A month of #songrequests, retrospective

I can’t believe it has been an entire month of weekly #songrequests. A lot of time has gone into this and thanks for watching and listening to this evolution of sound and style. It has been a real challenge.

I had been thinking about doing something like this earlier this year but put it off because life happened. And seeing how I’m actually traveling to do performances in October, I knew I had to take this more seriously. If I were to just practice by myself I know that I would end up goofing off and maybe something musical might happen, but probably not. I also know that I would get stuck doing the same patterns; #songrequests is a way to challenge me.

Some things I’ve learned:

  • It is so time consuming. Monday evenings usually are spent preparing new patches, searching Spotify for ideas, and thinking about how to execute the song. Tuesday evening is spent preparing, recording, and processing the output. And I’ve been going to bed around 3:00 AM.
  • Shorter is definitely better. As much as I like 25-40 minute sets, attention spans are short on the Internet.
  • Video is better than audio. I love SoundCloud but for this kind of music the visuals are more interesting than just listening to the song.
  • Glow-in-the-dark colors are awesome on video. I’ve taken a lot of notes from other videos I’ve seen and color-changing backgrounds really make the whole thing better. Par lights are awesome. Visualizations are distracting though.
  • I really only use 1 iPad. I’ve been trying to work in a 2nd iPad but it takes so much concentration to run 1 iPad the second one mostly sits there. One day it’ll become integral.
  • 25 keys isn’t enough. When locked into 2 octaves I end up really getting stuck in 1 or 2 main patterns because I don’t have to hit the octave shift buttons. One day I’ll upgrade to a 37-key, but it has to run off of the iPad batteries.
  • 2 phrase chord progressions are about the max I can juggle. That’s enough for a 2-3 minute song. It’s a little boring for a 8+ minute song.