Free Time

Work dried up, so I've had plenty of time to try to get something done the past week. The only show I managed to work was U2 the other day. The crew shirts they gave us were pretty cool...nobody said being a stagehand was glamourous.

I would love to have the opportunity to interview some of the people that I work with, some of them have been in the business for 50 years. As one could imagine, some of them have the most stories -famous Hollywood actors who refuse to enter their dressing rooms unless they're painted orange and stuff like that. Hell, my childhood hero Hulk Hogan dumped my dinner on the floor when I worked a wrestling show about seven or eight years ago.

I've been working on a few new mixes with some tools that I have acquired recently. This one I call "ride" because it ended up having a western thing going. I'm including a bit of the improvised jam that I decided to create the mix from. I suppose I should use a click track for this type of thing, but what are you gonna do?

jam 11-22


ride

noise

With a bit more free time on my hands the last couple of weeks I've had some time to do some experimentation with sounds. Playing with new pedals and new software, I'm finding the recording process to be much more fun this time around.

-I think I've rediscovered my love for noise.

Before, the goal had always been to eliminate the noise, to the extent that on more than one occasion I spent hours covering the doors and windows of my living room with blankets and mattresses in order to muffle the sounds of traffic. Of course the results were never worth the effort.

The other night I was talking to Joe Mac at the Doug Fir before he played his set (which rocked). We both agreed that music exists in a space. It doesn't come out of a vacuum. -I ride my bike past a warehouse with sounds of industrial machines and when I get home I pick up my guitar and possibly I'm still in that space, and its mood and rhythm comes through in what I create. Why not take a microphone and capture the sound of that space? That was the thought behind the audio of my experimental short "i." But, now, with a few more tools, I am much more free to create my own spaces.

Although I studied music theory and ear training and all that, the intellectual side of music has never been that attractive to me. While I hope to have something meaningful to say in my art, music is more a physical and emotional experience to me. For example in this piece which I'm calling "noise" I came up with several chord changes to take the harmony somewhere and make it more interesting, but it just didn't work. I couldn't add to the harmonic structure without losing the original mood. When I put the headphones on I can practically melt into the furniture.


"noise"


Someday I hope to be in the position to record all of my acoustic tunes in a form that I can be satisfied with, which will require an actual studio.

Kris's tune

The tune on this post was recorded in an hour or so when my friend Kris James from Phoenix visited last year. He had the lyrics and had a melody for them and I came up with guitar and harmonica parts to accompany him and his drum. Here's the mix I came up with.
"Alone and Desperate"

He's been playing in a band down there for going on 10 years (Danville Trains), which is very cool, but I've been trying to convince him to move and start a band with me all that time.