Skip to main content

Day Two Hundred Ninety Four (Year Two)

Relaxing tonight, and trying to get through a bit of the listening that has piled up over the last few weeks.  I've got The Search playing in itunes as I write tonight.

I've got to say, Jay Farrar has his moments of brilliance, but of the three bands (Son Volt, Wilco, and Uncle Tupelo), I definitely fall more on the Wilco side than anything else.  It has something to do with both the raw emotion, and the sense of adventure that lay at the heart of their music, I think.  I can appreciate what Jay Farrar does, but a lot of the time it feels like he's preserving something in amber as opposed to pushing the envelope for something new.  That's not always a bad thing, but I do tend to notice that the Son Volt tracks I like the most are the ones where he seems more emotionally committed to the lyric (and subsequently, the playing).

What I spent the most time doing today, where music is concerned anyway, was more sorting and examining of resources.  One of the things I found in that search was an Eagles tab book that I forgot I had.  I worked through a bit of the intro to "Already Gone" on the electric as a result of that find.  The string bends in that song are something I need to work on. Actually, string bending, specifically, is an aspect of my playing that needs work on an all-around sort of level.

What I really ought to do is sit down and make an objective list of the things in my playing that need work, and then go from there in terms of progress.  I find myself laying out things here a lot and list off things that then sometimes get lost in the shuffle.  If I'm going to start teaching and maximize my own playing, I need to be better about the follow through on the things I'd like to get done musically.

I've got Monday and Tuesday off, and I'll be in Cherokee visiting SL, but she's got to work both days, so I will have plenty of time to get my ducks in a row.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Day Three

Short one today. I've got a bunch of the DVDs that Guitar World has put out. Waded through those to see what I had, worked off of the lead guitar one. Just basic scales , but still a light place to begin. It was nice to just start loosening up my fingers again. Off from work tomorrow, so hopefully I'll get a lot of playing done. Said I'd mention the other project I'm hoping to finish this year. Back when I was living in WI, I started a hard rock band with a friend of mine. She was heavily influenced by Evanescence, and so, with her as vocalist, we started writing songs. We had written and demoed almost a full album's worth of music by the time I moved to IA, and had even purchased a P.A. in preparation for eventual gigs. We never did find a permanent drummer or bassist, so our demos sound very rough (and not nearly loud enough). I'd like to finish those songs, and make an EP of the 4 or 5 strongest, just as a way to put a cap on that project. More tom...

Day Three Hundred Fifty Seven (Year Seven)

Today was okay.  It ended up being quieter than I wanted it to be, but I got in a few things. 1.  I got the music from the car hauled in and sorted out in advance of my road trip to Dubuque for a little longer than a day.  I'm taking the Radiohead reissue with me for that, since I haven't gotten a chance to sit down with it yet. 2.  I'm also taking an empty notebook along with me, in the hopes that I might start to get some lyric ideas down on paper while I'm gone.  I watched some cool videos early this morning about the idea of writing all of the music before writing lyrics, and the way things are going that is looking like what's going on with me. 3.  I wish there had been more playing today, but I'm still feeling good about where things are sitting.  This next week needs to include a lot of writing.

Day Ninety Three (Year Six)

Today was an interesting day. On one hand, it wasn't a day where I spent a ton of time in the studio, but on the other hand, it was a day where the time that I did spend in the studio was probably the most productive time I've had in a long time.  In short, even though I didn't spend all that much time working on the EP tonight, I feel like I got a whole lot closer to finishing it. I've been frustrated with myself lately for not finishing things a bit quicker, and struggling with the fact that, while I have been successful at finding a whole lot of kernels of songs, they haven't seemed to want to sprout into completed works.  Tonight, instead of freaking out and making myself more stressed out, I sat down and looked at a few favorite songs to see if I could sneak a peek behind the veil, if you will. The answers jumped out at me immediately.  I haven't been doing enough with the kernels.  Mostly, I haven't been facilitating the chord changes that will a...