Music made with toy instruments (experimental)

Hello, I think I posted something made with these in this forum a while ago. Now I've got five more tracks. All tracks are about 1-2 minutes in length, with a total length of around 10 minutes. I'm sure a lot of people don't just want to listen to them all, so here's a few examples:

Hammond

Mesopotamian Salainen Temppeli (this is the one I posted before I think)

If you want to hear the rest:

All tracks here (.rar, 12.5 MB)

Individual tracks here

All comments are welcome.

Get a little more involved with the forum and you'll get comments ;)

edit-- ok i listened anyway...um...weird, i don't get it at all. at least try a line in, that quality is horrendous and it just sounded like random noise...sorry :/

it sounds like what goes over in the head of a freaked up caged up animal which is trying to find some beauty in an impossible cruel world.

what i mean to say is what you wanted to come out didn't sound to me like its what you wanted to come out. do you play what you hear? do you hear what you play and satisfied? etc etc

I loved "Mesopotamian Salainen Temppeli" when you first showed it here, and I still do. I also like some of your other tracks here, particularly "Kimmo saa turpaan avaruudessa" and "Azerbaijan" - but sometimes it's a fine line for me between interesting, fresh, humorous music and somewhat thoughtless dabbling. That's why some of your other tracks seem rather uninteresting to me, particularly Hammond, which sounds a bit like a somewhat clumsy piano impro to me (Alberti bass and melody, not perfectly fitting together harmonically), just with different sounds than a piano has. This and some other tracks don't really make use of the differences your instruments have to other, traditional instruments, which makes them much less interesting.

I still like your approach and as I've said, I find there are some really nice things in there. But it might still be a good idea to try to go beyond your original concept (which seems to be rather improvisational) and try including some other approaches: For example making more detailed planning beforehand, maybe notating some things before playing them (I just assume you're not doing that now - I may be totally wrong), maybe including some other instruments too (a combination with some more traditional instruments might be fascinating), trying out various extremes (in duration, rhythm, or in density by making a track consisting of a LOAD of such tones over each other etc.), or just thinking of any kind of other ways of expanding your idea to different things. There is quite a scene out there of people making music out of toy instruments, so you do need to make a bit an effort to stick out individually.

So all in all, I think you have some really nice seeds there, but I think they need some thoughtful care to let them develop, especially to develop into a wider variety of different things. Don't place too much emphasis on creating a definite label (like "experimantal music for toy instruments") for yourself just yet.

Thanks to everyone for the comments.

Duncan11: Sure, I intend to. I've noticed that giving feedback to others instead of just posting own music is largely encouraged here, it's a really good thing.

Gardener: Thanks for the detailed comment, interesting thoughts. You're right that my approach was always very improvisational. I was usually kind of making it up as I went along, and a single track was done in about 1-2 hours. Hammond was the only track that had been somewhat pre-composed and not completely improvisational. I was first hesitant to release it at all, but some people have called it their favourite. I have been thinking about doing more stuff like this, and will probably take a bit less improvisational approach then.

I think you have some talent. You took toys and made them almost listenable.

I suggest that you try to find a way to get your music into the computer in a way where the resulting sounds are a bit more palatable.

There is some coherency to this but again the sounds themselves are very distracting.

There are inexpensive ways to begin to compose.

Ron

The mesopotamian one is interesting. The very simple sounds are a little distracting, but it's heartfelt, which makes it more successful than otherwise possible.

The quick left turn into noise is interesting, and it could be argued that it was set up with the extra noises, but i feel it needed to be a more gradual shift. The fragments of melody that crop up in that part center it well...

Neat stuff...

Um, i'm sorry I couldn't focus on the substance because the sound was so crass. Ditch the antiques and join the VST revolution.

Haha the Mesopotamian one is pretty humorous. It sounds like something Nintendo could have had a go at in the mid- to late-eighties had the Wii existed back then.

It kinda... loses it when it turns into random noise, but the first half was pretty cool.