I gotta get these ideas out of my head and into 16 bit byte arrays before they disappear back into the ether. Or something like that. I kinda wish I was recording onto magnetic tape... but it is what it is and tbh, that would probably hinder getting the ideas out.

So yeah, I've been writing, composing, playing, recording... all that. It's a lot of work, but it's a labor of love so I wouldn't change a thing. I just wish I had more time to put towards it. But yeah, I'm excited to show yall what I've been working on with this new stuff.

One interesting thing happened recently though with my production process. See, back when I first started producing my music, I just basically did everything with a laptop and a midi 25 key midi controller. (I think... it could have been a 37) But anyway, back then I always felt like my music would sound so much better if I was recording with 'real' gear instead of just on a computer. I always heard old heads talking about analog synthesizers and drum machines, and I was like... I gotta have that! So I kinda went on this quest to get everyhthing I could. Now, my collection is by no means as serious as what I've seen the professionals have, but I'm pretty happy with it.

The gear is great, but there is a downside to all that. Basically, zero portability. But the main thing is that I feel like I got kinda lost in the sauce and caught up in 'sound quality'. It gets to a point where you're just not focusing your mental engergy on the composition because you're thinking... "ahh man, this kick drum sounds so good". Shit like that. Don't get me wrong, I do sincerly believe that hardware, (even digital hardware, idk... maybe it's the DACs (digital to analog converters)??? Especially analog, does sound better, but if that distracts you from focousing on creating a good melody, putting together the right chord progression, or laying down the perfect drum groove. The song just isn't gonna be as good as it can no matter how good the sound quality is.

Don't get me wrong though, even though I don't think hardware is a necessity, I do think owning and using it has been a net positive for my music. The main reason doesn't even have anything to do with sound quality. It's that it kinda forced me to get better at using my hands and ears to produce and rely less on my eyes. This basically equates to being able to work faster cause there's less trial and error poking around in the dark type shit. Doing it inside the box (the computer) makes you focus a lot on what you can see. drawing in and sliding around notes. clicking and dragging parameters and all that. There's nothing wrong with that, but when working with hardware, you might actually spend time learning the chord progression and just playing it to record the audio instead of doing all the work to sequence it and record it back in. But yeah, aside from that. I always thought hardware was cool if you wanna make videos. Watching someone make a beat fully on a computer isn't as interesting... but honestly, who cares if the end product is fire and is getting spins. Ultimately, that's all that matters.

Oh yeah, back to the main point. So the interesting thing that happened was, I've been traveling a lil bit lately so I went back to the laptop and midi controller setup. For a while, I was trying to use my fancy plugins, but for some reason they just make my DAW (Logic Pro X) crash randomly and that got super annoying. I'd re-open a project after closing it out properly and it straight up wouldn't open. It'd just crash. So I realized it was some of the third party plugins. So, I just decided, I just start working with all stock Logic stuff, then replace the sounds with better plugins or hardware later. But what happened, is I realized I started focusing a lot more mental energy on just making a good composition despite what sounds I have available. A lot less time 'searching for that perfect snare' or 'trying to find the perfect pad sound, or whatever'. Then! The other thing that happened, is I realized the stock stuff in Logic can actually sound pretty good all on its own. So yeah, some of this stuff I'm gonna replace, but some of it just sounds good as it is and might need to be messed with. We'll see.

So yeah, I'm gonna get back in the studio cause I wanna make this next stuff I drop really does numbers. But we'll see.