The No More Zeroes Project

My goal is to become a faster and more competent composer by writing one piece a day for one year. Each composition must be a minimum of two minutes in length, but there are no other restrictions. I will post each composition here, as well as a quick breakdown of how the writing process went. I'm pumped.

[no-more-zeroes]

This one is really similar in tone and construction to 0108. I really just built on some unused melodic content and it kinda grew from there.

[no-more-zeroes]

Good ol' trance. I like the melody on this one particularly. The mixing was interesting, tried some interesting things with compression I hadn't before.

[no-more-zeroes]

A more complex arrangement of strings, winds, and percussion in a lilting 12/8.

[no-more-zeroes]

An electronic ambient piece for an underwater section of a game.

[no-more-zeroes]

Snowflakes

Time spent on project: 1 hour 42 minutes

I was legitimately late with this one. Not, “I was an hour late” or, “I physically couldn’t upload the piece” but “I straight up did not do this piece on January 10th.” I was really bummed out by 0109, honestly. I didn’t like the piece, I didn’t like the feeling it left me with, and I didn’t want to go back to my laptop and make music. I had so many false starts with 0110, I just couldn’t find my mojo. Eventually I remembered what I was decent at, and that was making melodies over chord progressions, so I whipped up a nice sounding chord progression in Chordbot and let the rest come naturally. I like this one; it’s reminiscent of Mostly Theoretical, and I got kinda the same vibe (no pun intended) while I was writing it. Honestly, I can’t let myself get blocked like this again. I’m 10 days into a 365 day project, which is less than 3% of the way done. I’ve got all this ambition and all these ideas, and I want to see this project through, but it won’t happen unless I force myself every day, whether I want to or not, to sit down and write music. On another tangent, going back to my 0107 writeup, I’ve been thinking a lot about my personal musical style the past few days. I’ve spent the first 10 days of this project in a variety of styles (trance, electronica, jazz, orchestral, world, experimental), and it makes me wonder what kind of a musician I really am. I recently started going back through Waterflame’s whole discography, since he’s one of my earliest and truest inspirations. All of his pieces have this great signature feel about them; a bouncy, compound meter with melodies that excite but always sound similar enough to recognize. I want that for myself, and I understand that it takes time to develop, but I worry that trying so much new stuff is hindering the development of one personal style. I love electronic music, but I also love orchestral pieces and pop-vocal music. I’d like to develop my styles in all three of those. I’ve got 355 days left to do that.

[no-more-zeroes]

A vibes and strings piece about the cold in 3/4.

[no-more-zeroes]

Tomorrowland Tribute

Time spent on project: 1 hour 21 minutes.

Another one I’m not really proud of. I procrastinated a lot today; I had a good chunk of the afternoon that I could have dedicated to this composition, and instead I just threw something together in an hour or so. I really have to manage my time better if I want these compositions to be meaningful, because this was honestly nothing more than an exercise in quick mixing and manual arpeggiation. I like the sound that I got out of the Harmless synth for the keys, but other than that the synthesis was kinda dull and simple. The beat is repetitive and uninspired. I did use a spectrogram to test my mix out, which is something I’d been meaning to try, and I have to say it’s very useful. Will do that again. What really gets me is that I knew this was gonna be kind of a rushed, uninspired song and it still ended up sounding relatively nice. It sounds like the name, like something you’d hear at a Disney parade. Easy to follow, kinda catchy for the kids. I stand on this pulpit every day and fight for the right of electronic musicians to not be dismissed out of hand because our work is “simple,” but I completely perpetuated the stereotype tonight. I threw together some basically programmed synths, combined them with some rudimentary mixing knowledge, and I had a workable track. I feel ashamed of this track, and it is against my better judgment to put it on the internet with my name on it.

[no-more-zeroes]

A decidedly simple theme for a Disney lights parade.

[no-more-zeroes]

Farewell to Ogygia

Time spent on project: 2 hours 2 minutes

I knew from the start that I wanted this to be a piano-centric composition. The pad was kind of a nice touch, I enjoyed the effect, but I had to take the drums and bass out. They were distracting from the melodic line too much. So, once again, I present another two track composition. Minimalism is great and all, but I’d love to do something more complex. Anywho, this track was made with a very specific theme in mind. It couldn’t be too sweet, it had to have that taste of regret and sadness. Ogygia, for you unenlightened, is the island that Calypso was banished to in Greek mythology. She was destined to fall in love with every hero marooned on her island, only for them to be whisked away and never to return. She was doomed forever to see her lovers drift away. I think I really captured that feel. The composition was actually really hard, since my MIDI keyboard decided it didn’t like its USB jack anymore and I couldn’t find a 9V DC plug. So I did it all by hand in the piano roll. It was interesting, certainly more time consuming, but I didn’t have as great an incentive to play around. I just figured out the melody and wrote it in. Also, sorry it’s slightly late, had to do the Jeopardy online test. Woohoo.

