Category Archives: music - Page 3

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.

chasing saturday

Posted by on November 30, 2010 No comments

Finally! New music! This collection of 6 simple songs has been incubating since the summer. It is primarily solo electric guitar and most of the tracks are chamber like. There are two tracks that my good friends Astra and Jason contributed to without really knowing. I won’t ruin the surprise but there are two vocal only tracks and, well, they fall well within the parameters of my style – if I have one.

Chasing Saturday

So head on over here and DOWNLOAD CHASING SATURDAY! Pass it on! And thanks for listening.

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.

keep moving

Posted by on June 3, 2010 No comments

Summer isn’t really a great time for me in terms of creativity. There’s too much daylight and way too much heat. I don’t function well. This is of course exacerbated in Texas. It’s really hot down here for a long stretch. The bad stuff is here and I will have to tough it out for a while. It makes me tired.

That said, a box of stuff is on its way to my house so I can continue on instrument 003. I can’t exactly shut my life down just because I’m too hot to make sense. I got back into the studio and did some recording. In fact, I have put down two new tunes this week. I’m also ramping up the latest album project and trying to get all of the necessary ducks in a row for that. So things are moving even if the blog is slow.

nice and cool...

I know that I push The War of Art by Mr. Pressfield a lot. But the fact is, it really saved me last summer. (I make the situation of toughing it out in the A/C sound so dire, don’t I? Well, it feels that way.) Pressfield makes the point that if you show up, good things happen. He’s right. Every time I go into the studio I record /something/. Any time I sit down with some wood and tools I make /something/. Even if the end product of that session isn’t great, there is more produced than zero. The experience of doing the work adds to that weird 10,000 hours that it takes to achieve some level of mastery. Experience is never a waste though it might be tougher to wrap one’s head around.

What is most important to realize in the times when the work is tough to get into is that the only lost time is the time we don’t spend doing something. I love the fact that my wife and I have given up the passive life. The TV is almost never on. She works hard sewing garments (I have some fantastic shirts as proof). She is using her mind. Being creative. I work on my guitars in the same room where she sews. Our son plays in that room the whole time. He helps a lot. I’m hoping desperately that he’s being imprinted. I want him to see that making things matters. Showing up counts. Someday he will find the thing that ignites his passions and I want to have provided him with a solid example of how to live a life where the things that are important to us are front and center.

A lot rides on those nights in the studio and the hot weekend afternoons in the garage. So that’s where I am. I’m not batting 1000, but I’m swinging.

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!