Tripecac - Working Progress (2012)

No Idea [3:57] 2012-04-21 - 2012-06-05
Valley Gals [4:15] 2012-05-05 - 2012-06-07
Repop [3:50] 2012-05-18 - 2012-06-14
4am [4:00] 2012-05-22 - 2012-06-19
5er [7:05] 2012-06-20 - 2012-06-28
Out of Kontakt [3:54] 2012-07-02 - 2012-07-11
FMyxeS [3:53] 2012-07-18 - 2012-07-24
Doom Cough [3:49] 2012-08-03 - 2012-08-14
Unap [4:59] 2012-08-16 - 2012-08-30
Off Season [4:28] 2012-09-04 - 2012-09-10
Hot Snow [3:50] 2012-09-11 - 2012-09-17
Ex Too [2:59] 2012-10-04 - 2012-10-10
Drumap [3:38] 2012-10-11 - 2012-10-30
Steps Back [5:23] 2012-11-01 - 2012-11-06
Loop Forward [3:56] 2012-11-07 - 2012-11-12
Thumthing [4:10] 2012-11-14 - 2012-11-16
Windy Up [4:41] 2012-11-19 - 2012-11-22

It's hard to make musical progress while working so much. Day jobs and parenthood consume not only time but energy. Songs take longer to finish, creative trains of thought are lost, techniques get rusty, and software updates seem to fly out faster than we can keep up.

This year, Sonar X2 was released. Hoping it would fix the many flaws in X1, I pre-ordered X2 and installed it as soon as it was available.

Unfortunately, X2's learning curve and bugs were even worse than X1, killing my musical momentum and much of my enthusiasm. In the future, I will ignore the marketing promises and wait until there is a proven benefit to upgrading. I'm tired of wasting my precious time on technical difficulties.

(Yeah, Trav, blame the racket!)

Despite the software issues, there were moments when making music was a lot of fun, even energizing. If you listen very, very carefully you just might hear the childish enthusiasm trying to shove its way through the mounds of tedium and frustration.

Whether there was any real creative progress over the course of this album is debatable, but there certainly were improvements in the song creation process. I've become a lot more comfortable with soft synths, to the point where I can now start a song just as easily as I could with the Triton. I find myself focusing more on musical ideas and less on the GUIs, which is good. And I'm continually optimizing my workflow, so that I can make the most of the limited time and energy that I do have.

So, Tripecac remains a work in progress. Hopefully the next album will show less scaffolding and more dramatic views and gargoyles.