Hope lives (as the internal struggles of a guitar hobbyist continue)

I’ve mentioned in a couple of recent posts that I’m playing the guitar more often.

2010 was largely a dead year for me and my guitar playing. I played in spurts, which is par for the course, but the big difference this year was the staggering* amount of time that I didn’t play.

*I can’t actually show you how staggering it was, because I didn’t keep a log. Trust me, though: it was probably my least-disciplined year in a long, long time.

Why didn’t I play very much? Well, I won’t get into too many specifics, but there are several factors that go into disciplining one’s self to engage in a hobby on a regular basis, and thus, several bad habits that can be inhibitors to that. The biggest contributor was a lack of inspiration or interest. It’s something that’s difficult to explain… but it generally stems from my ever-present lack of confidence in my abilities to improve and create, my internal self-censoring mechanism, and, well, just being stuck in a rut.

My view of myself as a player goes something like this: “Unpracticed, slow, undisciplined. Unfocused. Unoriginal. One-dimensional. Over-uses open/droning strings, sliding chord shapes, chord bends. Strums weird (at the wrist) – open strings/chords sound muddy as a result. Can’t bend single notes to proper pitch. Often misses notes, particularly when trying to ‘solo.’ Poor finger-style player.” Etc. There’s more, but those are the most pertinent points for me.

(Yes, I also suck at learning and playing the works of others. I’m extremely poor at learning different styles: jazz, classical and blues guitar feel inauthentic to me – that is, me as a guitarist. I love jazz, classical, blues, and many other styles of guitar playing, but I feel like a total imposter when I try to play them, so instead I try to incorporate elements of those styles into my playing when I can.)

Anyway… now that I’ve typed all of that out, if I step back and look at that list I can see some constructive points there. Making a list of areas of weakness doesn’t mean that I have to wallow in it (I’m telling myself this, mind you…).

1. For one thing, open strings, drones and pedals, sliding chords, chord bends and vibrato, etc. are all things that I’m interested in. I enjoy them, and I like using them – they help to define my playing style. That’s a positive thing, and so using them is ok.
2. My strumming style (and, to a lesser extent, my picking style) is evolving. To be more descriptive about it, I tend to strum at a slight angle to the strings – that is, my pick doesn’t hit the strings straight on. I hold my guitar so that the neck is a bit higher than the body, but I strum relatively perpendicular to the floor. I’ve tried different things – the most radical two options being a) eliminating “strumming” from my style entirely and b) holding my guitar like the Beatles did (neither was remotely satisfying) – and I’ve shortened my guitar strap a bit to give it better balance. As a result of some experimentation, this issue is actually improving.
3. Several of the other areas are chronic issues for me, and are technical issues that I have to dedicate myself to overcoming. So, that’s on me – I can’t let my confidence be completely trampled by issues that I’ve not taken the time to practice through and/or fix.

* * * * *

While I certainly have issues as a musician, one thing that I don’t have is very many issues with my instrument setup.

Currently, the guitar that I play the most is my Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster. It has noiseless pickups, which is great for playing in an apartment. It also has a switch that, when engaged, allows for double the amount of pickup combinations of a normal Strat. I don’t mess with those configurations, though – the sounds are funky, I guess, but I’m not a funky guitar player. I just leave the switch disengaged and the pickups at the neck (mainly) or middle positions, and go from there.

I don’t use any effects right now. As far as amps go, I was using a Peavy Basic 60 bass amp, which, when adjusted quite a bit, produced a nice, warm, bass-y sound. However, while I like the sound to some extent, it’s a little too bottom-heavy for an apartment, so recently I have been using my Crate Palomino V8, which is a little tube amp that I picked up on eBay a few years ago. It’s a simple little amp, and it isn’t perfect… but right now it’s music to my ears.

With the Strat at the neck position, and the Crate at low volume with moderate gain, I can get some warm tones and nice, subtle dynamics. More than ever, I feel like I can control the amount of distortion that I get by playing more/less intensely or by rolling back slightly on the guitar’s volume knob.

