Daily Create: Coloring

Coloring: In An Otherwise Odd World

The prompt for this morning’s Daily Create via DS106 was to use Scrap-Coloring to color an image or file. I’ve used the site before and it’s easy to get lost in it, particularly if the image has a lot of little details. I chose the cover design of my album of sound sketches from last year. (take a listen).

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

Song: Constellations (Moments Left Behind)

I’ve been trying to get myself into a regular routine again of writing songs, and taking any kernel of something to the next steps, of demo recording and maybe making a video to go with it. This one — Constellations (Moments Left Behind) — might still need some work but I like the way I am trying to use constellation stories as a way to frame our own experiences. I think it sort of works.

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

Music: Street Stomp

The Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that I use for making music with loops often has new packages of sound that I try out. Last week, the package was interesting, with a Mariachi-style series of loops. So I played around a bit to make this Street Stomp piece.

Peace (and strings),
Kevin

Video Documentary: The Last Repair Shop

When I was a kid, my father (a drummer) used to bring me to visit a musical instrument repair shop for odds and ends, and it would be a place I enjoy just being in, just hanging out in.

It was called George’s Music Shop, and George was the man behind the counter, and when I was learning saxophone, it remained a place of wonder. I even used my memories there for a collection of connected short stories at one point (NOTE TO SELF: dig that up and revisit the stories)

This documentary — The Last Repair Shop – is a wonder of capturing a place in Los Angeles, and how the shop is a hub for fixing things and maybe, people.

It also inspired my morning poem:

On a memory stop
to an old repair shop
on Main, a whistle in B flat
ringing on the door, opening,
explaining I’m here,
aiming to get a broken sax,
fixed; worn pads,
replaced; things sound
better, with love

I hand it to the man
behind a glass counter
littered with sheet music,
cork grease, guitar strings –
his probing fingers pour
over every turn of the neck,
the bell, the cage, the springs

In a gruff voice, he speaks,
in a sort of bebop rhyme:
he’ll weave some magic
to make my sax sing again –
come back in two weeks time

Peace (and repairs),
Kevin

Gift Of Peace (Solstice 2023)

Each year, I try to do at least one or two different things with a song for the holidays that I wrote some years back with my friend, John Graiff. This year, I tried an acoustic version, with some slight musical and lyric changes, and last night, my friends Bob and Greg joined in playing and recording the song.

Here is the original version:

Peace (and light),
Kevin

Google’s New AI Tool: MusicFX

I have long been interested (sometimes, alarmed) by how some of the new machine learning/AI tools might impact the making of music. Mostly, I have not been all that impressed (good thing for human music composers, right?) but I also know that the technology is only getting better. (See some earlier posts)

The results have been awful or weird or un-listenable.

Google just released its new tool called MusicFX in its AI Test Kitchen (so, you know, beta) and, well, it’s a big leap forward to what I was playing around with just a few months ago. You write in text about the kind of music you want, and you can add genre, instrumentation, etc, and the site generates a 30 second track. The few experiments I did sounded decent.

Bad news for human music composers? Maybe.

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

PS — there’s also a new TextFX in the same platform but I can’t for the life of me figure out its value.

Gift Of Peace Remix 2023

Five years ago, my friend, John, and I went into a recording studio to record a holiday song that we wrote – A Gift Of Peace (For Christmas) — and each year, he and I try to do different remix versions of it, just to keep the song fresh and alive for us.

This year, I used some music software to convert the song into music manuscript (which I then printed out and packaged as a gift to my friend, John). Here, I turned the manuscript into a video, with the instrumental part of the song as backing track.

Peace (not war),
Kevin

PS — the song is still in the music streaming ecosystems:

Pandora: https://www.pandora.com/artist/the-lu…

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/5eNEvH…   / a-gift-of-peace-for-christmas-single  

Amazon Music: https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Peace-Chr…

Tidal: https://tidal.com/browse/album/94652490