Category Archives: accountability - Page 4

Computers

Posted by on April 5, 2011 No comments

The guitar wasn’t my only interest as a kid. When I was in grade school, first or second grade maybe, my dad got a C/PM-80 computer with two (TWO!) 8 ½” floppy disk drives. It sat on top of a file cabinet in the office space of our house. The case was made from a couple of metal boxes that were spray painted dark blue. The machine was glorious. With a couple of Byte magazines and some books I got from the elementary school book fair I went to work learning BASIC. It was an amazing time.

When I wasn’t messing around with my friends all summer long, I was holed up in that room learning to use and write programs. I learned logic. I began to understand syntax. I was figuring out one of the most important lessons of my life: how to teach myself things. It was my dealing with the bit box that led me to the conclusion that I could probably do just about anything with the right book and some spare time. Thirty or so years later it still feels true.

My dad always made sure that we had a computer in the house. Always. He’s a nerd of the first order but more than that he really understood where the world was going and how it was going to get there. He didn’t predict the timing of the explosion of the Internet, but he knew it was coming. That’s a lot more than most could say since most people didn’t know that there was an Internet until it was on the cover of every magazine and newspaper (remember those? So quaint!).

With a simple upgrade came a modem. With a modem came figuring out how to communicate with one of my nerd buddies down the block over a computer. No one would think anything of a 5th grader chatting on a computer today, but back in the early 80s? No one even knew what that meant (unless they’d seen War Games). And for that I am thankful!

The BBS community taught me how to get my hands on software that I didn’t write. I learned to make noises with that little speaker inside of the PC. By the time the SoundBlaster card (yeah, the original with 8 blazing bits of audio fidelity!) came out, I could write some pretty cool software that made music.

The experimentation that was possible with computers held my attention. I understood what could be. I could someday record my guitar onto my computer. But at 11 MB/minute of stereo CD quality audio, that wasn’t going to happen until I was in graduate school. Nonetheless, I watched and waited. I went to NYU where I could get my hands on all of that tasty technology. I was surrounded by people who understood what could be done with those boxes with the blinking lights. It all made sense.

Some of the software that I wrote back then, in 1995, was pretty cool. It was at that moment that the whale of the Internet was breaching into popular consciousness. More and more musicians and composers were trading ideas. Motion capture, interactive environments, and artificial performers were the hot topics. I was in the middle of it. The things I saw and the people I met inspire me to this day. Oh, and all of that Internet nerdery eventually led to full time, gainful employment. A nice side benefit for composers of unpopular music who like to eat and sleep in warm, dry places.

Computer music dominated my life for most of my 20s. I lost track of the guitar for a while. It sat in a spare bedroom waiting for me. I did eventually find my way back, but it took some time to restore a little balance.
Today it’s hard to imagine music without a computer. After all, what is an iPod? What about your music server at home? Or the entire infrastructure of music distribution? Does anyone buy CDs anymore? I haven’t bought one in close to 10 years. And for a creator of music the computer is almost as important as the instrument or voice. These are and have been amazing times with the best stuff still ahead (I think).

Yesterday on my lunch hour I did something incredible. I downloaded an analog synth program to my new iPad. I made a sequence and noodled with some patches. Then I bounced it down and passed it off to another program that allowed me to process it further. An analog synth that would fill the better part of a dining room table and an 8 track recorder now fit in a package that weighs in at just over a pound and is small enough to be held in one hand. Forget the flying cars, this is the future that I ordered!

Learning to Dig Classical Music

Posted by on March 29, 2011 No comments

The guitar lessons that my mom signed me up for, per the terms of The Deal, were explicitly for the “Classical Guitar.” I had no idea what that meant. The fact is, I was not raised in a family that listened to classical music. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I firmly believe that if you haven’t been introduced to “classical music” (a term that I hate dearly and use only because of a shared cultural context – more on that another time) by the age of 10 there just isn’t much hope of getting it ingrained. The only way for an appreciation of traditional western fare to make it into an individual’s heart after that point is via a good teacher. I didn’t have a good teacher. I had an amazing teacher.

I took a little sidebar to look him up on the internet. I can’t find him on Facebook and the one person that I knew we’d have in common seems to have killed her account so I’ll just throw his name out there and hope that he finds me one day as he’s doing a vanity search (which he’d probably never do). Ken Leonard was the perfect person to enter my life at that key juncture. He introduced me to Hunter S. Thomson, Henry Miller, Kate Bush, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Sor, Villa-Lobos, and most of the other artists, writers, and musicians who color everything that I love creatively.

