Category Archives: thought - Page 17

gear failure

Posted by on February 2, 2010 2 comments

There are some simple pieces of equipment that make my musical life possible. My instruments, of course, and my computer are the key players in the game. Without those I’m stuck. But it’s never the guitar that fails, it’s the cable, right? well, since my son showed up the most important piece of gear in my studio would be my headphones. I’ve had my Sennheiser HD-25s for a long time. Close to 10 years, actually. They were brilliant right up to the end. A short in the cable coupled with something that I can’t quite diagnose has brought their demise.

This is a hassle.

So I ordered up a new set being as I live in the 4th largest city in the United States and for some reason can’t find the cans I want. And now I wait. If only I lived in Austin or got out that direction more often I could have access to great stuff. As it stands I am a hostage to the internet and various shipping companies. Of course if these are the height of my complaints it’s all just whining. And it is.

That isn’t to say that I’m not working. I have plunked out a few things but I’m feeling nervous about hitting my weekly recording. If all else fails, I will pick up my 12 string, hit record, and hope for the best. It’ll be like an open mic night but with only one musician in the room.

There’s a lot for me to say about my new guitar (it sounds great!) and the instrument building projects I have coming up. I want to make some gifts for friends and a recent twist of fate put me on track for just such a venture. More on that soon.

Music soon.

overload

Posted by on January 26, 2010 No comments

It seems to me that now would be a great time to unplug from the Internet. I guess I’m falling for whatever the name for the slow information movement is. The more I’m deluged with RSS feeds and blogs and podcasts the more I want to put my head someplace else. But that’s not really feasible on many levels. The fact remains that we are an information based society. If you haven’t heard the latest from the Twitter stream then you’re completely out of the loop.

I think about my vacation strategy at times like these. I used to select where I went on vacation by the amount of connectivity it had. If I could find a hotel with no phones I would take it. The fewer cell towers the better. Now that’s almost impossible despite what the major carriers say about one another. The fact is my phone will ring in most places if I let it. What I think a lot of people are seeing now is that in the same way that I want to control access to my time while I’m on vacation we all want to control access to our attention on a daily basis.

It seems like a silly problem. It’s really, really easy to put the computer down or turn it off. We don’t have to surf from our phones while at lunch, but we do it anyway. It’s a habit that needs to be broken. I truly admire the remaining holdouts who have avoided falling into the pit. That said, it’s serious business.

All day long we hear (and read) about how the Internet has changed everything. You can’t exist without a web presence. Worth is measured in social networks and “followers.” Having just finished American Gods I find that amusing. And forget trying to be a creative person without a dozen ways to make yourself and your work available to as broad an audience as possible. These challenges cut both ways. I want everyone to look at my stuff but I want to control access to my attention.

What am I doing? I’m paring down my feeds. I’m getting really, really selective. It’s high time for an information diet. More time with my head in a book and less time with eyeballs glued to the screen. And much more attention to building instruments and making music. Hell, the Internet could wash away as long as I have a good six string.

None of this will stop my blabbing on this blog twice a week of course. This is quality content!

collaboration

Posted by on January 5, 2010 No comments

Maybe the one thing that the Internet does well is put people with a purpose in touch with one another in such a way as to allow important things to get done. For me, important things are almost always related to music. I’m doing a lot of work now with a friend who is a short drive to Austin away and another who is up in the frozen hinterlands known to the locals as “Canada.” I’m shuffling a lot of bits back and forth across these intarwebz and actually seeing some promising results.

huh?

Working with people at a distance on something as temporally volatile as music isn’t ideal. I much prefer sitting on the couch in my living room with the people I’m playing with so we can build something up and enjoy the give and take. A little eye contact to see when things are going to get quiet. Or watching hands to see what I just screwed up so I don’t do it again. It’s instant feedback and everything is so malleable.

Playing with a recording is like playing with a ghost. But playing with a ghost is better than being alone. Unless you’re in a “Poltergeist” movie. Or that one movie about the house that dripped blood. That was gross.

