in case you appreciate awesome things…
Here’s not one, but two awesome things I’ve recently come across.
Awesome thing #1!
If you have any use for free sound effects, samples, drum loops, audio whatevers.. and if you like them to be all three kinds of free (royalty, copyright, and just free).. and if you like websites that are actually nice n’ user-friendly with good searchability and are not ugly.. and if you like the idea of a cool community project by fellow music/sound people who all contribute original audio samples for anyone to use.. you have to check out SOUNDSNAP!
Awesome thing #2!
Has anyone seen Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads? Man, I gotta. Check out this awesome weird interview with David Byrne:
(brought to us by Tim, friend of the show).
Bonus Awesome Things:
Keeping Your Spark Lit
A wee niblet of good advice from Mr. Handy:
Little reminder about how to keep your spark lit without feeling overwhelmed, even though I’ve pontificated on this at greater length in my big ol’ SERIES: Forget that you have “work to do”. Just turn on the freaking software that you use, load something in, and listen to it. That’s your only requirement. It’s as easy as sitting around listening to iTunes, only instead of clicking on the iTunes icon, you click on the Tracktion icon. Or the Audacity icon. Or Logic, or Audition, or Pro Tools, or whatever you use. Don’t worry about getting work done; just go in like you’re there to listen. Be curious about it. The initiative to start monkeying with it will come on its own, and even if it doesn’t come immediately, that’s fine. You’re visiting that realm — that’s the most important thing!
The Album Makes You
Keith Handy just wrote what may be the final installment in his “So You Want To Make An Album” series. I think it’s my favorite, though it’s difficult to choose.
Have a quote or two:
“A lot of insight can come from simple reversals of perspective. We do it with our pets all the time. We say our cats own us. This isn’t a lie, it’s just a different way of seeing something. In a similar way, as recording artists, or as artists of any kind, it’s good once in a while to remember that our music and art is creating us. (And when we release an album, it’s really releasing us.)”
“You don’t designate a blank space, and then suddenly create stuff out of thin air to fill that space — you create raw material just by being yourself, and then one day you decide to actually make a point of collecting, preserving, beautifying, and assigning track numbers to whatever is coming out of you, so that someone else in the world might benefit from it.”
Sowing Seeds of Possibility
A quick update to touch base with y’all.
IMPROVITAPING: is going surprisingly better than expected, and I’m only doing it at half the speed I’m supposed to (every other day instead of every day). The half-hour minimum time requirement was definitely a missing link. I’ll be making this an ongoing thing, and even posting clips from sessions here and there to appease your curiosities (and embarass the hell out of myself).
SONG SEEDS: are what I call the little tidbits of recorded ideas (guitar parts, vocal melodies, etc.) I’ve been collecting over the past several months which carry potentials to become full-grown awesome songs. I have 29 so far, not including the 7 improvitape sessions I’ve already done, each of which contains at least two new song seeds (and some are so close to being full-grown songs already, it freaks me out a little bit).
YOUTUBE: subscribers to my youtube channel have now passed the 800 mark. So weird! Speaking of weird…
TWIN PEAKS: rules! All of you should rent the series and be addicted with me. Actually, something that doesn’t rule… we’re almost through all the episodes. So if I seem all wigged out next week, it’s probably Cooper withdrawals.
DAY JOB: goes swimmingly. It’s 95% official now that I’m going to be the Catholic church’s web designer (for my city, not the Vatican). 80% of my work right now consists of looking at other cities’ Catholic websites, critiquing the hell out of them and taking notes. Awesome. Also awesome is they’re going to pay me to take a CSS course, and then pay me to teach my boss everything I’ve learned. It’s so great to be finally (knock on wood) in a non-ulcer-inducing job, that I like, working for non-assholes. Don’t laugh, this is a big deal for me.
FALL: has arrived! my favorite season of all. The air smells of my favorite childhood memories, and I get to wear cozy sweaters and ponchos again, yay! Speaking of transitional periods…
CHANGES: will be happening around here over the next while, website-wise and who-knows-what-else-wise. How drastic, I don’t know, but I’m re-thinking everything, particularly giving more serious creative thought to the conceptual, theatrical, promotional and collaborative possibilities of my growing Artistic/Musical Empire! haha… right. But seriously, I’m getting a bunch of good ideas, and I even have professional help! In related news…
GATHERTOGETHERIN: Look it up. Check it out. It will come up in conversation. I may even quiz you. In more related news…
SEATTLE: is where I’m headed tomorrow to visit some friends, old and new. Back Sunday!
