Fuck Computers
Hello!
THE UPDATE:
God, this has easily been the busiest year of my life. It just doesn’t let up - which is good, but it’s definitely been testing my limits!
Here’s a little bit of backstory I guess - at the end of last year I was on the other end of my first national tour. I got back and I was ready to dive into this album concept I had that eventually became the CR-V 3 song EP.
But as I just noted - that’s an EP, not an album - so where did the rest of the tracks go? Well, there are still many tracks I planned on rolling into that album - some are pretty full, some are half started, and then I have a ton of little ideas. I could probably complete that album someday relatively soon, maybe within a year.
But I went to get back into it, and just the whole idea of my existing workflow got so scary, annoying, and boring all at the same time. It sounded impossible to me to do a whole ‘nother album the same old way sitting at the same old desk.
Additionally - I wanted to get back to touring ASAP. That huge tour was the best time of my life and I wanted to do more….even though it put me $22k in debt LMAO.
So, I got a tour on the books with Deth Rali for the end of August (these things do take months of planning) and in the meanwhile I took a few local gigs to get prepared.
So, what does that all mean?? It means that this year has been more about trying to make money and shipping shitloads of merch orders every week while also rehearsing a ton every week. This means that my studio is very much not in studio mode and it’s in constant disarray, it’s a terrible mess.
Point being, it’s not an inspiring place to be. But a musician can’t just stop making music.
All of a sudden it clicked for me - fuck the computer. Why is a messy room going to stop me from making music?? Do something else. Do it a different way.
So I started just taking instruments out of the room and recording them in different ways - to samplers, to cassette.
It’s harder, but simpler. Most importantly, it makes me think about feel and having fun more than making that “big important album you said you’d finish, only to yourself”.
Well, it’s been a learning process, but I’ve made a couple beats (you might even call them songs).
THE SONGS AND HOW THEY WERE MADE:
I started by sampling every drum machine in my studio to a single sampler and put it on an SD card. This meant I had all my drum tones in my pocket at all times. Then I’d make beats using the drum samples, sometimes bouncing the patterns to other samplers at different recording fidelities, and sometimes bouncing patterns into cassette, which I’d then bounce back to the main sampler. I repeated this process for synths and basslines as well.
Whenever I got bored with stuff, I’d grab my SP-303 and go to my living room and record random vinyl in my collection. Man, the art of sampling is pretty wild. You have to just get in and get out with any little snippet of sound that’s interesting to you.
Anyways, that all got put together in my SP-404 as a bunch of random patterns that, when played together, could amount to a song. For these two songs, I had them in “pieces” of patterns on the 404, but then would live sequence them into a “song” recording which made it to a cassette. Then I played the cassette into the computer and mastered the WAV file into these MP3s you hear below.
The process took many steps but was essentially quicker than what I do on computers. I don’t really think these are done or if they’ll even make it to some final album, but that’s kinda the thing - who cares? These are crucial learning songs for new stuff to come…
Anyways - finally some new (weird) stuff from me. Let me know what you think:
”The Mala” and “SKYZIP”
-Jesse