In the liner notes for his CD Perfect Night: Live in London, Lou Reed wrote about his experience with a new pickup that had been developed – it enabled him to plug his acoustic guitar into an electric guitar amp and play it loud without it sounding like crap and/or distorting. He said that it “sounded like diamonds.” That’s how I feel about this simple setup. Of course, it sounds very different from Lou’s version of diamonds, but… my point is this: to me, it sounds great. It’s inspiring and satisfying to pick up the guitar, play one note, and smile a big smile inside. It’s about as close as I’ll ever get to some of Sonic Youth’s various guitar sounds, so I’m grateful for that.

* * * * *

The guitar sound moves me right now. I find that, more than I have in a long time, I am drawn to the guitar as a source of diversion. This gives me hope, because, amazingly, over the past year I’ve often thought to myself that perhaps my days of even playing sporadically were drawing to a close. As it stands right now, that already seems like a thought from the distant past – I feel good about where I am: even though my playing has many faults, it’s enjoyable, and that allows some contentment to balance out my awareness of the steep road to betterment that lies before me .

Creative rut

I am in a creative rut, musically speaking.

For the past several months, I did little in the way of creating new music. I played my guitar, and futzed around with some new ideas, but I didn’t come up with anything that I liked.

More recently, however, I’ve been focusing more of my attention toward actually writing something that I’m going to enjoy playing. And as of today, though, I still have little more than scraps.

At times, I’ve played some songs that I wrote in the past. I’m talking about stuff that I wrote more than five years ago, or more than ten years ago. Music that I can certainly find fault with, but is nevertheless challenging and beautiful, in its own way.

My favorite song to play is one that I started and completed within the past two years. It’s not recorded, because it’s not ready yet – I’m still sort of learning it. However, it was one of those songs that started out as an idea that I scrapped, picked up again, drastically reworked, and then added to until it became fairly fully-realized. I love playing it, and would like to record it some day.

That song, however, is not really new anymore.

I have really been enjoying playing my electric guitar. It sounds great – it’s the best-sounding guitar that I have ever owned – and that in itself is an inspiration and a motivator. However, there is conflict within me about whether I should be trying to write on it as opposed to my inferior-sounding acoustic guitar.

The acoustic guitar is a great instrument for playing and singing by yourself – once you get a song down, you can easily make something that sounds pretty good, because the guitar and your hands are providing the tones, and your voice can settle into the song nicely. The electric, on the other hand, can be a viable solo instrument, but for me, it’s more difficult to make music that way. My guitar, a Stratocaster, is plugged into a bass amp, and the clean tones that I get are very pleasing to me. An amplified electric guitar is more volatile in nature than an acoustic – tones can sound great, but mistakes sound more pronounced, and volume can be less predictable. Since I am a mistake machine, I feel like my desire to create something worthwhile on the instrument is constantly being subverted by my inability to make what I create sound good.

However, I’m sort of getting away from what I was originally talking about.

The music that I created five or ten years ago sounds inspired, and I know that it’s good. I’ve always wanted to build upon that music, and continue to make better and better music. What I’m finding, though, is that the stuff I’m working on is comparatively more basic. A positive way of looking at it would be to say that it’s more minimalistic in nature. Indeed, when I get done playing something that I’ve been recently working on, I sometimes walk away with a Breeders song stuck in my head. It’s good stuff, to be sure. But I have to get over the internal conflict that I have right now, which is wanting to write good music, not technical music, not “dumb” music (“dumb” being self-derogatory, not directed at anyone who makes good, relatively easy-to-play music). I don’t have to make intricacy the goal. Hopefully, I can learn to let the song happen, and not censor myself too much. Otherwise, I fear that I’ll just end up beating my head against the wall, and have nothing to show for it.

Some music that gives me life

A look at some music that moves and rejuvenates me…

George Winston, “Rainsong [Fortune's Lullaby]” (Plains, 1999)

This is a cover, but it’s a very good one. It’s a good song to listen to when I’m feeling frustrated, like I’m feeling as I write this.*

I love that George Winston, whose music is classified as New Age, sounds nothing like most of the other artists in his genre because his music is organically recorded; by that, I mean that he plays his music on a great piano, and records in a great-sounding room with a great microphone. There are no special computer effects, Casio keyboard sounds or huge washes of reverb, and you can really hear the sounds of the room and the instrument on the recordings.

