toys

how essential is each instrument that you own?  is that second delay pedal more of an instrument that you play, or is more like a toy?  would that tremorama really flush out your pedal board for later in your musical career, or is it just another sweet investment that you never really needed to invest in?

where does the line end, from your first pedal which is the turning point for dynamic music making, all the way to collecting your 5th germanium fuzz, and where can you define it?

will they become less or more meaningful to you?

can you tell im reading "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance"?

hillcrest

music takes a lot out of a person.  emotionally and physically draining, the idea of making your music as heart-filled as possible every night on a 3 month tour across the world seems near impossible to me.

So how do you make a song that means the world to you and play it every night for a thousand people and have it mean the same amount to you?

how many times does it take to play a song until it looses its meaning?

does "your hand in mine" mean the same to explosions in the sky as it did when they wrote it?

is this why clapton no longer plays that song about his son?  and why radiohead no longer plays creep?

unanswerable

we have truly hit the information age.

this post itself will arrive at your doorstep the instant i say it is done,a nd you will read it faster than i wrote it, and the information will be piped through "a series of tubes" to everyone world wide (assuming they want to read it)

so why is modern music still being composed with 4 dudes, each with drums, guitar, bass, or keys?

if we are truly learning the most that we can, then why don't we constantly use this information to make the next best instrument?

people eat up technology, and i guess thats why it is inside the guitar pedals, but i feel there is more out there.  more instruments that are better and still analog, or amplifiers that are tube driven but with 4 channels on a footswitch that lets you stack by turning each one on separately.

improvisation

while working on songs for aggroslacker, i was wondering where the line begins and ends for improvisational pieces.

how does someone name a song that completely improvise every time, where the song never sounds the same any time, and maybe the only similarity is the key signature?

how do you work on songs in an improvisational way?

is a song still improv if you start with the same riff every time, and build to somewhere new and different?  what about two riffs?  what about 5 different riffs?

and where does that line finally fall between and orchestrated song, and a song that is a "jam"?

axe dude

why is the musical world dominated by males?

is the guitar too phallic?

are songs like action films or like "chick" flicks?

is the pay less for girls like in corporate america?

maybe there is some sort of draw for males to play music, but i have never found that my music impresses any girl that i like, and girls are no reason to play music at all.  maybe i was hoping to find a girl that played music and play duets with her.  

it seems that this is not the case though.  to find a girl that even thinks about playing music is hard, and then one that isnt just a romanic musician (someone who wants to play, but never sits down and makes something out of that idea) is impossible to find.  i know 2 in the local scene around here.  

something about equality in the sexes has to reach the world of music.  im tired of playing shows with a band of dudes, and there is another band of dudes.  

genrism

today i will be playing some doom metal / drone with my friends.  its codenamed aggroslacker.

love it or leave it.

what i query to the young out there, is the idea of musical genres.  the idea itself really helps people find what they like (just as i post about playing music within these genre definitions).  what i have seen in the real world, is just the opposite, especially within the youth.  a common occurrence among questions about music, it is often to be heard something along the lines of "everything but country and classical" or something along these lines.

is this the same sort of idea as racism?  if we all hate something, will it disappear completely and will it have been a genocide, or is going to be with us forever, as part of history?

can we inspect these genres in a close manner, and see that there is some sliding scale from rap to classical, just like there is a sliding scale of skin tone from africa to europe?

shipwrecker for download

here we have it, the good tracks, the bad tracks, the ones that dont fall into either category, and finally the shit that doesnt even sound like me.  all for download at:

http://www.last.fm/music/terrible+horrible+enormous+things/shipwrecker

and the album cover is floating around the internet somewhere too...

homestead

moved into a new house over the past couple of days, blogless.  

while i try to figure out how to put my rpm challenge on the internet, i can at least divulge the track titles

terrible horrible enormous things - shipwrecker

1 ) experience death without self

2) cured are the defeated, rested are the worn(live)

3) rain focused glow

4) the sea sings

5) tell an old story

6) stay in bed with me, darling

7) i fear there is too much at risk