limits

There are hard limits on how much you can do.  Musically you can only play until your fingers start to wobble and the notes grind or mesh together.  You can only practice until your fingers bleed or giant calluses form that disfigure you or, worse of all, you get a wrist cramp.  I'll be talking about the worst of all possible situations, the wrist cramp.  Yeah really.  This is a warning.  One time, I laughed and kept playing.  Boom, couldn't play for a week.  Scary stuff.

So, you're probably thinking, fine, so what?  Sometimes you just go down and don't get back up?  That does not help me.  Well, glad you asked.  According to my research, sleep and lack of practice are the only things that can help you.  If at all possible, you should invest in protective material for your arm.  I didn't, but I figure it would probably work.  So, how do I know when I'm getting close?  Should be kinda obvious.  Short sessions help if you're not so aware.

The hardest part is going to be actually stopping.  I noticed that I started to get withdrawls by about day 2.  By day 4 or 5, I was willing to risk it.  But, I was able to decide that if I waited I'd have a better chance of it not happening again.  After that, you'll need to scale back your practice schedule because you will be weak.  This can not be helped, but with proper disipline you can get back to where you used to be and beyond hopefully since you were probably practicing too much in the first place with that intention.

levels

Meaningful changes are being made.  I have now waited the appropriate amount of time and I am able to make changes to my recordings.  I think that I just have to go through them enough times to be able to decide things.  I guess most importantly I figured out how to improve the quality of my equipment without having money to actually upgrade it.  Sure it's not even close to what you might hear on the radio, but I'm starting to get there.  The tracks are starting to sound cleaner.

For some reason after I've had a song recorded for a while, I start to notice things that I should have picked up on already.  Like, why did I make the percussion track so quiet you can't even hear it?  So I go back and adjust the levels a bit.  Maybe add some sound FX because I can.  That's how my work starts to slowly sound like an actual body of work.  Slight improvements to what I already have.

I like the way my new and enhanced stuff sounds.  It feels like I'm starting to get somewhere.  I'm not sure how they actually turned out because I have to wait a while before I can make any sort of meaningful analysis, but progress is good.

thoughts on book reviews

I'm just going to comment on why I'm not doing book reviews.  On the side for book reviews, while I am reading I will have something to blog about.  But, I think that if I don't blog every now and then it'll be ok.  I'll just have to figure out a way around it, or stop blogging. Whatever seems to work.

Book reviews are basically going to be a waste of my time.  I know they are not actually a waste of time.  I'm sure that you'd find I'm actually in strong support of book reviews.  But since I'm also a writer, I'm not sure that it would be helpful in the way that I want it to be.  Yeah, it's good practice.  But what am I writing about.  The plot?  I guess.  If I'm going to pick anything specific, I might as well do an actual piece of writing.  That would be something I would then blog about, the writing, but not posting the book review, turned into writing.

To be fair though, that's not even the real reason.  I'm not really going straight through just one book.  I'm kinda bouncing back and forth a bit trying to get very specific things out of the literature.  So, really I would have a very small amount of material to work with and if I do get any good ideas for writing from that material, I think I should do a more formal work with it.  That's my logic to this point.  You could also say that I'm avoiding the formality of a structured book review.  I think it would kinda go against the general flow of my writing here.  But, posting a book review is still always possible.  This is just why this post isn't a book review.

new reading material

I have decided that I have become lazy.  Yes, this is something I must say every so often.  I am no longer taking my work seriously enough.  Well, alright, I don't know if I'm going to call it work since I've never been paid to write.  I mean, I've written things at jobs before, but I don't think that's what I was hired for.  Also, I'm not sure I should be using the word seriously either since I didn't go to school for writing and don't actually schedule time to practice reading or writing or anything else that might even be remotely related to the subject.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I've picked out some new books that I'm going to be working with.  Yeah, that's right.  I wasn't really finished with the last ones.  But I was finished enough.  Good riddance I say.  I got from them what I wanted to get from them.  I think they're in a better place now.  Now I have some new stuff all picked out and ready to go.  I may or may not finish this new stuff.  I like my choices though.  My selections are going to round out where I am right now.