Ray Lamontagne, “Narrow Escape” (Trouble, 2003)

Footage from 2003, the year that his album Trouble was released. I love performances like this, where just a voice and an acoustic guitar more than captivate a music hall audience.

The Verlaines, “Heavy 33″ (No Alternative, 1993)

This is just audio with a slide show, but that’s all you really need. I love every single thing about this song.

The Verlaines, fronted by Graeme Downes, were from New Zealand. They released several albums between 1985 and 1997, and I would love to get my hands on them all. I don’t know too much about them, but “Heavy 33″ showed up on the No Alternative compilation in 1993.

This song has never gotten old for me. The guitar sound is almost perfect, and the lyrics

I’m striving to coax or wrench you; I can’t even reach you.

You’re starving for something; I’ve got nothing to feed you.

are amazing. I’d love to someday be able to say that I had written a song like this.

Sonic Youth, “The Empty Page” (Murray Street, 2002)

I love the reckless precision that Sonic Youth displays in their music. They present themselves as both a band that, musically, is on the fringe of insanity and also knows exactly what it is doing. The results are a wonderful mix of discordance and beauty.

This is one of their more melodic tunes. I am really attached to this song, and whenever it comes up in the iTunes shuffle I pay special attention to it. The section between 2:07 and 2:33 is a great (although, for them, subtle) example of the musicality that they display in their “noisier” moments.

I also like the “I am not Beck” shirt.

Eddie Vedder, “Hard Sun” (Into The Wild, 2007)

Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack to the movie Into The Wild is pretty amazing. It has some understated music on it that differs significantly from Pearl Jam’s, but is still true to his voice and creative history. Interestingly, “Hard Sun” probably sounds more like Pearl Jam than anything else on the album, but it’s actually a cover of a song by Canadian singer-songwriter Indio (given name Gordon Peterson).

Vedder used some of the influence of the Qawalli vocal tradition that he learned while working with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Dead Man Walking soundtrack, 1993) in the mid-section, which is an instrumental section in Indio’s original (it starts at around the 2:15 mark). And the harmonies by Corin Tucker complement his vocals really well.

This is a fan video, but it’s not bad at all, and is the only one that I could find that wasn’t either the promotional video for the movie or an audio-only version.

Loreena McKennitt, “Dante’s Prayer” (The Book of Secrets, 1997)

Loreena McKennitt is a Canadian musician of born to Scottish and Irish parents. While her music is commonly classified as folk, she has been influenced by music from around the world (Scottish, Irish, Spanish, Arabic, etc.). In addition to that, she has referenced several literary works along the way, including Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman and, for this one, Dante’s Inferno.

McKennitt has a beautiful voice, and is an accomplished pianist, harpist and accordionist. I love this song, and this live version from her Nights from the Alhambra DVD (2007) is impeccable. The bit of history that she gives while introducing it gives precious insight into her inspiration for the song.

* * * * *

So there’s a peak into some of the music that gives me life.

*Upon finishing this list, I feel less frustrated. Music can both ground you and take you on a journey. It’s a wonderful thing.

Lucid Dreamers – a refreshing musical experience

Lucid Dreamers website

A couple of months ago, I met a gentleman named Stacey Young. Stacey works with several of the people in our apartment complex. Our conversation started when I pointed out a beautiful blue-green butterfly to him. He then mentioned that he had noticed me carrying an guitar and amp one day, and so the conversation turned to music. I told him about the casual nature of my musical hobby, and then he told me about his group, Lucid Dreamers.

He told me that, over the years, he had been able to put together a nice recording studio with, from what I gather, some sweet old-school recording equipment and instruments. He is a multi-instrumentalist, and together with his long-time songwriting partner Chris Davis, they cover vocals, bass, drums and other percussion instruments, keyboards, various stringed instruments, and flute (among others).

We had a great conversation, and he surprised me by going to his car and giving me their latest CD, The Cosmic Wheel, to check out. It was an awesome gift, especially for having just met! I went into my place and listened to it, and then I listened to it again. And again, the next day, and so on…

Lucid Dreamers is difficult to categorize. I would call them progressive, which is sort of a catch-all label for music that doesn’t fit a formula, although I would not call them progressive rock. He told me that they are working on an instrumental CD with everything to piano and cello songs to full-on jazz rock, and upon listening to the CD, I could hear jazz rock among their many influences. The music is very refreshing, as it perfectly fits their “making the music that we like to make is the reward itself” ethos.

