Nothing like a new synth or plugin to get the gear gears grinding again, but when times get tough or you’re feeling uninspired, who can you turn to? Not talking the current sounds thread, I’m more curious about offline relationships(or online ones that go further than regular social media interactions).
A friend from work plays acoustic and has great lyrical instincts. I get to focus on fretless bass, no other hardware except the amp. It feels good to have regular rehearsals & play with someone else, even if it’s not my usual genre.
My father learning trumpet at 65, struggling with intonation & scales. Sounds like shit but I always want to sample him, it’s so wholesome. We share an interest in artists like Nils Frahm & Portico Quartet, so birthday presents can usually be ambient backing tracks for him play with.
There’s an animation professor I stayed close with after graduation. These days we hang out every few months and he steers me back towards projection art, connecting me with like-minded creatives and providing his studio space as a meetup spot.
What about y’all? A modular meetup you always go to? That one drunk guy at every open mic you play? Is this all for your Sweetwater rep??
One of my friends is an artist and animator, and she’s one of my favorite people to talk about art critically with. Wish I could chat more often, but she’s moved across the country and is currently head-down on an indie game, so her free time is basically non-existent.
And on the corny side, my wife. Endlessly supportive and a fine singer.
Summary
I hereby promise not to inflict any husband-and-wife music on any of you
Ooh yup, I’m losing a couple close creative buddies to moves this fall. ones going to NYC and I’m excited for an excuse to go hang out, but the other is off to Missouri and I can’t see myself paying him a visit any time soon.
Low pressure collaboration with loved ones is the best, especially when the skills are a good complement. I can draw great lineart, always hand the ipad off to my partner for coloring.
When I arrived in my current city, first thing I did was to type the name of the city + Elektron in SoundCloud. I’ve made new friends quickly, and even if they moved away now I still see them. They’ve become really trustworthy friends.
As a bonus, they made me discover a new strata of the city I wasn’t aware of.
Less than a year ago, I discovered that a neighbor was making experimental music.
I contacted them and quickly made a new friend.
Spending some time finding new likeminded people, possibly from a different generation, is something I value a lot.
Especially people that enjoy improvisation
Aha! I needed to hear something like this. Most of my friends lean towards more traditional instruments. Nothing like bonding over gear. I like the idea of showing up for a jam sesh to find more than one person rocking a knobby gray box.
I have two friends that make a little electronic music but one lives in Carnation (the boonies) and the other lives in Olympia which is a fine place but more than 60 miles away. Here in town I have countless friends that do the rock n roll but none of them really care about the electronic stuff and since I no longer care about making/doing rock n roll our musical paths don’t really cross outside of being occasionally asked to play a show where I’m the only electronicist. I’m old and after a very busy lifetime of constant socializing this arrangement I have now where I’m pretty much alone all the time is just fucking perfect. Every so often I sync the DFAM to the TR8S and my buddy’ll come over and twiddle DFAM knobs whilst I jam away on the Digitone Keys. But that’s like maybe every three or four months and right now it’s plenty. I can’t imagine I’ll go the rest of my life without another proper musical collaboration but right now I love this solo action.
As far as nonmusical friendships go I am a serious comics nut and mostly hang with a group of local cartoonists. We get psychedelic and go crazy and then go back to our individual lives of creative toil.
I’ve got a friend who’s a great guitar player, recording him has been the most exciting challenge lately. Unfortunately, I can’t make music together with him, unless maybe I write something first and he plays to it (we haven’t tried that yet). Whatever he plays is so different from what I write (and mostly from what I listen to) that I can’t come up with anything.
I’ve got another friend who lives in a few thousand kilometers from me, he’s into hardware synths as well, our genre preferences and workflows are completely different, yet we can spend hours discussing patchbays and mixers.
My wife often compliments my music, which says a lot about her musical taste. Yesterday she praised my track that later got criticized (for numerous valid reasons) by more experienced producers.
No luck with local communities where I live. Not many synth owners, and most of them are foreigners. Being a foreigner myself, I don’t want to get caught in an expat bubble.
For some reason I feel this with guitarists and other leads instrument way more than bassists or drummers.
My struggle starting from scratch is that it’s almost always slower than the other person’s mind & fingers. Nothing’s worse then when a buddy has a fresh idea but the sequencer has other plans.
I do really like dedicating a model cycles project for little sketches and jam templates. Not finished works, just one or two tracks each that can offer a starting point.
oo, yup. for me March '20-June '22 had been sparse on collaborations, between the pandemic & needing to push past a number of learning curves(OT & Ableton really had a lot to unpack). I was grateful for some time to develop my workflow and create some personal projects.
Coming from an animation program, I ended up with more music friends to mix things up outside of work/school. Now that I’ve been out a few years and turned my creative focus to music, it’s flipped. I still love spending time with classmates from that era but we aren’t trying to collab on short films or anything. It’s weed and movie nights for us, usually something obscure & kooky.
When covid hit, I stopped seeing friends. Didn’t go to bars or clubs anymore (although that has more to do with my age (48) than any pandemic) so I basically ”lost” all my friends. Social media is a joke, empty calories with no real interaction or real conversation. Seeing one true friend in a bar for one beer is infinitely more rewarding than ”hanging out” with a thousand facebook friends virtually.
I’m awfully lucky I have my book/record/comicshop. Thru that I’ve found a lot of new friends and likeminded people. It helps that I hired one of my best friends to work in my shop and we get to joke around every day, but also I’ve grown fond of many of our customers. Idiots don’t usually read books or collect vinyl so most of my customer base is really nice and cool people from all ages. I enjoy chatting about jazz or prog rock with some of our older customers but I also like to talk about video games with youngsters who come to buy second hand Nintendo games from us. There’s even some customers who like to talk about synths as they know that I’m a synthguy.
Nowadays 90% of the time on social media I spend hiding things. Clicking on ads I don’t want to see, hiding people I’m fed up with. Having the shop is a godsend in these times. Also, it seems that my shop has become kind of a meeting place for other people too. There has been a lot of chance meetings between people that haven’t seen each other in years and have perhaps moved to other cities etc. Music, comics, books and video games are a thing that brings similar people together.
Tricks for evenings/parties were I don’t know many people have been
taking part to the organization a bit, you usually have time to bond with a couple of interesting persons
trying to remember the name of as many people you can: a friend of mine suggested this to me a few years ago, and it’s been game changing. For this, you have to really talk to the persons, have them talking more than you do
Last point has been crucial to cancel a fight that could have turned extremely bad, last party I’ve been, and I was so glad I had “played” this little game. It was the thing that gave me sufficient credit to unknot the situation and avoid both cops and hospital.
But I also met some exceptional people I would never have crossed otherwise.
I have a friend from work plays cello, bass and piano. Her two sons are also musicians. Funny, it hasn’t even occurred to me to ask my friend to get together to make music. Maybe I should!
