Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Two days of excellent rehearsals. With Mr Bashford. We have now "completed" (completed = run through a few times, figured out all the sounds we want to make, recorded a few drum loops, half-thought of a few melodic ideas) four pieces of music that total to around an hour. On the night they could be anywhere from 4 minutes to two hours, depending on how we feel!

I should not play the music down that much... While it is improvised, to get to an hours worth of music has taken us a couple of months of regular work, a few times a week for a number of hours each time. As with most things, it is easier to decide what you don't want than to come up with something you do like. Alot of our musical creativity has been throwing out and rejecting stuff that we thought was working but when repeated or listened to, is not working.

Yesterday was especially pleasant as we rifled through my bank of Mellotron sounds. Pleasant = nostalgic. Mr Bashford was looking for sounds to invoke from his machine as he struck its rubber pads. I would change the sound bank and play a few notes while Mr Bashford would either nod his head sagely or screw his face up in pain or simply say things like, 'No. Too Moody Blues or too Yes.' He selected a few choirs and a few string sounds. I played a few simple chords or a 2 or 3 note slow melody, transferred the resultant file to his machine and Mr Bashford now plays the mellotron. We use it in only one piece, so far, the StringMachine song. The name says it all, although in nearly 20 minutes of music there are one or two moments when a guitar sound is almost recognizable.

The names I choose for the music indicate the amount of time I spend over those things. One is called, "Twelve tones to Locrian" and another is called "Alocrian". A new piece is called "In Sen" and another is called "White notes". At least, I will not be confused as to which key/mode to play each piece in...

Also, we even went through a few mini-moog sounds until I felt we had wasted too much time. Nostalgia not withstanding. The Moog sounds will be for some other time although careful choice will be required. The days of Mr Emerson are no longer here, and together with his erstwhile companion in music Mr Wakeman (perhaps they still are companions, I don't know), they have made alot of the moog sounds so distinctive as to be unusable by anyone else. Except, perhaps, if they are invoked by a drummer...

I have a task to complete that I have been putting off for a long time. There is a mess of cables and connections in the study, and the rack-able items need to be, well..., put into a rack. I have had the case sitting around for a month or two. It's, yet another, music related task that has nothing to do with producing or playing music. Immediately. The items must be racked since I cannot play live carrying around those items singly but, I will have to spend quite some time unconnecting, fitting (using tools like a screwdriver - I hope the hammer will not be required), re-connecting, trying to remember where the connections went, and then testing/sound checking it all. I will then be back to exactly where I am now, able to play and produce music. I'm sure you can see the reason for my reticence.

The floor in the study before...


The empty rack case... (and the wonderful doona in the spare room)


1:00pm
Been distracted by various rural pursuits. Some friends needed attention...


And others simply needed mum...


As I was outside in this early summer weather, much too early and much too summery - even if these last years are not directly caused by global warming then these years (and much worse) are what we can expect in the years and decades to come. I have no grandchildren yet but when I do I will have to apologise to them on behalf of all of us - thinking about how much time and effort there is in music without playing music. It seems most of time is spent organising. For example, doing the web sites (on this blog I thought about putting my interests as "having completed web sites"), preparing documentation, even down to an afternoon trying to work out a template for endsongs business letters, another whole day went by trying to prepare music samples from some of the music we have recorded so far. I have taken a few 5 or so second snippets and faded them in and then out and then joined them together. Ohh! It sounds so easy when I write it like that. A day was spent working out how to do that - it's easy now.... Of course, once I have no further use for that skill. Covering letters have been written, drum samples for Mr Bashford have been stretched and altered (often the mistakes caused by my ineptitude in all things musical technician-wise have been quite interesting - I could not reproduce them of course, so they have been quickly rendered to disk before I made further mistakes that removed the music all together), also various tiny business-tidying thingys that are inconsequential but lead to a day being over and a guitar not being touched.

And our farm needs attention from time to time - although that is "real" work. I sound not say that, I don't mean it. In the scheme of things everything is "real" work, even sitting on your bum reflecting - perhaps that is the only real work there is. We all need more time for that.

The work so far is only preparation, and there is (some) optimism since I have not come up against the real world of venue owners and audiences that care not for the music. I have no current contacts, I do not know any venue owners, so I will have to do what I did 30 years ago and: find venues that may be suitable and will accept our music (even if only on Monday at 5pm), then approach said venues with what has been prepared including music samples and try to convince them that we are worth employing (even though we have a following of zero and can guarantee no audience). Somehow I need to convince people that "new" music is worth it (it isn't - but I need to convince them otherwise).

Why bother? Mmm. Well, it will be fun and very little of what we do needs to be productive.

Times moves on. Perhaps the rack case packing will be done tomorrow.

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