internal tensions

[jfb]

Some of you have heard this stuff before:


1. I used to play jazz piano. The whole point of playing jazz, for me, was playing with other people--the real-time communication, the group invention, was what was exciting about it. There's nothing quite like that moment where all of you in the band do the same surprising thing at the same time.

2. Then I fell out of touch and out of practice. Plus, there was other music I liked. Mostly singer-songwriter music. (Peter Mulvey was an important factor.) I couldn't figure out how to make that music with a piano, but I gradually realized I could figure it out with a mandolin.

3. I started singing and playing solo as a way to find other musicians to play with. It was somehow easier for me to get up on stage in front of a bunch of other musicians at an open mike than to answer an ad in the paper.

4. Somewhere along the way I started to enjoy playing solo. So now I sit in with other people, or have them sit in with me, in an ad hoc way, but I don't have any standing collaborations of the sort I was originally looking for.

5. I bought a bunch of recording gear--I can't even remember why--and started playing with it alone in my apartment just to figure out how it all worked. I have a lot of instruments, and can play them all, to some degree. So I can put together fairly complex arrangements all by my lonesome.

6. I can't do everything, of course. I can't play blues guitar like my friend Russell, or sing high and clear like my friend Kristina. And I enjoy making music with them. But I can make a recording that mostly satisfies me without blues guitar or a female vocal. And so far, that's what I've done.

6. But I can't play drums, and I can't fake them. I like recordings that use drum machines and loops, I just don't know how to make them. Tonight I spent a couple of hours just fiddling with drum loops for my latest recording ("No Time to Lose"), and they still sound nothing like what I want.

7. And then I went out to see Johnny Smith, and found my friend Dave Ray playing drums with him. And I thought, well, duh.


So anyway, if the logistics work out, it looks like I'm going to get Dave to record some drum tracks for me. Hooray!

Comments

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Depends on the song. Like, "Snowblinded," if I try to imagine it with percussion, just sounds wrong. While "One and the Same"--superficially a similar sort of song--apparently cried out for percussion so badly that I had to add it myself. (The percussive noises on that track are me thumping and slapping the dampened strings of my guitar.) And then there's "Losing Streak" which, for me, works either way.

(Speaking of desperate percussion, I'm listening to an MP3 by someone I met in Santa Cruz (http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/588/the_lost_missouri_letters.html) with percussion that I think is a typewriter. Except, where does a college student get a typewriter these days?)

As for violin: One of the high points of the last couple of years was the show (http://journal.drowning.org/75183.html) I played with the aforementioned Dave (on drums, bass, and guitar) and Joan Ling, the violinist. It was a good color on all of the songs, and utterly transformed "Losing Streak". So yeah, I've thought about violin.

I want to have a CD I don't feel too bad about getting people to pay for by the time I take my trip next month. So what I might do is finish an EP worth of "solo" stuff (plus drums, if it works out), and then this fall work on recording a better, full-length CD with other people.

typewriter sounds

[dongle.livejournal.com]

One of the instant message clients - maybe it was Trillian, or AIM, or ICQ - provided a "typewriter" sound when you were typing a message. Perhaps someone lifted the .wav file and created a drum loop.