WeeklyBeats 2018!!

[TubularCorporation]

haha

 

[Stock]

14 hours ago, thawkins said:

I always thought that even if there's no time to do it properly, I should do it anyway - just take 10 minutes on nanoloop or something to just do something extremely minimal (and crappy). Even if it sucks, fuck it: next time you'll do better. And who knows when you listen to it months later, it may turn out that what you though was a turd has a silver lining and a heart of gold.

Haha yeah the idea of just throwing a quick nanoloop beat while during a commute crossed my mind more than once...

[thawkins]

9 hours ago, Stock said:

Haha yeah the idea of just throwing a quick nanoloop beat while during a commute crossed my mind more than once...

Yeah, the minimum length is 1 minute, so sometimes I just made a very short nanoloop thing because I was traveling with a really crappy connection and I could not upload bigger mp3s.

Besides, Brian Eno made sounds for the Windows 95 (I think) that were even shorter than this, so...

[Guest]

This weeks weeklybeats submission, some beats to bump in the jeep;
https://soundcloud.com/hiekematiek/dusdat

Edited February 16, 2020 by Guest

[acid1]

Nice one @plugexpert

[thawkins]

2020 Weeklybeats is over, congrats to everyone who took part and super congrats to those who lasted till the bitter end!

 

Resurrecting this thread to point out that even though 2021 is not an "official" weekly beats year, there is a small spin off here https://streak.club/s/1444/weekly-music-2021 that will start accepting submissions from next week.

I have posted about my experience in several threads now, but personally starting with Weeklybeats 2018 and adopting a weekly music routine has helped me a lot in getting to a way better place in terms of my music than I was before. I still can't stand most of the tracks I make, but at least this year I have had a couple I still like, so that is progress of a kind.

 

[sweepstakes]

2020 was my 3rd year participating but my 1st year finishing all 52. For most of it, it felt like a chore, but it kept my momentum up, and I found it pretty valuable for many reasons. I think I'm going to avoid this kind of weekly/daily music thing in 2021 so that I can work more intentionally/organically, but I plan to be back for 2022.

[thawkins]

Yeah the routine can be quite a mind killer, but for me I keep doing it because I am pretty sure that once I stop, I will not follow through with any promise I make to myself regarding "make an album" or "finish some of those tracks".

[modey]

I don't think I like the idea of Weekly Beats after all. It's cool to pump out a ton of jams, but I feel like I never really make anything of substance. Nothing I've made has ended up on any releases, at the most I keep them as patterns I can mess with during live gigs. 

That said though, I think next year I'm gonna aim to have some kind of script that automates the entire process—generating and rendering a short piece of music, uploading it to the server, and writing a generated description. I'll have to talk to trash80 about getting access to the APIs (?) behind the WB's upload page. I'd love to be able to pump out a song a week and not even have to listen to them  

[thawkins]

You can just take some time, figure out a generative patch in Live, record 52 minutes worth of that, and then just post the whole thing over the course of a year in 1 minute segments. It's not against the rules if you render the segment during the correct week.  At that point, why not just pipe pink noise into a vocoder saying today's date and call it a day.

I get the same feeling that all my weekly stuff ends up being mediocre. I am not sure if this is necessarily bad though, because occasionally I end up with a really good track that I like. And working on it every week means that I get better technically, which in theory is a good thing because it allows me to execute my vision better.

And another thing that I keep thinking about is that maybe I think my weekly beats results are crap because by the time I listen to them again - weeks later - I have already gotten so much better than when I was back when I made the tracks. Makes sense, right?  So just wait, I will be churning out killer tracks any time now.

[sweepstakes]

16 hours ago, thawkins said:

I get the same feeling that all my weekly stuff ends up being mediocre. I am not sure if this is necessarily bad though, because occasionally I end up with a really good track that I like. And working on it every week means that I get better technically, which in theory is a good thing because it allows me to execute my vision better.

I agree with this in principle, but at least for me there is this thing about letting it breathe a bit. Not even, like, endless turd-polishing, just making something, letting it get stuck in my head, coming back to it in 2 days and throwing out most of the track except the actual good parts, rinse, repeat. With WB I usually got about 20% of the way into that process. It might be a matter of my process changing too; I used to be much happier cranking stuff out really fast. It felt like about 80% of what I made for WB2020 was poop, even by my low standards.

I have friends who just want to make as much stuff as possible all the time to keep up with the frenetic pace of the modern world or whatever, and I frankly hear the lack of reflection and depth in their tunes. I'm really not into that. I like doing stuff weekly or even daily but I also like letting that shit rot on my disk/groovebox, and I can choose to share only if and when it's good and ready, by my own definition.

That said I might still do it in 2022. I'm just really glad to take a year off, and count me out of Jamuary, etc.

[thawkins]

Yeah these are really good points @sweepstakes. I think there is definitely a bad influence coming in from all the platforms that require you to post post post post something all the time. If you don't keep churning content, you will be replaced with someone else.

Myself, I thought I would be able to build a regular following by posting things regularly (weekly) and now after having done the weekly streaming for half a year, I think it kind of works out. I would definitely not say everything I post is worth it's weight in gold, and going forward it might not be a good idea to just post tracks that I do not feel like posting.

Maybe it is worth to reorient the post-something-every-week routine to be as an outlet for sketches and experiments with different techniques. This way I will learn something new every week but there is no obligation to make it into a fully produced track.

Certainly I'd say I feel a bit worn out as well, but I think this could be related to last year being a rough one in general too.  

[exitonly]

the past year i decided that i was no longer going to try to upload any tracks to soundcloud etc to preview, and also not even try to fully finish any given track but instead try to get a large number of tracks up to about 80% done, where there might still need to be some more work on the arrangement and then mixing etc but its still a complete idea. as a result, i wrote more music last year than i have since high school, where i was just churning out stuff to 2 track all the time.

it will be more work to polish them off, which i plan on starting on soon once these last few are up to 80%.  it's been kind of addictive to stay the same mindset in terms of churning out ideas and not having to switch gears and think about things in terms of mixing etc. 

in the past i would spend a lot of time getting one track 'perfect' and then when it came time to write a new one i'd have to refresh myself on what my process was. so now im able to take some ideas from the previous thing i was working on and expand them/tweak them into the next one and its so much more fluid.

the only downside is that i get a bit anxious that the finished product for some of these tracks might not be as good as i expect and i'll have more dud tracks and it will be depressing. will find out soon!

[sweepstakes]

5 hours ago, thawkins said:

Maybe it is worth to reorient the post-something-every-week routine to be as an outlet for sketches and experiments with different techniques. This way I will learn something new every week but there is no obligation to make it into a fully produced track.

You had a number of good points, but in particular I adore this idea. I'm doing kind of a similar thing with a "study group" right now and it's been very fun.

[Petajaja]

I really liked this idea for posting a track a week but I decided against join because I'm so new here and also I feel like my music would've been so out of place compared to everything else on that page so I'd thought that I'd maybe set up something similar with a few people I know. Funny thing is that I'd thought exactly the above, that it'd be nice to have very little limitation on what has to be done, so long as you're doing something that's new for you in some way each week.

I've got a long list of things that I've been meaning to get around to trying / learning and this weekly output thing seems like a really good extra little push!

I've also spent most of last year focusing more on quantity than quality, I'd developed a habit of being too perfectionist about everything and it was sucking the fun out of music making and was also sucking the soul out of my music. Most of the music I ended up making was nothing special but I was able to get it down to being able to finish something in a day and some of it was actually alright. The most valuable thing I gained from it is breaking that old habit and I feel much more excited for spending longer amounts of time on tracks this year.