Voice messages

Once upon a time I was very trendy, very efficient, and supposedly saving time, which is why I disliked voice messages and joined this imaginary sect. Its main and core principle was to hate everyone who sent voice messages, as if they were deliberately wasting other people’s time and as if you needed some special environment just to listen to them.

Telegram even added an option to forbid sending them. And did it for people with a paid subscription. Lol.

Lately, I’ve completely reconsidered my attitude toward voice messages and, to be honest, I no longer understand why I disliked them so much. They are a wonderful form of asynchronous communication, second only to video messages. And I love them both as a sender and as a recipient.

If you need to tell a story or explain something substantial, they save a lot of time compared to typing. And in the process of speaking through an idea / problem / story, you suddenly formulate it better. Yes, I don’t always record them on the first try, and sometimes I don’t even send them after saying everything out loud. For some reason, with text this takes more time.

But the best thing about them is that they’re human. They contain emotions, pauses, awkward moments, laughter; sarcasm and various other nuances are easier to hear. It’s easier to understand a person through them simply because they carry additional information and create context.

And another great thing is that now there’s 2x–3x playback speed everywhere and automatic transcription to text.

This expressiveness and humanity are hard to achieve in text, while in a simple voice message you get it for free. There’s only one problem with them, just like with regular messages: they should be forbidden if they contain only one or two words.

One year of Natatki

My first album is one year old. It’s the perfect time to give it a listen!

Many times I thought that I could have done some things better, or spent more time on certain parts, worked more on the mix or the master, and so on.

This was my first experience releasing so much music at once. And honestly, by the time I released it, I was already very tired of it (a bit of burnout). It’s really not as simple as it looks, especially considering that it was all completely solo work at absolutely every stage.

A year later, I realize that I love it exactly the way it was released. Yes, it’s a bit rough in places, there are some mistakes here and there, but I like every track, the emotions, and how genre-diverse it is. And in any case, it’s always possible to do remasters and remixes 😁

I thought for a long time about what to call it and ended up naming it simply Natatki (Notes), because that’s exactly what it was.

For example, Praz navalnicu (Through the storm) I wrote when there was a storm in Warsaw one summer. I captured those emotions while running home from the thunderclouds and then, the next morning, looking at photos of fallen trees 😬

17 hadoŭ (17 years) and Lidskaje mora (“Lida Sea”; it doesn’t exist on the map) are lo-fi boom bap tracks, like the ones I loved making when I was 17, memories of home 🍃

By the way, my favorite track is Paśla viečarynki (After party). That’s more or less how I feel, just like in that track, when I think that I actually did it.

Black Friday sale at Ekran!

In the Ekran there is a big 50% discount. You can use the promo code via the link. Depending on the region, the price will be approximately 10 dollars.

If you have never used the app, you can read this article. It is an application that helps you quickly edit a screen recording or a screenshot for social media.

One-time purchase

Black Friday sale at Artykul!

Use code ARYEAR30 for a one-year subscription, or ARFR30 for a one-time purchase. To redeem the code, go to Artykul → Settings → Redeem Code, or use the links below.

One-year subscription

One-time purchase

Don’t forget to subscribe to Artykul on Telegram.

The simplest solution

Once, on a master, I had this annoying click in just one spot. It showed up because of a mess of automations, special effects, unlucky layering of everything imaginable, and the piano sample had a super short attack that made it kind of “pop”.

I spent about an hour heroically trying to redo all the automations, trying to figure out why it was happening. I even managed to break the entire project at one point, thankfully I had backups. I did eventually find the cause in one messed-up automation curve, but once I started fixing it, the vibe disappeared (and I would have had to rework the previous minute completely).

Then I thought, what on earth am I doing, and just added an automation that muted the click for a few milliseconds right in that spot. Sometimes, instead of messing around and wasting a ton of time while breaking everything else, you can just fix the problem with duct tape.

By the way, this is good advice in general: don’t overcomplicate things you can fix with simple solutions.