What I mean is that it’s difficult to play off of that wall that is the recording. It can be unnerving, that lack of responsiveness. Music is all about give and take and that constant flux. It isn’t all lost in a situation like this, but it’s harder to see it that way. What slowly changes is the way what’s played relates to what is recorded. Imperfections in the recording take on a different character and define what comes later. And in the give and take that happens over hours or days the natural cooling off period allows for a more critical eye. In many ways dragging out the process can improve it.

That sounds like a great way to dress up the fact that my friends don’t live next door and that I can only record at weird hours anyway.

There are a couple of things underway right now and hopefully there will be tunes to share in the very near future. I’m slowly becoming OK with sharing things that are in progress as a way of keeping myself honest. It doesn’t have to be finished, it just needs to be done. Watch this space for more tunes soon.

non-list post

Posted by on December 18, 2009 No comments

As is the case around the end of the year, some things are slowing down to a crawl and other things are picking up speed. Creatively I have a lot going on but none of it has made it to the blog. Following the release of Nothing Of Consequence I started something in an entirely different vein. It was good to put myself into something different and I’ve gotten together about five tunes. I did a little digging and have found a couple of people who wouldn’t mind singing on a track or two and collaborating with me. That’s really good news as it’s something that I miss. Along those lines, I’m starting up another site to host those collaborations. More on that as events warrant. Which is to say, until I get some free time or there are three or four tracks to share, I’m too busy to build.

Speaking of building, after finishing the lute I ramped up work on my first guitar. I’m down to a few nitpicky bits and it should be strung up shortly! It ain’t pretty, but it’s beautiful. And if I can knock that out before the end of the year it will be quite an accomplishment psychologically. Two instruments and an album in one year is pretty good for someone with a full time job. To be fair, most of it happened in the last half of the year which means that I could have done a lot more. I don’t do new year’s resolutions but if I did it would center around raising the priority of my musical output and upping the ante on building instruments. Maybe I should be all hip and make an end of the year list so that I can track my shortcomings over the next year. I love arbitrary deadlines and mind games, so I might just do that. Let’s see…

1. A new album of solo material.
2. A collection of collaborations.
3. More covers with friends.
4. At least one new instrument.
5. Something super-secret.
6. Come up with a magic bullet for pimping my tunes.
7. More time with the blog (relates to #6).

All of those seem pretty reasonable. But don’t all lists?

The Things We Love

Posted by on November 28, 2009 4 comments

Everything changes. The things that we love today are gone so quickly. And by “things” and “love” I mean the pastimes and activities that we use to define ourselves. So much can be communicated about one’s character by simply giving the title of a favorite book or stating a passion for a particular kind of music. These are the loves that fill in the gaps. The thoughts that cement the routine together. Certain songs on the way to work or a book after dinner gives meaning to the mundane. To see the way they have changed and will change can be disconcerting.

I have a library. It isn’t an Umberto Eco library but it’s a pain to move. I love books. I usually can’t leave a book store without dropping $30 to $50. In a good book store like Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa I can walk in and simply let the shelves speak to me. There is always something. I reach out to the shelf and pick it up. It’s there in my hand. I can feel the weight. The physical presence of the object tells me things. I know how many pages are in it and can guess at how long it will take me to read it. I can flip through it and skim a bit. There are margins for doodling and, after I have purchased it, a receipt to fold up and use as a bookmark. But it won’t be like this for long.

When I was in high school in the late eighties and early nineties, things had already changed in the way I listened to music twice. Music went from vinyl records to cassettes and then from cassettes to compact discs. (Note: I’m leaving out the almighty 8-track because, well, we should pretend that some things didn’t happen.) There are some records that by the time I was a senior I had purchased three times! And with each change in medium, something was gained and something was lost.

A record had liner notes. There was a jacket with a huge piece of cover art. The art said nothing about the quality of the music inside, but it was an integral part of the experience. People born after 1980 will just have to take my word for it. Records also enforced time limits. Only so many songs could be on a side. And there were two sides! An A side and a B side. Most of the heavy hitting material was on the top of the album with some often times less heard material on the back. So many great songs were relegated to the B side. I was going to say that the entire B side of Synchronicity by The Police was excellent stuff but I think that that particular album reaches into the future. I’ll get back to that momentarily. The medium dictated form and forced artists to make decisions about their material. A record was a piece of art because of what it was physically.

