Released in full
One More Step is now up on YouTube as a full-length listen.
This one means a lot to me. I wrote it in 2010–2011 as the theme song for Ningen Yakyū ("Human Baseball"), an independent film I was making.
Noise Margin, a fictional band
Until now I have been releasing songs by a female singer, AKINO Uta. Originally, though, most of my writing was band music — pop punk and rock. So this time I built the music video around a fictional band called Noise Margin.
Taken literally, a noise margin is the tolerance allowed for noise: the headroom that keeps a small voltage deviation from being misread. I transposed that into music, with the concept of "headroom for a genre you do not normally listen to."
Digging up the old files
When I wrote this I was using something around Cakewalk SONAR 6. I had not touched that software in over ten years, so finding the old data and the lyrics took some work.
I rebuilt it in Studio One this time. As I have written before, I cannot read a score and I work entirely self-taught, by feel. Which means every part is step-entered by hand. By the time a song is finished I have tendonitis.
I have worked this way the whole time and made no particular progress, so music production still amounts to manual labour for me.
What Human Baseball was
Back to the film for a moment — what exactly was Ningen Yakyū?
A group of office workers, facing the collapse of their company, settle things with a baseball game. That is the whole premise. The problem is that they have no baseball equipment. Stuck, one new recruit pipes up: "All right, I'll be the ball." And human baseball begins.
One More Step is the theme song I wrote to carry those absurd, deadly serious office workers.
Turning that surreal material into a music video as-is proved difficult, and I gave up partway. The song itself felt like the youth of a salaryman, so this time I have made a straight-down-the-line coming-of-age video instead.
The end goal is an album on YouTube
I am releasing one song at a time on YouTube, but the final goal is to assemble an album on YouTube.
Uploading audio alone to a subscription service like Spotify would be over quickly. I choose YouTube because of what video production meant to me in my twenties. My underlying belief is that music needs images and images need music, so there is a sense of a culmination in this.
I still have no idea how to grow viewership on the main videos, but I am going to keep at it a while longer, trusting only in doing it steadily.
Trusting that somewhere out there is someone who likes my songs. Trusting that quiet fans exist. Telling myself that a lot of people simply run a high ratio of tsun to dere. Thank you, as ever, for your support.