Category Archives: thought - Page 21

updated bio

Posted by on September 8, 2009 No comments

I updated my bio. Good? Bad? I’m hoping for 50% less suck when compared to the previous version. Man, I hate writing bio things and artist’s statements and whatnot almost as much as I detest doing up program notes. But what I had before in that space was physically painful to read.

umbrella!

Come to think of it, the whole self promotion thing is a drag. Someone with more tact might call it a necessary evil, but I’m not that guy. Hopefully I will release something soon and make all of these posts seem worthwhile in retrospect. Here’s to hoping!

journals

Posted by on September 4, 2009 No comments

I have kept journals for a very, very long time. I think it started in high school and tracks with my progress as a composer. I lacked the tools and talent to create the music that I imagined, so I wrote it out in prose and symbols. It wasn’t musical notiation in the traditional sense. There were lines and shapes. The visualization of imagined sounds. Much later I would study the notation of electronic music and see that I wasn’t alone. We rarely are.

My habit seems to be journaling more when I am composing less. It’s almost like switching muscle groups after a particularly rough workout. When the sounds aren’t coming, the words are. But as soon as the music returns, the journaling drops away. Since most of my journal entries during these musical dry spells are me moaning about how little I am producing I can only deduce that it’s a crutch of sorts to fill the idle time my mind and hands are having thrust upon them. It’s interesting that I’m posting as much on this blog as I am as I’ve been particularly productive lately.

It seems to me that journaling is an often ignored artform. There seems to be something of a resurgance in the popularity of journaling and there are many, many articles about how and why to journal floating around out there right now. There are the art journals that encourage us to scribble. Morning page journals that are set to wake up the creative mind and slowly brings us up to speed for the day. There are journals for tracking our habits. I prefer to keep all of these activities in the same place. I want a document.

lines

I admit that I am more than mildly obsessed with documenting my creative work. This goes back to my first experiences with playing the guitar. Even at the age of 15 I could see that traditional notation left out a lot of information about how something was intended to be played. Yet recordings are subjective and leave out whatever plan there was for the performance. It’s only by combining the two that we get anything close to a complete story. As an avid improvisor, it’s often difficult to record something during my Monday night session and get back into it on Wednesday because I might not remember what my plan was. What key was this in? What tuning did I use? So there is an impetus to document these things simply for my personal information. But there’s more to it than that.

There’s always more to it.

My brother is a brilliant artist. He takes photographs, draws, paints, and pushes computers to do crazy things with images. His final product is a document. More importantly, it’s something someone could hang on the wall. Each of our parents has something on the wall that he made. It’s very difficult to put up a recording and it doesn’t make much sense to hang a score. And the score isn’t the music. I’m not saying that there is a sibling rivalry to this day over who has more of their creative garbage on mom or dad’s walls, but it was the first time I really noticed that the musical process produces few physical artifacts and saw the deficiencies of what documents are produced.

In writing this blog, I’d like to be able to bring people into what I do. My end game here is to develop a small audience of maybe 100 people to listen to what I do in any way they choose. After all, music is nothing without someone to hear it. But the question is, how does one showcase something that is developing when scraps and pieces of recordings and bits of paper don’t really mean anything? A painting in process is one thing. A score in progress is quite another. Or is it? Maybe a nightly dump of everything that was done over the course of a session would be an interesting thing. And maybe it would be a silly pile of flawed recordings and pictures of indecipherable notes. The project I’m working on right now doesn’t lend itself to this, but an experiment/exercise might be in order.

sunset with heavy reverb

Posted by on September 2, 2009 No comments

The past two nights have been all about the tools. A new version of Logic would mean plenty of exploration even if this weren’t such a guitar heavy release. What’s killing me is that all of the features that were added are aimed straight at me. I can sit for hours and tweak this parameter or that and get totally lost in the sounds of my guitar. It’s a sensation that is loaded down with heavy memories.

