its been over a year since the last blog post, but id really like to start using it more. problem is i never really know what to do, but since im taking a break from social media for a few days i think ill post here instead. todays entry isnt about computers but rather im gonna ramble for a bit about the album im in the middle of working on because that seems much more fun. im also gonna talk a bit about some other stuff i have in the works, i guess thisll just be a general update on what im doing lately.
first off i want to stress, i dont know if this album is coming out this year. to start throwing out numbers and statistics i think im about 70% done with the album? the final track sequence is ready and i have a work-in-progress rough version of the entire album, meaning at this point the album is *listenable* if not *finished*.
so, what does this all mean as far as actual completion and release dates go?
for starters, 70% is a bit of a rough estimate as far as completion percentage goes and doesnt actually reflect the current "completion" percentage because, lets be real thats not something that can properly be quantified. if i had to put out an actually quantifiable measure of completion the numbers work out more to 40%, but thats literally just going off my "completion" chart which is nothing more than a list of the songs and the four stages that remain for each of the 15 songs that made the cut. those stages are tracking, overdubs, mixing, and mastering, and those of you who understand how music works and how record production works should understand that this doesnt account for the long hours spent writing most of these songs in the first place, nor does it account for how many of the songs were tracked and mixed as they were being written.
taking all of this into account, the 70% number i have right now is really just an estimate based on the amount of work i have *remaining*. as mentioned before, there are 15 tracks on this record. some of those tracks have already been effectively mixed and mastered, as, spoiler alert, some of the tracks on the album are actually leftovers from a project i was working on back in june. i had intended to follow up wildflower dances with an album of solo buchla easel performances, using the arturia easel plugin and improvising entire pieces on it, but i lost interest in it at some point (ADHD is a bitch) and moved on to what has become this new album i keep referring to (i swear it has a name im just not ready to announce anything specific yet).
while playing around with the sequencing of the album over the past month or so and watching it grow from what was initially supposed to be just a 60 minute single album into the 102 minute behemoth double CD that its become, i managed to work a few of those performances into the tracklist. i didnt want to just leave them on the cutting room floor never to be released because their home project got shelved, and the solo performance nature of them felt like a perfect fit with the vibe im trying to create on this album. thanks to my current living situation after moving from raleigh, NC to denver, CO ive been forced to experiment a lot more with what my music even is and what im even trying to achieve both sonically and ideologically, thanks to an increased reliance on MIDI sequencing and programming of virtual instruments (i dont even have a bass guitar anymore, just two electric guitars), which has led me to seek out a more "performance" oriented workflow wherever possible.
so, in that case, what does all of this amount to? i seem to be rambling again.
heres whats going on with the album and whats left before production is finally complete: out of 15 tracks, five have been marked as being essentially complete minus any additional mastering work i feel might be required. three of these are the aforementioned easel performances, one of which is *not* included in full and has been trimmed from a staggering 12 minutes to a measly 2 minutes (i might put out the full version at some point, i just couldnt find anywhere for it to fit on this record), while the others are the intro and outro to the album. among the other 10 tracks, all but two have progressed past the tracking stage and merely need overdubs before they can be mixed. the two songs that still need to be tracked are *almost* done, but require a significant portion of the base tracks to be rerecorded hence why i cant mark them as being fully tracked. once those two are done, i can move on to overdubs for the remaining tracks, and then the album can be properly mixed and mastered and a release date can be figured out.
the ideal here would be to have the album out by the end of the year, but there is a very good chance it wont be ready in time for this, as its already september, and id like to not put it out after the midway point of december if possible as thats not a particularly good time for releases in my experience (even if so many of my albums come out in december). even if i had the album mixed and mastered by the end of october id still only *barely* have enough time to get it uploaded to distrokid and bandcamp in time for an early december date, which would mean a month and a half left to finish the album, something i just dont think i can do. so, likely, itll come out some time early next year. i had hoped to have the album out by october, but given the amount of work left after the album decided to balloon in size, that doesnt look like its happening.
with all that out of the way, lets move on to other things that have been occupying my free time as of late.
in the background to all of this, i reinstalled ableton live at the start of the month. i dont plan to switch to ableton fulltime as my primary DAW, im still very happy with logic pro and a lot of what i do normally really doesnt vibe with abletons workflow or feature-set, but i *have* been using it to create more standalone type electronic music. i may or may not put out an EP or a compilation of some of the stuff ive been doing with ableton, a lot of it is techno and drum & bass type stuff that i dont want to really associate with my primary output as robin, but some of it is decent stuff (or at least i think it is) and id like to do something with it at some point. at the very least its been helping me work on my sound design skills by giving me a canvas that *thrives* on sound design in a way that my usual post-rock stuff doesnt always let me play with, but certainly benefits from.
for non-musical pursuits, ive started writing again. not fanfic, although i have been slowly writing stuff for the homestuck fan-comic me and my kismesis have been making. we havent been very active with it since moving to denver at the start of the year, but were slowly getting back in the swing of things. what ive mostly been writing lately has been a combination of kink stuff and horror stuff, as the intersection of those two i feel is where a lot of my writing strengths lie. ive also been working on the story to go in the liner notes of the new album, yes there will be another story with this album like there was with my last album, i dont quite know what direction itll take but i have some ideas.
ive also been toying with the idea of getting back into game design, not that my previous efforts ever went very far but its always been something ive wanted to do. ive been playing a lot of yume nikki and .flow and LSD dream emulator lately, and those three in particular always get me feeling inspired to create something of my own, so maybe this time things will pan out. i dont have a lot to say on this front as its just been stuff im thinking about lately rather than anything ive actually invested a lot of time into yet, but who knows.
i think thats all from me this time, i cant really think of anything else to say. to summarize the above, there is a new album coming out probably early next year, its about 70% done and is currently listenable yet unfinished, its about 102 minutes long, it features a lot more electronic work than my last album did by virtue of necessity, and i have a few other things im toying around with that have yet to see the light of day but are in fact proof that im still around and still creating. i wish i had more to say than that, but i think i spent most of my words rambling about the new album. not that thats not the intended focus of this post in the first place since it very much *was*. anyhow, bye for now, see you next update.