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…
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…
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…
So here’s what’s been going on with my fourth album in the past few weeks. In short, not a whole lot. 
I’ll recap what I’ve gotten done so far.
(As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m taking the working titles for these tracks from this list, so I don’t have to think about what to call them.)
Aunt Nancy: I wrote about the character of this piece in the post…
This week on Twitter and Facebook I mentioned recording “scratch” tracks a couple of times — and I got to thinking that I should talk about recording, since it’s such a big part of what I do.
As I mentioned in an interview on Anne Hubben’s website yesterday (thanks Anne!), I do NOT consider myself an audio engineer. I’m really not a technically-minded person. But recordings are my medium more than performance, so I’ve…
Apropos of my last post, here’s what Ursula Le Guin wrote this morning in “The stars of modern SF pick the best science fiction” at The Guardian (thanks to mysterious Facebook algorithms and Oliver Arditi for the link).
Genre is a rich dialect, in which you can say certain things in a particularly satisfying way, but if it gives up connection with the general literary language it becomes a jargon, meaningful only to an ingroup. Useful
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As I mention up there in the header, I’m working on my fourth album. It’s going to be very different from my first three — I thought I’d tell you a little about what I’m planning.
My first three albums were mostly experimental guitar music. A lot of improvisation. The compositions themselves were — in many cases — built from recorded improvisations looped and layered on top of each other. There were a few left turns: the classical solo…
