Category Archives: thought - Page 12

focus and flow

Posted by on May 11, 2010 No comments

The new guitar is getting a French polish. Shellac and a wad of cotton wrapped up in a t-shirt scrap traveling over the surface of the wood in tiny figure eights. With a little boy running around it can be difficult to focus, but this task seems to demand all of the attention it deserves. The result is so uniform and shiny. And deep. It’s like the wood blooms right there as the shellac coats it. The colors change and the detail is more pronounced. It’s hard to ignore the beauty in what has been dubbed a labor intensive process.

Like sanding, where a little material is removed with each pass, the polishing action adds a little at a time. It’s precision work. It would be easy to space out and miss something or ignore a finer detail, but the meditative nature of such a task provides focus. For me, it’s easy to achieve flow in these moments. When the coat is complete and the shellac needs time to cure or when more needs to be made, getting up from my chair feels good. I’m rested. My mind is clear. I feel refreshed.

By the weekend I should be ready to glue on the neck and mount the bridge. I can shape and prepare the nut. The instrument may even be strung and playable by the beginning of next week. Then it’s back into the studio for some recording and back to the drawing board to lay out the next guitar. I wish I could imagine a better pass time, but I can’t.

listening and me

Posted by on May 5, 2010 2 comments

One of the things I do on my lunch hour is write in my journal. There are piles of essays in there on every topic that trips my trigger. Lately, I’m thinking seriously about my relationship with music and the guitar. It’s hard to do that and keep a straight face sometimes. We all want to believe that our relationship with music is unique. That it’s more complex than can be communicated in words. But I honestly believe that it’s like that for everyone. Music is a very different experience in that almost everyone listens to it and everyone who does has a reaction. I have met very few people who are indifferent about music. Ask someone about a genre and you are likely to hear either “love” or “hate” in the response. Seldom do we hear “yeah, I mean, I’m OK with country music.”

As I dig in to how my listening has changed over the last decade or so, it’s strange to see how picky I have become. It’s almost like my time is worth more now that we’re in a world where music is inexpensive and plentiful. And with the increase in the amount of music we have and the nearly invisible barrier to entry for artists, I don’t have the same personal gatekeepers that I once did. The result is that I strike out in fits and grab what clicks and leave the rest. It’s sad to say that I rarely let my iPod go on shuffle for more than two songs before I get twitchy and kick it over to the next song. And lately playlists are a bust as well.

Maybe I’m getting moody in my old age. Nah.

I think it plays into my creative process. I’m not interested in input right now. I want to play and record. I’d hate to think that my subconscious is silly enough to think it’s done listening, but maybe I need a break. Maybe it’s time to push full steam ahead and produce. Rolling into my least productive time of the year, that’s a frightening thought. But we have to ship, right? No point in saying you’re an artist if you never make anything.

The Recording Devil

Posted by on April 27, 2010 2 comments

This past weekend we had the great pleasure of hosting my good buddy Astra. She and I have been sending recordings back and forth for a while now and it seemed like a good idea to import her from her native land of Canada for a jam session and to hang out in general. She’s a lot of fun and aside despite having my son fall in love with her and follow her everywhere she went, we got some recording done. The best part was that we were able to get together with my buddy Jason of Cloxco fame (if there is any fame there…which there isn’t, but it’s my blog and I make the rules). Having two great singers in one room was an amazing experience. There’s nothing like the exquisite pleasure of making music with good friends who happen to be very talented musicians.

CHICKENS!!!!!

The way that Jason and I work is simple. We have two rules: three takes maximum for any track and nothing is allowed to be perfect. We’re really good at adhering to both of them. Astra did a great job of hanging with us on that.

What I find funny, and what prompted this line of thought, is that the three of us are pretty good with the whole performance thing and yet are so very self-deprecating. It’s difficult to listen to yourself and not be incredibly critical. I’ve done it for years. There were hours and hours spent recording myself in front of my little pocket tape recorder and listening to the playback so that I could get some idea of how I sounded so that I could improve. It floors me that today I could use my iPhone and get 100 times the quality and recording time out of it. Hell, when I was in college the idea of a cell phone for regular people wasn’t real yet. In any case, those recordings were a way to get better. They were a way to be critical of my performance in a positive way.