But records could be scratched and broken. They could melt. And they couldn’t be played in cars. Enter the cassette. There was still some cover art, but it was all but lost. It’s impossible to appreciate a Yes album cover shrunk to that size. It may as well not be there. There was still an A and a B side so the album format was maintained. It was the first step to making music portable and giving us choices. We could listen to a particular tape in the car or on a portable stereo anywhere. We gained something important and lost something important. But it was nothing compared to the next step.

My first CD player was a Sony portable unit with detachable speakers. It had dual cassette decks for making mix tapes and it was awesome. By the time CDs had come into vogue, my record collecting days were over. I had piles and piles of cassettes that littered my vintage ‘84 Ford Escort. I was even beginning to lose some interest in things that made records so important in terms of form. A cassette can be run in fast forward to skip a song. Skipping a song on a record is work. Skipping a song on a CD is nothing more than a single click of a button. The attraction was strong.

But there was another button on my CD player that changed everything for all time: shuffle. Yes, shuffle. I could click a button and it would play the CD in a random order. I didn’t have to listen to it as the artist intended. The machine could mix it up so that it was new every time. The implications of this simple action are huge. It negates years of experience in ordering tracks for dramatic effect. Imagine if The Beatles had put the tracks of Sgt. Pepper in alphabetical order. When I was first playing around with the shuffle function, it was hard to know why artists wouldn’t start doing just that. I believe that this has led to the front loading of albums in a shameless sense. Most albums today have the singles dumped up front and everything else just follows.

The other enormous change was having only one side. Looking back for a moment to Synchronicity, I think that this could very well be the perfect CD. The tracks flow across sides beautifully and since almost every song on that album was a single, having it run straight through or in a random order produces excellent results. But having a single side and treating an album as a collection of songs exposes the filler tracks for what they are. This should raise the bar for song writing, but sadly (or not), CDs weren’t the end of the road.

Today we have fully digital music that requires no physical media at all. Why buy a CD when I can jump online, click once, and have it on my iPod? Nothing to clutter my shelves, no broken jewel cases, and no plastic platters to crack. Oh, and none of those filler tracks if I don’t want them. That’s right, I don’t have to be forced to choose between buying the full item or the singles that a label chooses to sell. I can take any song or songs I want and leave the rest to rot.

What has digital music brought me? Well, for starters, two weeks worth of music on a device that is the size of a pack of cards, acts as a phone, checks my email, and keeps my to do list all while playing video golf. I can have an enormous collection and order it any way I like. My music is entirely about me.

What have I lost? In some sense, the intent of the artist. There’s no limit to how many songs can be in a collection. Album art is all but dead. There are no cool liner notes with inside jokes and crazy nicknames. I don’t have to abide by the order the artist applies to the songs. She may as well not bother. I have also lost context. Is a gentle introduction with a delicate guitar figure going to do well on the heels of “The Ace of Spades”? What is it doing there anyway?

Has any of this ruined music for me? No, but it has changed it dramatically. The evolution of the media that brings me my favorite songs has forever changed my relationship to them. There is no judgement made here, it’s simply changed.

What does any of this have to do with books? I ordered an eBook reader. My reading will no longer be tethered to a specific physical object. An entire library could someday fit in that device. I won’t know how many pages are in a book anymore because I will be able to change the font size on my reader. Pages will cease to have meaning. Will the focus shift to words? Can I retrain myself to think that way? How will publishers present this to me? Will the cover of the book slowly die? Will I read more because I will have one-click access to books? Will I miss the turning of the pages the way I missed the crackle of the needle on turntable only to have it pass away into memory as something that was important only once it was gone? What will the eBook do to the form and format of the novel or books in general? Will it destroy our notion of the book the way mp3 files have killed the album?

The changes to my music collection happened slowly over time and more importantly, when I wasn’t paying attention. With eBooks I am hyperaware of what it means to make this change. And I care.

We change. So do the things we love.