Still In The Madness

Again I worked on New Years Madness. I was able to finish up the piano part in midi and it took quite a while being that the ending is rather complex and with places of syncopation. I will have to go through it again, making sure it is actually right, but I need to remove myself from that after the hours spent working at it today. I have yet to fix and again alter the tempo transition. That change goes from 120 to 230 BPM or nearly doubling the tempo. I am unclear right now of how to best incorporate that transition using the midi structure that actually holds the tempo, in a way that allow for a smooth duplication with instrument and vocal recordings. I do know that making the shift in tempo from existing will cause those analog recordings to fall out of sync when the new tempo change begins. I won't attempt to keep the existing part that will remain correct for a preference to make it all anew and hopefully better.

I also went through the mid piece lead guitar parts as practice, to keep it fresh for when the time comes to record it correctly. I may get to that tomorrow, or then still I might move on to a different song for a day or three in order to keep myself from burn out. I have found that burn out due to the repetition in this process is a big factor of why I am so slow to finish anything. It is because I have never kept a schedule that rotates the music from time to time or regularly. I've always simply stayed on one song with the hope that I would reach completion, though only a couple of them have actually made it to their end, completed in these past ten or fifteen years. I have to remedy that. Hopefully working with this list can solve this issue, leading to a bunch of finished works by years end.

Time has come today and so forward we go creating more with the memory of this song burned in my mind.

Back to Madness

It has been a few weeks since I wrote. Music has been rather low on the list of priority, but, thankfully that is changing again. This week I have practiced some, and as well, I have done some recording. It seems that I am finding it a problem to remember or to find the will to write of the progress immediately after. Today is different. I wrote it out, three well made paragraphs, then the computer failed in the save function disappearing the document, unsaved, hate it when that happens. Now a couple hours, dinner and a movie later, I attempt to re-write or otherwise write something similar. I am using a different word processor this time.

I had left the song New Years Madness to lose its priority after another New Years came and went, yet again. Last night during my practice session I decided to make a list of songs to finish, seven of them. The list has the song titles followed by the existing tracks and their quality (good, rough, finished, needs editing, etc) to work from. Today I had the urge to work on New Years Madness again. As a motivation, last night I had a thought about the structure of this song. It has a one beat followed by its counter part on the three followed by what I would call a four plus ( with it being at four point five, or the eighth after the four (in 4/4 time). I have been hearing this in my head for years and attempted to record it using different guitars or differing electronic effects between the one and that counterpart, though it never sounded right. Last night was an epiphany, use the piano! I tried it, though my piano playing is still very elementary, and it came out sounding pretty good after a good while practicing. I decided to record it as a rough draft track. Having done that with very limited success and a lot of errors, I decided to write it out in midi by following what I had developed on the piano. I spent many hours there after writing out the score. I ran out of steam before completing it, though there is but thirty seconds to a minute remaining to complete.

It sounds pretty good, progress is being made. I believe that I am going to have to alter the tempo more, going through that transition that brings the tempo up from 120 BPM to something like 200 BPM (I can't remember the final tempo in the moment). If I do decide to alter the tempo, that choice in turn voids the three guitar tracks and the vocal track, leaving them forced to be re-recorded. I may do that before I am done as its sound is still off (to my ear) through that transition.

Progress is happening again, it is good to be back!

Recall From Memory

Another couple of sessions with music and its production has passed without my entering any information into the blog regarding those events. I rarely recognize what I do with music as eventful though there are times when I am able to capture the real essence of my work that personally seem as crossing some sort of milestone. I am not reporting on any milestones today though. It is also true that counter to my desire to write these essays while the event remains fresh in mind, a couple of days have passed and thus I may be unable to write fully of all that occurred during those sessions, due to the illusiveness surrounding my personal ability to write completely of what is now a fleeting memory.

