Category Archives: accountability - Page 5

gear purge

Posted by on October 26, 2010 No comments

In my studio closet there is a rack of gear that I have not powered up since I moved to Texas. This tells me something. It tells me that it’s time for it to go. Some of the stuff doesn’t work any more. Some of it is experimental and home brewed. There are a couple of cassette decks that I will need one more time to transfer the last of my tape media to digital. Most of the equipment is junk that just has to go because it has outlived its usefulness. In a world of flash recorders and endless hard disk space, who needs DAT (more so one that doesn’t work)? No one in a home studio, that’s for sure. So I will be purging the closet. This is fairly momentous.

There’s a lot of history in there. I’ve lugged around a ton of that gear since my college days. The K2000 is a good example. It was a great synth in its day, but I can get better results with my laptop and GarageBand. There are effects in there that can go as well since I do most of my guitar tweaking through massive plugin arrays and digital constructs of my own again on the laptop. Getting rid of this stuff will be a big deal.

spiderman...irving spiderman...

If you know anything about musicians, you know that in our hearts we’re all gear whores. Especially the ones who swear all they ever need is a tape deck and a guitar and one mic and one pre-amp and… See? Even if the setup is as bare bones as it can get (and I have strong opinions about what a wonderful idea that is) we all still get the Musicians Friend catalog and flip through it with long, spindly webs of drool forming at the corners of our mouths. It’s the nature of the beast. What great things could I do with THAT widget or doodad?!? Think of the “Sonic Possibilities!”

In the end, it’s just more crap to haul when you move.

I would like for my studio to be focused on things that make sound. I have more instruments than I probably should (but I will never admit that to my wife) and that means that I should keep the rest of the gear as slim and trim as I can. It will make an entertaining pile at the electronics recycling center. Again, most of it hasn’t worked or been powered up in years. It’s the end of the era of big gear. It’s the beginning of the minimal phase. Soon enough, everything will be done on an iPad with a single mic or mixer anyway. I’ll try to get ahead of the curve on this one.

back to projects and the studio

Posted by on June 10, 2010 No comments

I’m back to the studio grind. I find that I spend less time in the studio composing and more actually recording in the summer. This is not intuitive as I can’t run the ceiling fan in there when I’m recording and as I may have mentioned before, the ceiling fans are the way I get through the day during the summer. That said, things are moving along. I have come up with a few new tracks that have some hope in them but need a little time to ferment.

old wood

That might be the most difficult part of working in the summer: it’s slow. Everything feels slow. Nothing wants to move or disturb the air in any way. I sit on the floor and strum my guitar (the new one with which I have fallen completely in love). Sometimes I listen to the sound bouncing off of the walls in the dark. I can sit on a single chord for quite some time. It feels good to practice the varying textures that can be created with a single sonority. As always, there’s much to be gained by slowing down. But it doesn’t fill the pages of my notebooks or the contents of my recording collection.

I know it has been a long time since I released any music on the site. That will change shortly. I’m setting up to do a marathon recording session and get a new EP out. I have enough material for that and before I can really dig in on some of my collaborations I have to get it out of my system. Watch this space for new tunes!

Last weekend was the first in a long time where I didn’t do anything that related to building an instrument and it almost drove my crazy. I have come to depend on that activity as an outlet the way my wife uses sewing. It’s important to make things! A large package from Luthiers Mercantile showed up this week and made sure that my madness won’t be an issue in the coming months. Instrument 003 is off and running. This stuff is fun. It’s a wonderful hobby, not all that expensive (when compared with boats, hunting gear, and motor sports), and very refreshing. I almost always feel better after working on an instrument. It’s solving physical problems that matter to me. That last part is probably the most fulfilling. There is nothing like solving a problem that matters.

So there will be more pictures of the building process soon. More bells and whistles this time. More good fun.

five things

Posted by on May 19, 2010 No comments

I’m big on the Five Things List. There’s no way for me to know where I got the idea, but it was certainly from a blog and I know that I started doing it on 21 Dec 2009. In the little notebook in my bag, the pages are filling up with five things that I accomplished today. At first it was a neat little hack to keep an eye on the projects that were getting real face time. Job related items don’t make the list. Only things that are done on my clock count. As a result, there’s a tendency to pad things when only one project is in motion. But the technique is a great way to track values.

most useful tool

In most lists there is at least one reference to my son. Whether we baked some cookies or he “helped” mow the lawn or we read an extra book at story time, he generally makes the cut. There is also always some reference to a musical project. It could be a new recording or a new instrument. Maybe a tool finally arrived or I found a new way of doing something through trial and error. Those things make the list. And there are self care items. Trips to the doctor or errands that are finally done. Reading and listening progress. Things that I do.

