Catching My Breath

I took a little break from writing after the holidays...I'd just been a bit overwhelmed and there was so much going on. Now that the social obligations are down to a funky few, and the cookies have all been et (back to the gym for me!), and my folks have been packed off on the plane and delivered to Florida's land of Sunshine & Geezers, I've been relaxing a bit and playing catch-up with everything else in my life. Feels good! It's gonna take a little time to decompress...maybe take a holiday from the holidays...

Playing a lot more too, at least on guitar. The Mobsters band is a good impetus for me to woodshed, and I seem to be leaning into the Swing side of my influences again, which is really fun. Mickey Richard, Guitarist and Luthier Extraordinaire, found and gave me an old old old Doghouse Bass last week. Very Cool! It's gonna need some work, but not too much I think. I'm looking forward to stringing it up and working with that thing, maybe do a little Swing Duet action with Mickey...that would be great.

I also went Tech again and got Band-In-A-Box, a cool and kind of frightening tool. It's a software/MIDI/loops program, and what you do is basically type in your chords and time signature, etc, and then bango! The thing starts pumping out a full arrangement with drums, bass, guitar, horns and more. Scary really, but GREAT for practicing. I'd been just running through the Mobsters swing songs at home by myself, but typing them into BIAB and playing with a full band, much more fun! And strangely I find myself playing LESS notes, and leaving a lot more space. If this tool can help me then I'm gonna use it.

At any rate, hopefully I'm back writing again...who knows, perhaps writing songs again too. I find that creative periods can occasionally be goosed into being, but for the most part they come when they will, and I've got to respect that and enjoy it when it's happening. Right now though, I'm off to work again...

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.