More improvisation practice…
Dorian Strat Mess (Youtube)
I did start to wonder what these occasional bouts of improv practice had to do with my “record something every week” plan, but it makes sense, really. One of the main reasons I lose the recording momentum sometimes is because I get bored of my own playing, so this is all part of the plan!
*cough*
Well, when your home studio also doubles as a transcription suite (sounds impressive, eh?) and half of Bluesjamtracks High Command, you don’t always get the time for making ill-conceived demo recordings. The past two weeks have mostly involved publicising bluesjamtracks.com and starting work on a second book of guitar transcriptions for Wishbone Ash.
I have been doing some recording as well, but I’ve nothing to play for you, for two reasons. Firstly, because lots of it was shite, so I just deleted it. Secondly, because I’ve been recording some little snippets for an idea which is still only half-formed. It also requires a little bit of web design, and I’m incredibly lazy. More details soon…
All the tweaking and testing involved in the bluesjamtracks launch meant that my recording time was limited last week. Still, Richard and I found time to experiment with mixes of a couple of things he’s been working on (such as this electronic tune).
While doing so, I got to spend a bit more quality time with a couple of plugins from PSP Audioware, a Polish company that deserves more exposure. I’ve been using the Vintage Warmer for quite a while now, but also tried experimenting (on the track above) with the MasterQ. As with the Vintage Warmer, I was impressed by how easy it was to bring about a marked improvement simply by setting the controls according to semi-educated guesswork. In this case, I wanted to tighten up the top end and add a little “air” to the overall mix. More experimentation is needed, but I’m very tempted to start splashing out on more PSP stuff…
I’ve been occasionally alluding to a “new project” on here for a while now, so it’s a great relief to come clean at last…
In an ideal scenario, the site would have gone live last March… that’s when we felt we’d finalised both the concept and design. However, while an e-commerce company (who weren’t really up to the job) took several months to get things up and running, we were able to add more content and polish the overall concept. Maybe these things happen for a reason…
Mostly tinkering this week, so no audio files to share with you.
I’ve been working on some ideas with my friend Richard; before Christmas, we knocked together the general gist of a track based on a demo he’d recorded on his 8-track. I’ve since done some tweaking and remixing, and we’re going to do some more work tomorrow, hopefully incorporating some real drums. Updates as they happen.
On a more mundane note, I’ve been having a very minor studio clear-out. I realised I just wasn’t using my Line 6 effects enough to justify their presence. The FM4 Filter Modeller went off to a grateful Ebayer in Italy last week, and the Echo Pro is listed on Ebay right now (click here by 4 Feb if you’re interested). The rack is going to look very sparse, but the upshot is that I’ll now have sufficient space on the patchbay to have all three FMR units (RNC, RNP, RNLA) hooked up for instant routing.
This should have appeared sooner, but an air-conditioning failure at 34sp’s datacentre put a temporary spanner in the works. Anyway…
Another week, and not so much time for recording. In the continued absence of Exciting New Musical Concepts (not that I’ve tried particularly hard) I decided to spend more time working on my improvising. Still focusing on ways to reduce the “burble”, I knocked up a backing track featuring three key (or rather mode) changes, forcing me to use “target notes” and play around the chords.
The result, via Youtube… Burble with Key Changes
(If you’re interested in the gear used, it’s just my recently acquired Tokai Love Rock plugged straight into a Cornford Harlequin, with a touch of reverb and delay applied in Logic)
Well, that was the first full week of my “record something every week” resolution.
Lacking any concrete musical ideas, I decided to try and resurrect my atrophied improvisation abilities. A recurrent trait in my playing is that, after periods of less-than-diligent practice, I tend to “burble”. The technique is there, but the mental sharpness disappears, so my fingers seek out the comfortable, well-trodden routes.
So, having recorded a bass/drums/chords backing, I set about improvising a few solos, with the aim of editing, harmonising and generally arranging them into a supposedly “written” piece of music. This is an approach I love… Frank Zappa used it on numerous occasions. However, having started all that, I then got sidetracked by a thread on uk.music.guitar where a few people were jamming over a backing track and posting the results on Youtube. This seemed an ideal opportunity to investigate using iMovie to combine high-quality audio (recorded in Logic) with video clips from my compact digicam.
The resulting solo is a bit messy, but the experiment worked well enough to convince me that it’s a useable working method for future projects. In particular, I found some tips for optimising iPhoto projects destined for Youtube… thanks to Martin Backschat for being more patient than I could ever be (tips in handy visual form on Flickr).
Video on Youtube… Slow Gilmourish Jam
Happy New Year, readers!
I considered writing at length about several things over the past week, both serious global events and trivial domestic buffoonery. But in the end, I just couldn’t be arsed. I decided not to do a “review of 2006/plans for 2007″ post because… well, just about everyone does them and, after all, it’s only an arbitrary division of an infinitely divisible dimension, innit?
Another type of apathy prevented me from commenting on the Saddam execution. I mean, what is there left to say? Our glorious liberation forces might not have bombed them back into the Stone Age exactly, but they definitely seem to have landed Iraq squarely back in the Middle Ages. And when those grainy phonecam pics make a callous monster like Saddam look for all the world like the shivering, innocent victim of a terrorist kidnap, you know something’s badly screwed up.
But anyway. I wasn’t going to go into any of that.
I do have a resolution of sorts, though. It’s not strictly a “New Year Resolution” because I thought of it a few weeks back, but this seems as good a starting point as any. My musical output over the past year has been pretty stingy and it’s not like I haven’t had the time or musical inspiration. It’s simply a matter of getting out of the habit, the routine of taking those hesitant first creative steps that usually (for me, anyway) start the whole snowball effect of musical exploration.
So… for the whole of this year, at least while I’m not away on holiday, I will record *something* every single week. Regardless of length, quality or usefulness, I’ll have some sort of SOUND at the end of each week. The year started on a Monday, so I shall report back every Monday with my latest offering… whatever it is.
Finally, while we’re on a musical theme, here’s my first favourite pithy quote of 2007. Jim Nugent, discussing the enharmonic keys of Db and C# on the uk.music.guitar newsgroup…
Remember I was moaning about Universal Music and their blinkered, litigious greed? Well, how about we move up a level through the music industry hierarchy to that noble umbrella organisation, the Recording Industry Association of America…
RIAA Petitions Judges to Lower Artist Royalties (IGN News)
Basically, the record companies (who are, according to the RIAA, truly wonderful because they “drive revenue”) aren’t earning enough money from modern music delivery technologies such as ringtones and downloads. And here’s the shining, crystalline reason for why the RIAA is called the RIAA and not the “Wonderful World of Lovely Music For All” (or something)… they decide to claw back some revenue by paying their artists less. Yep, the people who make the music, without whom there wouldn’t be a music industry.
I give you Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music. For a CEO of a major producer of electronic media, Doug doesn’t seem to be too comfortable with the modern world. First of all, he knows exactly what we’re all doing with our iPods…
It’s not just the little plastic boxes we carry around in our pockets, either. Poor Doug is feeling a bit confused by pretty much everything that young people do these days. So what does he do? He sues MySpace…
The Wired article mentions damages of up to $150,000 *per song*. I had no idea all those MySpace teenagers were doing so much damage to the world Emo economy…