Lucid Dreamers is definitely a group to check out if you have an interest in positive, jazzy, psychedelic-tinged music. You can find their website by clicking the album cover photo or the link in the first paragraph, and you can find three of the songs from their latest album streaming there.

Leonard Cohen performs “Chelsea Hotel” at the Royal Albert Hall!

Leonard Cohen gave a rare performance of “Chelsea Hotel,” from his first album Songs of Leonard Cohen, at the Royal Albert Hall in London during his massive 2008 world tour. I’ve never heard a live version of it before, so this was a treat!

* * * * *

Note: This post contains an embedded video – if you are reading this in a reader, please click the link to this post to see the video!

The incomplete songwriter: a self-critical look

the Previous, April 1996 (photo by Andrew Eckert)

Today, while I was playing guitar, I decided to fire up the old iMac** in order to see if I had any files of lyrics from the Previous, the band I was a part of in college. I had found a folder last week in the basement that contained some lyrics, posters, letters and such, and I wanted to see if there were any others on the computer. There weren’t, but I did have several years worth of my own attempts at songwriting stored there.

Sitting there with my guitar, I began opening files from as early as 2001. Some songs had chord notations, but most of them were just verse. I couldn’t remember half of the songs at all, and there were others where I could only remember how the chorus was sung. Most of the songs are incomplete.

* * * * *

Looking at those songs served as a painful reminder that, for me, songwriting has always been very difficult. I get a lot of pleasure out of being creative, but I’m rarely happy with the results. Off the top of my head, here is how I would grade myself on some random elements of the songwriting process:

• Coming up with guitar parts: A-
• Coming up with a melodic hook or two: B+
• Coming up with a lyrical hook or two: B
• Completing the first verse: C
• Completing the chorus: B-
• Completing the second verse: D-
• Song construction/completion: D
• Writing “good” lyrics: C-
• Intros/outros: B

There are some interesting issues that I’ve been thinking about, relative to the subject of my own songwriting. I’ve always said that I felt confident in my ability to write music, but that I struggled with lyrics. However, looking at the list above, it’s somewhat obvious that there are a lot of areas where I’m deficient.

One major issue that causes a lot of problems for me is that I have a severely overactive internal censor. The censor works overtime in a couple of different ways. For one thing, I’m always wary of borrowing too many ideas from another songs. Sometimes I think that I’m too wary of this, and I think that it stems from the fact that, in the early days, I wrote music that was completely derivative of what was popular at the time. My guitar-playing (and songwriting) was in its infancy, and I didn’t have many musical tools to work with. As I began to branch out, with regard to both what I listened to and what I was able to do with the guitar, the need to censor myself began to lessen, but the habit of over-censoring myself is one that has been very difficult to break ever since.

The problem with too much self-censorship is that one begins to kill off ideas before they can be tinkered with, reworked, or fleshed out. While many great songwriters and songwriting teams record their ideas and jams, in order to cull the good bits and use them to write a song, I tend to try to work linearly; that is, I come up with an idea, decide if it’s “good,” and then work on it until I reach a stopping point. That stopping point may be time, frustration, fatigue, interruption, or something else, but it’s rarely because the song is complete. Additionally, I usually do not record what I’ve come up with – regardless of what I think about it – free of judgment. Over the course of an hour, I might have ten musical ideas, reject five of them, forget two others, and run into a brick wall with the other three. In the end, I have a fraction of the material that I could have had. I’ve lost many potentially good ideas this way, and regretted it later.

Some of what I’m writing here is about not recording my ideas, and that is simply laziness and a lack of focus. However, it ties in with the self-censorship issue, because it’s all part of an even larger problem.

