I apologize to everyone for dropping off the face of the earth.

I have a fascination with too many different things, music being only one of them. Languages are another.

I've been taking Arabic classes, and... though the grammar was easy for me, the vocabulary wasn't. I had been falling far behind in learning vocabulary.

I concentrated on that, using a flashcard program that (supposedly) maximizes your ability to learn while minimizes the time you need to take.

Guess what?

Even with computer help, learning vocabulary is hard. Especially since I have a brain like a steel trap. (Everything inside gets mangled beyond recognition.)

My spare hour per day went there, not to writing music.

I'm going to put more time into my art, and in about a week or two, I'll be posting music again.

Take care.

1) Post these rules
2) Post 8 true things about yourself
3) At the end you must tag 6 people and post their icons
4) Go to their page and send them a message saying you tagged them
5) NO TAG-BACKS

Okay... Eight true things about myself:

1) I have never been arrested for yodeling in my underwear.
2) Michael Jackson has never licked my nose. Nor is he ever likely to.
3) I can tell the difference between a cabbage and an elephant, at least three times out of five.
4) I have not yet caused the universe's time flow to reverse.
5) I know all the words to all three movements of John Cage's 4' 33"
6) I was not the one who brought Tuvan throat singing to Antarctica.
7) When threatened, I cannot confuse my enemies by releasing the contents of my ink sacs.
8) I am not personally responsible for the destruction of the Sahara Forest.

I'm not going to tag people. Enjoy!

I haven't been writing music over the past week, because I'm working on a paper for a music theory class.

I'm getting into deep, fundamental stuff.

When I started, my ears had to be convinced that it was possible to hear major sevenths and minor ninths as consonances.

Now, my ears refuse to believe that major sevenths and minor ninths are dissonances...

 kurreltheraven has released Furry by sixty, part second! (Hey, at the end he said that this bad English is an official name. I'm sticking with it.)

It's sixty minutes of amazing music -- a half-dozen genres, thirty-six artists, each contributing one-minute songs. It has three of my pieces that have not been released here.

Go and enjoy it!

Michael Jackson, dead at 50.

Goodbye.

Some time yesterday, someone graced me with the one-thousandth page view.

Whoo hoo!

Thank you, every one who reads this, for taking note of my music and my lessons. I appreciate the notes, the +favorites, and for just knowing that people enjoy what I compose!

According to Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset, my music here (not counting lessons or scraps) is worth $2,720,000.

Yaaaaayy! I'm rich!

Dear all,
I have a half-dozen ideas for my next piece. I need your help to choose:

1. What mood should it be?
- Happy
- Sad
- Surprise
- Love
- Fear

(I wrote "Anger" in Three Young Rats...)

2. What time signature should I use?

- 4/4: Most rock, blues.
- 3/4: Waltz
- 6/8: Swing-type music
- A complex time signature (5/4, 7/8, etc.)
- Free time

Thanks!

I have two ideas for my next music piece. Which would you rather hear?

1. Slow downtempo electronica going through the circle of fifths. Extremely consonant (though I'm likely to have samples in the background.) It would probably feel as if it were constantly settling, but never settles.

2. Music that's constantly changing (and I mean that literally: every 36 beats will start a new scale, and every 72 beats will start a new time signature!) The music's structure is based on shifting around different sections of a (two-dimensional 3-5 just intonation) scale.


If those two choices made no sense, then choose between:

1. Relaxing
2. Unsettling

Furry x 60, Round 2

 kurreltheraven posted the first round at furryx60.com: a collection of songs by furry composers, each of which is exactly sixty seconds long. (Note: The alternate site is up.)

He's doing it again.

You can submit anything as long as it fits the following criteria:

- must be sixty seconds long, no more and no less
- must be a your own completely original work (this means NO remixing, NO rearranging, NO sampling other people's stuff)
- must be in my inbox as a WAV, FLAC or high-quality MP3 (256kbps+) by the end of 1st June 2009

I've submitted three songs to his second compilation; I hope that he chooses to use all three of them. (Two of them are weird, in very opposite ways.)

If you haven't participated before, it's a chance to join a weird, wonderful compilation. Click on the link at the top of this message to learn how to submit.

Take care, all!

Dear all,
Yesterday, a professional composer, Erik Ulman, reviewed three of my songs (Bach is Back, Spring Bransle, and Cutesy!). To remind me where I need to go, here are his comments:

- Different instruments can move at different speeds.
- I should move my melody among different instruments.
- My chord changes are too "square", too regular. They need to flow more.
- I occasionally have parallel fifths.

Here are his recommendations:

- Try writing in a sonata form: take two, contrasting themes -- and let them crossbreed.
- Try leaving out instruments in early presentations of material, and as the piece continues, restore instruments.
- Repeat the chord structure from Spring Bransle, but with every repeat, give a new melody.

They're good suggestions, and I'll try them over the next month or so.

Take care, all.

For everyone that I've offended when I gave advice... I'm sorry. (And if you have a specific gripe with how I posted a message to you, please let me know so that I can apologize to you directly.)

I need to think more about how you receive it.

My ears are not your ears. You don't have to follow my words.

I have a simple question:

If you wanted to describe my music to someone else, how would you describe it?

I'd like to know what seems "constant" in my music, so I can choose whether I want to emphasize those constants -- or to subvert them.

Rhythm is based on dance.
Melody is based on the human voice.
Harmony is based on ratio(*).
And music is based on expectation.

(*) Errr... the ratio of frequencies between the notes. But that doesn't scan so nicely.

Note to self:

There's a REASON why almost no songs go to 300 beats per minute.

Your fingers fall off, trying to play all those notes!

You need to find a DIFFERENT way to write the world's fastest song...

*walks on, looking shellshocked*

Alternate tunings sometimes give really neat results...

*bandages his ears*

...but it also makes for amazingly awful sounds.

*seems calmer when he can't hear the awful din*

I'm going to go hide myself in a corner now...

I gave a musical challenge:

1. Score (ie: write out) a piece of music that is purely percussive.
2. Do not repeat any structure more than three times in a row, and do not use any structure more than six times in the piece as a whole.
3. Record what you've written. Feel free to use multiple "takes" and to use multiple layers.

I'm throwing it to everyone. If you're writing a piece for this challenge, leave a comment here. I'll update the list.

Here are the pieces so far:

 alandrian : Drum-Fuck
 chipuni : Drumming!
 El_Diabloz : Drumming Madness

I had a wonderful time at Further Confusion. However, a sad thing happened:

I lost my music notebook.

Inside it was the only copy of the lyrics to fuDuli. Though I can reconstruct the chord progression and the song's structure, I can't reconstruct the lyrics. It also had many ideas for future songs. Much sadness.

On the other hand, when I've heard my voice, I'm not sure that I should be singing..

I've been posting scraps. These not-even-half-baked snippets explore a musical idea -- often, not very well.

I post them to recognize whether people understand my quick ideas... but I wonder: what do listeners think about them?

If you're given a lot of snippets with not-always-pleasant musical ideas, are you more likely to stop watching someone? Or are you interested in my weird musical ideas (as I re-learn how to compose)?

Dear all,
Sixty seconds for a complete piece of music (or poem).

Twenty-four furry musicians from at least three continents took the challenge. They wrote forty pieces of music. Everything from very challenging electronica to rock to semi-jazz or semi-world got thrown into the mix.

The result? Furry x 60. It's under a Creative Commons license; available for download or streaming.

The best part of the collection: If you don't like a style of music, wait sixty seconds and you'll hear something completely different.

Great thanks to Kurrel the Raven for creating this project!