The recordings we made this weekend captured something that has never happened before and might not happen again for a long time. It’s impossible for me to treat it as a musical recording in any critical sense. It was our first exposure to the material and the first time we’d all been in the same room together. Great things happened and I’m very happy that I captured it. The recordings are documents. It doesn’t make them devoid of musicality or immune to criticism; that would miss the point entirely. What it does is imbue them with something special. Something extra. The feeling that fingers slipping around or missed down beats are unimportant in that context. The recordings capture an energy and a moment.

By all accounts we had a great time. The resulting recordings are awesome and the future work that will come from them has me bouncing with excitement.

making things

Posted by on April 22, 2010 No comments

I took last week off and spent it with my family. We camped for two nights and that was fantastic! We also made a trip to Austin to visit friends and family (they can be the same people, you know). I spent the time when we weren’t traveling in the garage working on my newest guitar. It’s another OM style instrument. This one has higher quality materials and I’m certainly paying more attention to the details since I know where they are now. I think it will be a better instrument overall and is moving much more quickly toward completion than its predecessor.

Building the instrument has brought up a number of issues for me, not the least of which is the question of the artisan and quality. Easy credit and over-consumption has done horrible things to our culture. Everything is a commodity. As a result, there is little to no attachment between people and the things they own. I find that disturbing. Not only do we own too much stuff, we don’t care about any of it on a more than superficial level (how much money and time will it take to replace?). That’s sad. Now, I don’t much care about the perception of others when it comes to the things I have, but I care about my perception and relationship to the things. If I have something that I use every day, I want it to be of high quality and meet my needs in a way that is better than just getting something done. Isn’t it better to buy a hammer that will last a lifetime than to buy one every two or three years?

clamped!

It’s also starting to sink in that objects made by artisans have two relationships that are more and more important to me: the relationship between the creator and the item and that of the item and its final owner. This is a small part of why I drool endlessly over the Saddleback Leather bags. They are handmade by artisans. They are of high quality. They will outlast me. That last bit may be a part of why it’s important to me to build a great instrument. I have the hope that someone will enjoy it after I am long gone. The hope that it will persist. This could appear to be very romantic and silly, but if we don’t have a relationship with the things we make and use, there is less depth and ritual in their use. Is that important? Yes!

An instrument that feels good, sounds good, and looks good can inspire a player. There is a certain characteristic of an instrument that draws a person to play it. There isn’t really any good way to quantify that and we shouldn’t try. What works for me will not work for someone else and, frankly, I don’t care. That give and take is unique and beautiful. Whatever it is in that instrument that inspires joy and literally forces someone to make music doesn’t have a suitable word in English (that I know of) and is more important than the monetary value attached to it or the fashion of the day.

I’m looking at the things in my life and trying to simplify them. I need less stuff, but the stuff that I have needs to be more than just stuff off of some assembly line. I would rather pay more for the character and experience. It comes down to this: if what you’re doing matters, then what you’re doing it with has to be seriously considered. Surrounding myself with inspiration is the surest path to results that I know.

writing and writing

Posted by on April 6, 2010 No comments

One of the funny things about creative work is that the idea in the head can often run counter to plans. That’s why plans are so wonderful. They provide a direction in the event that the next step isn’t clear. But that doesn’t mean that a plan is The Plan. The last two weeks have been a painful reminder of this fact.

In my head when I’m moving through my day, there’s a bit of music that repeats itself. It’s something highly processed. Very soft and amorphous. More of a texture than a melody or harmony. It sits just at the edge of my hearing. It’s very attractive. I’m more and more moved by it.

But that’s not what I’m doing in the studio.

When I go into the sanctuary that is my studio, I get distracted. I pick up a guitar, recently it’s the one I made as it’s more and more my only instrument, and strum. Or pick. Or just noodle a bit. The next thing I know, the framework of a more traditional song structure produces itself. In fact, this has happened probably 8 times in the last two weeks. Good ideas are flowing from the stream that I’m not as excited about. Or so it would seem. But I’m not one to buck the muse. When things are working, they’re working and that’s so much better than when everything goes dead silent.

So the notebook is filling itself with chord progressions and snippets of melody. Alternate tunings. My own brand of notation. The pages become overrun with ink and I hurry to record a stable version for future reference. All is well. When this storm dries up, I can go back and rework some things. I’ll have a bed of material to get things moving again and new inspiration will strike. And eventually I’ll get to write the piece that’s sitting just out of sight.