, the album is sort of a reverse Inside The Beat, where it starts as a very inward-facing, personal album, and then moves outward. “Alice” fits the introspective side of it perfectly. The pseudo-lyrics I’ve been working on for it are based on a poem I wrote at the beginning of the year, and deal with my feelings as I came to terms with being transgendered. What I’m thinking of doing is recording them in either a whispy/whispery voice and then applying some effects to make them sound ethereal, or doing something on the verge of spoken word and then doing some heavy processing. Either of these should fit well with the song, which is already pretty atmospheric sounding.
Aside from that, I’m thinking I may do some remastering work with some of my old pre-Partition 36 pieces in order to practice some new engineering tricks I’ve been researching. Furthermore, some of my old master CDs have been scratched, and I don’t have the original master files anymore, so making new recordings will also serve an archival purpose. These shouldn’t take long at all since everything is written really just needs to be re-recorded into a multi-track master, and they aren’t a priority. But expect a few to be released here through the blog.
As you may have noticed, both this blog and the Partition 36 Facebook page have been pretty quiet lately. Unfortunately this is because I’ve been in the middle of moving my studio and have hit some unexpected delays. So while I can sorta use my laptop to work on side projects (such as the Japan Aid Collaboration CD and a joint project my friend started called treeFungus), I can’t really work on Partition 36 stuff. I have been using the time to do research and work on some writing that might turn into lyrics, though. So all is not lost!
Hopefully things will come together in the next few weeks and I can get back into full swing. This is one downside to doing everything on my computer, from the composition, to the synth programming, to the engineering.
In the meantime, why not head over to my discography page and take a listen to a few tracks (remember, they’re all online for free)? Or visit the Facebook page? Or better yet, order a copy of Inside The Beat?