ONOTE and OTONE - A musical project
Written by Barry Warsaw in music on Wed 20 July 2011. Tags: music, otone, onote,
I'm starting a new musical project, which I'm calling OTONE and/or ONOTE. Actually, I've been working on this project for several years without realizing what I wanted to do with it. It coalesced in my mind when I thought of the acronyms above. Here's what they stand for:
- The One Tune One Night Experiment (OTONE)
- The One Night One Tune Experiment (ONOTE)
I'm not yet sure what the difference between the two are yet (though see below), but here's the idea behind the project.
If you're like me, you can easily sweat over a song and its recording forever, tweaking the mix, or hearing another melody, or (worst of all) agonizing over every word of a lyric that was like pulling teeth in the first place. Sometimes you think if you just do one more take of the guitar, you can get it perfect, or oh! it just needs a little bit of tamborine right there. Sometimes the arrangement just doesn't sit quite right, or you know in your gut that lurking out there somewhere there's a better way to get from the bridge to the last chorus.
Well, I'm kind of frustrated with that because it can lead to never actually finishing a song and getting it out there for folks to hear. At some point you reach diminishing returns, where the little tweaks don't really improve the song enough. Probably most importantly, the whole thing can put the brakes on the creative process. I liken it to software maintenance vs. creating a new project from scratch.
Software maintenance is important, useful, and can be fun, but the juices really get flowing when you're starting a new project. You get this rush of an idea and your fingers can't type fast enough to translate them into code. It's …