* * * * *

The major problem that I have with my own songwriting is a lack of confidence in my abilities. I also do not like my own voice, which has killed a lot of recordings for me. The lack of confidence leads directly to several behaviors that are detrimental to my songwriting process and my enjoyment of the experience:

• Over-censorship.
• Not taking the time to record my ideas, either through written notation or via a sound recording.
• Giving up on a work in progress before it’s finished (and never picking it up again).
• Periods of dormancy, where I don’t try because “I’m not a good songwriter anyway.”
• Attempting to write more interesting and challenging music to make up for my struggling lyric-writing skills. Most of the time, this only increases the level of difficulty for writing lyrics that work with the music, and usually ends with an incomplete song.

If I am going to have any success with, and enjoy the process of, songwriting, I need to address some of these issues. I need to work smarter. (I also need to “lighten up” a bit.) It is my hope that having a dedicated workspace for writing and recording music in my home will make it easier to reverse some of my mental and behavioral inhibitions about the songwriting process.

* * * * *

** Note: I recently set up my old iMac (2006, duo-core processor, 150GB hard drive) again. It has been largely neglected since I bought my new one last December, mainly because it was suffering from terrible performance issues.

Earlier in the summer, I was toying with just wiping the hard drive and reinstalling the OS. However, a week or two ago I decided to try removing some files and programs, with the idea that it was simply bogged down with (what is now) unnecessary stuff. So I trashed World of Warcraft and all of my addons, about 50GB of music, and some other files that I no longer need. When I was done with that, I started up a couple of applications, Safari and Microsoft Office, that had been giving me problems. I didn’t expect too much – these are applications that had taken a minute or more to open previously, but lo and behold, they opened within a reasonably short time!

I would like to continue to record music with that computer. While my new iMac is in the main part of the apartment and gets the bulk of my attention, the old one is in a back bedroom along with my guitars and amps. It’s a relatively quiet area, and I am trying to get it organized so that the environment is more conducive to playing and recording.

From the feed reader: recent posts of interest

A few articles I’d like to share…

• Alex Skolnick, lead guitarist for thrash band Testament and his own jazz group, Alex Skolnick Trio, posted about The Shred Epidemic late last month at Guitarplayer.com. As a talented guitarist who brings a lot of melody and musicality to his leads, his take on the issue is compelling.
• Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic writes a blog for Seattle Weekly, and a few weeks ago he wrote an article about Analog vs. Digital as a recording medium. I know a lot about music, but he gave an interesting inside perspective on analog tape and the challenges it presents during the remastering process.
• On a different front, Krist wrote recently about Wyclef Jean’s bid to become the new president of Haiti, relating his own short experiences as a candidate for Lt. Governor of Washington in 2004.
• Joe Posnanski wrote recently about the Heart and Hustle Award, which Derek Jeter has inexplicably never won.
• The new issue of Spin magazine has an article by David Peisner about this year’s Soundgarden reunion. Part of the article, containing bits of interviews with each of the four members, is available at Spin.com.
• Icedragon at Druid Main recently posted a series of articles about druid macros, and I found them to be a very helpful resource. They are Macros Revisited, /Cast [Advanced] Macros, and C-c-c-combo Breaker! Dual Macros.

 

Music list: classic rock special

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been in a classic rock mood. Not exclusively, of course, because that would go against my nature as regards my music listening behavior. However, I’ve heard several oldies-but-goodies recently, and I thought I’d make some of them the focus of my first music list in several weeks.

1. Neil Young – “Tonight’s The Night (Part 1)”
2. Grateful Dead – “Morning Dew” (live)
3. Boston – “Foreplay/Long Time”
4. Neil Diamond – “Kentucky Woman”
5. The Velvet Underground – “Here She Comes Now”
6. Led Zeppelin – “Since I’ve Been Loving You”
7. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – “I Need To Know”
8. Jefferson Airplane – “She Has Funny Cars”
9. Van Halen – “Runaround”
10. Norman Greenbaum – “Spirit In The Sky”
11. REO Speedwagon – “That Ain’t Love”
12. Cream – “World Of Pain”

Additionally, Black Country Communion has released the cover art for their upcoming album, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago on this blog. Here it is – it looks like it would be a fun album to own on vinyl!

Black Country Communion's "Black Country"

Miscellaneous update: heat wave edition

The heat has been pretty much unbearable this week. As such, I’ve tried to balance some productivity with some fun inside stuff.

