EMP in the US

So I haven’t written for a few days, because since my first two days kid-free, which were spent frantically playing with Logic 8, I’ve had basically nothing but Logic 8 in my brain. I’ve agonised slightly as to whether I really wanted to put the early attempts on here, but frankly, this is supposed to be a record of my life, and these aren’t tracks, they are studies, or exercises, and might serve as a reminder of how to do things, by showing how I learned them.

This first one is an “ambient works” study, obviously favourite, Aphex Twin in mind, and maybe a little Future Sound of London “Lifeforms” too. This was an exercise in learning to use the sampler. It was easy to assign multiple samples across the Korg, but I struggled a little to assign 1 sample across the whole keyboard, but this turned out to be because I’d set the pitch to be out of audible range! Oh and for some reason, there’s an incongruous cymbal in the middle that I simply cannot find in any track to remove it! It drove me crazy for a while, but I had to move on!

jan15th10.mp3 (click to listen)

The next is really just 3 elements of a cheesy house track, as I really couldn’t figure out a bass for it. This was an experiment with Ultrabeat – the drum machine & sequencer. This is really a study on “Lost in Love” by Legend B from Reactivate 10.

Cheesyhousejan10.mp3 (click to listen)

Then on Monday it was “Martin Luther King day”, so schools were out. I went out to clear my driveway:

..but I got distracted into building a snowman. I had help:

Finished!

This is why our neighbourhood is so great for the boys – lots of friends to hang out with:

Then, because there was no teaching, David came home early and we went to Occom Pond. I had hoped to take Thomas skating, to try out some new double-bladed strap-on skates that our friends had given us for Thomas. However, there was a lot of water and slush on the pond, and while there were quite a few skaters out, I didn’t fancy getting soaked. As it happens we got soaked anyway – sledding. This didn’t happen before, as it was so cold, there was no wet, but the weekend has been pretty warm – it was 4° C at the pond. Also, the fresh snow was very powdery, which slowed the sledding down quite a lot. It was still slippery enough climbing the “big” hill though:

And I just liked this photo: