Jatopian wrote:
so JtRH is the only one I'm kinda "meh" on. Which is a bit odd, as Erik made all of the AE music and most of the JtRH music - one would expect him to improve with time.
There is a disconcerting tradeoff between creativity and polish. I felt the JtRH music was more polished and annoyed me less than AE stuff. But the AE pieces had some of better musical ideas. This tradeoff messes with me a bit, because I'm old enough to know that I'm definitely worse at some things than I was before. (While thankfully better at other things.)
JtRH was also put together in a weird way. I had planned for another musician to do the JtRH music, and that didn't work out. A lot of missed deadlines and setbacks. I got really frustrated about the situation, and decided I would take all of the song fragments I had laying around on my hard drive and extend them to full length songs. Most of these were 30 or 60 seconds long and had some musical idea that seemed good to me, but I had left it unfinished for whatever reason. So in a pretty short amount of time, I forced myself to finish a bunch of songs. And I might have been a bit hackish about it. ("
Hmm. I can copy and paste these 16 measures from over here, change two of the instruments, and it sounds varied enough."
)
After JtRH, I didn't have this catalog of music fragments laying around, and writing new music takes a lot of time with my amateurish method (no keyboard playing, just sequencing in an old-fashioned tracker style). Near that point, I hit on the idea of just licensing music already written by someone else. I thought about music that I really liked that was done by people on small labels or no labels, which led me to Jon Sonnenberg. Absolutely not regretting that choice. I was glad to hear more of Jon's music in GatEB.
Sometimes I feel like writing more music. But that ends up giving me a stretched-thin-and-trying-too-hard feeling, because I'm already working on getting good at other creative skills.
-Erik
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