there's a rant I've wanted to go on but It's Been A Very Busy Month so for the moment here's a quick post
I've felt vague impulses to Write Something about Doing Music because sometimes I like to Write Something and I Do Music and sometimes people are like "wow how do you do music like that" so I feel like I should do a mashup of Writing and Music but iunno what specifically to write about in relation to Doing Music so I think I need a prompt so is anyone actually curious about how I in particular approach some specific kind of music thing
better edit: reformatted as blog post on Dreamwidth
vekoN
hmm... you could write about your sound design process, or writing microtonal melodies. these are a bit general so feel free to narrow these to something specific
Saltbearer
re: sound design process: my process is that I stack a bunch of effects to tweak a timbre toward the Rich and Clean hyper-specific thing in my head and then fall painfully short of it, but hopefully what I manage to generate still sounds cool
sometimes that involves branching parallel signal processing chains, and/or feedback loops, and/or layering, and/or isolating changes/artifacts through filtering or parallel-inverse-polarity canceling or something
I worry about stripping away the richness of any particular sound more than I do muddiness, so I don't like to do a lot of cutting just to make things play nicely together, and when I do, I find myself wishing multiband or dynamic sidechain compression were a little simpler to do in SunVox, before maybe settling on just hooking a bandpass off a thing to a Sound2Ctl (converts signal amplitude to parameter value) to an equivalent peak filter (EQ band)’s gain, with high amp narrowly smashing away a range conflict
re: microtonality, I've been loving SunVox's recently-added-in-terms-of-version-history Free keyboard mode, which makes it easy to tap and (if necessary) drag (while step size = 0) to ± the exact tone you want to input — to *reach out of* 12TET for spicier/~creamier~ tones. I am A Dumb when it comes to formal music theory or precise mathematical formulas relating to scale construction, but A Feeling Creature when it comes to sharpening or flattening things and drooling over the magical and exciting Rare Intervals with the Forbidden Consonance that scratch deep itches inside me that send my spirit to times and places that never existed.
I don't feel so tempted to play around with n-EDO tunings, or seek out compositions within specific ones to make them feel familiar. I like how The Tuning System That The Vast Majority Of [Material Constituting My Experiences With My Favorite Artform] Was Composed In sounds, generally, and *really* enjoy That, But Sometimes A Little More. I've been granted the power to easily step outside The Box, so stepping into another box would be... annoying, probably? there's something to be said for working within constraints, but I think composing by ear/heart while untethered speaks louder.