I got back to the song New Years Madness on New Years day. The eventual result was a lot of practice with the Guitar. I had recorded a lead Guitar riff through a short break section all those years ago, though the recording has many errors. This is a short break, maybe 20 seconds in duration. I made a duet electric Guitar part using a wah-wah and quite a lot of distortion with heavy overdrive. These simultaneous Guitar parts use a 1 and 3 straight harmony, with the 1 track adding the wah. Quite honestly I am quite a novice with electric Guitar, having only owned one for 14 years, I seldom use it, as I retain a preference for my Guild Acoustic Guitars. Still I enjoy learning the tools and fully appreciate the American Standard model Fender Stratocaster for the quality instrument it is. I did record what I played, though it remains less than satisfactory for a finished recording. I was able to identify and correct the faltering errors in that original recording where its end is a diverging direction. This type of sound is unattainable with an acoustic Guitar, yet the electric stuff is still quite foreign within my own acquired use and my own abilities. All in all I found that session to be a success. There is a lot yet to accomplish before that song has reached the state equal to what I know it should be as recognized in my mind's eye.

From there after an hour or so of fooling around with the practice of it, I felt I had accomplished all I could in that session and I was in need of moving on to something else for a while.

There are so many songs that I have yet to move from the rough draft form to being a completed work that captures my image of what I know they will become. I have been doing the music, writing, composing, and playing for myself, my own entertainment mostly, for so long now that the numbers of songs yet to complete is immense. One at a time they all need attention, yet none hold a position of priority. That was not the case last month, when I grabbed the now failed idea of completing New Years Madness before the new year arrived.

On this particular evening, I did shift to the song I call Birdie, a song about playing Disc Golf. Disc Golf is a sport that I used to avidly participate in, before becoming physically disabled. Thus the song holds a unique place in me that goes beyond the music there in. It is a simpler song in its structure that repeats 2 core themes, the part "a" and the part "b" and eventually resolving with a variation on the a. I made this song with many layers of Guitar parts, all being played simultaneously atop Bass and rhythm Guitar track. There are three lead Guitar tracks, though one is a complement to the rhythm Guitar, the other two are quite different from one to the other. On this night I basically reviewed the old recordings, again having to sort through the old versions, though only two of them. From there I again realized (as I had when I left this song behind or otherwise quit working on it) that the lead parts had many errors that need correcting. I practiced one of them, the main "lead" part, for several repetitions of the song, regaining the theme in my mind. I didn't record anything of this song work session.

I believe that was the extent of the session, which I believe was on the evening of New Years Eve. I did similarly on New Years day, in reviewing and practicing, though the focus was more on Birdie, and yet another song. This one is called Thinking On Rhyme. This is a song I wrote in the Fall of 2010. It is a word painting on being trapped, thus taking the form of prison as metaphor. I actually believe the lyric is in reality about my own feeling of being trapped in this broken physical body, though I can but speculate on the lyrics. As Bob Dylan said, the songs are out there and we (songwriters) find them as we move through time, or something to that effect. I believe that many of the songs I write simply flow into me from some other place of consciousness, rather than coming out of my own conscious effort to create them. This particular song, Thinking On Rhyme, employs acoustic Guitar with a finger picking style atop a Bass track. It is a very simple song musically, having but three chords through the main portion of the piece. The ending leaves that pattern walking up the theme's key scale through three or four cycles, from position 3 to 6(7) (on Piano). Thus far I have yet to write any other instrumentation into the song though I believe it is deserving of something more. I have made two versions of this song also. One uses a musical halt of about one second in every line of the melody, the result of which is now not preferred. It was fun to make the other version, as the process is so enjoyable. Recently I learned this song on the Piano and may incorporate that part into the eventual final recording.

Now it is another day, with another opportunity to practice, something I have yet to do, though I believe I will. I really want to try to write these blog entries in the moments immediately after the conclusion of practice or recording rather than ignoring this potential to capture the event while fresh. I guess it is a discipline I have yet to master. It is far easier to simply let the time pass by shifting to the physical and mental comfort of watching a movie from the recliner chair with a glass of red wine, my usual evening pastime.