But the things I mentioned above aren’t the real trick. The real trick, which I’m still trying to master, is imaging what I want the list to say and making it so. My mom does the same thing but kicks it up a notch. She makes lists of five things she wants to do tomorrow. I tried that too. It works for her because she’s OK with hitting three out of five. When I see that I can’t check off every item, I get bummed out. It doesn’t help that I write things like “Research the history of Luthierie in southern Spain” as list items. So I’m working toward making the list a certain shape. If I hit the general curve, it feels good and pushes me to do more. And I know that at the end of the day I need to write down Five Things, so I’d better have at least that many.

plans and accountability

Posted by on May 13, 2010 No comments

My brain is on fire with ideas, but the will to execute is running low. This happens seasonally for me. I don’t know if it’s the academic calendar that was drilled into my head for who knows how many years or if it’s the added pressure of the summer in Texas that is to blame (probably a combination) but come May, I am done. And by done I mean, “Get me a beer, I’m gonna go sit on the deck and stare at the lawn” done. Not “Let’s go on vacation” done. No. This is vegetative in nature.

To break out of this last year, I read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and it promptly kicked my butt out of the chair and into my studio. Of course I gave my copy to my brother and had to go get another. I’d buy that book 10 times and it still wouldn’t repay Pressfield for the good it did me. I’m going to see if that works. But in the mean time, I will put out a list to the world of the three things that I have to complete before the end of the summer.

mmm...shellac...

First, I need to plan and source my next guitar. It will be another OM with 14 frets to the body. This time, I will do some cool inlay on the headstock and try to push my construction to be closer to perfect.

Second, an EP of the tunes that I have been amassing for the past 6 months. There is plenty in there and another instrumental album is only a week or two of sessions away.

Third, a cloxco EP with Jason and Astra. We worked up a lot of material and we have some stuff that just needs to be ironed out. It all starts in my studio with me laying down some tracks and getting them sent out. No magic. Just a little time in the woodshed.

So there they are. Those are the things and I need to get cracking!

starting something new

Posted by on February 8, 2010 4 comments

Epiphanies are hard to come by so when drops in for a visit, I take notice. It was a big goal for me this year to release a song a week on ye olde blogge but what I have come to see is that it takes longer than a week for me to polish something to the state it needs to be in for public consumption. I’m often surprised by the positive feedback I get for what I feel are unfinished tracks and it leaves me feeling a little weird. Either I’m too picky or folks are just being nice. Either way, it’s not good and I’m not feeling good about the work I’m releasing, aside from being able to say I put something out. Where does that leave me?

What I really want, and have always wanted, are songs and pieces that connect. I like thinking of “the album” as a larger form and individual tracks as movements that exist within it. It’s really difficult, though not impossible, to have ten or twelve songs relate to one another in a meaningful way and, more to the point, in the age of the iPod and the death of continuity that is “shuffle” I want to produce tracks that compel the listener to follow that development. In that vein, I’m going to pursue the idea of the EP.

With six or so songs in a unit, I think I can produce several of these in a 12 month period (where several > 2). Maybe even 1 per quarter. Maybe not. But the point will be to have a unit that is polished and released with no regrets. That might be what I enjoyed most about Nothing of Consequence: no regrets and it shipped on time. I still think it sounds great. Download it here: https://www.othertime.com/musicblog/?page_id=377

So there you have it. I have some collaborations going on right now that will require their own vehicles, but for me, I will be focusing on the EP for the foreseeable future. This means, sadly, that I will have to come up with useful ways to elaborate on my progress here on the blog both for accountability and to keep the six or seven people who read this with any regularity coming back for more. I might even go back to my exercises (one complete piece written and released in one sitting). They keep me sharp and happy.

My focus is getting tighter and it feels good. More music soon.