Musical Powerup

As last year wore on, I found myself someplace I remember being about a decade ago: firmly entrenched in a job, and not doing any "me" stuff, apart from passing the time with time-wasting books and TV whenever I wasn't actually at work.  I wasn't creating anything, and I wasn't really spending any time thinking, and I certainly wasn't talking to anyone or reading anything which made me think.  You see, that's a problem with approaching middle age: you've seen and heard and done more and more of the stuff that's around where you live, and nothing and no one does or says anything which makes you think anymore, because you don't have to.  If you parachuted me into any classroom in the province, I feel like I could wing it without much effort, whether the teacher had prepared anything for me or not.  You see?  Thinking not required, going through the motions some days.  Boring.

I don't enjoy that.  I want to try new things.  I want to switch it up. I certainly don't want to do what everyone says is the typical way.

So the year changed, and this somehow gave me permission to start out on a whole new year, doing stuff differently.  I was getting pretty bored with how last year had been going.  I started reading this old paperback I picked up in an armload of "getting myself through the month" used books.  It's called "Teaching Thinking" by Edward De Bono, and just reading the first bit got me thinking a whole lot.  He made the rather obvious point that we don't require students to think much at all.  In fact, I find they instantly detect and usually resent the first sign of being asked to think.  De Bono doesn't even think critical thinking, analysis or response is the be all and end all of thinking, though.  He thinks there is reactive/responsive/appreciative/analytical/critical thinking, and then the opposite, which is pro-active/reaction causing/creating/original agenda pursuing thinking.  How do we get that into the classroom?  Dunno.

So that got me thinking.  No one has been around to talk to about stuff, as everyone is off with their wives and girlfriends and kids and so on, but I've done OK.  I did spend five days of my Christmas vacation in a row in my apartment like a recluse without seeing a single human soul before I stopped waiting for my various friends to show back up once they were done with family obligations, and visited my own relatives and started starting the new year.  

The holidays had started out very well with me getting a guy who's going to school in Toronto to come over while in town for Christmas and lay down a carefully thought-out piano part.  He also slapped down some stuff I can use in my video game documentary, which I decided to call Get Ready Player 1: A History of Video Game Consoles.  After this, though, the silent days started to slide in under the door one by one and obviously weren't going to stop coming. I reached a bit of a crisis about music: I was out of inspiration, confidence and motivation, but was troubled by the lack of band practicing for a month, the guitar sitting on its stand with a broken, unreplaced string emblematic of something deeper.  So I thought about music a bit.

I started out, years ago, recording on a cassette four-track recorder.  After this I had an abortive, expensive, extremely educational experience with a studio which had inferior equipment and which eventually went out of business, leaving me with a stack of ADAT tapes of unfinished stuff.  This propelled me back to my four-track with new knowledge and agendas and visions, and eventually computers I could afford caught up with the four track as a viable means of recording stuff.  Latency (stuff randomly sliding in and out of time) was a big problem for a long time.  I tried Cakewalk, gave up on Cubase, due to its complicatedness, and eventually for some reason (I guess I liked Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge) started using Sonic Foundry's Acid Pro and Vegas programs.  I got my studio stuff into my computer with a great deal of bother, and have been replacing or re-recording much of it anyway, the more clearer my idea of what I think would be a good idea gets.

I'd been using Vegas 4.0 as my main recording software for years, and was feeling that this was a bit odd, though I loved using it to edit video.  Well, after spending the first part of my Christmas holidays doing lots of editing video with it, I experimented with upgrading it rather than changing to a new program entirely.  I went from Vegas 4 straight to Vegas 8 today (Sony bought Sonic Foundry), and was amazed to see that, not only did it work with all the old files, presets and plugins and so on, but it was actually LESS system hungry than the old one, which translates into me having a much easier time previewing and mixing stuff before rendering it.  This is great.

Back in my studio experiment days, I got a skinny little teenaged girl to sing on two of my songs.  Her voice was really unique, and when I re-recorded the songs, I missed it and have been having real trouble getting girl singers to sing.  Ten years later, I looked her up on facebook, and she seems overjoyed at the chance to get recorded, so she says she'll sing on the new versions for me.  Hooray!

Also, after going through two opened packs of guitar strings and finding that I'd broken the same string twice, which meant that each pack was missing that string and I'd need to go the music store, I set out.  I decided to give the local guy a try.  He complains when I meet him on the street that I don't use his store, but he didn't carry the strings I used and seemed to be closed a lot.  I drove in a snowstorm across town, and he was closed.  At 4 on Friday.  He saw me cruise by in my car, and waved out the window behind his closed sign.  Eff him, I decided and went to the next town over, where the store I like better is.

That store has a guy who loves to talk for hours about anything you might like to know about music.  I whiled away two hours doing this, and getting advice, tried to buy a guitar stand, and when I described the one I wanted, he set about ordering it, as I didn't want what he had in his store, and then he ended up giving me two G strings without charging me a cent, to put in my two packs of G stringless guitar string sets.  Then I picked up some DVDs from the rental store.  I seldom rent DVDs, usually buying or downloading them, so this was me renting mainly to get to hear DVD commentary on DVDs which I haven't seen a good price on yet.

So, this evening, correctly not counting on hearing a whisper from any of my in-town or visiting-from-out-of-town-for-Christmas friends, I had a beer, listened to commentaries on Prince Caspian and the final episode of Six Feet Under, restrung my guitar and tried out Sony Vegas 8.0 on a song of mine.  Cool in all directions.

Having a vision of what you want to do and the tools you need and can get your hands on to do it really brightens up a greying life.