My first daily piece of music for "Fun A Day" 2016. http://www.artclash.com/ I made this by sequencing a beat on my volca beats drum machine, synching that to my SH-101 synth, sequencing a bass line on the synth, and recording those into Cubase. I then overdubbed a few tracks of guitar through my tc electronic Flashback X4 delay.

Day 01

Day two of Fun-A-Day music making. Tomorrow I hope to have something more than an instrumental to post.

Day 02

I'm still working on a cover so in the meantime I made another instrumental jam. This time I'm using soft synths from Cubase for the drums, bass synth, and pad synth, with some more Korg monotron delay noodling and some crunchy guitar.


Day 03

No time to finish that Song Fight song tonight, so, jammed out quick on the bass and guitar to the drum machine.

Day 07

Busy tonight so I had to make some music this morning. This is just a jam with drum machine and bass and lead synths (all SH-101). Kind of video game music sounding I guess.

Day 08

Tonight's piece is just a short plaintive instrumental with some guitar and shaker.

Day 10

Today's music is a synth meditation. I got a set of the Oblique Strategies cards for Christmas. I drew one about "the edge" and the frame, so, I layered some circular sounding parts on top of each other with a bunch of ambiance. I think it's a nice chill piece, maybe like a more positive version of something you'd hear in a David Lynch movie...

Day 11

Just a quick little solo guitar instrumental tonight. It's been a long day.

Day 12

I tried to mix it up and go with all acoustic instruments this time, various cutesy things like ukulele, melodica, glockenspiel and a dulcimer like thing my Mom gave me for Christmas. I would have liked to had time for another couple takes and for this idea to cohere some more but I only had time for this pretty raw jam version.

Day 13

Tonight's jam is a bit similar to last night. I used the uke to strum the rhythm chords again, and the "Music Maker" and the glock to play melodic lines. No melodica this time, instead I played bass and threw in some shaker. Similar instrumentation but different vibe, not as Beirut sounding as last night.

Day 14

The uke seems to be my go to idea generating instrument at the moment. This is another 2-minute ABAB structured jam, rhythm chords strummed on the uke, pad on the melodica. I added in some mallet drums, toms and kick and snare without the snares, and some bass, which I think give things a nice rolling feel. Then I laid some melodies on top with picked and slide electric guitar.

Day 15

I can't seem to put away that lap harp. Tonight I started off with a beat on the volca beats on top of which I layered some guitar chords. On the chords I played a little double-stop held out note part, which I then decided to double with the glock. Next came a haunting little lap harp line, which I harmonized. To wrap it up I laid down some groovy bass and some lead guitar.

Day 16

Late to work on music tonight. I whipped up a very fast beat on the volca beats and then thrashed out some guitar power chords and picked P-bass on top. I finished up with some SH-101 lead and arpeggios. I'm over half way through as of yesterday, just two more weeks to go. Whoo!

Day 17

Tonight I made another instrumental, a bit longer than usual. It's a bit mellow. I started off with the drum loop then laid down the pump organ (it's fake, sadly I don't have a real pump organ) which lead to all the rest (bass and guitars and glockenspiel). This is one of the times where I felt like I've got the start of something potentially interesting going. Maybe I can revisit this.

Day 20

I have to be honest, I'm having a hard time summoning inspiration at this point. Tonight's music puts me over the 2/3rds mark though so that's something. I tried to multitask and write music on the guitar while watching a TV show. Probably not a great idea. Anyway, this is some anthemic rock with SH-101 lead lines and lead guitar noodling. Enjoy!(?)

Day 21

Today I turned to my recently acquired Oblique Strategies deck for some help with finding inspiration. I drew a card that simply said "Tidy Up". Immediately I thought of playing of a straight, simple dry drum machine beat. I was pleasantly surprised that everything then followed naturally from there for me, and I got this done in record time.

Day 22

Had to do this one quick tonight, just some drums and bass and some lead.