When I was in high school, I managed to save up enough money to purchase a new Fender Stratocaster (American, thankyouverymuch!). It’s black with a white pickguard and a rosewood fretboard. Note the verb tense of that last sentence. It’s still in my studio and will be until the unthinkable comes to pass. In fact, changing out the pickups and electronics is on my winter to do list. That guitar was a turning point for me. It opened up a world of sounds. At the time, I had access to an early 70s vintage Fender Twin amp with the old spring reverb unit. My mom worked, so in the winter when the sun was setting early, I would sit in the basement after school with the last light of the day streaming through the window and play until my fingers hurt or I heard the garage door go up.

green treasure?

Technically, things were much simpler then. I had so few stomp boxes (maybe two?) and the amp itself had little more than EQ, poor grounding, and that reverb unit. But the sounds I could make were astonishing to me even then. There was such subtlety in the range of every pot on the amp. The differences between levels on different pickup settings. The art of blending them together. Searching for my sound was deep research; a mission.

That’s where I ended up last night. There’s the cute ability in Logic now to lay out a pedal board with all sorts of festively designed interfaces. It’s intuitive, quick, and as addictive as having all of those boxes on the floor at my feet. I sat and twisted this knob and that, always listening for the shifts in balance and tone. For that breaking point where the sound comes together and becomes the physical manifestation of my imagination. But rather than hit record and do something that would move the current track forward, I sat and played for a good hour. Not a bit was recorded. This is why I’ll likely stay the hell away from Mainstage. I could get lost in there!

It was beautiful. The guitar was sounding good as the sun went down. I forgot to turn on the lights and when I looked up, time was gone, it was dark, and everything felt right. It reminded me that those are the moments that encouraged me to become a musician. It was never the time spent on stage or performing in any capacity. It was the time alone in the studio. The meditative nature of practicing. Living in the sound and allowing the moment to be whatever it turned out to be. It’s not the kind of thing that can be shared, I don’t think. That’s sad on the one hand, but on the other, we have to admit that some of the great moments of life are spent discovering things in some kind of isolation. That flow should be embraced and celebrated.

roll with it

Posted by on August 28, 2009 No comments

The ol’ bag of tricks feels like it has gotten a significant upgrade lately. Making a list of track names before I have any music at all has been brilliant for tricking me into getting started in the studio because with a working title it feels like there is more of a plan. When I look at the list of titles, I have some idea of how that track should sound and because it’s in a list there’s an apparent functionality to it due to its placement. There are some of us who still believe in albums! But what I’m learning is that although I have motivated myself by believing that there is a plan, there is, in fact, no plan.

I was dead certain that what I was doing last night had to have a certain instrumentation to it. When I read the title I knew, I mean I really KNEW that it was destined to be something in particular. My hands didn’t agree. In fact, nothing agreed. The more I played around the more I saw that it had to be something else entirely. Trying to force preconceived notions onto a muse (or whatever) is a losing battle. Sometimes you’re going to paint the Mona Lisa and sometimes you’re going to paint a helicopter. There’s not much wisdom in trying to make one out of the other.

um...

Learning to roll with it is something that came to me relatively easily. It’s one of the few life lessons I got from doing plays (the other one being don’t date actresses unless you absolutely must). Even as a high school student in front of a crowd of friends and parents the addictive nature of laughter and applause quickly teaches give and take. Interpreting lines or melodies based on reactions and things that are truly outside of your control is an excellent skill to have. Now my home studio is about as far from a stage as you can get but the same lessons apply. I’m the only person in the room but my internal editor, the part of me that does the composing, and my hands all have equal say in what gets done. When two of them are stacked against the other, changes are made. Adapt or go read a book!

Last night I went from wanting to write something very sparse with little melody to something that sounds like Adrian Belew in a surf band. Tantalizing? It probably doesn’t sound like that at all, but when I go to pimp my album you’d better believe I will mention it. I really enjoy the result and I look forward to working on it more today. But it isn’t what I thought it would be. It turns out that’s OK. My new working philosophy is more about doing the work than doing the work I plan or envision. I know I’m supposed to be doing something but until I do it there isn’t much point in fretting over it or getting set up for a particular result. This is something that I will revisit soon.

