2024-03-18: ongoing creative work

this is something i do from time to time — and i'm always good to myself, i never get upset for not maintaining some perfect balance of time towards everything. if i'm working on something, that's fine. but, i've been working on composition, trying to see how some music will work within one of my larger software projects. i started off by spending a week or so working on a nes-style chiptune, via famitracker; and this was a lot of fun, and i think the result is actually a bit of a banger, at least as it hits its b section.

but when i exported it and tried it out in the larger context, it didn't seem to work. last week i sent a youtube link to my project's discord channel; they kind of agreed. a good piece, maybe the wrong sound? haven't put the video anywhere but there and it's already got 40+ views? wild.

(i know this is nothing, but it's also more than all of my videos except one, and that's after a week, whereas the others have been up in some cases for a couple of years, so,)

anyway. i poke around. i've done some traditional composition and arrangement (mostly the latter) in musescore, but musescore 3's instruments are pretty bad. not much better than the midis that people played on their websites in 1996. but musescore 4 apparently has much better instruments. so i download it, and download the instrument packs, import one of my pieces from 3 for a test run, and...yup. much closer to the real thing.

anyway, looking for other ideas to try out, i sit down, and suddenly i've been spending the last three days working on something different, a more traditional composition, even as my phone's notepad app fills up with ideas to work on once i've figured this stuff out. i start a woodwind quartet. it's a theme and three variations. i've been challenging myself to do a section each day and so far i've been successful.

the plan today's to finish up the last variation, then start listening carefully, work towards a second draft. keep thinking about how to record the other ideas i've been writing down, and try those too. here we go.

journal