My pharmacy has this really boring hold music. I mean, when is hold music not boring? But this just takes the boring up to 11. It's a 2-step chord progression, just 1-7-1-7, over and over and over again. It's in C major at 130 BPM, has only 2 chords in the whole piece, and probably fades down before any other chords can play. How do I know any of this? Well, as someone on feminising HRT, I have to ring the pharmacy fairly often because the insurance company keeps playing in my face. They tell the clinic one thing, they tell the pharmacy something else, and I end up having to transfer the prescription to a different store and buy it myself with money I've been saving for car repair. Since I have no shortage of piano keyboards in my studio, I decided to play along with the hold music one day. Most DAW software and keyboard workstations in general default to 4/4 ♩=130 when you turn it on; the logic being that most composers tend to write in this metre, so you won't have to set much up in order to start a new project.
Earlier this afternoon, I had to ring the pharmacy and I got inspired to write hold music. I've already done a whole lot of that with the MT-32 soundfont, but I decided to write acoustic hold music this time. At the risk of sounding self-aggrandising, I'm very good at writing in this style. Sterile, corporate-friendly music with no artistic undertones or subtext of any kind. Music that I imagine the generative AI will be churning out in 3 years. There's no special trick to writing hold music, just avoid using large amounts of reverb.
I didn't say I like writing hold music, I said I'm good at it. One does not equal the other. Superficially, "Industry Standards" does sound better than the pharmacy's new hold music, because all I did was add an extra step to the chord progression and a key change. It's structured so you can use either the purely soft-rock bit with the piano and guitars, or the orchestral bit with the strings and oboe. But, honestly, if you have to be on hold so long that the song plays in its entirety, you're better off hanging up and ringing again tomorrow.
I wish I could make music as art again. It's been since Real Life Fast Travel that I've been able to do that. There is no hold music here; each song carries artistic weight, presented in a form that I've loved since grade school: videogame music. "What the Heck is a Mega Duck?" was more or less of an experiment; are these 30-year-old sounds still able to produce a broadcast-quality song? I have personal biases in favour of the equipment I used, so I'll let others answer that question. I guess, "Get To You" is artistic, but I wrote it nearly 2 years ago.
I'm just blathering at this point. "Industry Standards" would be perfectly at home in a Pepsico onboarding video. I'm not good at much else, but at least I can write themes for the corporate feudal state. Maybe the anticapitalist uprising will have the consideration to kill me first.
Forget it. I'm not having a good day.
--23 July 2024--