what is going on in your musical life

yeah 5 years already! in june technically.
now for the real problem: i have real difficulty with the concept of "putting myself out there" for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the stigma against self-promotion. i don't need to go on about the shame and stigma of self-promotion among music-making people. however, if i don't do it, no one will come to me; unfortunately every time i try to do it, i recoil internally and stop before i even start. then there is the feeling of begging for attention, which has been trained out of me over many years. i'm not really sure how to reach out without feeling this way, like i have no idea how to do it. i feel like i need advice from someone who knows me & gets my perspective and situation, but ???

you're right though, it does come in waves. i am not having one atm but like i said, i am getting a decent fix elsewhere in my musical life.

LL, to me you are a hero for passing on to others what you know/love. The courage to do that is laudable - so is your general air of humility and wonder about it... being eager to exchange information with your students and cast out a net for suggestions.

Personally I spent a decade working frightfully hard on composing original music, recording almost every instrument myself, teaching it to a full band, and finding gigs at which to present it to the public. I love it but the cost/benefit ratio is way out of whack.

In contrast, my current ninjacoustic trio - beloved 80s covers but using folk/bluegrass instrumentation - is relaxing and fun.

Thanks! It's so fun too -- I went on outings with students on Sunday night (to see a string quartet play Wadada Leo Smith's borderline incomprehensible compositions about Marian Anderson and Ma Rainey AND talk about them at the cost of $5) and Tuesday (to see a house band play for swing dancers at a legendary Chicago venue). The only student who kvetched about it (and not even directly to me) was the young woman who spent her 20th birthday seeing string quartet free jazz with her mom (who is also in my class and reported the kvetching) <3 good times imo <3

i'm not really sure how to reach out without feeling this way, like i have no idea how to do it.

There's definitely a lot of people clamoring for attention, and social media really amplifies this. I have the same issue, but I realize, that in the context of the "news feed" you just blend in with everyone else (unless you go about attention-seeking in a very dramatic way -- which I also have seen plenty of), and you shouldn't feel shame or like you stick out in a bad way.

One thing I think is useful is to be specific about what you are looking for. Are you looking for collaborators? Are you looking for gigs? Are you looking for gigs for a specific project? And if you are contacting people, or just doing a fb post "putting it out there" people tend to respond to specifics, rather than more general things, where you will get "likes" and "hearts" but little actual action.

and in my life -- I have now been booking music in arts venues for 19 years, on and off, mostly on. I keep saying, "okay this is the last one" and then I get pulled back in ...

that's good advice, thank you <3
i know i have more luck getting things actually done by talking with people in person than via social media.

Performing tomorrow. Don't feel ready yet.

Just finished mixing my fifth record

Had a meeting with the label and they're saying "January 2019"

I feel sick to my stomach, lazy, stupid, but also happy that I might get a vacation this summer

daer fgti's label, ur slow coaches

grats though!

That sucks, but I've been enjoying the time between finishing the thing and the thing coming out. I always feel like I can't truly start on another record until the last one has been released, so it's nice to mentally let myself off the hook from feeling like I should be making music. That's obv a long time though.

If it was a novel it'd be an even longer wait! Way longer.

unless u lose patience and put it out yourself, like an idiot

A little readier

Sund4r, where/what are you playing?

I'll be playing at University of Ottawa in a few of hours, doing a solo set of ambient/proggy/fusion-ish electric guitar+laptop music with a couple of new pieces. Rehearsal felt good this morning. I'll do a similar set in MA in a couple of weeks.

Excited for fgti's new album! Summer vacation sounds nice, unless it means that money will be tight.

Agreed to do a dj set in Chicago that starts at 3:30 am

This went well, played from 3:45 - 4:45 and drove back afterwards, staying up all night at my advanced age was easier than expected.

Mixing on CDJ-900s was a little trickier than I expected but I think I played it smart. It would have been nice to be able to do longer, tighter blends but I stuck to quick + safe transitions for the most part and we all had fun.

Grats fgti, that's great news! Lj otm though, Jan '19... Sheesh.

