pushing paint

Posted by on August 18, 2009 1 comment

It’s very important for each person to have one thing in life that doesn’t have to be done well to be enjoyable. For someone like me who has trouble enjoying things at which I do not excel, it is doubly so. A few years back, I picked up oil painting because it was the most interesting looking evening class being offered by the community college. It was hard not to get hooked on it right away. Make no mistake, I have no talent for it but the relaxing effect of playing with the color and the seemingly endless possibilities offered by the medium forced me to drop any pretense of ability and enjoy it.

Since my move to the expanse that is The Republic, I haven’t done much with it. It’s hard enough to squeeze in time for my musical work and having a little boy who is into everything all the time galavanting from room to room at mach 4 isn’t conducive to quiet reflection or, quite frankly, open tubes of paint. But I had an idea while I was playing with a piece of software called Scribbles. The idea seemed pretty good and I thought it might be nice to use some colors that would work in the living room. I pitched the idea to my wife and she was totally into it (she loves purely decorative paintings). Off I went to ye olde art shoppe.

don't sweat it

The project came to a close last night. It was so much fun. I turned on some music and just pushed the paint around the canvas. The scratching of the brush is a wonderful sound. The finished work (which I am loathe to call it) isn’t half bad. In fact, if I had any amount invested in the craft of painting, I would say that it’s some sort of minimal primitivism (or um…something like that…). But to feel good about that, I would have to be able to paint a still life that actually looked like its subject. These were the thoughts going through my head last night as I cleaned up my supplies. How much craft should one have to have mastered before being able to critique and classify one’s own work?

It’s my opinion that art and craft are two different things that are not entirely interrelated. I think one can have craft without art though it is difficult to go the other way around. During my schooling I was (and still am) always highly suspicious of composers who wrote aleatoric music or took on free jazz without being able to write a four voice chorale in the style of Bach or explain the basics of harmony and counterpoint. Something in my gut told me that it wasn’t acceptable to simply break the rules when there wasn’t a solid understanding of them. One can’t effectively go against the grain without knowing the grain intimately. After all, how can one create an effective reaction without having a precipitating action?

This all reeks of academic silliness best discussed with espresso and berets, but I think there’s something to this. Having a blog doesn’t make one a writer any more than my trip to the Artarama (not a joke! Great store!) makes me a painter. What does it take to cross that line? I believe that it’s craft. Knowing the medium. Appreciating it. Loving it. And time. So much time. A great deal in music that comes down to woodshedding. Those hours spent learning patterns and scales. The days of working on tone and intonation. There’s a reason it’s called a discipline.

Looking back on my painting classes and the time I spent with the canvas after them, it’s small wonder that I painted the same salt shaker time and time again. Something in me must have realized that the real work of learning a craft is in the etudes, not the masterpieces. The more time one spends with the etudes, the shorter the gap to the masterpiece. That is what separates the Professional, to borrow a term from The War of Art (yes, I’m still fully in love with this book) from everyone else. A Professional knows that there must be an investment in craft to achieve art. We can’t have art without it. Or at least we can’t sustain art without it. There are always outliers but they have that name for a reason. Who really wants to be a one hit wonder?

But I didn’t pick up the brush to make art. I did it to have fun and make something that would match the living room. The process of creating it was purely recreational and allowed me a space that did not have the demands that I place upon myself in my musical work. It is successful, but I don’t think it is art.

loving the work

Posted by on August 14, 2009 No comments

Les Paul died yesterday at the beautiful age of 94. Regrettably, I never saw him perform live. Being a guitar lover like I am and having spent so much time with music technology it’s impossible not to take a moment to show some respect for the man who brought us the solid body electric guitar (though I never really cared for the Les Paul as I am more of a philistine Strat guy) and multitrack recording. Those two things right there get him on the top 10 list, but in the interviews with him what made him truly remarkable was his love for doing what he did.

I have a profound respect and jealousy for people who are in love with their day jobs. Make no mistake, I enjoy what I do and I believe I’m pretty good at it. That said, I do it more because I have a knack for it and enjoy the problems than because of a deep and abiding passion for it. Les Paul had that passion and drive.

He was still playing live. Still granting interviews (check out http://fretboardjournal.com/ for an interview with him a couple of issues back – great stuff!). Still making and loving music. His ethic and approach are an inspiration and he’ll be sorely missed by those who appreciate what he brought to the art form.

Maybe I should pick up a Les Paul custom in his honor.

But I don’t think I’d want to explain the credit card charge to my wife.

current work

Posted by on August 13, 2009 4 comments

New tunes are being crafted this week. I have 80-90% of a leading track and it’s pleasing. There are some things that need to be filled in, but I need some distance from it. I’ll be starting on a new track tonight. The collection is aiming for something that I’ve wanted to do for some time but never got around to starting. It’s more ambient with lots of electric guitar so beaten and abused that it barely sounds like a stringed instrument much less a guitar. Frippertronics gone horribly, horribly wrong. Or right.

The trick I’m using this time is to start with titles for songs and work backward. I’ve always left titling pieces for the end because I hate tacking a name to musical units. Movements, songs, pieces, whatever. Op. 44 would be fine with me to be perfectly honest. But by starting with the titles, I have almost a theme with which to start each session and that provides a certain kind of motivation.

this should not make sense

I took a hint from a site I used to read and can’t recall now that mentioned looking to the titles of books, chapters or poems for song ideas. On a lark, I dove into my database of books (yeah, I database my personal library) and dug out some fragments of titles. It’s an ecclectic mix of names and topics but there’s a flow there that I have divined for myself and there is some small excitement in an experiement like this.

