Progressive Rock Artist seeks Audience
I haven’t felt like dumping my thoughts into the public arena for a month or so. Working two jobs is using up most of my creative energy, and what’s left is going into trying to complete the Piece Of Music That Just Won’t Die, titled “Listen” but might be more accurately be called “Please Finish”.
I just want to make it perfect. Is that so wrong?
This weekend we are going to see Rush at the MGM Grand Arena. Ho ho. The title of this entry seems extra appropriate.
When was the last time you went to the record store? Ah-hah! That’s, that’s how it works, buddy. It’s the kids go to the record store, and the kids are — I was going to say “stupid,” but they’re not. They’re just ignorant. And many of them will evolve, you know, from really dumb stuff, because the dumb music is sort of like a joke that’s only funny once. And you can only go to a Justin Timberlake concert once. You go a second time, you see the same thing — maybe they got new fireworks, but Justin ain’t got nothing new to say, okay?
And, so, then you start to evolve up. And maybe you wind up at Bruce Hornsby, maybe you wind up at Willie Nelson, maybe you wind up at Randy Newman, maybe you wind up at Joni Mitchell, maybe wind up at James Taylor for God’s sake. But somewhere in there, you wind up loving music, and you evolve up to a level where you go after somebody who can really do it — Shawn Colvin, Mark Cohn, people who can really do it. And some of those kids are going to evolve to there, and that’ll be great. But I don’t see success for singer-songwriters. I don’t see it.
Tuesday evening we get in from work, and there it is on our front doorstep.
Now it has it’s own page.
The Blueshifter is… still coming. Those nice guys at Carvin are really looking out for me. But the upshot is that it will take a few more weeks. More as it comes to hand.
My hands hurt. But there is nothing like a little real percussion to liven up a track. A couple of months ago Guitar Center had a sale and I picked up a tamborine, a shaker, and a doumbek. Well, they’ve been sitting around looking pretty but not actually producing sound. However, this weekend I experimented with adding percussion to the track I’ve been working on for the last six months, and boy, does it make a difference. The MIDI-sequenced drum samples sound much better when mixed with a little analog zing, splash and poum.
The downside is that my hands hurt. I’ll give serious props to percussion players from now on. It’s tricky to keep a steady beat, and even more tricky to do it when you’ve got a blister on the inside of your thumb caused by casual tamborine use.
I suspect I am the only person in the world trying to use MIDIQuest with the Digitech GSP21. It turns out that the GSP apparently ignores requests for a sysex dump unless it is sitting on the utility menu option “Dump MIDI Data? Press V for Yes”. As soon as you get it to that point, you can tell MIDIQuest to extract the patch information from the device and display it in the edit buffer on the computer screen. What is also not obvious is that the only mode that appears to work is “ALL” information, but it *looks* like a single patch. If you right-click on the patch name, you get a drop-down list of all of the patches and you can jump to any particular one.
So, good news: GSP21 patches are backed up, and I got the POD backed up as well. And, I’ve discovered that the correct settings to get a decent guitar sound for that piece I’ve been working on: It’s the middle single-coil pickup on the Ibanez, through the “Paradigm Lead” patch on the GSP. And it sounds better still if I use the POD on the GSP’s effect loop for gain/distortion and use the GSP for tap delays only.
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