vurr n' co / vurrsys || 24 || ΔΘ& || read our pinned post ok?

we're the vurr n' co system!! we're queer weirdos who love self expression and creativity. 18+!

last.fm listening



geometric
@geometric

i studied and worked as a graphic designer at the start of my career, and i still do a lot of design focused work, and i feel like my head is most always in the realm of aesthetics. and then my career moved more into game development, and found a new focus on technical skill and process. i feel like this is very common, you find yourself artistically motivated and you want to learn to do a thing, and on today's internet you will find endless resources on how to achieve a particular aesthetic, or improve your technical abilities. Learn color theory. Learn to draw the human hand. Learn to build a finite state machine in gamemaker. Learn to sidechain your bass in ableton live.


magmacranes
@magmacranes

so many of the audio people i talk to just want to discuss sample libraries or wwise or whatever. which i get! it’s an easy way to make conversation, and i do genuinely enjoy talking about these things a lot of the time.

but like for example, i don’t think i’ve ever said out loud that the reason i love the clarinet so much is that to me it feels like being in a forest during that part of spring when all the little leaves are starting to emerge from their buds, quiet and curious and hopeful.

or that f# minor is my favorite key because something about it just resonates so deeply within me, it pulls at my heartstrings and make me want to cry, but it’s that good kind of sadness that makes you realize how lucky you are to be experiencing being alive.

i don’t talk this way a lot because it feels overly sincere, and i’m always afraid i’m going to make people feel uncomfortable with my sudden flood of feelings, hah. so i talk about technical things more, which sometimes can lead to me thinking about music in an overly technical way. and sometimes i can get so caught up in that way of thinking that i forget why it is that i really love making music.

sorry for going on a long screed on your post @geometric , lol. but i think you’ve hit on something very real here. i’ve been feeling pretty uninspired lately, and i think it’s because i’ve just been thinking about music in terms of things like building interactive music systems and finding the best sounding reverb and that sort thing. i gotta start focusing on the emotional side of it again, get that spark back.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @geometric's post:

yeah I've been feeling the same way, and I'm also realizing that so much of the art in any medium that I think of as my favourite is art that's made with so much passion and love that you can feel it in every part of the work

in reply to @magmacranes's post:

aw man I miss my clarinet now! I should . . . probably buy a clarinet?? heck. anyway I have a very similar feeling about C#m. at least, when I'm writing in it. which is often. aw geez now I'm thinking thoughts and feeling feelings.

I think spending my early teens lurking guitar forums permanently burned out my desire to give a shit about talking shop in regards to Products™️ with any other audio folks!! that and spending many formative years where my only instrument was "laptop", and having to use a bunch of stock plugins "incorrectly" in order to make them behave like something New. when I first encountered Brian Eno's "studio as an instrument" principle I was just like, yeah? doesn't everyone do this? and then I learned that boy howdy no they do not.

anyway, any compositional ability I have comes from playing in a shitload of bands growing up and spending too much time on the damned computer box or playing NES games, so I have a catastrophically huge amount of respect for people like you that can actually write music, like, compositionally. my theory training is limited to like, blues guitar and depeche mode hooks. literally all I have to go off of is vibes. I have nothing else availed to me. so any and all music I make is first and foremost emotive, from the hip. I wish I had the verb set to be able to apply formal training and intricate understanding. even back in your biomes and glimmer eps I was just like, damn, I wish I knew how to make music do this. how to have this kind of control over fine details of composition. but it doesn't frustrate me or bum me out really. it's inspiring because it's a concrete reminder that there is always more to do with music—even strictly in the sense of notes on a sheet—than any given one of us can ever fully grasp or master, and that just gets me excited to learn more and try new things. seeing those post made me put down shin megami iv apocalypse on my new nintendo three dee ess ex ell and go sit at my workstation to sketch out an idea. so thanks for this.

Dave if you see this you know I love you homie but I do not have the emotional fortitude right now to analyze the effects of my graphic design career in my understanding of aesthetic and what that's done to me as a musician or a communist or a human being lmao I think that would be lethal right now.

c# minor is another good one! i have very similar feelings about it as i do f# minor.

and sometimes i’m the opposite actually, where i occasionally get a little jealous of people who don’t have the rigorous classical/music theory training that i do. sometimes i try to ignore it and just write based on feeling, but there’s always a voice in my head being like “hey cool that’s a neopolitan 6th. eww are those parallel octaves? oh i wonder what it’s called when you use the 11th like that” lol.

overall i’m really glad i have that background, i think it makes me a better composer (for the style of music i do anyway), but i do wish i knew how to switch it off.