ale{atori}c

I had known this little outpost of the internet wasn’t functioning for awhile now. I hadn’t posted to it since 2014, so I figured it didn’t matter. Most of the “readers” were bots and spammers, and I disabled the user registration because they were only registering so that they could comment about deals on athletic shoes and cosmetics and luxury watches, and maintenance was a hassle for a blog I wasn’t updating because everyone was on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.

But, as I contemplated starting a new place to dump musical (and potentially other?) ideas I’m playing with, especially with my growing disillusionment with all forms of corporate-run social media, I finally made peace with resurrecting this blog. I had accidentally erased all of the files but some sleuthing into my own backups eventually proved successful. One of the first things that happened was an alert from my hosting provider that I had installed a captcha plugin that had been used maliciously to spam fake dialog boxes on unsuspecting users.

Since I last posted here, we had a fascist President come and go, we lost several beloved pets, I joined a talented singer-songwriter’s band playing atmospheric guitar harmonies, my main band (having ascended from trio to a quartet) lost its long-time bassist/multi-instrumentalist and was replaced by another talented friend, rehearsed for 4 years, played one gig, and then fell apart again without releasing anything more than one single… then the drummer and I rebooted again with one of our oldest and best friends on bass, and honestly things have never been more fun and satisfying, playing late 60s-inspired original garage psych instrumentals with funk and jazz influences from Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix/Band of Gyspies, the Meters, the Beatles as well as 80’s-early 90’s shoegaze/jangle/goth bands and African guitar music…. We got to play one gig at the Circle Bar (RIP), with a brand-new set…. and then of course COVID-19 happened.

The three of us have been getting together outside to jam on various acoustic instruments during the intermission, but soon we’ll all be fully vaccinated again and looking forward to returning to electrified amplification. I hope our neighbors haven’t gotten too used to the quiet in the meantime.

Personally, I’ve miraculously come into possession of my dream synth and have quietly been making droney, lush, and pulse-oriented evolving analog sounds that have been a form of meditative exercise and escapism for me during the pandemic. I need to find the time to finish mixing them and release them. Also I’ve been spending some time in Max/MSP again, working on some custom sequencer patches. I also have a design for algorithmic composition that I’ve sketched out and am working on implementing, inspired by Terry Riley’s In C. (Which I have written about and produced an Ableton Live version of here before).

Meanwhile as a guitar player I’ve been concentrating on learning a bit of theory that puts more chords, patterns and scales in my arsenal. After most of my lifetime as a guitar player thinking that too much learning would keep me from expressing my “true” sound, I am pretty comfortable tapping into that and now wish to increase my vocabulary. I’d also love to be able to hang with any musician in any impromptu jam situation at any time. Honestly a lifelong dream is to just show up with an instrument and just be able to play. I’ve acquired a much better ear but I still hit the occasional wrong note from time to time. I can play a melody or harmony almost intuitively but not a diminished chord or an augmented one. (I’ve just leveled up to being able to play major-7ths anywhere on the neck. Not that it was hard, but I just never learned it. But that is just half the battle — the other half is training your ear to know when to play the major 7th.)

Finally, as a guitar geek I’d be remiss not to share my love of a couple pedals I’ve acquired in the past 5 years. The Eventide Space has given me the Twin Peaks style atmosphere I need for playing with Saint Lorelei, but I use it a lot in everything. The Dusky Hypatia is an extremely versatile fuzz/overdrive pedal that gives me the tone I need when I want more than the Tube Screamer boost.

Anyway, like funerals are more for the living, perhaps blogs are more for the writer than the reader. But I still hope a few people get ideas or interest from anything I’ve posted. I’d still love to hear from anyone who wants to trade ideas or share experiences. May peace and good music follow you wherever you go.

After hearing a well-known food writer talk about how he forces himself to write first thing with coffee every morning, I’ve been thinking about how much time a creative person should allocate to the following areas:

• Create: For a writer, forcing yourself to put pen to paper. A musician: actively composing. An artist: paint must be on the brush—whether or not you are feeling the Muse.
• Consume: Reading, listening, participating in the arts passively. It’s hard to think of an interesting musician without finding a person who listened to older records obsessively. Same goes for all other artists, with few exceptions, and most of the exceptions are liars.
• Communicate: Talking to others about/within/around the topic; sharing stories; formal and informal meetings. Online communication is certainly a big part of it (What I am doing now with this blog entry in fact). Writers have retreats. Musicians have jam sessions.
• Practice (This was gong to be “Learn” but “CCCP” was a better acronym): Includes all forms of active study, from practicing your instrument, to attending lectures, to reading instructional materials. It can even be watching TV or YouTube if it teaches you something.

It seems there must be some kind of balance, and I suppose it depends somewhat on the kind of work you do. Communication seems less important in most of the visual arts, and Practice is probably hard to do if you’re a writer unless you’re actually writing, and that puts you in the Create area.

I am curious to hear from anyone who’s developed an approach to this. As a self-taught musician, and a wanna-be writer, I used to believe that everything was in the Create zone. I felt guilty, even angry at myself when I was doing anything but writing. It’s taken me a long time to realize how important the other 3 areas outside Creation are important. I think I have got the Consume area down — now I could definitely could use more Practice in my life.

One thing I have noticed is that you need to understand where you are on the curve of learning vs the plateaus of inspiration. If you are finding it hard to be inspired, there’s a good chance that your energies would be better spent learning. Study someone whose work you really respect. Immerse yourself in it. Don’t worry about being a copycat—you’ll probably only retain 5% of what you learned anyway, and you’ll synthesize whatever you retained into your toolbox. The next time you try to create, you’ll have a new palette to choose from. That’s my take anyway, and I’d love to hear yours.