Art & Technology Blog: Notes and commentary on design, illustration, music production and applied technology and development.
Their recent Equals One Album is the first Purple Album I've bought in decades. The new guitarist Simon McBride is way more classic Purple than Steve Moore was.
The track PORTABLE DOOR also cleverly covers my own disdain of X with its weird populist and trivia garnering large followings of under-achieving, loud, over-sharers and more than a few roleplaying for popularity, mostly for an unsophisticated, hick, JERKVILLE audience.
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I have but together a PDF Booklet for this Best Of Album and is about the very long journey it has been, and some notes on the tracks, and their making.
We recorded a fair few tracks with our 4 track TASCAM Portastudio back in the 80s, but those have been lost to time. Don't even own a cassette player anymore, and don't want one. There was a time after that where we just used a midi D-110 synthesizer with a sequencer, but my 15years at Roland in Japan, "at a music gear company", was the time I was least interested in playing the guitar and making my own music. Just had to do something else in my spare time. The release of Reaper in 2005, living in Sydney again, not being in any "music gear company", and having the time, rekindled the passion.
Half of the tracks in this album have vocals and most of those were done in 2021.
I had notes of what lyric lines could be in a song. I sang bits of them, rewriting as needed a verse at a time. I then listened back to that A LOT, so that the lyrics became a song I knew. Unlike the first time I tried to sing the lyric. I then re-sang everything, double and triple tracking the parts. Before vocals they were all just instrumentals, without thought for vocals. Normally you would strip out most of the melodic guitar or synth under the vocals, but I didn't do much of that here. Something else that makes these different. Maybe this kind of detail, and the lyrics should be in the Album booklet?
What I have done most of recently is stuff for under 60seconds music comics, and and extended version of the latest of those is included as well, HOW YOU USE IT.
If I came back on a different day, I would have chosen a few different tracks, but they are all on my Bandcamp page anyway, so this seems like more of a playlist than a best of album.
At 65+ I am at the age were you see more than a few people you know pass away. You just don't know how long you have left, and a BEST OF ALBUM was one of those things on I my bucket list, I can now mark off.
There are 1,000s of tracks uploaded to the streaming music sites daily. Very few of those will get listened too, unless a major artist on a big label manipulating the playlists. I know that my own stuff will be played once by friends and acquaintances totaling 10 plays over a few months. If the production was better (mixing, mastering, fewer playing mistakes etc etc) those numbers wouldn't be any different. I haven't built any kind of general audience to get more than that, and aren't interested in doing that.
I don't even try and charge anything for them, but can say some have paid for them, so that makes me a "professional musician" right? 😁
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We had the OBon Holidays here mid August, and our son and his family visited us for some 5 days. Great to see our grandson again. Not so great we got sick after they left, possibly from grandson or son. My symptoms were mild covid. Cough, slight fever. The medication I received for it was what you get for covid, and it took me almost 3 weeks to get over it. The medication made me groggy, mostly snoozed. I got to finally listen to Frank Zappa music during much of that.
Fine now I think, and back to normal programming...
I have been listening a lot to Ola Englund's Chug Projects and, as usual, Mattias IA Eklundh. Both are Metal, but Ola is of the much heavier, instrumental variety. Also looking over the TABs of some of their material.
I really love what they do. Been thinking I want some heavier tracks of my own recently. I have the drums and guitars and tone for it, but what comes natural at the moment is something else. The above is a music comic about it. Yes, I know guitar has a missing "i" in it, but couldn't be bothered fixing it.
This started as a G Lydian practice thing. Just adlibbing. I remember Allan Holdsworth in a guitar tutorial video where he had graphic printouts with all the scales, all modes on the fret board. Like this below I did for for 6/8 string guitar (the way I tune the 8). I do these in CorelDraw, they way I do my illustrations.
Of course he was about memorizing all of them, like he did.
If this had a few fast arpeggios, scale runs and two handed tapping in a solo, it would far more "metal", but this is more slow simple melodic lines. It is how I felt doing it.
Ola's Chug project is a way for him to force himself to weekly play guitar and make original music. My own Music Comics are like that too, but I don't have an audience waiting for mine. I do them for myself about recent thoughts. I generally keep them under 60 seconds so I can just throw them on Xwitter, where almost no one sees them, and even if they do, the chances someone will stop scrolling and play them is very low. Doesn't matter though. The click thru on X is so poor, even compared to Facebook.
The Reaper project:
This has Drums Against Humanity, uses their BLACK METAL midi pack. Guitar is just the Harley Benton R-458 8 string with a Metal Zone pedal and a cabinet IR called ML Sound Lab's BEST IR IN THE WORLD.wav
I didn't put a bass track on this. Just one of the things about this not being a standard arrangement.
I also put it in our Assorted Bits Album on Bandcamp.
I find it interesting that the ingredients can be so metal, but the result isn't. It is all "How You Use It" that makes a difference.
And unless you misunderstand that I can't or don't do heavier stuff, I think this was pretty heavy:
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