I haven’t done it, but I suspect if I went back and took a look at past blog posts I’d find a lot of “I set out to do this, but then this is how it actually went.” This, here, is another of those posts. This may just be my pet theme…
This time, I set myself a schedule to write six songs over the course of January: one every five days. I came up with the first two songs…
“It had that perfect commercial combination: startling originality and easy classification.” — Sarah Bakewell, referring to the first published version of Montaigne’s Essays in her book How To Live, or, A Life of Montaigne.
I’ve been thinking a lot about style and arrangement lately. In fact the closer I get to wrapping up the composition phase of this album, the more important it seems.
I’ve gone about this album in an unconventional way. First of all, it’s an album…
For a few years prior to putting out Java St Bagatelles in 2006, every time I ran into my friend Ryan Goodman he would ask me how the album was coming. It was coming slow. As I’ve said elsewhere, I wasn’t even necessarily planning to make an album until, probably, 2005 — I was just practicing. And recording. It was a great feeling not to be rushed. I didn’t feel like there was anything that I had to…
Yikes — another month! I worked all September on “Hermes,” which is finally done. Uh, done-ish. I should say that the demo for “Hermes” is mostly done. It’ll need to be mixed, but I think all the sounds are there — certainly the bones are in place.
I say “demo,” because once I have an album’s worth of material — a bit more, really, because I want to be able to choose only the best stuff — I’ll approach…
Last time I mentioned that I was going through my collection of “ideas,” looking for the start of the next piece for my fourth album. I have a nice stockpile of them at this point, and was homing in on a few, but instead I started working with a little riff that came up one morning when I was warming up.
It was like putting months into wooing a woman only to abandon her because some new pretty thing passes…
I know, I’ve been scarce around here lately. Here’s why.
There’s been a lot of exciting stuff to do at Masterdisk recently, and I’ve been spending more time doing it — full-time, basically. Then there are freelance projects that need wrapping up, and regular music work in the mornings (without spectacular consistency, unfortunately). As my grandfather used to say, “there’s a limit”! So, I’ve dropped way down on blogging and social media activity. At this point, it has been…
In my series of posts about recording (from a musician’s perspective) I’ve covered old-school “live in a room” recording, the convention of recording musicians separately, and one-man-band recordings. I’d like to add to that list something new: the remote recording session.
As regular readers will know, I’m composing the music for my fourth album. And I’ve written a number of posts touching on the difficulty I’ve had with the fourth of these new compositions, “Eris.” When I last…
An update on the Album IV demos. (Have I mentioned that I’m only working on demos? More about that later this week.) There are now four tracks in various states of completion.
“Aunt Nancy” is still unfinished. Needs at least a lead guitar part. Haven’t worked on this one since February.
“Brer Rabbit:” the recording is complete — needs to be mixed. Lots of moving parts — I’m apparently not looking forward to mixing this one, because it’s been…
You may have noticed that I’ve been updating the blog more frequently this week — I’ve been making an effort to put something up daily. I just think blogs are more effective when they’re daily. And by effective, I mean that they are more successful in drawing, and maintaining, a readership. And hopefully some of that readership is converted to a listenership. It’s more enjoyable to make music for people than it is to just make music. And since I’m…
I mentioned the other day that I had been working on a piece of music aside from my album tracks.
On May 28 I decided to record something new to use as the basis of an online collaboration. It would be a welcome diversion — a great way to blow off some steam. I spent an hour or so recording a guitar and a hand drum, and also plugged into a free keyboard app on M.’s iPad.
The collaboration…
