Works in progress

I thought I'd use this blog to share works in progress. The majority of my pieces will probably never be completed so if I don't post them here they'll just never be heard. I'm using MediaFire to host these for free, the cost being that you might get annoying pop-ups when you click the links, sorry. Besides that, downloading should be easy; let me know if anything is messed up or if you know of better alternatives for file hosting.

The main order of business recently has been to get final recorded versions of the songs in my live set, suitable for a CD and for promoting myself. Today I added the final touches to a version of Marketable that I'm tentatively satisfied with; I'll come back in a week or two and see if I think it needs any further tweaking. A lot of the other songs are close and I'll post them as I finish them.

Aside from that, I've been working on some classical-flavored stuff, instrumentals with emphasis on complicated polyphony, more intricate than the poppier stuff I do. I have over a hundred solo piano recordings from 2001-2004 of fragments that never developed into songs, which I'd like to develop this year. A few days ago I started developing one of those old kernels: "And Here's Another One" (the old idea is just the opening pattern).

I have a couple young cousins in Grosse Pointe who play cello and clarinet and I thought it would be fun for us to play a trio. Here's a sketch of an idea that I wrote today: Trio. (My computer doesn't have a clarinet sound so I used organ.)

I've also been working on random unfinished things in my more usual rock style, such as "I Set Fire To My House" (the last part with the harmony vocals is what I recently added).

My usual mode of operating is to switch between the hundred-odd open projects I have, adding a little each time, so that they sound fresh when I eventually come back to them. So, it may be awhile before the above get completed, if they ever do. But maybe this year I'll try a more focused approach.

My routine lately has been: biking in the morning, making music in the afternoon, and in the evening doing productive stuff on the internet (e.g. looking for happenings in Detroit, downloading music, playing with music production shareware), or sometimes visiting friends/family. I average about two hours of work per day on the music; past that I usually get tired and my brain isn't productive anymore. I'm taking weekends off to recharge.

Living alone in relative isolation gives one a feeling of being free, to let one's mind wander randomly unconstrained by responsibilities or fear of what others will think. There's good days and bad days but on average I feel significantly more creative than I have in recent years. Last week I even wrote down some notes for a bizarre short story about how games might theoretically play meta-games against other games. Don't know if there's any promise in that premise, but whatever, at least I'm thinking about stuff.