Monthly Archives: March 2009 - Page 2

permission

Posted by on March 10, 2009 No comments

probably the single most important thing i have ever done creatively was giving myself permission to not be good at everything that i do. in school i was a part of the nerd brigade. advanced this, a.p. that. the expectations were high and my performance was generally pretty good. the downside of this was that i didn’t encounter a lot of failure and when i did, there was such a negative reaction that i quickly found myself in the mindset of “if i’m not good at it, i won’t do it and then i can’t fail.” this is not a very useful way to get through life.

no one person is going to be good at everything and trying to be must lead to a painfully neurotic sensibility that can’t be much fun to be around. we have to be free to try new things and make mistakes. without mistakes, there is no learning. after all, when was the last time anyone learned something from doing it perfectly?

this all leads to my instrument building. taking things down to the bottom is a lot of fun. sometimes it’s not enough to simply play the guitar, one must build it first. it all sounds silly, but it has brought unforeseen levels of satisfaction. i started with a kit a long time ago (or so it seems) and now i have a lot more than just a pile of good looking kindling.

starting from a kit has taught me a lot. i can see how everything fits together and without having to fabricate the parts i can focus on construction. there has been time to build jigs, acquire clamps, and fashion a workspace that is flexible and functional. the way i’m thinking now though, it will be guitar number four that will be the first “good” instrument. maybe.

this first guitar is from a kit and it has some issues. i made several mistakes from which i couldn’t really recover. the next guitar will be from scratch so who knows what i’ll screw up when fabricating the parts. the third guitar will likely be more shaking out of bugs in my process. but number four should be something decent. or maybe it won’t. it doesn’t really matter because i’m just excited to be doing it. and that’s the way things should be.

here are some pictures of my current progress:

braced top

braced top

clamped top

clamped top

side braces

side braces

clamped back

clamped back

music is coming up this thursday. i have a sketch that feels pretty good and i’m expecting it to come together nicely by then.

fermata

Posted by on March 5, 2009 No comments

a lot of things have conspired to get in the way of me posting new music tonight. the acquisition of logic studio led to a ton of screwing around with various loops and cool plug-ins. i even did some time with the cool apple training book for logic. so there was a lot of looping and messing with my keyboard but not a lot of productivity. sometimes, that’s how it goes.

i have, however, made serious inroads on the guitar. the top and back are now completely braced and i should be able to attach them to the sides this weekend. there is so much to be learned from building this kit. when i start my first “from scratch” guitar i will have a much better idea of what i’m doing and will be able to avoid a ton of mistakes.

on another note, i was struck by something a friend said the other day about it being impossible to be robinson crusoe any more. with the pile of “social networking” sites and the internet being what it is, simply disappearing isn’t much of an option any more. i contrast that with friends i know who are, like me, semi-islands. we huddle off by ourselves in spare bedrooms, learning to play other instruments because we don’t live lives that allow for collaboration on our terms. there is some brilliant work being done out there on those islands and cast onto the waves like a message in a bottle. romantic, huh? i kinda like it.

i know from google analytics that people are looking at what i do. i get feed back. i try to give as much as i can when i find others in similar situations. i use the facebooks and myspaces of the web to broadcast to as wide an audience as i can find. in a sense, for artists living today these are the most connected and isolated of times. especially for those of us with day jobs.

that’s been rattling around in my head for some time and i don’t know that it makes any more sense now that it’s on the screen.

logic studio ate my jazz post

Posted by on March 3, 2009 No comments

i should be posting about the second set of lessons in the awesome jazz guitar book i mentioned below but i’m not. tonight i was distracted by logic studio and the coolness that it brings to the table. i upgraded (after teaching the dudes at the apple store about how the pricing works…sigh) and have been having a little too much fun messing around with it. the deal is, quite simply put, that the difference between logic express and studio is vast.

if all i got out of it was the space designer plugin interface, i would be quite content. in fact, that’s why the upgrade was planned. the presets and less than adequate access to specific parameters left me feeling like there was too much missing when defining the sound of acoustic instruments. my studio is a very dead, very small spare bedroom that lacks anything that resembles character. the living room/dining room of the house has hard floors and sounds great but there’s that whole “little boy and dog running all over the place” hurdle to clear. so i need to have a little something extra. space designer brings the love.

also of note, the sculpture synth. it does some funky modeling and produces some really lush pads. i’m a huge fan of camel audio’s cameleon 5000 soft synth and sculpture gives it a real run for its money. most of my studio time tonight was burned just moving sliders and messing around with weird pads. it’s really exciting to have access to this.

i still haven’t touched main stage or wave burner or soundtrack pro. wave burner will likely be that app that i can’t live without, but we’ll see.

also of note is the presence of all of apple’s jam packs in the logic studio suite. there are some that i could live without and a pile that really do provide that certain something. a point of departure or an enhancement. a lot of the loops to my mind are the equivalent of dumping some onion soup mix into a meatloaf because although you know you could measure out each and every spice you really have other, more important things you could be doing. yeah, the apple loops are like that.

i’m very pleased with the upgrade. this week’s sketch will probably be some more silly electronica with wild, overdone pads and drum loops processed through whatever i can dig up. this is seriously fun stuff.

and next week it’s back to the jazz studies! seriously! come back thursday for tunes.