on december 6, 2020, i uploaded the song jesus pizza to youtube. it sucks so please don't listen to it, but now i get to use it as a yearly milestone post! (even though i missed it this year but we won't talk about that) i think i'm going to make this post pretty short and to the point, since tbh i didn't really do anything interesting after like june, and also i don't want to write a lot of words right now. so here we go!!
jamuary!!
i'm not kidding when i say that taking part in the jamuary challenge this year i think singlehandedly improved my music making abilities by 100%. making a song every day really started wearing me down, but i think once i got to the last week or so, i managed to break out of it and really start experimenting around. coming out of it i felt a lot more confident in my composition, and it set the stage for me making songs that are way cooler than what i made last year.
pixel day
i made a track and did the sfx for pomegranite's pixelgrounds picross collab game for pixel day! i made my track in famitracker, which in hindsight was actually a really shitty decision since it doesn't fit very well with the game at all. someone actually complimented the sound effects in one of the reviews though, which really warmed my heart even though i spent a fairly insignificant amount of time on them! overall the game turned out great and i was really glad to have been a part of it!
audio tag team
in april, i took part in the audio tag team competition, a contest in which you got paired up with someone random and you had to each make a song with some kind of unifying factor. for round 1, zechnition and i got paired up, and we chose the theme of "technological nostalgia". they absolutely knocked it out of the park, and i think mine was pretty good too, though in hindsight it was a bit repetitive. i would like to tell you how well we did in the contest, but i can't, because the organizer didn't ever end up judging the round 1 entries, so the contest sort of just died a slow, sad death before it even really got off the ground. (i'm still pretty pissed about this btw) it was a fun experience though, i liked bouncing off musical ideas off of my partner and sharing wips and all that!
and then there was nothing
to be honest.. i didn't really do any other collaborative or competitive shit with my music this year. i tried to enter nguac and ngadm and got rejected from both of them, and i didn't see many collabs that i was super interested in ~~or confident enough to join~~. i also got hella demotivated around september and i still haven't really recovered. burned out maybe? idk. i think i need to do more fun collab shit in 2023 to really stretch my limits, but that's also what i said last year before proceeding to not put enough effort into meeting people, so who knows what will actually end up happening?
greatest hits
my favorite song that i made this year was "the new wisdom" and it's not even close. the production was kind of crap, but the bassline has been lodged in my head like a parasite for months. hopefully one day i can come back to it and give it the production value that it deserves!
some of my other favorites were "jet era", "summer slow jam", "swell swim", and "too much gravity". i won't elaborate too much because lazy but i just like them a lot :)
i also started trending more towards cinematic-style music as opposed to synth music in the latter half of the year. not really sure why, maybe because i have to put less effort in to make it sound good lol!! but songs like effortless ascension were definitely the best in terms of production this year. i haven't put as much effort as i should be putting into mixing and mastering, and i think it's starting to show as my compositions get more complex and the instruments start fighting for space. one of these days i'll figure out how to do it well!!
it also hit me this year just how much experience i still DON'T have. i think i'm making the huge mistake of continually comparing myself to people who have years and years of experience over me, so i'm continually floored at how everyone else manages to make their shit sound so good!! i try not to be too hard on myself (as difficult as that is) because of course i hear the flaws in my own stuff more clearly than everyone else's. it's still kind of tough though when i see a song with a description like "sharted this out in 5 minutes teehee might delete later" and i'm like "this is better than anything i've ever made!!"
anyway that's enough ranting with no proofreading. shoutout to anyone who ever listened to and/or enjoyed anything i did this year, it means a lot. shoutouts as well to pomegranite, zechnition, casper, and felithix for being cool people and making this year better for me!! see you in 2023!!
(p.s. additional shoutout to tom fulp for letting me claim the username "glotch" the other day, i feel special now!)