I need to get the thought of making a schedule out of my head right now.  The more that idea is considered the more I get the feeling that I might be obligated to start writing new material.  I'm just not there yet.  Yeah, I have some ideas, but they aren't even close.  Could be years away.  Maybe not years.  Could be though.  And no, this blog does not count as writing.  I also need to stop thinking about that.  I could string all the entries end to end and call it an anthology, but we'll all know it's just a blog.  Even with editing it's still just a weak biography at best.

writing practice

I think playlists are how I practice writing music.  I don't really have a lot of formal training, besides a few lessons in high school, and a few years of lessons in elementary school.  And being in bands.  But besides that, how else does one practice writing songs?  How do you know a good song from a bad song?  Well, I make a playlist and lable it, "good songs" and that pretty much ends that discussion.

The best thing about playlists is that unlike an actual song, you can pretty much go anywhere with them.  You don't have to stick with the same instruments or vocals.  Genres can be wildly different, or exactly the same.  Yeah, usually things make sense when you have a theme, or something that ties everything together.  But, "listen to this again" is still a theme.  And even if you don't even listen to it again, there was still a point where you listened to the song closely enough to give it a thumbs up.  Yeah, I enjoyed that.

Sometimes you can get fancy with playlists you've listened to a bunch of times.  But, that's not really a blog discussion.  I know some people have trouble with what they should or shouldn't say.  It's like, I have a blog, I'll just say anything I want.  But I've been trying to write this imagining that someone will read it eventually.  They might not, but at least it prevents me from doing things like talking about playlists too much.

allmusic

When I'm listening to new music, sometimes it largely feels like a conversation with myself.  So self, what do you think of this album?  Who would you compare this to?  How does the song's structure and lyrics hold up in the greater arc of all music ever released?  Some of these questions can be more difficult to answer than others.  When I'm listening to music I usually know a few things, 1. I found this somehow and 2. I would or wouldn't bother listening to it again.  After that, there's a lot of different ways you can go.  I guess what I'm getting at is, allmusic.com is awesome.

That's the direction I thought I was going with that.  I remember way back in high school when I first started going to their site, it was basically a competition between the online version of Rolling Stone magazine, them, and a few other random indepent-type sources.  Although, not to give allmusic too much credit since I don't think they have nearly the funding capabilities of Rolling Stone or the history.  But their site is better for what I use it for.

I think that this discussion is about editors.  I'm sure all the places that write reviews have just fine editors.  But Allmusic is a more complete source of editorial content.  They have chosen to focus on history of all music (as the name implies).  This allows them to do things like connect bands and influences.  To profile genres.  This place was actually like a music history course for me (in fact I actually did a school project by citing their research).  So, when I start feeling like I'm having a conversation with myself a bit too much, I can go to their site and sort of include them in my discussion.

pitch pipe

The first thing that I bought when I first started playing bass was a pitch pipe.  Well, after buying a bass and an amp, I bought a pitch pipe and a tuner.  I tried using the pitch pipe once, decided I wasn't very good at it and pretty much never used it again.  It's really loud.  And I can't quite match the sound to what I hear from my bass.  The tuner, you plug it in, play a string, and start tuning.  It even beeps when you're done.

Now I am learning how to use my long lost pitch pipe.  Why?  Because I want to be a serious musician.  I don't have to be professional, but I wouldn't object to it either.  This is one of the steps to get there.  I just know that.  It is not going to negatively affect my music career to be able to tune my instrument without a piece of machinery attached to it.  That is not going to be a negative.

