Ahoy! This is the Weekly Churn, where every Sunday I post about what I’ve been reading, watching, and thinking about over the previous week. Apparently in addition to skipping another week, I’ve also been forgetting my little intro thing the last few weeks. Anyway, it’s been a time, and updates will be brief for a while.
We were in Owen Sound last weekend, and it was mostly good, but emotional stuff related to my mother came up and I don’t even know what’s going on with that anymore. Work has gotten very stressful and a lot of the other stuff has just kind of been shunted to the side while I deal with being deeply in the shit with regard to deadlines. I haven’t even been able to read Sidewalk Labs’ MIDP, which would have been top on my list of priorities a month or two ago.
I used to be a drummer. I was never particularly good, but it was fun, and I was upset when I had to sell my drums to pay rent in 2012. In the early ’00s I also spent a couple of years making loop-based music. It wasn’t as physical as drumming, but it was a very similar kind of fun. A little over a week ago I bought a Maschine, which is a digital music production system. Parts of it are super intuitive and other parts are really, really not, but it’s what I’ve been using to de-stress. It is so much fun.
I’ve written six songs so far. Two of them aren’t finished enough to share, but four of them are up on my bandcamp.[ref]All music is free.[/ref] They aren’t “finished songs” in the sense that they’re perfected ideas; they’re more like sketches or demos. I may come back to them later when I’ve learned more, but that’s beside the point. I’m really just using them as tools to learn how the hardware and software works. I suppose I could read the manual, but what fun would that be? Additionally, I don’t intend to be a “serious musician” in any sense. I don’t pretend that these songs are particularly good, but my primary goal is to have fun and share the fun, not to make money or have any kind of career. As long as I’m enjoying myself I don’t care what else comes out of it.
Anyway, that’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!
