Posts tagged with "music"

a sketch of Shaded By Your Shadow

So the iPad 2 is some­thing I bought last week, sole­ly for the pur­pose of GarageBand. It’s pow­er­ful enough to be a sketch­pad where you can cre­ate musi­cal ideas, and because the instru­ments are touch-sen­si­tive, it’s real­ly fun to doo­dle and exper­i­ment. I don’t actu­al­ly have a bass or piano or drums, so the extra instru­men­ta­tion is pret­ty handy too.

Over the week­end I made this sketch of Shaded By Your Shadow as I was fig­ur­ing my way around the soft­ware. It’s always been one of my favourite songs by Shane; the title alone evokes this image of lying in the grass on a warm day, with some­one’s hair drift­ing in the haze of their out­line above you.

I haven’t lost myself this much in a project (small as it was) in a long time. I had to fig­ure out the roles of instru­ments I’ve nev­er played before, per­cus­sion being a par­tic­u­lar­ly weak point of mine cause I rarely pay atten­tion to it when I’m lis­ten­ing to music. There are a lot of synth instru­ments includ­ed with GarageBand, so I tried to give it an 80s synth-pop sound. Everything was done right on the iPad, includ­ing vocals which were record­ed using the built-in micro­phone.

I still have to learn about mix­ing and pro­duc­tion and what­not (and since I don’t have any mon­i­tors, I’m com­plete­ly blind when set­ting the var­i­ous lev­els), but I was hap­py as punch just to be able to fig­ure out the soft­ware and process. It real­ly is it’s own cre­ative process when mak­ing a full band arrange­ment for a song, a puz­zle in it’s own right, because you can start with an idea or motif on any instru­ment and there are so many direc­tions you can go from there.

Silk and Steel and Steve

I’ve always been after a more mel­low sound than what I can cur­rent­ly get out my gui­tar. Madeleine sug­gest­ed I try D’Addario Silk and Steel strings, so I bought a pack a few days ago and have been play­ing them since. I asked Steve to demo the strings, as well as my love­ly gui­tar Larissa, cause my abil­i­ties aren’t good enough to real­ly show her off.

Sometimes I love them cause they’re so bright and clear, oth­er times I hate them cause the tone comes off as thin and frail; it real­ly depends on what kind of music I’m play­ing. When Steve plays them they’re shock­ing­ly bright and pierc­ing com­pared to the sound I get; I’m not sure if it’s the dif­fer­ence in our nails or tech­nique (or both).

They’re def­i­nite­ly meant for fin­ger­pick­ing cause they’re so light1 that even mod­er­ate strum­ming will make them buzz, which severe­ly lim­its my pos­si­ble reper­toire. On the bright side, it’s much eas­i­er to fret barre chords, and cer­tain pas­sages that were a strug­gle to play clean­ly only require a light touch now.

Another advan­tage is that the tone makes me feel like I’m play­ing a dif­fer­ent gui­tar. Even though it’s not quite the dry and mel­low sound of a clas­si­cal nylon, it’s some­what staving off my desire to buy the Taylor I’ve been eying2, but who knows how long that’ll last.

Steve’s the only per­son I know who lives by the gui­tar, both lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly. I’ve seen such bril­liant things come out of his fin­gers. Sometimes in the mid­dle of a song I’m show­ing him, he’ll pick up the melody and go some­where com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent with it that’s more beau­ti­ful than the orig­i­nal. And even though he’s main­ly a jazz guy (after Wes Montgomery), he can play any style from clas­si­cal to fla­men­co.

I’ve tak­en up his belief in not using a pick and stick­ing with my fin­ger­nails. “Just anoth­er thing between you and the gui­tar”, he said to me once. And when I explain how I’m stuck on some­thing he’ll say, “Have you done it three-and-a-half mil­lion times?” to remind me that any­thing’s pos­si­ble with enough prac­tice. He’s filled with all these tiny yet cru­cial bits of infor­ma­tion that have influ­enced how I approach the instru­ment.

  1. 0.11–0.47, but they feel like 0.10. [↩]
  2. It just so hap­pens that Steve’s main gui­tar is the exact nylon-string Taylor hybrid I’ve been drool­ing over for months now. [↩]

between the river and the ravens I'm fed

Consider the ravens. They do not sow or reap, they have no store­room or barn; yet God feeds them.

—Luke 12:24

It’s start­ing to get uncom­fort­ably busy. There’s always some­one else to vis­it, anoth­er per­son to catch up with. Projects have a way of find­ing me too; I’ll hear a song and decide that I need to make an arrange­ment, or some­one will approach me for a web­site or video when they’re pur­su­ing dreams of their own.

dinner at the Trolley's

Me and Trolley and Steph and Aaron and not you. I win.

(I have yet to get a pic­ture of Trolley with a full glass of beer.)