Day 23

Whoo, made it >2/3rds of the way now. Tonight I didn't have a ton of energy, I'm getting a cold and was out all day. This is just some guitar, bass, and drums. Zzzzzzzz

Day 24

I've got a fever and am barely keeping it together tonight. Here's another slow jam, with some lush analog delay. I've got a volca beats and live bass groove under some shimmery guitars and topped with some SH-101 leads that in the end sound to me like lovely R2D2 noises.

Day 25 (R2D2 In Love)

Tonight I was feeling the influence of a band called The Autumn Defense, which is a project of two of the members of Wilco. This doesn't really sound like them, they're awesome and their music is super rich and fleshed out with amazing musicianship. Anyway, I came up with the acoustic guitar part, then the drums, the bass, and last the melody.

Fun-A-Day 2017

I've been playing so much keyboard lately that I decided to switch to guitar. I picked up my acoustic and immediately came up with this finger picked part so I wound up making an early Iron & Wine sounding little instrument.

EDIT I forgot to mention I used the Spider capo ( http://www.spidercapo.com/ ) which is what you see in the picture.

I got a very late start tonight. I started off with an idea I'd had earlier in the day about doing something in 5/4 with a particular bassline rhythm and took it from there.

Fun-A-Day 2018

2018 Day 12

Tonight I started from the idea of some relatively quiet even strumming of chords on the acoustic guitar, then I programmed a drum loop for it and added in some driving picked bass. The melody is guitar and fake Wurlitzer in unison.

2018 Day 13

I dug out my Spider Capo the other day and decided to try another two capo setup on the guitar for some more finger picking. Using 5/4 also appealed to me again for some reason. I did some bass using the low register of the Reface CP's fake Wurli and then did some melodic stuff using a few of the patches from the EZKeys fake Mellotron.

2018 Day 15

Tonight was Tuesday jam night with my bandmates in Berkeley Social Scene. We'd already entered Song Fight and there wasn't a new title up yet, so I roped them into working on my daily music with me. This is what we came up with. Written off the cuff and recorded live as is our wont.

2018 Day 16 (with Berkeley Social Scene)

I wanted to play some bass tonight, and wound up doing some funky white boy noodly jam band stuff.

2018 Day 17

I went to a really great concert tonight in which a huge cast of amazing local and other musicians performed the entire soundtrack from the movie "Rushmore". This music is nothing like any of that and in no way inspired by that, except that because I went to the concert I didn't get home till 10:30 and really needed to crank out some music as quickly as possible. So I whipped out this atmospheric groove with guitar melody on top.

2018 Day 18

Tonight we went to see "Dr. Katz Live" which is a live version of a late 90s Comedy Central animated show "Dr. Katz Professional Therapist". The format of the show is a therapy session between Dr. Katz and usually a comedian, usually setting up the comedians to go into various of their jokes and routines. I'm not sure if the TV show was all improvised but the live version definitely is. The "patient" walks out and sits down with Jonathan Katz and they both just wing it. It's awesome! One of the guests tonight was Kate Micucci and she was wearing this amazing pink sweater she said she'd bought today in Japantown that said "Love Fun Coolpeople Smile" on it. In honor of her and her sweater I write this brief song for my music for today.

2018 Day 19

This post put the "Motorik" beat on my mind: http://blog.pandora.com/us/the-motorik-beat/ so I messed around with trying to make some simulation of that kind of beat with some spacey ambient harmonized SH-101 pad and driving bass and guitar lead.

2018 Day 20

I jammed another jam tonight, similar setup to last night but with Volca beats, and going for a different style. I fed the Volca beats "sync out" to the "ext clock in" of the SH-101 so I could play live over the drum and synth loop, so that was exciting.

2018 Day 21

Very little time tonight, I'm off to see St. Vincent. Did some quick a cappelle looping type stuff.

2018 Day 22

My name is Sam and I aim to make a piece of music every day in January for "Fun-A-Day". For more info about "Fun-A-Day" see here:

http://www.artclash.com/


Sam Fun-A-Day

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