Ken started things off slowly. He needed to teach me how to do certain fingerings and so he took a tune by one of my favorite bands, The Police, and arranged it so that I would learn some basic arpeggios. After a few more pop tunes, he showed me what the guitar could do. And that was it. Once I heard some bits from Bach’s lute suite and a couple of Villa-Lobos etudes, I knew that most of what I thought I knew about the guitar and its potential was so naive. It was like skipping from thinking that the world of music could be contained in a single Woody Guthrie song and then hearing King Crimson. My mind was blown open and there really was no going back.

I listened to everything I could get my hands on. I couldn’t really get my head around the orchestra, but I dearly loved opera. And chamber music. The string quartets of Beethoven and Webern. I couldn’t describe what it was that made them stand out, but they did. I had a dozen Segovia cassettes and I would put them on in my room before I went to sleep at night. The music became a part of me.

It was a little surprising to some that I majored in composition when I went off to the conservatory. Not Ken. He knew where it started, in that small room on the second floor at Woodsy’s Music in Kent, Ohio. He smiled when I told him about the theory headaches and how hard ear training was for me. I really wish we hadn’t lost touch, but the years in between were long and unkind. But he was my first music teacher and certainly made the deepest impression on me of anyone outside of my family until my college years.

Going through a box in my closet I found some half-finished manuscripts from over 10 years ago. That was a different person in a different lifetime. But I may dust them off and see if I can do something with them in this life.

Getting Things Together

Posted by on March 15, 2011 No comments

So the thing is, I have a new baby girl in my house. She’s beautiful. She’s also new. That means middle of the night feedings, diapers every hour or so, and not a lot of sleep. In that vein, I have started laying out a road map for things that I want to get done this year.

I thought that I could throttle back on projects, but the fact remains that I tend to work on what I want to work on when I want to work on it. That’s not coducive to cutting back. What I’ve done instead is get organized. Like, really organized.

In the next week or so, I will start posting progress on all of my current projects. There’s a lot of inspiration in the air right now. I can feel the tunes brewing. And I can feel a return to some of the things that I left by the wayside a few years back. I’m going to stick with the collections of 6 songs and try to keep things flowing.

2010 recap

Posted by on December 31, 2010 No comments

In 2010 I managed to accomplish the following musical tasks:

1. Completed an acoustic guitar.
2. Completed 60% of a second guitar.
3. Released Thought Music.
4. Released Chasing Saturday
5. Collaborated with Astra and Jason on several tunes (in person, even!).
6. Started work on a longer term Cloxco album.

Not. Too. Shabby.

With the impending arrival of a little girl early in 2011, I’m not sure what things will look like, but I’m hoping to do at least as well next year. Big plans include building an electric guitar and composing a couple of serious pieces for the classical guitar. I would also like to release some more of the acoustic noodlings I have been saving and really get the Cloxco project off the ground.

Here’s to getting things done in 2011. Good luck in all of your projects.

back to practicing

Posted by on December 13, 2010 No comments

After I released Chasing Saturday I got back to some of the musical debt that I have accumulated. I owed things to the cloxco crew and a couple of other folks, so I made a recording or two and sent them out. Being as this is the season for not being able to get things done, I don’t expect to hear anything back for a while. That’s cool by me as I’m neck deep in Christmas excitement with my son and my wife and I are almost done building our daughter. Things are crazy. But I still have my time. My studio time. The sacred time.

I restrung my classical guitar about the time that my musical house was almost in order and in a fit of excitement, I dug out the Segovia scales and Mauro Giuliani’s 120 daily exercises for the right hand. It was humbling. I am badly out of practice. I don’t feel good about that. It’s time to get back to old habits, so I have.

important books

An hour with these two books a night is hardly enough to recover from how out of shape I have become, but it’s what I have so it is what I will give over to the craft. I feel so good after the woodshedding. There is something so deeply satisfying about practicing. There are few other things like it. I would say that physical exercise is one. Being able to do 100 pushups is impressive, but it’s not really meaningful for anyone other than the person who does them. Scales and arpeggios are the same way. Memorizing all of the Segovia scales and the right hand exercises is a personal discipline. It pays very real dividends in performance and when writing, but it’s deeper than that.

Practicing is doing something for yourself. It is actively making you a better performer, a better listener, and a more disciplined artist. It’s proof of your dedication to your craft.

I’ve missed practicing and I didn’t really realize it. Of course I will have to get back to producing music and my hour isn’t going to get any longer any time soon, so some of this will fall to the wayside. But if I can integrate it into my day somehow, I know that I will feel much, much better.