Howdy from Houston, Texas

Greetings.

Joined wikiloops searching for musical community.
Posted some backing tracks before this post.
Enjoying so far.

MikeB

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welcome on board ! have fun around ;)

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Welcome to the 'loops! Good to have you with us :)

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Howdy Mike,

welcome to the Loops, I look forward hearing your music.

P.S. I 've been to Texas once, loved it!!

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and a warm wiki welcome from me as well Mike :) have fun :)

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Well, I am writing this from a tablet before bedtime. Close to one year learning the ropes at wiki loops. Hardly listen to mass produced music anymore, listening to some albums here. The music you play just feels more natural doing that.

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Welcome to the Loops Mike!!! Enjoy:)
keith

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What wl did for me, how I dealt with it, where I am now...

I came to WL just before the breakout of COVID. I had moved into an apartment
Near the house where I grew up in hoping to start some based home based business, but
It never took off. I’d been planning to use a local brewery as a possible venue to perform dub techno as a dj, but Covid put a stop to that as the business closed. So, I spent the first year of the pandemic living alone in a one bedroom, mucking about with web software hosting business apps and getting involved with wikiloops.

When the lease was up, I moved back into my parents house. It felt weird but covid was still going on so I sort of wrote the move off as a sabbatical that was focused almost exclusively on music, art, field recording, and computers.
I would be involved with music and musical ideas for most of the days during the second year of the pandemic. At the height of my involvement, I had some decent bass and keyboard jamming skills and could hang with some of the more accomplished musicians. After being on music sabbatical for most of the outbreak and past ‘back to business’ time, I decided so much music was not for me. I put down my plucks and began investigating hardware synths as a means to not take my hobby so seriously. Pulling back from my practice commitments, my musicianship (I sometimes wonder where I could’ve gone if I rented a cabin in Taos or somewhere and woodshed for a year) suffered somewhat, but I’ve gotten to a comfortable point where there’s space for improvement but perfection is not sought out. I enjoy orchestrating synths and creating scapes out of arps, drones, and sequences, that include some improvisation. I occasionally find the desire to work out songs and whatever routine led me to now, is just too physically demanding or untrained for serious work or fun.

What I’ve taken from wikiloops, is that after about 2 years of involvement, and a desire and commitment to ‘improve my groove’. I was able to do that. Looking back I can see the areas in my musicianship that need work, esp. understanding of timing and gates is a big issue for jams, and synths help me understand this with their numeric coding. Developing an intense harmonic sense is required for a dedicated jammer, and eventually my skills and thoughts were at odds with my DNA and background. Formative years listening to rock and pop and my harmonic imagination just runs up against the same problems as I find myself wishing the art of happiness was as easy as practicing Cm keyboard skills.

This isn’t a goodbye letter, just an article I thought I’d write. Life using wikiloops day in day out is a very interesting process, and I wonder how the site has helped others adjust their routines and approach to music.

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That's cool of you to share. Online music collaborators are a rare breed and I'm always interested to hear about other's approaches, environments, motivations, etc. Some of us just have to create music it appears and sharing that with like minded people is certainly something good that the internet has enabled. I'm glad you're here. Keep discovering.

Brad

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"Rare breed", that is a nice term, and indicates that we are only few and that makes this group even more kind of family compared to kind of anonymous folks in a football stadium. What I enjoy is the statistics how long members typically stay and return to here, that is often for years. While personal development takes place and turns sometimes a personality inside out - or the other way?, I see with so much pleasure that folks return with their creativity even years later. What a tremendous consistency over time. Mathematician Emmy Noether researched and found the physical conservation laws, so good, but she didn't find out the stay-with-WL-consistency law, she died way too early for being able to discover this. And I would love to know the specific continuous symmetry which could lead to this effect here.
Just my thoughts for now and hopefully I don't distract the topic. Looking forward to your next upload, your continuous symmetries in your works :)

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