Art & Technology Blog: Mixed Media Missives mostly around design, comics & music.
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? 😁
We can be found at ArtAndTechnology
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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Kinsugi is the Japanese art of repairing things like broken ceramic goods with gold to keep them, useable, but also "a reminder to stay optimistic when things fall apart and to celebrate the flaws and missteps of life".
That is a wonderful philosophy.
Last night Mattias uploaded his track Kintsugi to YouTube. He gives me a credit, but the video I took in Osaka of him is really such a small part of this video:
For the love of Japan I put together a tune called Kintsugi, celebrating imperfections and the impermanence of all things.Filmed by Yogev Gabay (Sweden) and Adrian S. Bruce (Japan).Much thanks to Keiichi Ishida and the crew of Zanshin Musical Instruments for everything.For more information about Freak Guitar Lab and the Ulv guitars, please visit https://freakguitarlab.com/
A really small part, must only be a few seconds.
Mattias brought this track to Japan in early May. He seems to work on many things at the same time in his Freak Enterprise, like recording tracks and videos, preparing for, then doing his Freak Guitar Camp, handling his online store, promoting his guitars, other clinics or performing. Kintsugi is quite a complicated video to edit together, but he has done more than a few of similar complexity, so guess it didn't take him as long as it would me to do. From the little I heard of it in May to the release yesterday has been 4 months. Think it indicates just how busy he keeps himself "being a modern, successful, musician in the age of streaming and social media".
What a guy! 😮
Listening carefully I can hear a synth part or three in there as well as the Toontracks drums and guitars. The kind of thing I do too. Not as skillfully though!
We can be found at ArtAndTechnology
For many weeks I have been regularly making some short piece of music that I can pull out an under 60 sec clip from to use as the soundtrack to one of my Music-Comics. 60 seconds is the limit to upload to X/Twitter, which is by far the simplest way of showing the 1 or 2 people that could possibly want to read/ hear them. Pretty sure most who view them have the sounded muted anyway.
But I really do them as a creative exercise for myself. Making stuff keeps me a "Happy Camper" and these are not massively time consuming things to do.
Ola Englund: Sunday With Ola, weekly opening music was a way for him to force making music into his schedule, and sub sequentially release his CHUGG PROJECT albums. This is something like that, but not as regular, or for any real audience.
The music is made in Reaper with guitars and synths I have, The video is all made in MOHO Pro12 from a small collection of stuff I have made to do these with. Mostly all first take things. Make something, release it, move on. Getting the 8 string increased my output for a while, as I practiced and got used to it. I always record and practice into Reaper anyway.
Of course I like some better than others. All depends on what comes to me as I do one.
I originally started just making square format YouTube shorts, as that is what YouTube encouraged, but they are undiscoverable by anyone doing that, and how many people get to see them is up to YouTube putting one in 10 peoples feeds for some hours after being uploaded, seeing if any play them to the end to determine if they show it to someone else (and taking into account what your subscriber numbers are and some other random stuff).
So this is what a Short Format looked like:
The other problem with shorts though, is they are 99% garbage. That seems to appeal to the largest audience, but not me.
So what is this Music-Comics about?
Just trying to combine my interest in making music, with my interest in comics, and my dislike of doing time consuming animation, and rendering. Hate waiting for rendering. The comics are really fast and easy to do in MOHO. This being the project for the Cubism thing at the top of the page here.
I currently have the waveform of the music as the background, and show the red playbar a wave player has.
To the front of that is just something I feel like saying today. Like a 3 panel comic strip in a newspaper, doesn't take long to read, and could say something that makes you think. As far as I know, nobody else has done this format before.
We can be found at ArtAndTechnology