How?  Every time I tune my bass I play the pitch pipe along with the tuner.  My theory is that eventually I'll just be able to tell when the bass is out of tune by just using the pitch pipe.  The tuner will visually tell me when I'm in tune and with enough practice I'll be able to hear when I'm out of tune.  I hope anyway.  I think that if I'm patient and I work hard enough, I'll be able to improve myself as a musician.

jamming

I thought of something that could be a really interesting idea.  To this point I have mostly been writing songs that are fairly structured and will typically challenge my ability as a musician.  This means that there may be key changes or the tempo will be physically difficult to reach or the notes are positioned in a way to be out of my typical comfort zone.  But since I've been recording, I have not tried the very obvious idea of slowing down my songs a bit.

You're probably thinking (I am at least), what part of this isn't supposed to be insulting?  Well, I have not tried this so I don't know how things are going to turn out.  Without too much difficulty I could record a simple loop.  That loop I could play back in my headphones and just record me improvising over it.  Variations in simple loops could be difficult eventually, but since I haven't recorded any, this could be an interesting starting point for some new music.

I don't plan to have any updates anytime soon because this is just an idea.  I'm not even sure how much I like the idea.  But improvising and recording it is something I haven't tried yet.  Could be worth spending a little bit of time trying.  Now I need to figure out how to just "create" simple loops to play over.

playlist day

Playlist day today!  So basically I just listen to songs for a while and add them to a list.  Yeah, it's that simple.  Then, you know, you start to skip over a song here or there.  Or there's a really good intro.  And of course there's always a theme.  Most of the time anyway.  Until you get one of those spots in the playlist where you kinda change the theme a bit, but even then there's still kind of a theme.

I think I know my music library pretty well.  I try to keep all of my cds on my computer so that I have an easily accessible library from Winamp (I also have different media players for different purposes.  VLC is internet radio, my stuff, and other local stuff).  I think that I know my collection pretty well by this point.  There's a few albums in there I don't know too well, but I mostly leave them out of playlists.  I'm not a madman afterall.

As far as I can tell I don't really have a purpose for any of this.  Usually when I make playlists I'll at least have a vague idea of what I'm doing.  Impress girl.  But I'm just kinda recording what I'm listening to I guess.  At some point if someone ever sees my computer it would be interesting for them.  I guess that's also assuming that I'd want to listen to these again.  I bet I would, if someone else really wanted to know about it.  It's not really the kind of thing I'd show off, but I already like all the music so I don't really have a reason to not explain things.

adjusting levels

Important choice review today.  I decided that one of the songs on my demo (I created a VLC playlist that has my top 5 songs.  Two bass songs, two computer songs, and one turntable mix song) had the percussion track (turntable) mixed way to quiet.  I turned up the mid, turned down the treble and bass to improve sound quality and rendered a new track.  So, originally I was trying to keep the percussion kinda quiet so that the bass would stand out more because the bass is the part that contains the most complex part of the song.  It's supposed to be the center of attention and I don't want it getting drowned out by way to loud percussion tracks.  But I noticed that on low volumes I was having trouble hearing it at all.  That's not really the point either.

I think that I made a good decision.  The track went from sounding like the turntable was a sound effect to an actual instrument.  I like when it sounds like an actual instrument, while still having the bass be the focus of the song.  Now I'm not sure if it's too loud, but I think I'm going in the right direction.  I also like the way it sounds with the mid turned up.  It's not quite a treble, but it's close.  It also sounds more significant without getting in the way of the bass stuff.

On an interesting side note, I discovered how to trim the areas where the sound starts to max.  When I lower the gain in the max sound areas, I can turn up the overall bass sound and get a louder recording.  It's still not quite what I'd like to hear, but It's close.  I might even go over a few of my other recordings and apply this technique and see if they start to sound a little more professional.  I'm actually surprised, I didn't think that listening to my recordings would start to make a difference this quickly, but I really like the changes so far.  My overall work is starting to head in the right direction.

community lurking

Today was going back over the Jamendo library and expanding my playlists.  Before doing this, I went through and listened to all the songs I'd already added to my playlists.  This actually took a lot longer than I expected.  My thought was, I'd go through and listen to all of the songs I have on my playlists before browsing for new music.  That way, I at least won't be saving any duplicates.  I don't actually have a reason not to do this because I've gotten quite a bit accomplished today.  And on the plus side, whenever I visit this site I'll have some fairly well-groomed playlists that I am fairly familiar with.

I'm not sure if it's actually possible to get to know the Jamendo community.  Almost seems absurd to think I could listen to any significant portion of their library.  But then I get in there and start browsing the song tags (which I keep noticing are suprisingly well done) and flipping through the pages, so who knows.  I still haven't gotten to that point where I'm like, ok, the quality is definately starting to drop right around here.  These people are just posting way too soon.  I'm sure that point is in there somewhere though.

Also, I'm not sure if I should say this out loud or not, but I'm not sure why I haven't recognized any of the artists on the site.  They claim to have 27,000 songs or something like that.  I haven't heard of any of this.  Not even by accident.  I feel like the odds should be better than that.  I don't know, whatever.

strength training

Now that I have a few songs written and recorded it's time for me to start practicing them more.  So far I've been listening to music in general, I think that helps after you do a bit of recording to kind of see where you stand in terms of quality.  Then I listened to what I have a few more times, which actually turned out pretty well for at least a few of the songs.  I think that the percussion tracks fit really well with the bass so far.  The computer stuff goes surprisingly well overall with what I have.

I think that to get to where I want to be with all of the tracks I'm going to have to do some strength training.  I noticed on a few of the songs my skill level isn't quite where I would have wanted it when I wrote the song.  The recordings are able to get across what I was trying to accomplish musically, but I know they can sound more fluid with some more work and another recording session.  So this means that I'll be doing some similar stuff in my practices, but with a focus on the new songs I wrote.  I will probably also try to practice more often, depending on if I can.

This part is one of the most frustrating because I like to write new stuff, but it's just going to sound sloppy if I leave things where they are right now.  I also haven't bothered to finish writing the other tracks because I'm not sure how much the songs are going to change when I can play them more easily.  It's really not going to be a significant amount of training to get to where I want to be, but I'll have to really focus and make sure that I'm physically where I want to be to have these recordings.

preparing to publish

Most of today was spent doing fairly unproductive things.  I did get around to making those PDF files which took a lot longer than I expected.  There are a few benifits to PDF files, but they are basically text that you can't edit.  Before creating them, I had to go through all the compiled text files I'd previously created and check to make sure all the formatting was exactly as I wanted.  This meant making changes to the spacing between poem titles, the text, and the margin by going through every page of all the books.  I also made some decent improvements to the location of the section and book titles.

In addition to that interesting work, I also rearranged the folder containing all the publishable materials.  Right now the actual files that I edit are still in their own area, but now I have a cool space with text, PDF, and a set of HTML files that were already on the computer.  All three folders contain exactly the same thing, but each has a slightly unique presentation.  I also have some extras in the folder holding this stuff.  A comic, a drawing I did, and a script that launches the HTML in order, so technically you could read all the books in the correct order by just clicking the file.

rhythm

I spent most of today working on writing and recording percussion tracks.  At the moment this includes turntable scratching and what I like to call "cowbell".  All of the "bass" oriented songs that I've recorded so far I have first written and recorded a bassline, then I listen to it and play along with some sort of rhythm.  I've found that this generally works if I can pay close enough attention to the bass to notice if I speed up or slow down.

First I recorded a turntable track for a song.  The turntable actually sounds a lot less awkward than you might think.  I haven't learned enough about percussion in general to give the tracks a lot of variety, so I try to just sort of go along with the bassline the best I can.  I was actually able to do what I thought was some interesting stuff with the bridge of this track.  I'll have to listen to what I have before I have any further comments.

The second track I tried to record more turntable, but it sounded too similar to what I had just done.  Some people might not notice since the bassline isn't even close, but I would know.  So, instead of wasting my time trying to record something that wasn't working, I recorded a "cowbell" track instead.  Basically, I mess with the EQ settings a bit and it sounds close to the bass drum.  I think this will give me a way to distance myself a bit and hopefully have more luck writing another turntable percussion track.