Improvitaping
I’m discovering that songwriting is both easier and more difficult than I anticipated when I announced to the world, “Hey, look at me! I’m making an album!” But I figured, how hard could it be? Well, in theory, not very, but taking my own psychology into account, it’s proving harder than I thought. I’ve never actually completed a composition of my own, ever, so suddenly attempting to make an entire album’s worth of them is taking me into some dark, cold, uncharted waters within myself. In these strange realms I am discovering unexpected abilities (as I’d faithfully anticipated I would) but also some very annoying and stubborn barriers to equally important abilities that I need to develop.
Of course, I’m not surprised, just annoyed, and barriers are meant to be broken down and transcended, so I’m also not concerned. You can only transcend limitations once you become aware of them, and while becoming aware of them is painful and humbling, if you’re prepared to persevere through that discomfort, what awaits on the other end is well worth the effort. I’ve done this with enough fears and weaknesses in the past that I can say that with full confidence.
Creative limitations have their own unique challenges, of course. When you’re an artist, it can be difficult not to over-identify with your work, and to just let it flow unhindered, whether it’s filling you with happy, excited shivers of optimism or making you wonder why you’re even trying to do this when you so obviously suck. It’s crucial to allow yourself to become a clear, open vessel when you’re creating, to hold back the critic, force it to wait and sort it all out later. And when you have a very strong inner critic, and are a recovering perfectionist like I am, this is tough. When you’re dealing with a very raw, undeveloped ability on top of that, in which you haven’t any confidence yet, such as composing original music in my case, you (at least I) really need to lock yourself into something, a structure, a framework of discipline to help you force your way through those inevitable bouts of emotional resistance, and to strengthen those undeveloped creative muscles.
I’ve been trying for some time to create such a framework for myself, but with little to go on other than tidbits of advice from some creative friends (helpful advice, but often too vague for me), I’ve met with only limited success over the past several months. I have still been leaving myself too much to my own undisciplined devices, which can only make for slow, sporadic progress (of course, I have plenty of excuses as to why I’ve been so sloppy lately, but they’re mostly bullshit, lets be honest). Luckily, I think I’ve just found what I’m looking for. I happened upon it yesterday over at an excellent site called Project Renaissance. The technique I found is called ‘Improvitaping’! Here’s how it works:
The Improvitape Technique—
1. Simply play your chosen instrument (or bathtub-sing!) for a half hour per day while recording on blank tape. Try to make it sound like a “real” piece, keep going for a half hour per day….
2. In so doing, steer away from recognized themes and patterns. Keep on doodling for that half-hour per day, trying to make it sound like “a real piece.”
3. –And then the hardest part! –Play back the tapes you make, for an hour per day. –A half hour while paying attention to the contents; the other half hour as background while you are doing other things.
…Within 10 days, doing this at-least-90-minute-per-day program, as you run this simple flow-with-feedback process, you will be amazed to discover…
(read the rest of it, then come back. it’s short).
Simple enough, but I tend to dismiss things that I just come up with myself and give more of a chance to things that appear to be tried-and-true and are also clearly laid out in steps. Not always, but in learning a new skill, definitely. Also, I particularly like the fact that this involves developing abilities at the subconscious level that I would otherwise struggle with consciously (my left brain can be so incessantly intrusive in my creative process, I need to bypass it as much as possible).
The difference between this and just free-flowing for half-an-hour a day is the feedback aspect. It isn’t just a process of putting in creative time each day and hoping to come up with something usable out of all the wanking (which is basically what I’ve been doing lately), it’s actually a self-conditioning process where you are training and communicating with your (so-called) unconscious (right brain) through a process of cyclical feedback - a distillation process. You are teaching the inner creative part of you, in a very efficient manner, what you want from it, recieving more from it, refining and clarifying things further, and basically training it to more and more edit, refine and basically do all the composing on the inner level before it even comes out, instead of you having to sift through and edit and piece things together on the conscious level from a much more mediocre, unfocused pool of material, which is not only unecessarily time-consuming and frustrating, but not at all ideal in terms of the final results.
This is all somewhat hypothetical at this point, but it does make sense. Only way to know for sure is to test it, though, so that’s the plan, starting tonight.
This kind of technique can obviously be used in other creative pursuits. I’m going to work up an equivalent discipline for writing and another for visual art. Most likely they will end up supporting and enhancing each other. The writing one I can definitely see tying in nicely with the music one. Anyway, I’ll report back next week. If anyone has any experiences along these lines or possible improvements on this technique, please, comment.