I put a few tracks on a bandcamp page - the same ones I posted upthread - and I got some really nice feedback from some folk. A guy I haven't seen in ten years saw me share them on Facebook and messaged me - he manages a website for photography and videography and has asked me if I would be interested in supplying some soundtrack material for the content they produce. So I'm meeting up with him over the weekend for a catch-up and to discuss how this would work in practice. It might come to nothing but then again it might be interesting to do. At first I thought he was just looking for something he could get cheaply but he's determined to offer me a decent scale of money. It's exciting because he must, at some level, believe that what I'm working on is good enough that he's willing to associate his business and his name with it, it makes me feel kinda legit.

also, bedroom producers, how do you record your vocals properly? I thought I would give it a go by plugging in my (admittedly cheap) microphone into Ableton and using some EQ to take off the low frequences and adding some reverb but it sounds so tinny and unnatural and I have no idea which of the thousands of Youtube tutorials to start watching.

what kind of mic are you using now? if you don't already have one, even a budget to lower-midrange level condenser (say, $150-$300) microphone makes a big difference.

i don't know why i'm offering advice on production. i deeply hate the way that all my music sounds (although i think my compositions are ok, which keeps me going). what is going on in my musical life is that i'm re-recording a handful of songs at my best pal's studio, with my old college band as ace session players, basically. if all goes well i might actually play A Show, which used to be a core part of my identity but disappeared during my lost 20s

'person with projects sees my weird little bandcamp album and asks me to do soundtrack work' is pretty much my dream result, good on you boxedjoy

I record vocals at home with an SM57 & 58, usually thru a cheap rack compressor (or even sometimes thru a compressor guitar pedal, the blue Boss one). I mostly record to tape & eq on my tascam, but ime it's best to get a good clean/dry sound before you start adding reverb & effects. that's totally dependent on your voice so ya gotta just mess around with the eq and find the sweet spot. Compressors are your friend.

Congrats to boxedjoy and Karl.
At home I record vocals using a Shure SM57 connected to my computer via an old Tascam US-144mkII USB interface. The room I record in has a full height bookshelf behind me and heavy curtains on the window to the right, so this reduces a lot of the boxy room tone.

^ yeah any kind of dampening like that works great. also ime recording in hallways works really well for getting a little bit of natural reverb & a good tone, but ymmv. definitely worth trying tho if you can

what's going on in my musical life is, about two years ago I started piano lessons about 12 years after my musical life lapsed during high school. I bought a piano last year because I have more money and space than patience, it was the right choice because pianos are wonderful. I'm not practicing enough and each piece I work on merits weeks and months of effort but I've been working on Mozart K545 Piano Sonata in C major (well, the first movement, so far) and I can tell I've made progress.

For example: I can sight read the grand staff laboriously slowly. I can read the bass clef at all and read the treble clef a million times better than I ever could as a mallet percussionist. My hands stretch for a 9th. I can play the first few Hanons at 85bpm or so without totally falling over myself. I memorize pretty well. I don't spend too much time looking at my hands.

Anyway that's what's going on. My objective when I started was to have no objective or schedule for making any particular amount of progress and just do it indefinitely and see where things stood in ten years or so. Sometimes I wish I were more diligent at sitting down to practice, or learn pieces faster, but mostly I just keep going every week and hear stuff get better.

that's awesome! once you can sight read, even super slowly, it starts a positive feedback loop that eventually leads to you playing effortlessly behind your back in a speakeasy while people throw money in the air and cheer

keep enjoying yourself silby! that's how it's done imo
also learning feels good :)

flappy: I am in awe of your use of tape.

I still have a cassette Portastudio. I did a solo album on it (maybe 2004?). I'd love to say that I use it all the time but I don't, really. Maybe I should get it out again.

oh you mean my tape collage? thank you! glad you liked it... it was very fun & I felt insane in the best way making it. I've passed a hump in making the companion piece for the B side & am enjoying feeling insane again making it. I did some rough math back in November and I think "The Streets Are Hot Tonight" has somewhere between 600-900 individual edits. this new one is 8 minutes shorter so it should be uh.. less than that lol

definitely bust out the Portastudio. they are so much fun to work with. I also use mine for demos & cataloguing riffs & melodies, but the tape collages are the only time I feel like I'm using the thing as an instrument.