[no-more-zeroes]

A piano solo about losing someone you care about. With a little pad thrown in for dramatic effect.

[no-more-zeroes]

Tunnel Dwellers

Time spent on project: 59 minutes(!)

This was a purely improv experiment. I pulled four samples from the Reaktor Steampipe library and improv’ed on each instrument for a bit, then pulled it all together. No met, no quantization, just improv. Obviously the track isn’t super tonal/harmonic; my improv skills are not the point that I can just generate melodies on the fly. My backing is in percussion, and I particularly like the opening drum section because it’s so raw. The other two tonal voices have some interesting movement, especially the low buzz in the third part. That little melody could have led to a song all its own. Once again, just sitting down and putting down music instead of trying to plan the whole thing out has worked well for me. This was enjoyable and enlightening. One thing I have noticed is that the tracks have been super-varied the past couple days (jazz, trance, orchestral, atonal percussion), and I’m a little worried that I’m spending too much time trying to learn different styles than I should. I feel like I should be developing my own sound, but I also like trying new things. I really want to do some more vocal stuff. Now that I have access to a quiet studio setting, maybe that can happen.

[no-more-zeroes]

An improvised piece for a video game level featuring tunnels.

[no-more-zeroes]

On the Sand

Total time spent on project: 2 hours

So, first off, apologies for this coming so much later than it should have. The problem is, I couldn’t exactly do any kind of mix/master until this afternoon; I had to pack all my equipment up and book it back up to college. Anywho, this song didn’t take long to come together. I wanted to do an ocean-based thing because that’s what I was in the mood for, but honestly I’m disappointed with the result. I feel the same way about this track that I do about Wandering Sprites. It’s not necessarily a bad track; in fact, the Kairatune improv is fun and interesting melodically. I like this track, but it feels so artificial. It’s like I plopped down four notes, harmonized them, then just built a quick 2 minute track over what was there with some trancey stuff. It’s not that I dislike trance or the trance structure, it’s just that I feel that I’m not doing it justice. Doing a track in 2 hours isn’t exactly the kind of time you need to spend on a masterpiece. However, for better or worse, I’ve put myself under a set of restrictions that I think will make me better. And if I want to produce a long, polished track, well, I can always do that after the day’s submission is complete.

[no-more-zeroes]

Not complicated. Pleasant sounding.

[no-more-zeroes]

Above the Stars

Time spent on project: 2 hours and 24 minutes.

So I got $30 off coupon for the Native Instruments store and I got “The Mouth” plugin for Reaktor 5. It’s basically a vocal plugin that has effects, synths, and beat boxing settings. It’s amazingly versatile; you can make an entire track using only mouth sounds. I spent most of the afternoon fiddling around with it, and decided I wanted today’s track to be a vocal one. However, I couldn’t figure out how to structure the song, and I was running out of time, so I took a cue from Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” and pulled a vocal and vocoder only track. I wrote the lyrics basically as I sang them, only going through a few takes for each verse to get the melody down. I like the lyrics. They’re pretty. This whole thing was a very different experience than composing normally is for me, which is to say, I didn’t write out the structure or note patterns beforehand. It just sort of came together. I guess that’s what composition is like on an instrument that you’re proficient with (not that I’m claiming to be a proficient singer by any means). It’s new and it’s fun. Maybe some more traditional vocal stuff will follow this track.

[no-more-zeroes]

So I did a song with vocals and a vocoder. In fact, that's all I did this song with. It was fun and thought-provoking to do a song like this; I like the style and the sound. More to follow.

[no-more-zeroes]

Wandering Sprites

Time spent on project: 1 hour and 40 minutes.

So I got the Komplete Audio 6 interface today, and it’s rockin’. Great mic inputs, fantastic sound fidelity as an output device. All in all, very happy with it. It also came with some VST’s from NI, so I used some of the orchestral soundfonts in those to do today’s piece. Not how I expected it would turn out, and once again I’m about an hour late, even though I haven’t gone to bed yet. Gotta get outta that habit. The piece is simple, kinda whimsical and reminiscent of older video games like Paper Mario. The english horn sample is nothing to write home about, but I think I did the best I could under circumstances. I really tried to hit the 2 minute mark today. The other pieces have been relatively simple to get past 2 minutes, but the creative juices just weren’t flowing very fast tonight. I pushed through, though, and that’s a good feeling.