I'll add a description later, but I'm at the airport and have flight to catch!
Take 1 by danieldeklotz
[edit 11/21/2011] If you have heard much of the recordings that I have done in the past, you may notice a few common elements, including repetition and a certain lack of polish. I've found recently that if I'm just doing a music project for fun, I often like to get the background instruments to a certain point of polish, set the song on loop, and then just improvise the lead for pretty much as long as I like. After a while, I'll record an improvised lead part for a couple of loops and call it a song. That's basically what I did here. You'll notice that the song is a simple progression that is looped over and over, possibly with different background instruments (piano, bass, etc.), and the melody is just improvised as I go along. I only did one take for the guitar track, so that's why it sounds really rough and unpolished. If I wanted to, I could spend some time and go back to re-record the rough parts and splice the different takes together until I got something more or less polished, but that's not something I really enjoy doing. If I'm just making something for fun, I'd rather spend more time just exploring the more musical parts of composition.
Also, there's a certain amount of adventure to 1-take improv enterprises. Once you start taking multiple takes to make it all good, the composition really starts being all about improvisation, and starts being more about production. That can be fun as well, but there's something really adventurous about just doing the take and seeing where things end up. It might not end up perfect, but that's almost a good thing in music sometimes!
Friday, November 18, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Change the World
This is something I've been thinking about lately.
Growing up, I convinced myself that it was my calling in life to change the world in a major way, that somehow my life was not worthwhile if it didn't have some far-reaching impact on "the way people live their lives". Recently reading a lot of news about Steve Jobs and the way he "changed the way people live their lives", it's really made me think about what kind of mark I want to make on the world. Here's what I came up with.
It's not enough to change the way people live their lives. What's vastly more important is improving the quality of life. Although I love technology and innovation, I look over the past decade of innovation in consumer electronics (smaller/more powerful laptops, mp3 players, smart phones, WiFi, touch UI, bluetooth, hyprethreading, quad core, Facebook, Netflix, Kindle Fire, etc.) and I'm left thinking that the quality-of-life improvement all of these things have brought me has been marginal at best. Am I really that much happier because I'm writing this blog on a tablet instead of a desktop computer? Am I dramatically better off now that I can browse the internet from my phone? More importantly, is that the kind of legacy I want to leave behind? A new UI paradigm? A new social network? The next "innovative" new Software-As-A-Service?
Touch-based smart phones aren't life changing. Tablet devices aren't life changing. You want to know what's life changing? Clean water for the 12% of the world's population that doesn't currently have access to it, that's what's really life changing. That's the kind of thing that is really changing lives in a meaningful way. That's something that's worth being part of, a legacy much more worth passing on. If you're interested in being a part of that, you should check out http://www.charitywater.org/.
To be clear, I am totally into electronics innovation. There are some really cool things going on, and a lot of really interesting opportunities. But for me, I think the passion to innovate on technology stems from my passion to improve lives. An innovation is only as compelling to me as the life change it brings, which makes a biosand water filter demonstrably much more compelling and innovative in my eyes than any consumer device I own. That's right. Given the right context, a bucket of sand is more innovative than my smart phone. ;P
Growing up, I convinced myself that it was my calling in life to change the world in a major way, that somehow my life was not worthwhile if it didn't have some far-reaching impact on "the way people live their lives". Recently reading a lot of news about Steve Jobs and the way he "changed the way people live their lives", it's really made me think about what kind of mark I want to make on the world. Here's what I came up with.
It's not enough to change the way people live their lives. What's vastly more important is improving the quality of life. Although I love technology and innovation, I look over the past decade of innovation in consumer electronics (smaller/more powerful laptops, mp3 players, smart phones, WiFi, touch UI, bluetooth, hyprethreading, quad core, Facebook, Netflix, Kindle Fire, etc.) and I'm left thinking that the quality-of-life improvement all of these things have brought me has been marginal at best. Am I really that much happier because I'm writing this blog on a tablet instead of a desktop computer? Am I dramatically better off now that I can browse the internet from my phone? More importantly, is that the kind of legacy I want to leave behind? A new UI paradigm? A new social network? The next "innovative" new Software-As-A-Service?
Touch-based smart phones aren't life changing. Tablet devices aren't life changing. You want to know what's life changing? Clean water for the 12% of the world's population that doesn't currently have access to it, that's what's really life changing. That's the kind of thing that is really changing lives in a meaningful way. That's something that's worth being part of, a legacy much more worth passing on. If you're interested in being a part of that, you should check out http://www.charitywater.org/.
To be clear, I am totally into electronics innovation. There are some really cool things going on, and a lot of really interesting opportunities. But for me, I think the passion to innovate on technology stems from my passion to improve lives. An innovation is only as compelling to me as the life change it brings, which makes a biosand water filter demonstrably much more compelling and innovative in my eyes than any consumer device I own. That's right. Given the right context, a bucket of sand is more innovative than my smart phone. ;P
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Fresh Start
Every year or so, I find myself looking over my old (and mostly dormant) blogs, and in doing so feel compelled to start over with a totally new blog. Each new blog is totally doomed from the start. There's no reason to suspect that this one will be any different.
There is, however, one awesome difference between this blog and any of its predecessors: Music by me!
Happiness in C major by danieldeklotz
I had a hankering to get the old what a swell blog going again, but to be honest, the things I want to do with a blog these days are radically different. The old blog had a good thing going as a place for me to put all my quick witty comments and rip into marketing slogans and such (which I still love doing), but now I want a place where I can really delve into showcasing the stuff that I do on a deeper level. I want a place for openly exploring my approach to life and everything that's important to me: creativity, music, art, technology, philosophy, theology, and all their intersections. And that's what this blog (if it is successfull) will be all about. I may still make random posts on the swell blog just for old time's sake, but it's time to move on to something more meaningful.
I composed, recorded, and produced the song above a few weeks ago as part of getting familiar with the new Propellorhead Reason 6.0 (the new version of the primary music software I use). Reason has traditionally been mostly a synthesizer/sequencer program (no live audio recording), so I mostly used it to compose techno and video game music (I'll upload some of that later). In the new version of Reason, they've added (among many other things) audio recording, so that opens up a whole new realm of possibilities that I am only beginning to explore. Stay tuned for more!
There is, however, one awesome difference between this blog and any of its predecessors: Music by me!
Happiness in C major by danieldeklotz
I had a hankering to get the old what a swell blog going again, but to be honest, the things I want to do with a blog these days are radically different. The old blog had a good thing going as a place for me to put all my quick witty comments and rip into marketing slogans and such (which I still love doing), but now I want a place where I can really delve into showcasing the stuff that I do on a deeper level. I want a place for openly exploring my approach to life and everything that's important to me: creativity, music, art, technology, philosophy, theology, and all their intersections. And that's what this blog (if it is successfull) will be all about. I may still make random posts on the swell blog just for old time's sake, but it's time to move on to something more meaningful.
I composed, recorded, and produced the song above a few weeks ago as part of getting familiar with the new Propellorhead Reason 6.0 (the new version of the primary music software I use). Reason has traditionally been mostly a synthesizer/sequencer program (no live audio recording), so I mostly used it to compose techno and video game music (I'll upload some of that later). In the new version of Reason, they've added (among many other things) audio recording, so that opens up a whole new realm of possibilities that I am only beginning to explore. Stay tuned for more!
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