what is going on in your musical life

don't forget that this thread exists, lots of good advice already in there imo DRUMMERS: Advice for a beginner

I think the first time around, I just listened to songs and tried to make more or less the same noises.

A couple years ago I thought it would be good to do some actual practice-pad practice. So I'd do like paradiddles and whatnot. It may theoretically have strengthened my playing and/or my time. But as far as I can tell, in actual performance I just turn my brain off and move my arms, playing more or less what I always would have. Which is almost always adequate for the purpose. I dunno.

https://musicthing.co.uk/composing-with-tape-recorders-by-terence-dwyer/

Downloaded this, have to get my tablet working to read the PDF - physical copies are $$$$$ on EBay and Amazon

I was hoping HarvardX or coursera or one of those things would have a experimental music class but a quick search didn't find much.

XP i'm looking to play funky stuff... mostly steady not-super-fancy grooves, and some fancy fills here and there. thank u all for the tips, and for that link. i'm gonna try all yr recommendations and promise myself to put in 30 mins every time i go up to my li'l studio. :):)

first band practice in a year and change

i am........... euphoric

best day of my life really

:)

Congrats! It’s still illegal to play music with other humans present (unless singing in church) where I am. Haven’t had a full band practice since feb 2020 or any rehearsal at all since October.

My band is practicing on the 3rd - we played in the singers driveway last fall but we’re all double vaxxed so can actually play inside together for the first time since we played a show in February 2020

I'm making progress on the guitar and can now play reasonable halting facsimiles* of:

Blackbird
Just Like Heaven
True Faith
Inbetween Days
Fast Car
Mother
Get The Message
I Feel You
High Hawk Season
This Night Has Opened My Eyes (kind of)
Here Comes The Sun

* very simplified versions, not the exact guitar parts recorded, except for Blackbird

I also recorded a very short solo in an Ellington piece one of the groups I sing with is doing for a virtual concert at the end of the month.

A 1m solo cello homage to faulty video calls that I wrote is going to be streamed on Sunday night as part of a pandemic-themed concert. The event made local CBC news today. They included a clip of me playing an old guitar/electronics piece that's nothing like the cello piece; about 58:21 in the "Ottawa News, April 30" clip here: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa

Pulled a full 24 hour day yesterday, got up around 4 am to work a ticket remote and a shift all day then went to Louisville and did an evening of recording until about 2am and got home around 430. Been a while since a I had a 25 hour day, f'n bushed but it was fun as he11 actually getting do some MUSIC...

at long last i've been inducted into the mysteries of low-end management. maybe the best five quid i've ever spent: https://samplecraze.com/product/low-end/

eddie bazil and the SOS podcasters have been incredibly insightful: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos-podcasts?f%5B0%5D=node%253Afield_section%3A6971

also, gregory scott is the bob ross of compression, and his YT channel is my current favorite: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9fVPX36Qd8cmeqpQ4B8Ypj3nJYcCaYrJ

idk if this is the best thread for those kind of links, but in my musical life i have been drinking from the internet firehose of free and cheap info on mixing/engineering and benefiting a tonnnn

I'm definitely intrigued by these links

Trying to trade some fancy woodworking tools for a vintage Telecaster Deluxe.

I like those Kush videos.

Cool davey, I'll have to check out some of those SOS podcasts. It looks like the electronic one has some crossover with Jamie Lidell's podcast, which has some very inspiring segments on different sound design or electronic composition ideas.

Mixing videos can be such a rabbit hole, at the start at think "omg, I guess I should have been doing this the whole time?!" and then I'll hear how their example ends up and think "well, not necessarily." There are infinite ways to arrive at a mix, but the more problem-solving tools the better I guess.

Jamie Lidell’s reel to reel Mellotron is badass.

xp lol yes, very often it's:

*incisive, informative 20-minute explanation of a synthesizer's architecture; clever tips and tricks*

immediately followed by

*terrible 20-second demonstration that sounds like royalty-free music*

quite a few ppl out there are great at understanding/explaining how a thing works, and terrible at using it impactfully. educational youtube vids are an excellent use of their capacities and i'm thankful they've found their medium

Eddie Bazil's low-end book has demystified mid/side processing and shown me how use it to introduce subtle stereo motion into bass elements... it's arcane sorcery and i feel like a real audio nerd!

Made a Dylan cover but didn’t have the cheek to post it in the Dylan thread.

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/tmMoD8cVfKsSiX5u6"> https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/tmMoD8cVfKsSiX5u6

Great stuff! Your singing sounds fantastic.

That’s how you know it’s not me singing! I did everything else.

It all sounds great.

Thanks!

made a bass-driven atonal tech house thing. now it's finished and i have no idea what to do with it. anyway here's private link here if anyone's interested: https://soundcloud.com/808mixtapes/strap-on-and-ride-feat-jasbunnie/s-GdfPUwA7Ojk

Is 808mix all you or some kind of collective?

808mix was a radio show i hosted. it was my show, but the purpose was to provide a platform for the local DJ community, so a collective effort was a big part of it.

i gave up the show last year, though... i've been thinking it might be time to focus on my personal SoundCloud page, but ugh i don't want to pay for a second soundcloud pro account

I set up my new M1 iMac yesterday, which means I'm going down a Sibelius/GarageBand rabbit hole over the next few weeks

davey that track is sick, definitely seems like you should send it around

love the engine-revving synth and the Cybotron-esque part

just participated in a Shakespearean adaptation of Reservoir Dogs (our second attempt at getting off the ground, this time successful) where I played Key William and performed 5 songs that appeared in the movie on the ukulele between scenes ("Little Green Bag", "I Gotcha", "Stuck in the Middle with You", "Hooked on a Feeling", and "Coconut"). going to try and extract a few clips from it if I can (video not available yet).

idk how much I'll be playing uke now that this is over, as this is the entire reason I learned it, and I have a guitar gathering cobwebs, but it's fun to have additional instruments available in the house.

zither is next.

