Day 22: Back To It (+Beats)

Things appear to have straightened out somewhat. Not quite back to maximum productivity but I managed 90mins of exercise, I continued the mammoth task of tidying my room (and hope to have it finished tomorrow), cleaned my house, looked for jobs and finalised a beat. Hopefully I can keep this up. I do think I need more structure for this to work, though. I think I should also keep a weekly or monthly eye on how things are going in different areas - evaluate what works and what doesn't. Things to consider.

Given this was meant to be as much a creative diary as a general improvement one, I thought I'd upload some of the beats I've been working on and talk about them. I've got two I think I'll develop into full songs. My aim is to have two additional songs written by the time of my next gig - so, with these beats lined up, I'm going to stop fucking around with random ideas and work solely on the ideas that I currently have at my disposal.

Here are the two beats:

Idiot Mission Demo by M. O'Neill

This is the more developed. I was aiming for something upbeat and celebratory. Don't think I quite got there but the general funkiness and layering of sounds is very much the kind of sound world I want to create. It's probably the closest I've ever come to directly ripping off Public Enemy but I think there's enough quirk to it to stand apart. The big bassy sounds in the drums are Taikos. I fucking love Taikos.

There are lyrics to this (or a verse, at least) but I'm not ready to share them yet.

Melty Song Beat and Bass by M. O'Neill

Beat two. Only really finalised this rhythm today. It's my experiment in minimalism. As most anyone who has met me knows, my vision for my music is one of ten thousand ideas exploding at once. I still plan to explore that with this track but I've learnt - some would say somewhat reluctantly - that it is literally impossible to build a functional hip hop track (ie, one that makes people want to dance) without a balnce of simple and complex ideas (both musically and lyrically). If you make one element complicated, it tends to force another into simplicity. One of my missions for my music is to create lush, melodically dense works. I think this could be a good vehicle for that. Also, every song I've written has me rapping at a million words a minute. Time to scale it back and see if I can handle a slower BPM.

I quite like the bass for it. It needs mixing (it's a synth fed through guitar distortion) but I like the heavy, funky vibe it gives the song. I can see the song turning into a dark, throbbing kind of number.

I'm almost always wrong, though, so let's see what happens.