Journal By The Window

Time screams by the world like the winds around a huge tornado, bits of life and experience flying by at amazing speed.Like Dorothy in The Wizard Of OZ I watch various friends and loved ones spin by my window, and then disappear into the swirling funnel of time. Where will they go? Where will I land?

Things happen too fast for me to track them or to try to understand. A loved relative and an old Best Friend from my past both vanished into the mystery of death this month, and two other Old Best Friends appeared out of the void to reconnect. Cyn's aging Mom visited and my Dad recovered from our alarming and difficult Family Reunion, which he unknowingly attended with a fractured spine. Several friends have plunged into depression, and I seem to have the same malady, albeit in a milder form. Cynthia blazes about, a distracting blur of energy, doing a million things at once, like Vishnu. Work, chores, attending to family and basic needs eat up all available time, leaving my studio dusty and my recent CD unpromoted. And speaking of the studio, my PC keeps self-destructing.

So slowing down enough to write a few pages in a journal is a rare and welcome thing. I look out into the blue Autumn sky and listen to the insects and birds...something like peace comes over me and an inner Self relaxes for a moment. Time changes everything, for good or ill, but a little time to myself can only help me. And in turbulent times like these, I need that.

Loop Composition

For those crafty individuals who have been following my adventures, you know that I've embraced the Acid Pro 6 program for working with loop-based musical compositions. I started using it because I never could seem to get my drummer friends to make it out to my rather isolated country home, or if they did make it we never seemed to have enough time to do too much. Drum machines seem dreadful to me, and I don't think enough like a good drummer to create a great part that way anyway...and actually I think there are very few people who can pull that off. But with drum loops, you have 2 to 16 bar sections of recordings of actual drummers, and you can mix and match them if you have a good set of collections (thanks, Beta Monkey and Drums On Demand!). It does take time, and (for me at least to get what I want) a LOT of tracks...on average probably 30 to 40 for a drum part, including cymbal hits and such. But I can usually get a part that will be very difficult to tell from a real drummer (at least if that's what I'm trying to do). Hey, it fools many of my professional drummer friends! Is it a replacement for a good percussionist, playing live with a smokin' rhythm section? Hell, no! But try to get those guys out to the farm at 3:30 in the morning...hmm, Cynthia might have something to say about that too...

Now, however, I've been delving into this medium more and more, putting horn parts on tracks for clients as well as percussion...and I've been experimenting with doing compositions that are nearly all loops. At first those experiments all sounded like very bad hip-hop, but as I've gotten more used to working with Acid I've found that I can get a really good-sounding (to me at least) pop song or classical bagatelle happening. Again, it takes a lot of time, lots of slicing and dicing of the material (it helps to have a huge library of loop CDs as well), time moving, reversing, transposing and mangling the stuff into a usable form. But it can be done, and I'm thinking that several of these will be out on my next album!

For a while I was kind of embarrassed about admitting to using this kind of technology...I really am more of a player than an engineer at heart...but I've decided that creativity can transcend those concerns. There are lots of amazing writers using loops, and the collage aspect of making something out of little bits of nothing is very appealing. Plus, I'm will wind up playing on anything I do...I can't help that. It's just part of the fun...and if it's not fun then I'm not doin' it. It's certainly not for the giant dollars! Hm, I must find some of those giant dollars sometime.