In other completely unrelated news, it seems that Apple shipped Logic Studio 9 without telling me. I am not the kind of guy who keeps his head in the sand when it comes to software so I was a little unnerved when this was sprung on me by a buddy of mine. I’ve gotten a dozen emails from Apple about Snow Lepoard which will set me back $49 but nothing at all about a $199 upgrade to the new Logic? Not cool, yo. It’s a tradition (since Leopard…shut up, this is Texas and if you do something twice it’s a tradition! Or maybe that’s just A&M…) to go to the Apple store on the day the new OS is released so that three generations of nerds with the same first and last name can buy the best commercial UNIX package out there! I might have to sneak over and pick up Logic while I’m out. It’s not quite like dropping a pack of Juicy Fruit into the cart while mom isn’t looking but the requisite skills for successful execution are the same (does my wife read this blog? I should check the logs). In any case, the new audio editing features are something out of Blade Runner‘s “enhance image” scenes. Being able to push audio around like that is the stuff of dreams for a music tech grad student in 1995. It’s the kind of stuff that will be bread and butter for pop music but a powerful tool for expression in the hands of someone willing to use it in unconvetional ways. And don’t get me started on the new guitar stuff. That pedal board feature makes me giggle. Really, it does. Expect more chatter about this as events warrant.

what am i doing?

Posted by on August 26, 2009 No comments

It seems that the web around me is abuzz with people who share my frame of mind right now. A whole pile of things have shown up that completely click with where I am and what I am working toward. First, I should say that my untitled album project is moving along nicely. It’s a little strange that it’s going as well as it is and that I’m really enjoying the material even a week or more after calling it “done-ish.” I have some strong opinions on why that is. More about that as the project moves on.

Despite the fact that things are going well and I’m producing solid work on a regular schedule, I really miss posting things as soon as they’re mixed. It was nice to see people downloading mp3s and sending me email to let me know how it was going. But I am beginning to subscribe to the theory that if I want to create a collection that has continuity and should be taken as a whole, I need to be sure that it all goes out at once. It’s like telling someone about your great novel idea before the book is in any kind of draft state. There’s no drive to finish it because the cat is out of the bag and the story is told. I don’t want that to happen to me (again). But that feedback was immediate and felt really good. There was a great post about this desire to work in plain sight at Mildly Creative and you can read it here: Creating With The Door Open. I really get what he’s saying and since I just gave you a link, I don’t really need to go on about it here. Let’s just say that I will be posting something in the form of audio every week like I was doing with my sketches before summer hit to fill this gap for myself.

no worries

I have also been spending a lot of time analyzing how I do my creative work in the midst of my fulltime job and other assorted responsibilities. When thinking about living a dual existence, I often go back to Charles Ives. He’s certainly a hero of mine compositionally but he also gives me an idea of what one can do creatively while living a 9 to 5 (or 9 to 9) life. Another one to add to that list is T.S. Eliot. I’m a fan of his writing but I never really knew anything about the man. There was a post at Lateral Action about Eliot and how he managed to be as successful as he was while being a banker during the day and a poet at night. His wasn’t a lifestyle I would emulate, but he’s an inspirational character to be sure. Check out the article here: The T.S. Eliot Guide to Success.

A lot of this thinking comes from a brief discussion I had with my brother last week about something that my mom said a few months back. She made a comment about the fact that when she had only two hours to sit and write she would simply not do it because that wasn’t enough time to really dig in. Only. Two. Hours. One might imagine how that went over with the father of a 2 year old who might get one hour a day to devote to creative work. Let us say that I was not sympathetic to her situation. Apples to oranges? Maybe. But that apple sure has a lot of time on her hands from where this orange is sitting. It started me down the path of looking at what it means to work within the constraints of any given moment. Like I said the other day, breaking the rules is easier when you know them but I would add that having no rules at all or breaking them all the time doesn’t provide enough structure for good work to be done. A nifty post at Abundance Blog covers some of this nicely. Read it here: The Key to Success: Resourcefulness (Creativity + Determination). What I take from that and the things that have been bouncing around in my head is that we need a bedrock of boundaries to build on. Without some kind of block to whittle down the possibilities there are no limits and without limits there really is no imperative for action. Seriously, if mountains were easy to climb would anyone do it? Probably. But there wouldn’t be cool IMAX movies about it now would there?

That’s a lot of links. I don’t usually do that, but everything seems so related to where I am right now that it would be foolish to ignore.