Making Sound Choices in the Cloud

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

As part of my "creative outlest," I like posting some of my musical creations here, and I certainly hope you like it too. But I do have to confess that I don't want to have to make a video every time I want to post an mp3 file into a blogger post, like I had to do with my first music post ("First Thoughts").

So I needed some other way to get an mp3 file linked or inserted into a blogger post.

In a comment to an earlier music post I made, David List suggested using SoundCloud as a site to host my music mp3 files so they could be inserted into my blog posts.

So I checked out some potential music hosting sites, and compared their offerings, and you know what? David was right. SoundCloud offers the ability to upload two hours of tracks free, provides a slick interface, gives a central site to point people to, and also offers a cool widget to be able to insert the mp3 right into this blog.  I don't have to send you away to another link in order for you to have a listen.

Evidently there's also a huge community of other sound uploaders, and -- as with almost every form of social media -- you could spend all your time interacting with other people there.  But for me, all I want at this stage is just a bucket to store my files in so I can use this blog to share them and discuss them.  And SoundCloud seems to fit the bill extremely well -- thanks, David!

I've uploaded an mp3 of "First Thoughts" as well as another track -- something I recorded shortly after that first piece I did on the PC. For this one, I found some free MIDI drum loops and used a couple of them as the basis for this piece.  I chose two that were pretty far apart -- a metal beat and a jazz shuffle -- and I decided to try and merge them together. I like the idea of juxtaposing radically different things and trying to unite them in a creative way.

I called the piece "Choices".  Have a listen:



Everything besides the MIDI drum loops is my multi-tracked guitar.  I was going to use a MIDI track to insert some bass but instead I ended up making a track with an octaver effect on my guitar.  At this stage in my recording experience, it's easier.  I don't have either a bass or a MIDI keyboard to work with, but I'd very much like to get both eventually. I'm rapidly discovering that tapping away at the Q-W-E-R-T-Y keys to try and record a MIDI track is not the best way to go.

"Choices" seemed like a good name for this piece -- the tune seemed to evolve out of the idea of contrast, and juxtaposition, and hard versus soft, and even making choices about how to get a dang bass track on the piece.

Feel free to let me know what you think.

Oh, and also -- in my last music post, Alex commented that his musical tastes weren't very jazzy, so I'm hoping that at least the framing parts of this tune are more like the musical choices he might make.  ;^)

Thanks for listening!  And if you want to stay up on future tracks I add to SoundCloud, just visit my page HERE.