pengosolvent

right off the bat i am registering a lot of broken connections for myself in working on music, where as before i would have a lot of samples that ping in my head as aligned to a general concept i want to make, but here it was more like...
"i sort of like these samples even if i don't have a feeling or direction in mind yet"

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currently listening to a song i made for someone for their game that had a detective-y vibe, trying to remember what instruments feel like what and why

i have a little under an hour and a half for the rest of this which feels a little ... not overwhelming but it does feel a bit absurd (for myself)

i register time and time again how important it is to have an emotional throughline when i make music, but also to have trust that it will end up working out

i struggle with both of those, but especially the 2nd one

anyway i've been writing this while listening to the detective track
i like that bells, or high "beautiful" sounding instruments, seem to add a level of playful mysteriousness and i think i will be trying to incorporate that

i've no idea what this track is going to sound like

i admittedly have very little attachment to the theme because i don't... well, i'm not very social on cohost and i don't really "get" the attachment to eggbug or the vibe of "giving a gold star to CSS criminals"
i think it's meant to be funny, but i am notoriously bad at finding things funny

so i'm trying to figure out a feeling i can connect to along the way because it feels less like i've been given a theme and more like i've been given a scenario and i can go into that really a lot based on music commissions i've done, but i don't think i want to right now

-its been like 5 minutes- ok time to go back to trying to work on music

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sometimes i wonder if my method to try to stay on key helps or hinders me

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having a serious conversation while working on this is kind of nuts

i don't feel bad though

i'm currently just kind of making a bunch of noises and see if anything stands out to me

i have a hunch i'm not going to be able to make this sound "cohesive" or detective-y but i might be able to make it sound somewhat dark or in the shadows?

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i got a feeling of a sample to put into the song which is always a good sign
there's 35 minutes left, but that's still good i think... when i get a feeling like "this part needs [a specific sound]" it means i'm actually figuring out a feeling i want and what aligns to that feeling

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it's sad to feel all the places my confidence in music is really damaged... i want to add drums, and i immediately recall just how stressed i could become about doing drums "wrong"

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14 minutes and i dont think i'm going to be getting this to a point where i'm "happy" with it, but i do feel like i've at least gotten it to a point where i think there's something i can do with it with more time

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i got one last sample i wanted to get in just before my timer sounded

i touched up a few pieces...

i feel like i struggled to stay on theme, but to be fair i had no idea what i was going for and still don't

i think the end result sounds a bit sinister? also very messy
i feel like it makes sense that it sounds messy, i didn't entirely know what i wanted or why

i guess i was "investigating" my own musical process, which definitely does evade me often

i remember when i used to make music, i felt like i had specific instruments i associated with specific feelings, but i started feeling self-conscious about it
it makes me sad, doubt can really make one forget so many things

it can feel like i'm trying to wrangle myself down to work on a concept and that's hard when i struggle to feel anything, and thus i don't know what sounds i would like to use

i took a lot of damage when i was a teen about my instrument choices, where people were really against default instruments or something, presets, but i really associated those sounds with a lot of really specific feelings! i only felt more and more constrained from there

...sometimes i feel like that episode of spongebob with squidward teaching art class, where spongebob had his own methods of doing things and then ended up not connecting to that anymore

i would like to reconnect, it's sad to feel how "desolate" my internal music-making system has become

it's not always desolate, but when it is, it really is

i think i liked working on this though, because it felt like trying to piece together and figure what is damaged in me and where, and also when i do feel something i like

i'm glad i felt "oh a train sound would go well here" and i had like... a billion saved train sounds
i think the train is kind of drowned out in the song in some ways, but it's still nice to feel "i felt a specific want for something and thus enacted it"

i appreciate when there is clarity in my feelings. it can feel rare

i think this track feels like a heist or otherwise some kind of big thing is occurring and you're not entirely aware of what, but something else is aware of it and having fun

whether that's a "good" or "bad" thing... i suppose that is to be determined

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holy shit i'm really happy with the art, ash was like "i'm drawing something for mine" and i was like what the fuck i can't just NOT draw something for mine now... really glad i did
i like the result