Don't know where to put this but it made me lol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_90uFCrWWY

xxp thank u very much, Jordan! it was very much inspired by Doves, by Facta.

one of my buddies would like to include it on a label comp, but i might hold onto it until i finish another track or two, then send the the whole lot around and see about an EP release.

It's taken me the best part of two (sporadic) months but I can finally play Freight Train by Elizabeth Cotten - both the melody and the bass line. Still kinda clunky in places but I got it.

I was watching an episode of Mad Men recently, where Red's partner is rejected from being a surgeon because he 'doesn't have god in his fingers'. That phrase has been haunting me.

Watching Cotten play it, upside down with just her thumb and index finger is extraordinary.

That's the guitar upside down rather than her (but I bet she'd still pull it off).

Good for you - two months isn't bad for that!

Thank you! It has been a trip.

So I've got The Boxer, Freight Train, Don't Think Twice, The Fly and Blackbird. Does anyone have any thoughts of where I could/should go next?

"Dust in the Wind" and "Tears in Heaven" are other popular songs at that approximate level. If you want to step it up, you could try "Never Going Back Again" or "Hey Hey" (the Big Bill Broonzy song - charts are easily available for the Clapton Unplugged version, which is pretty close to the original). You could also step sideways to the "early intermediate" pieces here: https://www.classicalguitarshed.com/free-guitar-sheet-music/ . The Carulli op. 211, no. 8 is nice. Tàrrega's Lagrima is also beautiful and widely loved. If you can handle a lot of barre chords, you could try the original "Girl from Ipanema".

The "beginner" pieces at the classical guitar shed link aren't necessarily any more basic than the "early intermediate" ones, actually.

John Prine - "Clay Pigeons"

john fahey - sligo river blues is something i always twiddle away at. standard tuning, just a bunch of open c major, f maj 7 and g major chords with a bit of pinky action, and it still sounds pretty even if you play it badly (hi there!)

Thanks for the recommendations nick and sundr. I'll have a look around and see what I can manage.

I'm obsessing over trying to play the Funky Drummer beat/break perfectly, at tempo. Lots of little exercise to break down the different components of it, and sync everything up with this drop-catch (or push-pull) hi-hat technique. And let me tell you, I never knew how vast the gulf between 98 bpm and 100 bpm was until this pursuit.

So I've got The Boxer, Freight Train, Don't Think Twice, The Fly and Blackbird. Does anyone have any thoughts of where I could/should go next?

Two of my faves are These Days and this version of Here Comes The Sun: http://guitarfingerstyle.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Here-Comes-the-Sun.pdf

So last weekend I was excited to play a show on kit for a lot of people, because I really feel like I've broken through to the other side on some hand technique, finally. However, I had a legendarily bad show due to a freak in-ear monitoring snafu.

This was for a gig where I was playing to a click + backing tracks for the whole show, so the entire show hinges on me being able to hear. We were using a phone app to control our own in-ear mixes (based off the bass player's laptop running the program), and soundcheck went perfectly. All the tracks were labeled, I dialed in my own little mix and could hear perfectly, everything felt amazing. There was a little kerfuffle about the frontline having to move their gear so that the opening band could set up, which apparently was not the plan, but whatever.

A bit before showtime, there are problems. All the track labels on the mix app have been wiped somehow, and our mixes are gone. The bass player thinks he was able to recall them, just not the labels.

We hit the stage in front of at least a few hundred people, and immediately I know something is wrong. I have a quiet click track, but no backing tracks, just the live lead vocal that is horrifically hot & distorted (and covers up the click). No meters are firing and the tracks aren't labeled, so I can't even tell what to adjust to try and get a workable mix (this is on a janky phone as I'm playing drums).

The first song completely train wrecks halfway though, and it haunts me that I didn't just stop the show at this point (although really it was the frontperson's call).

After struggling through a couple more tunes, I realize that the guitarist next to me has the backing tracks in his wedge, so I take my in-ears out, and get the monitor guy to put them in my wedge (unfortunately we didn't have backup wedge mixes, because we were relying on in-ears and trying to keep the stage volume low). This gets me through another song or two, but I hate playing to backing tracks via monitors, and it doesn't work for tunes that have me just playing to the click for certain sections.

Eventually I hit on the solution of keeping my right earpiece in for the click, and having the drum machine/backing tracks on the monitor on my left. This lets me actually get through the show, but it's super stressful the whole time. Whenever stage volume gets loud I can't hear the click, and have to just trust I'm still on it. And I also have to blast the click just to hear it, because I only have the one earpiece in.

So basically I looked like an amateur even though I couldn't have been more prepared, and I couldn't hear anything but ringing and distortion in my right ear for 24 hours afterwards (which was very disturbing). On one level it's kind of hilarious, but also humuliating, no one in the audience could know how hard it was just to hold it together. I'm never doing anything like that again unless there are actual redundancies, and would definitely stop the show rather than attempt to muscle through for two hours, it was so fucked.

Oh my god, that sounds like hell