Launching Sorcy.org

Today I’ve launched sorcy.org, which is a site holding various music and musical experiments I’ve been working on since the beginning of last year. So far I’ve put up a compilation of songs I made last year, and I’ll be putting up some more stuff from this year later on (as I bring them to completion :P).

I would say that most of the tracks up there aren’t that good, and I realise that, but I like every single one of those tracks. I won’t release something unless I like it in some way. Some of the tracks are full songs, and other tracks are more short ideas or experiments.

At about the beginning of last year I decided to more seriously start teaching myself how to compose and produce music. Before that, over the years I had always dabbled, but I had never actually put in a lot of time to try to create some music.

The hardest part has been trying to discipline myself to actually study some music theory, and last year I ended up mostly experimenting around on my own. At the start of this year I started taking some music lessons, but I’ve had to cut those off due to work and other commitments. I still have the main course book, so I’ll probably keep trying to work through that on my own.

That said, there are many artists who I like who have had no formal music training at all, so I’m not convinced that learning this stuff properly is the only way to go. I think a lot of it is still just practice, practice, practice, which is why I’ve been trying to spend more time actually producing stuff with a goal to release it at some point.

As for gear (or, instruments?), I started with a MIDI keyboard I’ve had for some time and a lite copy of Ableton Live which I got with my soundcard. Later on I also bought myself a BCR2000, not just because tweaking knobs is fun, but also because looking less at a screen and listening more to the sound is good. Recently, I bought myself a Launchpad, which should not only be useful for Ableton Live stuff, but also hooking into the interesting experimental tools the Monome community have come up with.

At this point I consider myself to be very familiar with Ableton Live, so I’m ready to upgrade to the full version. I’m currently tossing up as to whether to get the standard edition, or the suite edition. Both are expensive, but the suite is more so. They also have boxed editions which once again cost more, but also include more stuff.

I’d also really like to get Max4Live which is essentially the new Max/MSP, but integrated with Ableton Live. It’s a visual audio programming environment, that has shared lineage with the open source Pure Data software. I really want to get more into sound design, and writing my own effects. There are also a whole lot of monome and launchpad patches for M4L popping up.

I’ve been somewhat slack the past few months in terms of working on my own tracks, but I was busy with the music classes. I’m going to be getting back into it now, and hopefully you’ll see some more tracks go up on sorcy.org. I have two in progress, but they’re not really complete enough to release.