The cover art for eu-IV’s SHINELIKETHESUN album.

The Micro-Chop Daily X #7

A Micro-Chop playlist featuring 10 hand-picked instrumentals — every single day for an entire year.

Gino Sorcinelli
Sep 4, 2018 · 4 min read

I t’s funny, when you commit to a project that’s really ambitious and crazy, people tend to look at you like you’ve lost your damn mind after you explain the game plan to them. I’ve had that reaction several times in the past week when I tell family and friends I’m making a 10-beat playlist every single day for a full year. That’s how I know I’m on to something.

The Micro-Chop Daily X #7—ten hand-picked instrumentals for your listening enjoyment.

When it comes down to it, I can be an insufferable and stubborn asshole. I don’t like to be told that I can’t do something. So when I see people openly doubting my ability to pull this thing off, it gives me an additional boost of energy to see The Micro-Chop Daily X playlists all the way through to the end.

In this day and age, if you want people to care about your articles, website, and writing, being a good writer isn’t enough in most cases. I guess once you’ve reached a certain level of financial stability it might be enough, but if you’re an emerging writer still looking for an online audience and building your brand, you have to find different ways to engage people and get them interested. Some people might care about your words based on their own merit, but other people need an added bonus to engage with your articles.

Before I launched The Micro-Chop Daily X I made over 60 playlists for my readers to enjoy. I focused on specific DAWs, drum machines, labels, producers, samplers, and every other imaginable angle that I could find to organize music into some kind of cohesive collection. These took me hours and hours and hours to compile and organize. And you know what? They didn’t make as much of a difference in generating views as you might think.

Every music site is doing playlists now. If you want to stand out, you have to do something with greater frequency and more consistency than any and every other site to get people’s attention.

Doing a daily playlist lets me potentially hook someone who might have otherwise ignored Micro-Chop. It helps me interact with a broader pool of artists with greater frequency. And it gives me a fun, built-in writing prompt every single day. This is a useful tool for any writer trying to put something out into the world on a daily basis.

I also dig the fact that there are endless ways to organize these playlists. For Daily X playlists 1–3, I selected beats from a broad spectrum of artists that I really like. There was no real central theme other than the songs worked well together.

After #1–3 I decided it would be interesting to organize the lists by crews and labels. I dedicated entire Daily X playlists to Mello Music Group, Fat Beats, and Mutant Academy.

For today’s playlist, I’m going back to a broad spectrum of artists and no particular theme. I plan on alternating between the two styles over and over again so people don’t get burned out on either one.

So there you have it. One week of Micro-Chop Daily X playlists down, 51 weeks to go before I meet my goal. I don’t know how I’ll feel about all of this in a month, but it’s a lot of fun right now. I hope today’s playlist inspires you to dig further into each artist’s catalog and provides you with some new favorites.

The seventh playlist in this series features the following artists, with each name hyperlinked to bring you directly to their Bandcamp, SoundCloud, or website: Courtney Hawkins, Jett I Masstyr, Lee Bannon, baechulgi, Sarah, The !llstrumentalist, DJ Babu, Linafornia, Southpaw, Kreatev, eu-IV.

Be on the lookout for The Micro-Chop Daily X #8 dropping tomorrow.


If you enjoyed this piece, please consider following my Micro-Chop and Bookshelf Beats publications or donating to the Micro-Chop Patreon page. You can also read my work at HipHopDX or follow me on Twitter.

Micro-Chop

Dissecting beatmaking, DJing, music production, rapping, and sampling.

Gino Sorcinelli

Written by

Freelance journalist @Ableton, ‏@HipHopDX, @okayplayer, @Passionweiss, @RBMA, @ughhdotcom + @wearestillcrew. Creator of www.Micro-Chop.com and @bookshelfbeats.

Micro-Chop

Dissecting beatmaking, DJing, music production, rapping, and sampling.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade