I'm not doing Advent, this year, so there are days throughout December when I'm *gasp* ... doing things other than coding new games..!

-=-=-

Korg Gadget

In January 2014, KORG released Gadget on the iPad. There'd been a few music making "DAW"s on iOS, but nearly all of them tended to be squeezed into a smaller iPhone display, or were converted from desktop apps without the care and attention that they needed. With teensy tiny little buttons that expected mouse-cursor-sized fingers, and Piano rolls that expected you to have a scroll wheel and didn't let you resize things.

And then KORG Gadget showed up. .. and oh, what a breath of fresh air it was.
Built from the ground up to make use of the iPad. Everything was the right size, all interactions felt natural.
It was comfortable to use, your finger never seemed to get in the way, and everything flowed wonderfully.

I did a quick JNKPlat Melody test, and the app seemed perfect to me, so I hit New Project and started a new musical adventure.

The "New Project" button gave me a random title : Conspicuous Advocator
So I made a little melody with that title, and then for the second track it seemed a good idea to carry on through the alphabet.
Conspicuous Balloons, then Conspicuous Calligraphy, and so on.

Continue..?

I would lay in bed at night, plotting little melodies, creating patterns, building tunes and having so much fun that I was actually able to schedule a weekly musical upload!
One a week started to become the norm, and soon I was up to Conspicuous Zebra!

... And then I started it all over again, with an Enigmatically album... Adventurous, Backdated, and on and on and on I went, generating loads of music in ways that I hadn't previously achieved.

Music for games, music for fun, music for the sake of creativity.
I carried on making more and more, posting a melody (or sometimes two) a week, posting them to my rapidly growing music archive.

2015 kicked in, and another couple more of these "Alphabetical Albums" were created.

And on, and on, and on it went!

Alphabetical

Analysing - 2018
Bitter - 2022
Conspicuous - 2014
Deconstructed - 2016
Enigmatically - 2014
Fanatically - 2016
Generous - 2018
Hello - 2018
Indistinguishably - 2018
Journal - 2017
Knitted - 2019
Liquid - 2015
Memories Of - 2016
Nothing - 2020
Original - 2021
Precarious - 2015
Pulpish - 2017 -- That's two P's!!
Quietly - 2020
Recorded - 2024
Sonically - 2017
Turbulent - 2023
Unclaimed - 2017
Variable - 2022
Walking - 2019
Xenial - 2023
Youthful - 2021
Zinc - 2024

26x26 Complete

It's now a decade later.
Over the past couple of years, I've finally made the switch to using Ableton on MacOS, mostly so I can play around with different virtual instruments and plugins, which Gadget still won't do on iOS (The MacOS version is different, but is even more pricey!)

Which brings us to today.
December 23rd 2024, and I'm releasing Recorded Zed.
This is the end of this crazy crazy journey, and marks the end of my unplanned 26x26 alphabetical musical adventure.

One (or more!) "choon", practically every week for 11 years, is more than enough. There's over 700 tracks to listen to, (over 1000 if you include instrumentals, and alternative versions!) and if you head on over to the Jukebox, you can click shuffle and listen to them all in the background. Alternatively, each album's page contains an album-download link, so you can grab all the music in high quality 320kbps MP3 format.

Crikey!!

fin...?

So. Is that it?
Not likely. I've already spent a ludicrous amount of time (and money!) building up my Ableton setup, so I'm sure I'll continue to make music for years to come.
But I don't think I'm going to be forcing myself to do things weekly, any more, and there likely won't be the output quantity you're used to.
I mean, there might be. I don't really know. I could never really say where my crazy mindset takes me, and goodness knows I need a creative outlet! But it'll be more haphazard going ahead.

May the music live on, forever!


View on YouTube

Recorded Zee
Lyrics by me
Vocals by Suno
Backing vocals by Emvoice App (Lucy and Jay)

I wrote the instrumental of the tune using Ableton, and then wrote some lyrics for it.
I uploaded the instrumental to Suno, fed it the lyrics, and out popped a song.
I extracted the vocals using Suno's own Stem Separator, and popped those back into Ableton, and then added extra layers of lyrics using Emvoice.
All in all, a nice little production!

A.I. Corner

Lyrics : By me
> Reveal 🔎
: Download | Suno Link
This is the version that I took the Stem vocals from.

Alternative version
: Download | Suno Link
This is an alternative version that I couldn't quite recognise the melody of. Not sure where it took it, if I'm honest!

Sung by Suno


"Cartoon Derek floating in a multicoloured musical fantasy soundscape. At the bottom of the screen are Karaoke lyrics and a bouncing ball "I'm not doing Advent!!" " by Replicate/Flux

> Reveal 🔎