I love it
Silent Peer Pressure (Count The Most (demo))
Fine, have a song. But, know that i wrote it less than 72 hours ago, and that it took two mics, two takes, one completely made up lyric transition, a heap of compression, a helping of reverb, a well-placed fade out (over my well-meaning but not well-tempered 20-beat Eb (look out, American Idol)), and carefully deployed doppler (i dare you to locate it) to make me even vaguely pleased enough to post this.
Erratic
Nine years of guitar playing and i still can’t manage to get through one frigging bar of 2/4 while trying to write a song.
This may indicate that i am writing new songs. I know that the hoopla celebration about this sort of thing has waned since i don’t accompany such announcements with audio any more. I’m trying to rectify that situation.
Seriously.
It’s just that as the years go by my standards get higher, and when i can’t strum a bar of frigging 2/4 correctly once in a half hour of recording i tend to give up where i would have previously just posted my weird aborted measure of 3.5/4 (i know, i know, that’s 2/4 then 3/8, shut up) and winced.
Nevermind how getting better at singing is like cutting infinity in half, and for every improvement i make my goal of being “good” seems to be persistently unreachable.
I think this will be a rare post that doesn’t involve creative editing or a contrived story about my life.
I sent my iPod back to Apple, certain that it was really broken and that i would receive a refurbed iPod and promptly sell it in its still-sealed mailer and then buy a fancy new iPod. Imagine my surprise when Apple sent me an email this morning to inform me that nothing was wrong with my unit. Sure. I didn’t troubleshoot for five hours until all the iPod did was the scary hard-disk death rattle over and over again and then bring it to an Apple store who TOLD ME to send it in for repair. Not at all. I am going to throw a major seven at some poor unsuspecting tech guy if they try to charge me for servicing a non-faulty unit, or some other such idiocy.
Also, i still don’t have the tracking number for my new guitar, which is a little frustrating since upon its arrival i only have a 24-hour window to decide whether or not i’d like to keep it. Plus, i am a hugely spoiled brat and want my now guitar asap. (and a squir-rel)
Finally, not since SongFight & SomeSongs have i become so immediately obsessed with a website as i am with Threadless. It’s like Songfight but with stuff to buy. Users submit t-shirt concepts, members vote for the concepts on a scale of 0-5 with a special “i’d buy it” button for emphasis, and roughly every week the webmasters choose what is presumably the highest score shirt with the most “buy it” clicks and make it into an honest to goodness t-shit.
Prepare to become addicted to both rating designs (some of which are so amazing that you want to bribe someone to produce them) and window shopping (with a few exceptions the designs they choose are awesome).
Alright, obviously i’m not recording any gems at this hour (which you won’t fully understand until you hear the notes i hit in chest voice on the new ones). To sleep.
Ikea & e-tailing, the twin inflators of my revolving debt
Inexplicably, we now seem to be in possession of lawn furniture for our concrete back yard. This is possibly linked to our cultivating what has now become a mid-sized container garden. (I found out that it’s just not chic to call it a pot garden. go figure.)
Being the son of “Elaine of the Black Thumb,” my experiences with gardening are limited to vicarious horticultural exploits with my father and grandmother. My father and I have the same way of needing to know everything about specialized or slightly obscure topics, and one of his major topics is growing tomatoes and peppers. At some previous point I seem to recall him having a pot garden in his basement, but I was always assured it was specifically for making superior quality rope.
In any event, i’ve managed to decimate a trio of strawberries, grow a tray of marigolds and eggplants from seeds, and keep alive a cheerily expanding blackberry bush that’s so cute that i might buy another.
Equally as inexplicable as my participation in the greenery, i am days away from being the owner of a brand new acoustic/electric guitar. I’m still not really sure how it happened. Something about having a day off of work, homemade cocktails, and eBay. I’ll report later this week on the results.
Pennies
I used to have this dream when i was sick that i entitled “the penny dream.” It would have been more aptly titled “the repetitive stress disorder” dream, or more colloquially “the Chinese water torture” dream, and maybe now you get the idea.
In the dream there was a set of balanced scales, and on one scale would be something improbably heavy, like a refridgerator, or a Buick. On the other scale, its weight would be ticked off by pennies steadily dispensed by some unseen hand. And, though the scales were large, inevitably as we approached the actual weight of the thing, one of the pennies would land just so that it sent dozens of other pennies cascading off of the scale, leaving me even further away from equalling the weight of the elephant or RV on the other side.
Any run of the penny dream that made it to the penny cascade more than twice almost always ended with naseau. Which brings me to today’s topic: the Hanon Exercises. Charles-Louis Hanon, evil genius and bane of piano students everywhere, penned The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises, a series of repetitive runs, arpeggios, and trills meant to strengthen all of the bits of the hand that are typically weak and lifeless.
Fine in concept, but then you merrily unwrap the book from its swoosh encoded box from Amazon to discover that past the first few exercises, just reading the exercise is going to be an exercise. And, furthermore, what looks like a fairly simple sequence with one or two skipped keys is actually the slow penny-dream-like torture of your pinky finger, until at the end of the first time you make it through four repetitions without hitting a stray note (for me, about forty minutes of warming up) and your pinky stretchs for the last perfect bass C you think, “yes, i will actually vomit on this casio fully weighted, graded, lifelike keyboard if i have to push down that key with my pinky.”
It’s after i reach that point with Hanon that i moved into the Bach, staying to the blessedly non-accidental keys and playing at approximately one eleventh of the speed that a professional player plays the exercises at, because professional players read eleventy times faster than i do. (Actually, i’ve discovered that if i’m allowed one run through a measure to screw it up i can usually do it correctly the second time, which means all of my Bach practices run doubly long, but i’m getting much surer much quicker than i expected to).
And, if i managed to get through the Bach relatively in one piece and with most of my dinner still intact, along with my pinky finger and my sanity then, depending on my mood and level of death-defying counting skills, i either play Tori Amos or Radiohead.
I don’t know if i could have ever really endured these piano-practice pennies as a child – i had a lot of patience, but not a lot of endurance, if that makes any sense. As an adult i realize that, occasionally, something tortorous is in my best interests.