It’s the same way when it comes to fig­ur­ing out what to eat late­ly. I open an emp­ty fridge a half dozen times, each time think­ing I’ll find a hid­den cache of food that was­n’t there before, then some­one will call me for din­ner.

I’ve been for­tu­nate enough to jam with a few peo­ple too, includ­ing Heather G, who pulled out her cel­lo for the first time in her adult­hood to give me root notes on the base­line. One draw of the bow across those strings has con­vinced me that I want one of my own; the tones are rich and meaty, some­thing you feel through the entire instru­ment, and espe­cial­ly the ten­sion of the rib­bon (and I thought the gui­tar was tac­tile). We even con­vinced Sergey to pick up some mal­lets and strike the keys of a glock­en­spiel with us, the first time in his life he’s ever played an instru­ment.

I’m look­ing for­ward to the Fall, when I have noth­ing else booked. Part of me wish­es I could take a year off and lock myself in a cot­tage some­where and work on my own projects with­out inter­rup­tion, but I don’t mind so much right now. Luckily, the work is always ful­fill­ing, regard­less of whether it’s for me or not, because so often I get to col­lab­o­rate with such won­der­ful­ly cre­ative peo­ple. I just need to ride the del­i­cate line between dis­trac­tion and over-stim­u­la­tion.

the lives of songs

She told me she tried to find this album I used to put on when we were hud­dled in the dark­ness. The prob­lem was that she could only remem­ber the cov­er, and it was after we stopped talk­ing for the third time or some­thing cause oth­er­wise she would have asked.

Then she was in Chapters one day. This book of best albums of the 2000s fell down, and there it was, Ágætis byr­jun, open at the page. “What are the chances?”, she asked me.

Sigur Rós Ágætis byrjun

I used to think of her lis­ten­ing to the songs I gave her with anoth­er guy and grow jeal­ous. But I could nev­er say I did­n’t have my own mem­o­ries asso­ci­at­ed with that album, lying between a wall and warm body on a bed swollen with cov­ers in New Jersey. I watched Jón Þór Birgisson sing into the pick­ups of his gui­tar, his ethe­re­al voice gen­tly mak­ing the strings trem­ble, in a sum­mer romance so long ago.

That was my intro­duc­tion to Sigur Rós, and in the same way I passed this album on to her. It made me feel so vul­ner­a­ble to be next to her in those moments (whether she real­ized it or not). Every time it came on was an emo­tion­al flash­back, a short-cir­cuit to this part of my past about which I’ve told so few.

I used to hope she kept the songs I gave her to her­self, and that she did­n’t use them to woo anoth­er guy the way I had always tried to with her. Perhaps I was a lit­tle pos­ses­sive about my music and some­what judg­men­tal on who I deemed to be deserv­ing enough to hear it. Eventually I real­ized that it’s not fair of me to feel that way. She had shared so many songs with me in turn, giv­ing me as much as I’d giv­en to her, and I’ve since passed those songs on to oth­ers.

Now I won­der who else will even­tu­al­ly expe­ri­ence these songs, and what mem­o­ries of their own they’ll have when they hear them.

god I hate myself for loving smoke and drink

The weath­er has been love­ly. It’s the per­fect tem­per­a­ture, though the humid­i­ty has giv­en my ukulele a much more pro­nounced buzz on the C string. Spring offi­cial­ly begins when I can take the mit­tens out of my car and dri­ve with the win­dows down, my only con­cern being that my music isn’t too embar­rass­ing, and I don’t get a sud­den burst of I BE ON THE HOTLINE LIKE ERRRRDAY when stopped at a red light.

cat on windowsill

 

I’m still phys­i­cal­ly recov­er­ing from last week­end. I got back to Darren’s late after work­ing a very intense 14 hours, and since it’s been so long since we last saw each oth­er, that was just the begin­ning of the night. Then we woke up ear­ly to see Chris. On the way home, I had to pull over at a com­fort sta­tion to grab a few winks in my car, but I was too uncom­fort­ably exhaust­ed to fall asleep, and end­ed up dri­ving home bug-eyed. I’m sure this is why my col­i­tis is act­ing up.

Probably not good that I’ve been liv­ing such a hedo­nis­tic lifestyle. I stay up far too late, drink too much caf­feine, and indulge in too many sweets close to bed­time. I can’t tell if I’ve stopped car­ing, or if I’ve stopped feel­ing guilty about it.

I’ve been going through long stretch­es with­out con­tact from the out­side world. It’s forced me to face my own iso­la­tion, yet I don’t feel lone­ly. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s cause I tend to get obsessed with my small hob­bies, and it dis­tracts me enough. I wor­ry that I’ve become a lit­tle too com­pla­cent in this intro­ver­sion. It makes me won­der how long I can keep going down this path, and whether I even want to be on it or not.