Books

After I finished reading The Eagle, I went through a span of several days where I felt like I didn’t want to read anything for a while. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but I didn’t think it would last long. I picked up Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger from time to time, and, as it’s not a long book, I finished it last night. It was a bargain book, and I was hoping that it would be a story that stands on its own; admittedly, this was because I didn’t want to have to find the sequels, but I’m going to have to at some point, because it really functions as the beginning to a larger story. So I have to read the next one at some point…

A couple of nights ago I started reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass, and it looks like that will be holding my attention for a while.

Music

I’ve been working on a song, little by little. Lyrics are much more difficult for me than guitar, so it’s going to take a while to finish. That’s fine, because it’s all for my own enjoyment. My fingers are coming along slowly, as I get them accustomed to playing the guitar every day. I’m hoping to change the strings on my acoustic this weekend, because it’s been a few months and they’re starting to look and feel worse for wear.

Video Games

The Steam “Perils of Summer Sale” ended on July 4th, and I restrained myself, not dropping a lot of money on a bunch of games that I’m not sure I would play. I have a terrible habit of buying games and letting them sit for months (or forever), and so I only picked up one game, Civilization IV Complete, for $10 last weekend. I had intended to buy another game or two, but there were a couple of occasions where I added a game to my cart when it was 75% off for the day, decided to think about it before buying, and then forgot about it (Torchlight for $5 was one of them). I wasn’t too broken up about that, in the end. Like I said, I’m really bad with playing most games that I’m “interested” in – something weird about my personality, I guess – so the one game was enough for me.

As a side note, there are many games that I know are available for Mac that are not available on Steam. Like Dragon Age: Origins. EA has made a concerted effort to make more games available for Mac over the past year or two, and they’re available elsewhere, but with DA:O I’m holding out for a while. I like the fact that Steam seems the most likely candidate to provide updates, something that has been universally absent for that game in particular on the Mac.

In general, I’m really happy with Steam, although I’ve only used it to purchase three games thus far. I do wish that they would release more than two or three games per month for Mac. I’m not blaming them, though. I’m sure that they’re constantly dealing with issues related to the games that they make available, and so I’ll continue to check a couple of times a week to see what’s new or on sale.

Etc.

As far as what else has been going on, I’ve been doing a little gardening (trying to keep the tomato plants sated and healthy has been my greatest challenge) and other yard work (in small spurts), as well as plenty of chilling out indoors, trying to stay cool. Fortunately, the worst part of the heat wave seems to be over, moving toward the southeastern coast now. We’ll still have temps in the low 90s next week, but it shouldn’t be as bad, thankfully!

Live bluegrass: River Wheel

River Wheel

On Friday night, I decided to take a walk into downtown Lancaster to see what was happening for First Friday. The weather was perfect – mid-seventies, low humidity, clear skies. I made my way to Prince St., into the heart of the Art District, and strolled through the crowds with an eye to see if there were any musical performers that would catch my ear.

The first group I came across was a six-piece acoustic band called River Wheel, a Lancaster-based group that plays regionally. Their line-up consisted of guitar, mandolin, two violins, cello, and upright bass. They were playing bluegrass, both vocal and instrumental music. I caught them as they were beginning to play a version of “Sittin’ On Top Of The World.” When they finished the song, I continued on, walking down a few more streets and encountering four or five other acts along the way.

However, I eventually found myself back on Prince St., in order to catch whatever I could of River Wheel, who were totally cooking! The sidewalk was crowded, but I was fortunate to be able to work my way closer for a better view, and by the last couple of songs I was standing right in front of them.

I’ve always had an affinity for upright bass players, and so it gave me great pleasure to watch and listen to Charles Meunch in particular. He calmly and fluidly contributed melodic lines while singing lead or harmonizing. All six players were excellent, and their playing blended perfectly into a beautiful acoustic sound that was exactly what I needed to hear that evening.

At about 8:45pm, they finished up with a rousing instrumental (which I sadly don’t know the name of). The audience clapped along, band members whooped and played “one more time!” several more times, and the evening ended on that major up-note.

I definitely recommend checking them out if you get the chance. They have a Myspace page featuring several songs, and if you are on Facebook you can find them here. The best, though, has to be seeing them live. I’ve already bookmarked their Myspace page so that I can plan to see them when they come into town again!