Sometimes, late at night, I get bored practicing Jazz and really just want to do random music. When I get those urges, I'll turn on the recorder and just let it run, no edits other than to cut down on dead space in the tracks.
It took me a bit to get my guitar situated, so you might have to listen to the repetitive beat for a few minutes to get to something interesting.
You can download this session of tIIF from archive.org.
I'm gonna call this series "The Internet Is Fun" for lack of a better title. There's no gaurantees that anything I do will be worth listening to, but the point is to put it out there.
In this installment of tIIF I'm messing around with my Korg Kaossilator, Electro Harmonix Holiest Grail Reverb pedal, Boss RC-2 loop back pedal, and my Microsynth.
The beats you hear are from the Korg, but that's the only thing. Everything else is done with my guitar. The baselines, the weird rumbling sounds, the stuff that sounds like a piano, and then obviously the stuff that sounds like a guitar. In this one I was playing around with mostly reverb and the Microsynth.
One thing I found really hard to do was synch up the Korg with the looper, since my timing isn't that great. I found that if I keep things really simple then I can do it, but if the rhythm is longer than about 4 bars I lose it.
I don't edit these, except to pull out dead space, so you'll hear me fuck up a lot.
I recently received an email that said this:
"As a fellow guitarist, from seeing your presentations and listening to your mp3, I hereby state: you, Zed, suck at playing guitar. I hope this one is going be taken properly and therefore mobilise you to work harder on your technique and melody-sense ;) I was a beginning guitarist as well and remember how hard it is to play something hearable when you've got like 1-2 years of playing behind yourself. Rock on!"
When I first started studying I was really hard on myself. It'd take me forever to learn simple stuff and I'd berate myself and just try even harder. Then, I realized I don't do that with just about anything else I try to learn. Other things I try to learn, I have a better more relaxed and aware attitude. I don't say I suck at programming or writing. I am simply aware of what I need to work on, and I'm just relaxed while I try to do them.
Now I don't think that way with music. Instead, I'm more relaxed and just aware of the distance between what I want to do, and what I am doing. I know I need to work on my ear, and rhythm, and nearly everything else, but I try to just keep track of where I am and work on them. This makes the whole effort much more enjoyable.
This is why I also don't mind putting things I make out there for people to comment on. Good or bad, the point is to make music for other people, not hide away for six years getting better. Before now I'd be scared shitless, now I kind of like it if I put something horrible out and people listen to it. In fact, the above quote is the result of an mp3 that a bunch of other people said they liked.
Then again, they weren't guitarists. Maybe I should just not make music for guitarists. Oh wait, yeah, I'm not.
This is also kind of why I hate saying I'm trying to be a guitarist now. At first I wanted to get as good as I could at the guitar, and that's been fun, but now I'm more interested in music in general. I've been learning piano and vocals and just general composition as well as guitar. Music theory is interesting, but also looking at it from a hacker's viewpoint of how can I fuck up music theory or exploit people's ears.
What you have in this session of tIIF is basically that: A hacker playing with tech to make music that hacks how music is played, made, and heard. I'm not trying to do anything other than explore that.
Another thing I'm interested in doing is exposing more of the creative process for people than others might. There's this great article on using Python to find drummers using click tracks. The guy uses the Echo Nest remix SDK to go through songs and statistically find drummers who use click tracks.
Now I don't think there's anything wrong with using a click track in the studio, especially since technology is what makes it so most musicians can even play an instrument. But, I think that it'd be interesting to do a different kind of show, where mistakes are made, and sometimes things suck, just because I think there's people out there who want a break from the robot drummer to listen to something human.