The 9th track in the project, and in my opinion the weakest one overall, from a production standpoint. 

I wrote the song a year or two ago, and never really did anything with it once I had it together. I was messing around with the chord progression Monday or Tuesday and decided to make it my track for the week.

I wanted to put together track that was a little more 'organic' than some of my recent tunes, and to that end I think succeeded - but at the expense of a more solid track overall.

The vocals are just at the top of my range and the timing is sort of awkward, which makes the delivery exceptionally sketchy in parts. After 3 or 4 days' attempts at a consistent, well-delivered vocal take, I finally just gave up and that's what you hear on the song. In my head there are a few nice, thick vocal harmonies at the ends of the verses/choruses, but no matter how hard I tried I wasn't able to get them to sound even remotely consonant, so I scratched the idea in favor of the plain-jane transition that's there now.

Also wanted to add a guitar solo at the end, but two solid hours of trying to track something - anything that didn't suck, really - for the 30-odd-seconds of the section proved fruitless and I decided to drop it from the track overall.

Not sure if I'll come back to work on this one - I'm not really all that happy with it, and don't know where I could give it any substantial polish (or rather, there are so many places needing polishing as to render it too ungainly a task).

Maybe time will bring me around to it - who knows.

Tune 9

Track 10 in the project.  I'm pretty happy with this one overall. I still need to tweak the levels some, but on the whole it's pretty solid. I had considered adding some vocals earlier on in the process, but as the tune came together more and I wasn't having much luck as far as vocal melodies/lyrics, I decided to nix that idea. 

The tune gets its name from the name of one of the synths I used on the track. It's actually 12 different instances of the same synth, set to different patches. It's quite a versatile little device, that.

Tune 10

The eleventh track in the project.

I'm mostly happy with it overall. As always, there are endless mix tweaks I could make, but I think for the most part it's pretty good. First one with vocals that I've actually written within the given week, too, which is kind of neat.  



Tune 11

This track rounds out an even dozen for the project.

I started this a couple of weeks ago in a coffeeshop near here (Fair Trade Coffee House, to be precise). Was futzing around with some beats and synth parts, and got a couple of basic grooves down. Didn't really touch it again until Thursday of this week, and it sort of developed a life of its own as I spent time on it. I was messing around with some guitar sounds, and got some really nice Strat tones that I liked a lot, and found a way to add that to the mix.

As always, it could use some extra fine tuning on the mix, but overall I'm happy with how this one came out. 

Tune 12

Track 13 in the project.
I came up with the progression and lyrics for this one a couple of summers ago but was never able to really put it into a form I was happy with. When I wrote it, I had it my head to be a sort of generic acoustic folkish tune, and whatever I tried to do that, it just sounded flat and boring. I decided to try a different approach on it, and I'm pretty happy with the results.
I put together the majority of the tracks (all but the vocals and guitar) in a couple of hours on my laptop at the coffeeshop earlier in the week, and then laid down the other tracks on Friday.
I like the arrangement and instrumentation of this one. The mix and mastering still sound kind of janky to me, but I can't figure out what to change to make them sound better.Overall I think it's a decent tune though.

The 'you' mentioned in the lyrics isn't anybody in particular - I just thought it worked out neatly with the rest of the lyrics.

For some reason the intro guitar sounds kind of warbly on this, but doesn't on the actual mp3 that I uploaded. Not sure what's going on there.

Tune 13

The 14th track in the project. I started this with the intention of it having vocals, but I had no luck coming up with decent (or even so-so) lyrics and no real melodies to speak of, so it turned into the '80s-esque wankfest we have here. 

I'm more or less happy with this one, for what it is. I came up with and laid down the basic beat/progression on Saturday and then added the lead parts Sunday, so for coming out of a less than 24 hour period, I think it's pretty okay. Has some cheesy elements, and it's a little less dynamic than I'd have hoped, but it'll do for the week. 

The mix could use a good amount of work, and the dynamics are pretty flat throughout which gets old fast, but that's a task for another day, if ever.

Tune 14

A post-hiatus entry in the project. This one's sort of so-so musically, but I think it's neat in light of the fact that every noise you hear on the track was made with my own voice, sampled and processed in Live. 

I recorded myself SM57-style, just making some random mouth sounds, and ran the clips through Ableton's Sampler instrument. Laid a bunch of effects and processing over them as necessary, and eventually turned it into a tune.

Again, nothing too fantastic musically, but as a piece of production, I think it's pretty rad.


Tune 15 (Vox Propio)

The 16th track in the project.

This one was sort of impromptu - I put down a couple of guitar riffs during the day Saturday that wound up becoming the meat of the tune. Arranged it Saturday night, tweaked it Sunday and uploaded.

This one is for all intents and purposes unfinished - it needs vocals or some kind of melody, and I had no luck putting any together. That rather large oversight aside, I really like this tune. I think it's got a good feel and flows nicely. Definitely want to see it finished with lyrics at some point.

Tune 16

Unfinished track I've been working on but have since cooled to. May go back and finish later.

Dancer Prancer (unfinished)

This one came together over a number of weeks. I put the main part down as sort of a sketch,  a cool musical snapshot, but didn't do much with it at first. 

A few weeks later I started playing around with it a little bit more, came up with a couple of other parts and some instrumentation, and mostly shaped it into what's there now.

I didn't spend too much time on the mix. It was never properly 'done' but after listening to it enough, I've gotten to a point where I'm pretty sure I won't be going back to it any time soon - so may as well upload it for all.

Tune 17

I've been doing music stuff on my computer for a few years now. I recently started a project: I put together a track a week, starting on Monday, and then Sunday night I upload it regardless of what shape it's in. It's basically an exercise in forcing myself to produce new content, rather than let myself work on tweaking a single tune ad infinitum, to the point of never finishing it and getting stuck in my own creative inertia.

  This SoundCloud is basically a repository for the tunes I come up with during that project. I may upload some of my other tracks too, but for now this is exclusively songs from the project. 

    So far, mostly so good. Please comment on the tunes if you feel like it - feedback is a great thing.

Oelav