So I’m making an album that I have wanted to make and using a technique that is yet another in a long series of new to me mindhacks. That should be enough to see me through.

Unlike previous endeavors I am going to release this as a unit so I won’t be putting up sketches of material for this collection. I want it to be a larger piece with interrelated movements. There’s this sense that once I have shared something it’s done and I don’t want that. It could seriously get in the way of the overall form and I’m just not cool with that. That doens’t mean I won’t be posting music! I still have things that I’m working out that might never make it to the full on production stage. It’s absolutely necessary for anyone to have feedback so there will still be stuff here. And soon!

editing

Posted by on August 11, 2009 No comments

I’m a horrible editor.

To be clear, what I mean is someone who can evaluate a creative work in progress and help it to reach a better final form than if it had been left alone. The masters of the skills that go into making a great editor are few and far between and, in my experience, aren’t generally people who produce their own creative work. There are notable exceptions to that. I have known brilliant composers who could take a piece of work by a student, find that germ of an idea that had brilliant potential, and without extinguishing it direct its creator in the polishing of the idea until its potential was fulfilled. I can count those people on one hand and the world lost one of them not too long ago. How I wish I could say that I learned enough to be a worthy replacement.

The problem seems to be zeroing in on that thing that makes a piece tick. Everyone can tell while making something whether it’s working or not, but not all can express exactly what it is that works. Without that clarity it is difficult to discuss the quality that should be maintained above all else. I find that it’s a little easier with something that someone else has made but it’s really difficult for me to do with my own work.

One of my few regrets about the greenman collection is that many of the pieces on there had something but I didn’t take the time to polish them as I should have. I know full well that the collection itself was more an exercise in completing and releasing an album but some of the works with the most potential didn’t get the detailing that they needed to go from good to great. I have a nifty list of excuses, but the fact is that my inner editor didn’t really speak up loudly enough to drown out the producer who simply wanted it out the door. And one of the many reasons that voice wasn’t heard is that I don’t really trust it.

Because I don’t trust my internal editor, when I was in school I ditched the pencil when composing for the pen. Pencils have erasers. Pens don’t. Something written in pen can be crossed out, but it’s difficult to obliterate it entirely. I found that many things that I erased or crossed out were actually pretty good the next day. Like a good soup they needed time in my mind to blend with other flavors and ripen into something wonderful or at the very least useful. I was led to the conclusion that my ability to edit while composing is suspect at best and that the task should be put off for 24 hours and preferably three days. Not much has changed since then.

I’m not very good at finding that thing that makes something cool. Especially while I’m in the process of working on it.

That was set in relief for me while I was working on a new tune. I put down a track of fingerstyle guitar and started layering on top of it. The layers were sounding better and better while the original track started to drift downward in comparative quality. By mistake I muted that track and it went from zero to really good. What I thought was the central theme turned out to be more of a scaffold than anything else. When it was pulled away the structure maintained itself and was more beautiful than before. If I were a better editor, I would have heard that sooner. Maybe. I can see my future randomly muting tracks while composing from now on just to see what needs to be there and what doesn’t.

accountability

Posted by on August 10, 2009 No comments

Accountability is a tough nut to crack. It can be a powerful tool when employed to get something done, but creating the right circumstances for it is difficult. Moreso when one is creating in a solo environment with no external pressures keeping deadlines in tact and work moving forward. It’s one of the larger pitfalls of functioning independently. It might also be one of the benefits.

What I mean is, when I want to accomplish something I need to find a mechanism for motivating myself when I’m exhausted. Having a family and a fulltime job can really take the wind out of my sails and make noodling around on the endless expanse of the internet more attractive than settling in to record something. One of the better motivators for me in recent memory was my commitment to post a new sketch, not a finished product, every Thursday. I stuck to that and it worked for quite a while. Well, until I was beaten down by a massive heat wave in June. That coupled with air conditioning failures more or less derailed most of my non-survival related activities. But my Thursday posts were something that I used to keep myself honest and they were a great idea. Yay me.

The only detractor to my weekly post was the lack of specificity. I had to post “something.” It didn’t have to be coherent or move any of my larger projects along, it simply had to exist. From a certain point of view that’s plenty good enough but if there is a larger goal in mind (like an album or collection or large scale work) I might have actually lost ground while appearing to make progress. The head games are all very tricky.

So why not simply lay out my end game and mark progress toward it? A lot of reasearch types have indicated that in some cases talking about something gives people the same charge as having done it. It’s like having the idea is enough and once we’ve communicated it the execution becomes unnecessary. I know I have allowed myself to fall into that more than once. My old journals are littered with references to projects that never went anywhere.

If telling someone about something makes me less likely to do it and doesn’t necessarily add any accountability then how does this work? Like everything else in life it comes down to personal discipline. The only person who can really hold me accountable is me. I’m really the only one who cares if I ever write another lick of music. I’m the only one who cares if it’s any good. The rest of the world would be perfectly happy to have me trot along with the other things I’m doing and could not care less about my urge to compose or record.

Accountability is about the person doing the work. It’s about me.

This stuff always sounds painfully hokey and I would ignore it if it weren’t completely true. But it is. My next trick is to come up with a way to make it work for me. Find a way to strike that balance and use the world around me to keep me moving while it’s trying to get in my way. There’s a hack in there somewhere and I will find it.

If anyone is listening, do you have any clues?