Moblog are running a competition “The soundtrack to your life” in conjunction with Sony Ericsson. It’s a musical theme to promote the sexay W800i walkman phone. I entered a piece of what might be broadly termed photojournalism. I went to my favourite record shop, Rough Trade, and to a crazy shop that sells synths and music production tech and interviewed the people there, chatted about music and then pulled it all together into a brief piece exploring my interaction with music. You can find the entry split into four parts on the site: 1, 2, 3, 4.

As part of the piece I talked about music making with Live, Reason and Max. I felt I needed something to do with my suddenly moderately sized pool of free time (work is slim since I went away for 2 weeks and came back), aside that is from writing an automatic-illustrating programme, playing chess, mixing, riding my bike around London and reading Gödel Escher Bach. So over the weekend I watched a few of Ableton’s Live videos and played around connecting Reason and Live via Rewire and MIDI. It was cool and I managed to make some fairly cool stuff, nothing special, just an improvement on the music I’ve created so far. Live allows you to record MIDI snapshots and tinker with them really quickly. You can be in the mix and say I want a little off-beat melody here and just play one in, quantize it and set it going. It makes it very easy to express music as it develops in your head. I find myself tapping or humming companion melodies and rhythms as I listen to tracks, I can use that to my advantage.

Then I downloaded a Reaktor 5 demo. Damn that is the sweetest piece of software ever. I don’t understand it at all really, only in a superficial way, but it’s so cool. Just the demo instruments and ensembles hint at a world of such great coolness that it makes me drool almost. I want to dedicate my life to it, like some kind of Reaktor-monk, shut away in a mountain monastery with just my laptop and that one piece of software.

But my main problem still is not my understanding of or ability with the software, but my lack of basic musical skills. I have been thinking that the way to resolve this is to just learn to play the piano. The idea being that by playing other people’s music I can bridge the gap between tune in my head and how that tune is played. Transforming the musical portions of my brain into a recordable form. So I’ve been contemplating splashing out on a nice MIDI/USB keyboard. But would I ever actually play it, or would I just go back to my Gamecube, or reading, or Illustrant (illustration generator program)? It’s £65 for the keyboard I’ve got my eye on, so it’s enough to make me weigh the decision carefully.

What I’d like to do is advance my musical “career”. Start gigging, probably at the Foundry again, get in with other musicians. I’d really like to collaborate and share ideas, but at the moment it would be embarrassing! I’d just like to produce good music and share it really.