New Sing Song! – do you wanna?

Hello there you browsers of the internet! I have recently released new music, but unlike the last few times, this one has vocals in it. I would appreciate it if anyone could give a listen and provide some feedback 😀

Flowers – 2/4

Their bodies, intertwined

Crossed branches adorned with blossoming flowers

Their breath, hot and shallow

And alive and exposed and together

Their hearts, laid open for all to see

For just this moment

New EP – Oak Ridge 2 (I miss you)

Hey guys! A few months ago I downloaded the digital audio workstation FL Studio, and these songs are the first batch of likely many. I would appreciate it a lot if you all could listen and give feedback. These tracks are a lot more polished than the last EP I put out, so I think these guys are much more worthy of your support.

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New EP – Oak Ridge

Hello there you all! Today I am here to share some new music I’ve made, which is a continuation of the track I posted about a year ago “Rubber Trees”. This album is entirely electronic and has some strong Minecraft and Blade Runner influences. This EP has 5 songs but is only 10 minutes long, so I’d appreciate it a lot if you all could give it a listen and provide some feedback or criticism!

Thank you everybody!

You Make a Song!

Hello there you chicken pickins. Today I’ve got a fun activity for us, along with some updates. Let’s get the updates out of the way so we can get the fun stuff! I’m going to be changing the schedule of Free Lunch, from Tuesdays and Fridays to Wednesdays and Saturdays. This helps my schedule a lot so that I have everything more spread out in my week. Tuesdays and Fridays are also not very good news days for me, as I usually have nothing to say that hasn’t been said on the Tuesday post since I have so little going on between those two days.

For today’s magic trick, I will be making a song appear! I’m going to give you a series of polls that will determine the song’s structure and such. Once I get the final results this Thursday, I’ll begin creating the song. I’m going to give myself a week to complete this so it will be out the following Thursday.

Let’s begin!

If you have any other suggestions for the song, feel free to leave them in the comments! Otherwise, thanks for reading all the way down to the very bottom of this post, I’ll see you next time!

 

Losing the Personal Plan Broke the Website

Hello there you comptrolling carts. Today I’m just here to talk to you about how WordPress messed up the blog after I didn’t pay for the personal plan again. I don’t usually complain on here, but these are pretty annoying.

When you search for Riley’s Backpack, the first thing that shows up to me is rileysbackpack.com, which when clicked leads to an error page. The second link is also broken, as well as the third. It was only the fourth link about halfway down the page (thanks to the images of backpacks) that lead to the website. I know WordPress says in the plan that it would promote your new domain on search engines, but why is it still maliciously promoting a blank page?

In posts when I would insert a link for you to click that leads to a post here, it would automatically make it a rileysbackpack.com address, which was fine when I owned rileysbackpack.com. Now I would need to go back and manually edit every single inserted link from the past two years for them to work again now.

I think it would be easy for WordPress to fix these issues, by just taking the wrong URL off of search engines, and replacing mention of the old URL with the new URL when membership expires.

That’s all for today, thanks for reading this post.

Free Lunch #71

Hello there you conversing cobblers. Today is Tuesday, which means that it’s time for another Free Lunch. If it’s been so long that you’ve forgotten what this series is, that’s alright. I just type for five minutes about whatever I want to and then publish it with only light editing.

I haven’t posted in almost two months, and I can finally have a good reason. Hume Fogg is pretty academically challenging so I have been using most of my free time to just relax instead of writing. I was spurred back to this by remembering when the author of one of my favorite books said my review was written eloquently. That’s a really fond memory, and I’d like to make more in the future, so here I am.

I’ve gotten a lot better at Trumpet in the last few months, thanks to being in two after-school clubs and practicing at least an hour at home every day. In Jazz Combos (one of the clubs) I’ve been developing my improvising skills, and I am a lot better at soloing than I was when I started. I think I’ve made more progress in the last 2 or 3 months than I did last year. I haven’t been working on my piano songs that much, but I did buy a melodica, which is fun to take around and play with. Speaking of my melodica, here are some very short musical ideas that I put on Soundcloud using it. They don’t make a lot of sense unless you read the description of each song, (click the title once it’s playing) which offer some insight on what I was trying to do. I think that trying out concepts from other mediums in music is super fun, which you can see in Hero’s Ringtone.

I got a raise at my job and made all A’s and high B’s in the first quarter of the school year, so my life is pretty good everywhere else too. I’ve generally been happier at high school than I was at middle school so far. What’s been going on in you guys’ lives?

That’s all the time I’ve got for you today, I’ll see you in the next post.

Free Lunch #69

Hello there you potential pots. Today is Tuesday, which means there’s like a 50% chance of a Free Lunch coming out. Lucky for you, today one’s coming out! If you don’t know what Free Lunch is, I basically just type on my computer or phone for five minutes about whatever is happening in my life, or anything I feel like typing about.

I have officially finished a whole week of high school, and so far it’s been mostly positive. The worst things about the new school year have just been getting lost on the way to classes (my school is like a maze), and being in awkward situations around people I don’t know. However, I think all of my classes will be pretty challenging and fun, even if they might get tedious later on. My favorite part of being in high school has been the freedom. At the end of the day, we aren’t shepherded into rooms to wait to be dismissed or even released over the intercom. Once it’s 3:00, we are just free to leave the building. There are no announcements telling us to leave or anything, the teacher will just say that class is over, and then we walk out of school.

I am 6th chair Trumpet out of 11 right now, which I think is higher than I should be. I’m not really going to complain about it, but I’m pretty sure some of the people behind me are better than I am. The schedules are pretty weird as well, we have double period days where classes are an hour and a half long, which is a really long time to be sitting and paying attention in my opinion.

The second unnamed piano piece that I’ve been working on for about 8 months is nearly finished, and I’m trying to think of some good names for it. An idea that I have is “Gymnopédie No. 4” because it draws so heavily from the original Gymnopédies.

Thanks for reading all the way down to the very bottom of this post, I’ll see you in the next one!

Ouch

I think I’m going to have a particularly rough start to the school year. Not only did I not even get close to finishing my summer reading assignments, but I have just now accidentally cut my thumb in a way that will stop me from comfortably holding a pencil, playing guitar and video games, and snapping. I also need to wake up at 6:00 AM tomorrow morning so that I can catch the bus to school. I’m sure I’ll be fine but these are some discouraging signs. (The summer reading thing was basically just me being lazy all summer though.)

Thanks for reading this short post which will act as a precursor for tomorrow’s Free Lunch.

Cya later!

riley’s backpack is dead

i think :^(