So this track my good friend Scott Elrick and I made has an interesting context to it. Scott and I have been composing music together for literally over 2 decades. It started out, basically with my guitar/amp/line-out, his keyboard, and my 4 track. I think we started in 1991. I know, we're a couple of old farts! We made a few good things. A lot of the stuff we made had some good riffs to it, but quite frankly, the way we put it together sounded like a hot mess. There were a lot of good ideas, but we basically layered THE SHIT out of everything. We're both spazzes, so the idea of "less is more" did not enter into our noggins. Scott and I did music off and on. I would be in bands and stuff, and once in awhile, in the interim between bands, I get together with him and make stuff. My riffs got a little more sophisticated, but it didn't matter, our composing style remained the same- a bunch of decent riffs mooshed together into a cloudy hodgepodge of noise. And we'd feel pretty good about it afterwards, kinda like the way you feel after the final piss you take after unloading a metric ton of diarrhea! I like how different our tastes and influences are in music. We definitely like some of e same things, but when it comes to personal preferences and styles, our top 3 are probably pretty different. Which is actually a fantastic thing, because that makes our collaborative effort that much more unique! Kind of like mating - diversity will yield in some great combinations. Inbreeding will not! So on this track that we created, literally a few days ago, Saturday, Oct 19, 2013, we had a different result for different reasons. Oh wait, I gotta mention this! (Stop whining about the length of this post!) I hadn't composed a whole lot, ever since moving to Austin in 2006. I used to do it all on a desktop computer. When my son jacked up the mic input on my iMac, I had no real desire to fix it, as I wasn't composing as much anyways. When we got an iPad, eventually I thought about the idea of composing on it. Scott, a huge fanboy of everything Mac, said GarageBand is on the iPad. I tried it out, and it was dog shit. I found studio.HD, and loved it! It is loop based, and very user friendly. Unlike fucking GarageBand for the iPad! I hooked up with an old singer friend of mine, Kapila Love, who sings Indian music. Back in Champaign, I sampled her voice for a track. We reconnected a few years ago when she told me she was moving to Texas. She gave me some incredible vocal samples, and I went to town on them! Made 2 albums from them! I was like a junkie in a heroin shop! When creating with her voice samples, on the very cool studio.HD platform on the iPad, I became more aware of putting instrumentation together. And, how to structure music pieces, particulalrly what to direct the listener to. I started understanding dynamics a little better. In other words, I was learning how to turn down the SUCK knob! So, in this piece that I made with Scott, we started out in our typical process. He'd find a beat, and we'd jam on it for a little bit. We started throwing down a few tracks, and Scott was arranging them as we were creating. That's what we always did. This had the potential to be another one of our mediocre tracks with a bunch of random riffs mooshed together. But then, recalling my process with Kapila's voice samples on my studio.HD, I said, "Let's keep making a few more riffs, and then we'll put it all together at the end." So we did. When it was time to put all the riffs together, that was the most interesting part. It turned into a discussion on what fits best where, and what kinds of things did we want to stand out, and what would create a greater impact to the listener. In fact, as we were doing that, we realized things like, "Hmm, if that is the effect, we should add a little more ____." So this was probably one of the more thought out, cerebral pieces we made. Breaking all the elements apart and then figuring out how to arrange them was something we'd never really done before. I'm really happy with the results, particularly since this was the first time we worked like this. I'm looking forward to the next time we do this! I'd like to get our old friend Chad Beckett involved, who's a Morrisy influenced singer!