Ramblings From Justin Penney

I haven't been exceptionally prolific with my writing lately. Not just on here but everything, music, lyrics... I did write some long needed code at work today but I'm not sure that counts. I have been really down on myself about it the last couple weeks and it hasn't been good. I'll pick up a guitar and play the same things. I'll pick up a bass and play the same things. Start banging on the drums... well that's usually not very pretty.

Last night I figured I'd change things around and I started playing with FL Studio. I bought it quite a while ago and used it for basic drum loops and as a click track for SONAR. I discovered Ping DXi and use that for a click track so FL Studio jsut kind of sat there... not that it's bad I'm just not big into drum loops. So anyway, I thought I'd play around with that for a while just to change things up. I started playing with some of the effects got a cool little thing going on. It's not cool enough to share but it was cool enough to make me think that I could come up with something new. So I brought up a new project and made a beat. It's similar to a beat from a Mock Orange song but I'll take the phlosophy of "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" on this one, besides it's a rocking beat.

So I plopped that in SONAR and looped it and repeated for about 3 minutes. I plugged in the Bronco bass and just started going until I got a little groove on and did a quick arrangement. Laid a guitar track down, did some guitar harmonies in the chorus and there's 2:11 of some bouncy rock fun after a little editing.

I played it for Jacey tonight and she really liked it. She's really good as a "this song is boring" test and she won't hold that back. After listening to it I brought up the last song I did, which is still sans words, and asked if these sounded cohesive. And sure enough they did.

So in basically two months I've got two songs. They needs real drums laid down and a couple parts re-tracked but it's steady progress. I'm pretty sure that these won't end up in his last chance but I'll do my vanity solo album anyway. All the pressure and self criticism and all it really took was to just let my gaurd down and play what was fun and felt good not what was clever or unique.

# posted by Justin @ 10:21 PM