Doh! Doofus here forgot to hit record on the interview with Rick Wade 🤦🏼‍♂️ I thought that it would automatically go live and start recording once the event countdown ended! Lesson learned. To anyone who didn’t make it - sorry!

[IMPORTANT: THE GAMES BEGIN ON TUESDAY 17. PLEASE TRY TO ATTEND THE GROUP CALL LISTED ON THE CALENDAR AS WE WILL BE EXPLAINING IN MORE DETAIL THE RULES] I'm happy to announce the teams for the first edition of the CIRLE OF SOUND community music production game suggested by @Aretius Klosa. The point of this game is to make a bunch of music as a community through an unusual collaboration procedure. The production process will be split into 5 stages; 1. Creating a soundpack (select no less than 10 sounds and no more than 30 sounds. These can be one shots, loops, musical loops, held synth note... etc. 2. Using the soundpack to come up with a 32 bar idea. Only use sounds you have received. Feel free to chop/reverse/pitch or whatever you need to do but only use the sound pack to create the idea. 3. Creating a full track arrangment from the 32 bar idea 4. Mixing the arranged song 5. Mastering the mixdown Every member of every group will do every stage at the same time. Every 2 weeks, you will export the audio stems of what you have created and pass it to the person below you on the list at the bottom of this post. IMPORTANT: EVERY STEP WILL REQUIRE YOU TO RENDER WHAT YOU HAVE TO AUDIO STEMS. THIS ENSURES CROSS DAW COMPATIBILITY. This cycle will progress for 10 weeks. Every 2 weeks everyone moves onto the next production stage using what they have been sent. So for example this means that during weeks 1 + 2, everyone will be tasked with creating a soundpack. In weeks 3 + 4, everyone will now be tasked with creating a 32 bar idea made with the soundpack passed to them by the team mate above them on the below list. In weeks 5 + 6, everyone will create an arrangement with the 32 bar idea they received from the team mate above them on the list... And so on. By the end of the 10-weeks, every member will have completed every one of the 5 stages and each group will have 3 finished songs. We will be holding a group Zoom call every 2 weeks so you can meet with your team mates in small breakout rooms and discuss how the process is going.

Belief: Something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held opinion or conviction. A system is a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network. Therefore, a belief system is the network of all things that one accepts to be true in their reality. ******************************************************************************** First, we adopted the beliefs of those who raised us; more often than not this was our parents, but perhaps we were raised by our grandparents or grew up in foster care. The specifics don’t matter as much as the simple fact that we were indoctrinated into a set of beliefs that did not necessarily belong to us. Interlinked with our familial beliefs were the beliefs of the community. This might have been the tendencies of thinking of the town we grew up in or the religious faith we were born into. The beliefs of those who raised us are a subset of the community that they were a part of. While there may be differences, the likelihood is that they would have had similar and conforming beliefs to others in that community. Such is the nature of acceptance in larger groups of people. If the community was an organized religion, it is interesting to note how we can be handed at birth, an entire belief system; one that features a fleshed out narrative of how things are, how people should behave and what is right and wrong. We did not choose to be part of this religion – instead, we just were until we decided to question it. If, of course, we ever ended up doing that at all. Community, unlike family, can be picked, and we must always remember that we are responsible for the company we keep. Almost identically to a religious community, we may have been indoctrinated into a political community. Political ideology is not based on universal truth, it is based on conjecture and personal interpretation of morality. The political party we were born into supporting had – just like any religion – had a fleshed out narrative of how things are, how people should behave and what is right and wrong.

A lot of people use music as an outlet for their emotional state. Sometimes that can work out counterintuitive. Meaning that if you are trying to express an emotion through music, sometimes it’s all the other things around you that jumps into the music. A good exercise that can actually lead to emotional loaded music is trying to describe something in nature, a frog, a night sky, conflict somewhere. Something that is not specific to your situation can sometimes lead to music describing how you feel about what you’re trying to describe in the music and Hocus Pocus you are now making music from an emotional place. Also, that can make you stop thinking about samples or cleaning up your desktop. Maybe type down some words, even if you make instrumental music. Try it. I’m sure it will work.

Kasseret is a collaboration with my friend from highschool. We have made two albums in 2024 and have a 3rd coming out this fall. We do very fast recording and mixing, 2-3 days for an album. It is quite satisfying to work fast and it bypassed all the doubt and pain of not ever finishing the music. Also a piano idea. I am working on some piano music that loops around simple melodic yet semi-atonal riffs and do not know where that ends.. https://soundcloud.com/gaestvincent/sets/taches-teaches/s-i4BiyRZLHzM?si=5197a4197ddf41e38c36ff259baae2db&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing