Self Control

Over the years, I've noticed that as my performance starts to improve, so does my self control.  Whenever I get to this point with what I am doing, where I start to become aware of my self control, that is when I start to believe in what I am doing.  When you first start doing something new, there are a lot of steps you go though.  Not being able to reach all the notes, hesitating at the wrong places, forgetting what you're doing, and generally trying a bit too hard to be somewhere.  As you get good enough, these things start to go away.  It's hard (if possible at all) to actually describe when or how this happens, but I feel like when you get there, you will know.  It's a good feeling to think that you're doing well at something.  Obviously, you can't look too far ahead because there are always going to be people that are better than you.

Consistency

I enjoy the consistency of my practice routine.  This may sound strange since when most people think about playing an instrument, they sort of imagine jazz musicians that can just sort of improvise songs whenever they like.  This is something I probably won't be as strong at, at least not right now.  The way that I practice, I work on the hardest parts of my songs and do scales.  This helps me to develop physically and puts me in what I consider to be a very strong songwriting position.  As I slowly get better, my practice routine changes slightly.  This is slower than you might expect since I have to be fairly comfortable with something to say that I'm getting better.  But what it does do is give me a regular affirmation of exactly where I am so that if I wanted to do something like improvise, I could know where I am starting from.

Getting Worried

Inspiration is starting to run dry.  I don't know exactly what to think about it, since I'm going to keep practicing in the exact same way every day.  I will have fewer things to write about for a while.  I will be accomplishing less.  It's not really such a bad thing, but that's just the way things are.  I know the obvious answer.  I need to get out and have more experiences.  I need to distance myself from where I am so I can think from a different place.  If you spend all your time thinking about stuff from the exact same place, you might find that your ideas are fairly similar.  Obviously I've decided that this is a bad thing for me at the moment.  Going back and working with my current ideas seems like even more of a chore, so I'll have to stop complaining for now.

Scaling Back

I think that my reading list has actually been too intense for my schedule lately.  I guess I can't really say this for sure since I've made a fair amount of progress with the novels I've been reading.  Yet, I can't help wonder why I've stopped reading the other stuff on my list.  I didn't mean to do this, but I just sort of stopped anyway.  I think that's how you know that you haven't been planning things well, you just sort of can't do it.  I probably could if I had some sort of reason for finishing things, but that's only going to lead me to starting something else.  Therefor, the problem has to have something to do with my lack of time.  I'm definately enjoying my plan/reading habits.  I'll have to give it some more thought as to what I could do differently.

Untitled

"Samuel wheeled on him and his eyes were filled with tears. 'Don't think it will ever die,'  he cried.  'Don't expect it.  Are you better than other men?  I tell you it won't ever die until you do.'  He stood panting for a moment and then he climbed into the rig and whipped Doxology and he drove away, his shoulders hunched, without saying good-bye"

John Steinbeck, East of Eden - pg. 270

Daily Routine

I have a group of favorite radio stations (because grouping my favorites makes the whole system more usable) that is just foreign music.  Since this is internet radio, there are stations that play some non-English songs, or stations in other countries that play music with English words.  But this is more like, top-40 type of music.  What's most popular in the country at the moment.  Since I've actually heard of famous musicians that I like doing this sort of thing, it seemed like it was worth a shot.  Luckily for me, I seem to have found a clever little loophole.  I don't really need to focus on the lyrics since I can't understand them anyway.  This pretty much just lets me focus on the actual instruments and how the vocals match up with that.  Sadly, I'll probably have to listen to the lyrics at some point, when I'm ready.

Upgrading

After many years of using the same, cheap instrument, I think that I need to at least consider looking into getting a new one.  Now, I can't say for certain, this is why I'm going to need to spend some time in music shops, but I think I can hear my guitar starting to break.  Or get out of tune.  Or it just sounds cheap.  I don't really know, so I guess if I can't tell why the new instrument is better than my old one, I really shouldn't bother getting a new one.  I guess that the new one would be shinnier.  In reality I probaly won't bother doing this for a long time.  But I have officially listed it as something that I have a reason for doing.

Judgement

Listening to the radio is not a useless endeavor.  I have just decided that today.  Most of the time it pretty much blends into the background and you don't really think about it that much.  It's also hard to think about songs you aren't familiar with.  But I think that my, "spot the good song" game makes it worth it.  I don't really have a reason for the songs I pick, or much of a pattern, but it takes some thought to decide that you like something.  I think that with all the time I spend listening to the radio it's got to be worth something.  I know that I am not wasting my time.  I bet in the future I'll even find more benefit from listening to the radio.  Probably.

Scenery

The reading that I'm doing has reminded me that for some reason I haven't been focusing on scenery lately.  There are a lot of uses for different types of styles, but writing about scenery is one of those things that most writing is going to have in some way.  I think that sometimes is takes a really well-written book to notice something like that because of the way that it makes long, flowing passages.  How it sort of encourages you to keep reading.  You don't always notice exactly how this affects a piece of writing until you spend some time reading different styles.  Obviously other styles don't omit this, but scenery can't be the focal point of every piece of writing.  It is a tool that I would like to have available.

Music Theory

While I was listening to some of my old vinyl, I stumbled across a fairly depressing realization.  I think that I'm further back with my music theory than I've been giving myself credit for.  I feel like I spend a lot of time practicing scales, but I don't spend nearly enough time improvising, and I spend almost no time at all playing with other people (or other live music).  Some of the stuff that people do with blues/jazz guitar is pretty far above what seems possible for me.  There are a lot of areas to explore and I feel like I don't know where to start.  I know some basic music theory concepts, but just listening to what can be done makes me wonder what it's going to take to get there.  A lot of practice?  Being around other people that practice a lot?  Maybe just listening to more music can help.

Vinyl Speculation

I started listening to some of my old vinyl again recently.  I'd just like to note right away that everything that I'm going to say is pretty much guessing and borderline hearsay.  The first time I listened to vinyl, I knew that it sounded good in it's own way, but I couldn't exactly say why or that it was any better than digital music.  It's possible my hearing has gotten better since I've last listened to vinyl, because I can tell there is a change when switching between mediums.  I know that digital music is available in a variety of different qualities, but that seems to improve in a different direction.  With a physical copy of music there are a lot of imperfections that just aren't there with digital copies, but this is easily ignored.  This lack of imperfections gives a sort of inflated quality improvement.  I want to say that the separation between instruments is more obvious with vinyl and this accounts for most of the quality difference that is hard if possible at all to actually define.  Once again, this is just something fun to think about.

Awkwardness

I haven't been doing enough brainstorming lately.  Instead of actually trying to do that and get some sort of outline, narrative, and general flow going, I've mostly just been doing random practice exercises.  I must feel out of shape or something.  I guess I would call this random practice exercise.  My main thoughts are that if I just do enough practice, I'll start to form actual idea around this mass of stuff that I start to accumulate.  So far, I think I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit.  I think that you need a lot of material to start to think about things like that.  When you only have a small amount you start to try to use everything.  I need to have a throw-away pile somewhere.  All I can really do is keep practicing.  Maybe, I should brainstorm more ways to practice.

Too Much Choice

There is a point when you have to stop making playlists.  Not even making playlists, there's actually a point where you need to stop listening to individual tracks and just do something else.  I know it kind of sounds like a joke, but it's been happening to me a lot lately.  It's where you're going along and start to panic about what song to play next.  You think, well, I like this, but how well does it go with the last song.  Then the song you were playing stops and you just kinda sit there for a while.  Sure, this happens a lot when you're listening to something new, but you'll be able to tell when you should do something else for a while.

Album Release

I have now decided that I need to have at least one music album that is available to the public if for some reason someone were to read my blog and want to see what I keep talking about.  Obviously I'm not going to release any of the bass tracks I've been working on because I just can't bring myself around to suggest it with the recording equipment that I have.  I'll probably release the computer tracks soon.  My official reason is that my turntable tracks the most obvious representation of what my music is going to sound like.  Experimental, loud, and a bit more aimed towards something that could be called the "sound-art" genre.  I don't remember if I made that term up or if it's something that's commonly used.  I should probably ask, but it's kinda awkward at this point.  Now, I will have more than fifteen second samples in a loop for people to listen to.  This is going to get some of my older stuff out there for people to see and will be an interesting follow-up to my poetry reading video.

Poetry Reading Pt. 1

Now that I have my finally brought myself around to making one of my poetry readings public, I think it's time to reflect on it a bit.  First of all, it's important to know that it's the first of a four part series that I recorded using my laptop cam and mic.  The material is taken from three different books and most of it is changed from the official versions.  I like to think that placing these things next to each other gives you some very interesting things to think about.  Surprisingly, the videos don't change a whole lot from the versions in the books, but a lot of art is about context and how the audience views it.  I've had all four videos posted for a while now, but they haven't been publicly accessible until just now.  I thought that if I could find the right moment it would be cool to have a big fancy entrance, but I ended up deciding that I needed to be more visible before I can think about things like that.  I ended up liking the idea so much that I want to start making more things public so that it's out there while I work on new material.

Short Writing

By this point I have quite a few short writing entries.  I don't really write a whole lot at once, so I really only have a vague idea of what the storyline is in my head.  This is just the way that I decided to do things.  It seemed like a good way to accomplish something without really needed to commit too much to it.  Now that I've accumulated a fair amount of writing, I'm starting to get the feeling that I need to be more familiar with what I have so far.  I haven't really read through most of it after writing it, but I'm starting to get the sense that things could get redundant fairly easily.  I'm not sure if there would even be anything wrong with it, but it's one of those things that just bothers me.

Random

I think this might be mostly an issue with having interesting things to write about, but I think I'm going to mention listening to music at random.  It's hard to make a good playlist if you don't know your music library pretty well.  It's pretty embarrassing when you only know the songs a little bit, but you think you know them better than that.  Although, this is hard to just sit down and do.  So, you spend a lot of time playing songs at random and seeing what happens.  Sometimes I'll listen to albums all the way through, but I tend to drift off a bit more when I do.  I am a lot more involved when I'm selecting songs one at a time.  It takes careful timing to play an album all the way through.

East of Eden

I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful.  But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley.  The water came in a thirty-year cycle.  There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass.  Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain.  And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain.  The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley.  The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray.  The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs.  Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley.  The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death.  People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking.  Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away.  And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years.  It was always that way.

John Steinbeck - East of Eden (pg. 5-6)

Taking Breaks

I don't really like taking breaks from playing bass.  I'm not sure if this is a healthy thing or not, but I shouldn't be thinking about it this much.  When you take a break from something you're supposed to get rest and feel well.  I've taken long breaks before so I know I'm not actually losing any of my skill, but I can still feel something.  I'm gonna need to get over this.  I can't practice every single day.  If I don't practice a day or two before a show or a recording session, I'm still going to be able to play.  Things are not this intense.  If anything, I think that this means I should start taking longer breaks from playing my bass until insignificant things aren't going to bother me anymore.

Low Volume

I think that I've mostly been listening to my recordings at low volume because on the radio songs can be played very quietly without ever seeming to lose anything.  It's kind of bothering me to know that I am not there, I'm not even sure where there is.  So, as a result I hadn't really listened to any of my stuff at high volume.  When I actually tried this out today, I noticed that there is more stuff than I thought that I'd been overlooking.  It wasn't a big problem to fix, but getting there was fairly random at best.  I'm not even sure how I would do more things like this in the future, but I'm glad that I was able to fix up a few tracks.

Getting Better

I'm not sure if this makes me sound like a beginner or not, but lately I've been practicing the same songs so much that I've started to kind of jam out with them a bit.  Nothing really too exciting since I've mostly been writing fairly formal rock type songs.  What I am doing is trying to make slight changes to the structure each time I play a song.  So far this has helped me remember what I've written the whole way through, try to get some the the specifics right, and I usually end up with cool versions that can be extended if I were at a show and wanted to for some reason.  This almost seems like a normal part of songwriting since it's helping the different parts fit together, but I don't really know for sure.

Mirror Practice

I think that my new thing is going to be performing shows for myself.  I remember hearing that you should always practice giving speeches in front of a mirror so that you can see what you look like when you're doing it.  I've performed before and usually someone will record it and I just watch that to see what I looked like.  Now that I'm mostly just writing and recording, I don't really have a way to see what I look like.  I have a few videos I made, but that seems to miss the point a little bit.  Also, I'm trying to see how the music and writing fit together even though they aren't actually intended to fit together.  But, they can exist in the same space and it's interesting to see how that works as an overall show type of thing.  I have a feeling that good things will come from doing this.