This is the second in my “One Take” series.  In an effort to kill the perfectionist within me, I’m forcing myself to just make stuff, and get it done quickly.  The drums are done in one take, and the rest is composed as quickly as I can, just until it feels about done.

As an artist who’s suffered from crippling perfectionism, which usually means that stuff would get worked on for a while, but was never “done” because, well, it’s never “perfect”…  I’m tired of just simply collecting a pile of sketched out, or nearly complete works, but never getting anything out there.

I recently read something that said, “the imperfect book that gets published is 100 times better than the perfect book than never leaves my desk.”  So these One Takes are an effort for me to take imperfect stuff and get it out there.

I hope you enjoy!

I added some “train beat” to this driving tune by Mumford & Sons.  Enjoy!

Hello, and welcome to somewhere other than Facebook!

I just completed my first “One Take” piece of music.  This is an idea I’ve had for a while, and I’m finally getting around to it.  The idea is simply that I sit down, and record a short video of me playing drums, once.  No double takes, no second chances-  I get an idea of what might be a nice musical idea, and some sort of structure, turn on the cameras, and whatever comes out it is.   I leave it at that.

Then I take the audio from that recording, and add to it-  I don’t play any stringed instruments, so no guitar, no bass, but I roughly play some keyboards.  So most of the stuff I’m going to be doing will be keyboard based, but I can get a lot of fun sounds out of keyboards, so I’ll compose like that.  Because I’m not a professional keyboard player, I take a little more time to come up with the actual parts for this side of it- so the keyboard parts are not first takes, but I still try to play them straight through as a performance, and not use cutting and pasting.  For example, on this song, the bass line took me six times through to get what I wanted.  The first time through, I was just poking around, trying to find something that sounded good.  I would get bits of ideas each time, and just keep adding.  I forgot to video myself playing the keyboard parts, and wasn’t even sure how I would work that into the video, but I plan on perhaps adding some of that in future videos.

The video editing is pretty new for me as well.  I have a pretty good understanding of Adobe Photoshop, so I understand a lot about what the color corrections, etc do, and I’ve messed around with some video editing before, but I’m now learning Final Cut Pro, which is a whole other thing.  But it’s a learning process, and if I want my stuff to get better, I have to start somewhere.

So here’s the first of hopefully many installments to my project: One Take