Enter Piano

It has been musically quiet on the home front these past two days, except for two brief set downs at the Piano. Now for me, after forty some years of playing music, finally I have myself a Piano. I have before now been without the experience of access to the keys at my leisure. In truth I have had very little exposure to the keyboard throughout life. One of my aunts had a Piano when I was very young, but for a few years, there after the Piano was absent from access to me, except for those brief hours separated by years, where a place that I was for a small space in time provided a Piano, allowing me small instances of opportunity to play. It was never enough to gain more than a slight knowing of that which they offer. Then later in life there was an electronic keyboard in the house I lived, and I did fool with it some, though at that time in my life I was wanting only for the Guitar, thus it was simple to most generally avoid its keys. Yet for those few months I did come to experience that which the keyboard offered, as far as the evident way one can observe and learn the structure of music, quite effortlessly. This is due to its structure and the way that structure relates to music. The keyboard offers a straight forward view of the score of music as the white keys dance with the black, the musical key structure becomes evident. At least that is what it seems for me, personally.

Like so many other learned intellectual activities in life, the reading part of music has always had the interference of my dyslexic vision. Although it may not actually be considered a visual problem the fact remains that when seeing symbolic script of any sort that I am aware of, it is to me problematic for my brain to interpret that which is before my eye. This is likely the influencing factor that has prevented my becoming fluent in the use of musical notation while playing music. Actually two other pieces of history need to be stated in order to accurately depict my own earliest experiences with music. My first exposure to anything resembling structured music and performance of music, started when I was of the age equal to that of early grade school. At that time I sang with a church Children's Choir. There may not have been any formal use of written musical score, though the lyrics were presented in a musical score type of manner, employing stanzas that had repeating lines of verse and the use of a coda. When I entered the 5th grade then, I started playing a clarinet with the school orchestra, if one could actually call it an orchestra. That class did introduce me to musical scores. It also introduced those goofy tricks to learn the staff, spelling "face," and that "every good boy does fine." I must admit that those two tricks disallowed me the ability to understand the staff as an even flow of the alphabet, that simply repeated. To me the staff was always F A C E or Every Good Boy Does Fine. I took on the mind set that the staff was only about the limerick or riddle, that abstract use of symbolism rather than the fluid flow of the alphabet and its consecutive notes. It took about fifteen or twenty years of actually playing music for that fluidity to become evident to my mind. I realize that is partly due to the dyslexic tenancy though it was also due to the teaching technique and my personal issues with visual symbolic imagery.

And finally 6 months ago I purchased my first, and my very own, piano. It is a quality instrument made by Yamaha, an electronic Piano, though it is one with few amenities. In this short time I have learned quite a lot, bringing out an ability to be familiar with and play the instrument, and also in understanding the musical key structure. The key of B major, or C major, then the minors, etc. It is vastly helping with my ability to understand why chord patterns fit together verses those which present ugly sounds rather than that of melodic harmony. Now I have always intellectually understood these qualities through their sounds, yet I had no ability to fluently articulate any reasoning to support the innate understanding I could hear.

This evening I played the piano some. My ability to play the instrument has a long way to go before it evolves into a natural fluent form. I still struggle knowing where all the notes are. Yet with the piano I can grasp the identification of each note. This is a condition that after forty some years I am still unable to do with a Guitar. That to me is puzzling, considering the amount of time I have invested in playing the instrument, writing musical compositions of various forms and performing, near flawlessly for so many years. I have always used the technique of memorization for playing music, for knowing songs. Still I am unable to fluently read musical score, although now I truly believe that the reason for my seeming inability to do so comes from the mix of that seeming incompatible teaching technique and how visual imagery interacts within my brain. Still I long to play the Piano with the kind of fluidity I am able to play the Guitar.

I set out to state that I had sat down at the Piano tonight and played a short pattern that I invented quite spontaneously. It proved further that I am developing a better feel of fluidity with the instrument, as well as putting it together with the understanding of musical structure. I notice the need to play the F# out of how it fits in the structure of the key, in the moment. Since I don't use written score I play otherwise, by putting my fingers to the keys, possessing that innate sense of why this fits over what will never fit. I still struggle with changing chords with any rapidity while retaining an understanding of where the other hand's fingers might need to go to keep the melody going. Piano is far different from Guitar, yet so much the same. Both use the same musical structures. A little practice every day will provide me with the ability I seek though I still lack possessing such skill. Tomorrow or even later tonight I will have another opportunity if all remains equal.