put a weird old little album I made about 10 years ago on spotify recently, the songs are all really short and named after champion australian racehorses, genres are all over the place, there's indie and post punk and pseudo-jazz and momus-y shit and this goofy track that sounds like rpg castle music among other things, a cpl songs about books like the tripods and John Barth's end of the road, theres droney singing, one is a riddle, one's backwards... I dunno why I'm sharing this it's weird and personal and I never showed anyone really except a few friends many years ago

Anyway if u like

https://open.spotify.com/album/2TYAmYElwFZhDeLcmwd2Nb?si=tdyZct6TRou3dXOisNs44g

21 songs in 31 minutes (but no song feels rushed) and you really covered a lot of territory! i really liked 'victory vein', which reminded me of unwound a bit. did you record all the tracks or did you have a band?

also you shouldn't feel weird about sharing it, i don't think. i totally sympathize because i have also had issues with sharing certain creative things (obv not gifs, which for some reason i don't have any problem constantly imposing on people, but other things). but i think some people, often perfectionists, overthink what the others will think and decide not to share it at all, and that's a shame! also i could be completely projecting all of this, sorry!

appreciate you checking it out karl! it actually means a lot, i've always found much to enjoy in the projects of yours that you've shared here.

this was a super non-collaborative project, i did everything myself including the recording and the album art. at the time i had a couple cheap acoustic guitars including a 12 string, also an ibanez bass and a fender stratocaster, logic 8 + a bunch of st0len s0ftware + drum libraries, mic on everything was i think an akg c214. i'd been playing and engineering music for other ppl for a while at that point but never sang or wrote lyrics before, this album was (and is) the only thing that was a more or less complete synthesis of everything i knew how to do driven by stuff that influenced me into a finished project of my own.. i'm definitely proud of it in some sense even though i think it's kind of 'purposeless' music and wouldn't mean much to most ppl, which i guess is another way of saying yes, i def overthink about how it would be received (or ignored) if i took more of an open, 'hey this is my music' approach.. v scary! anyway, thanks!

mate

seriously this is wonderful

yeah this is so good! It feels so personal and intimate and cohesive in a way its stylistic variety wouldn't suggest. Well done!

my big news is that one of my tracks was chosen to soundtrack this video for the charity Bloodwise

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2fcUETdtHo

the Youtube views are low but the original video was posted to Facebook as an embed and has had 2000 views, which is more than I could ever imagine for me sitting in my room being a weirdo mucking about on Ableton, I'm really excited by that. I met the videography team at the weekend and they have lots of ideas of things they want to do so it could be getting interesting.

this is happening
https://flic.kr/p/26KYkJh

lol or is it

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/979/41848078352_986da54df9.jpg

Been discussing a collaboration for two months but not getting the tracks until today, deadline is Monday. Honestly kind of excited for the all-decisions-are-final-decisions pressure that brings.

congrats boxedjoy

ill be there shakes! i restarted the chaki project almost a year ago and have been playing a lot with other one person acts like captured by robots and bob log III. its been a trip getting to know these dudes that go on the road by themselves. kind of inspiring!

was really tempted by the bob log double bill been a fan of his since the 90s, sorry I missed that! things have been p hectic for me this week :(

i am playing some extra percussion with a well established band and we sound awesome
show is a week from today!!

omg i remember bob log III!!

Best of luck to all. My acoustic covers trio has gigs coming up, working from more or less this list

Somebody to Love
Just Like Heaven
Hungry Like the Wolf
Don't Get me Wrong
Lovesong
Dreaming
Dreams
I'm on Fire
Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want
Straight Up
Things Can Only Get Better
No Myth
Tainted Love

Oh man I want to hear the HoJo!

Dreaming is a really sturdily constructed song, good cover choice

Well, I do have some decidedly uneven recordings from our first few drunken open mics:
Don't Get Me Wrong
Dreaming
Things Can Only Get Better

Ah sadly it looks like my band is done and right after getting our 2nd LP in hand. Figures. No biggy as I will keep playing music.

Anyway, now I got to figure out what to do with a lot of LPs that are never going to sell. I'm kinda thinking to try to spread them out by donations into thrift stores all over the place. It's got a good cover, so I figure someone might buy it for a buck.

I figure look at it as a bit of a cloud seeding project and see if anything comes of it.