Day 100. As you can probably imagine, I was spending a lot of energy trying to figure out what to do for my 100th day. I had considered a few options, like "33 seconds of silence", or a bizarre mashup of the previous 99 songs. In the end, I dec

Day 99 - Penultimate

Mar 29th, 2017 48s

Day 99. Almost done. I had fun with the pizzicato strings in this one. The pizzicato cello and the snare drum hold down the rhythm, and I have a few different violins and violas playing the melody.

Day 95 - Travel

Mar 29th, 2017 20s

Day 95. I wanted to try something in a medieval style, so this is a quick sketch mostly experimenting with the instrumentation of it.

Day 98 - Mushrooms

Mar 28th, 2017 48s

Day 98. Another multiple-layer piano track. Each piano has a different effect applied. Echo, reverbs, EQ to emphasize specific frequencies.

Day 97 - Unknown

Mar 27th, 2017 54s

Day 97. Further proving the theory that when I don't have a plan for the day, I end up finishing way sooner than I thought, today's song took less than an hour. As usual, I started this with the piano intro, and built it up from there. I consid

Day 96 - Sunrise

Mar 26th, 2017 40s

Day 96. I always seem to spend a lot more time on these when there's a specific sound I'm going for. This one turned out to take way more layers than I expected. I'm still a little confused why I couldn't quite get the string section to sound c

Day 94 - Windows

Mar 24th, 2017 40s

Day 94. I didn't have a great plan for this today. There's a lot of sounds going on here, but I tried to make a few of the highlights stand out. I think also after a few days in a row of doing piano-centric songs, I tend to try something in a t

Day 93 - Signal

Mar 23rd, 2017 31s

Day 93. I didn't end up finishing today's song before going to the studio for my last class, so I had to finish it here. I ended up doing something pretty simple just cause I didn't have much time. The video is some test footage we shot on the

Day 92 - Bloom

Mar 22nd, 2017 1m 4s

Day 92. This is maybe a little more wander-y than I wanted, I wasn't expecting to bring in the orchestra in the middle until after I had started. I originally thought it would be just piano again. There's a couple little nods to some other song

Day 91 - Green

Mar 21st, 2017 51s

Day 91. I don't know why I'm on such a piano kick lately. This one was kind of fun because it's more notes than can be played with two hands, but doesn't totally sound like it.

Day 90 - Sixpence

Mar 20th, 2017 48s

Day 90. The final stretch! Didn't know what I was going to do today, so again I started by playing around on the piano until I hit something that I could use to build off of. After I recorded the piano track, I added a few other instruments on

Day 89 - Double

Mar 19th, 2017 1m 7s

Day 89. This is all one take on the piano, with only a little tweaking of the timing and loudness of some notes. I was planning on adding some other instruments to it, but nothing seemed to fit quite right. I ended up adding an echo to the pian

Day 88 - Reunion

Mar 18th, 2017 1m 3s

Day 88. Another fun five-part piano piece. Each piano is panned slightly off-center. Some of them are a 2 bar loop, others do slight variations of their theme for each phrase. I decided to let this one fade out rather than do a build-out, since

Day 87 - Tryst

Mar 17th, 2017 48s

Day 87. Today was the first day in a while that I started a song by playing the piano for an hour before writing anything down. Once I knew what I was going for, I recorded the piano track. I added the other two instruments, a Duduk and Electri

Day 86 - Imperial

Mar 16th, 2017 19s

Day 86. I'm not sure a major key was right for this one or if I should have done it in a minor key instead. I mostly wanted to work on getting the orchestra to accent certain beats. The horn melody fills in the rest.

Day 85 - Suit

Mar 15th, 2017 39s

Day 85. This went in a whole different direction than I thought it would when I started. I originally started with the first piano notes, and then somehow ended up building it up to a jazzy rhythm. It's not perfect, I think the velocities of th

Day 84 - Winning

Mar 14th, 2017 18s

Day 84. This is a fun horn fanfare that resolves with a full orchestra. It took a while to get the horn accents right. During the last phrase I had to slow down the middle of it slightly for it to sound right. I also like the solo violin part t

Day 83 - Inspection

Mar 13th, 2017 43s

Day 83. I think this accurately reflects my mood today. This actually started with me accidentally hitting a few notes on the piano, and I just went from there. This is one of the few times that I can't actually tell you what all the chords and

Day 82 - Tense

Mar 12th, 2017 26s

Day 82. Today I knew I wanted to start with the pulsing notes that got gradually faster. I jotted that down, then later decided to turn it into something that would be at the end of a scene of a TV show with a dramatic build-up and lack of reso

Day 81 - Daylight

Mar 11th, 2017 32s

Day 81. Quick and easy one today. Piano, bass, french horns and percussion.

Day 80 - Jupiter

Mar 10th, 2017 26s

Day 80. This one is inspired by the style of Juno Reactor. There are a bunch of layers of percussion, all written manually. A light bongo track is on the 16th notes, with some accented beats. There's a simple synth bass+snare, plus a few other

Day 79 - Faders

Mar 9th, 2017 34s

Day 79. I felt like going with a guitar+bass+drum track today. The middle section needed some filling out in the mid-range frequencies, so I added some faint horns and another guitar part in the middle. I think it could still sound warmer, but

Day 78 - Why Markets Matter

Mar 8th, 2017 40s

Day 78. A few weeks ago, I asked my friend Mike Merrill (the world's first publicly traded person) to send me some audio samples of him reading some money-related words. He sent back a 10-minute long file audio. I sliced it up into individual w

Day 77 - Wind

Mar 7th, 2017 31s

Day 77. Just a quick mostly piano song, I feel a little bad that the other instruments feel kinda forced on top.

Day 76 - Music Box

Mar 6th, 2017 48s

Day 76. This is an oddly detuned music box. I was actually trying to find a more gentle music box sound but this is all I could find. I tweaked the EQ a bit to remove some of the lower "boomier" part of the sound, but it's still not as gentle a