Fake It Until You Make It Part Deux

Tips for appearing to know what you are doing.

1. Stop looking at the neck. I seek out someone in the audience to make eye contact..."He's playing to me!" Or close your eyes altogether.

2. Dress the part. Punk means no shirt and tie. By the same token, unless you are in a dirt band, dress up a bit. Looking good adds, does not take away.

3. If you fvck up big time, laugh.

4. Talk to the audience while tuning. Good anecdote time, especially if it segues into the next song.

5. "I meant to do that." is part of your repertoire. Be a cat.

6. Don't blow through people after you leave the stage. Many of not most come for the meet and greet afterwards.

7. Sloppy drunk or high is bad, mkay? A nice buzz is great. Enhances your interactions. Falling asleep on stage is really bad.

8. As part of #7 - eat before you drink before you go onstage. No burritos, nice and light but enough to mitigate what lies ahead. 

9. If you introduce me to your mom with the words, "You two have a lot in common," you are so off the list.

10. Share with anyone in the venue that has a direct impact on your sound - sound guy, lighting, the girl bringing you drinks...all of them.

11. Really, stop looking at the neck.

Black Holes

Yeah...I mean the gravitational monsters that have physicists and laymen alike wondering what they are and what does it mean to me?

N.P.R. had a fascinating article about the interior of black holes.
Stretch Or Splat? How A Black Hole Kills You Matters ... A Lot

It struck me as completely over thought.
(Many times in life what staggers others seems glaringly simple to me and conversely I can be the densest person in the room)

Gravity was classically though of as a force of attraction. The more mass an object contains the greater its attraction.
Wrong Mr. Newton.
Mr. Einstein showed us that magnetism is the only attraction related force in physics.

Gravity pushes you, not pulls you. This was an incredibly significant deviation from Newton.
The greater the mass the great the object deforms space around it, until like a bowl with no friction you slide to the bottom of the well created by the mass of that object.

What the artist doesn't show is the bowl extends in all directions, enclosing the planet like a shell, the depth and reach are the function of the mass. The center of the object being the focal point for the deformation of space. Where you are being pushed.

In this depiction of a black hole (the eponymous "artist rendition") we can see the leeching of a nearby planet as it enters the field of the black hole.
The surrounding accretion disk of spinning material, and the jets of material from the polar extremes.

Quantum physics demand nothing created, nothing destroyed. The information contained in your body must be preserved even after entering a black hole or all of quantum physics fails. It must go somewhere.

The other side of that coin in the N.P.R. piece is there is nothing inside a black hole. Space and time end.

Two things strike me as glaringly obvious.

As a fire clears a forest for new growth, black holes are galactic cleaning tools. We have found the womb of the stars, we can watch dust and matter coalesce into balls that gather mass and momentum. Some ignite when the pressures needed for atomic reaction are met. Some fall a tad short and become Jupiter. Gas giants that should have been stars, but failed.
Black holes remove matter from the visible universe. And to a man looking at fire a thousand years ago we might see that he thought a forest fire to be a most destructive force, consuming everything in its wake. A force of evil, a thing to be fought and defeated.
Black holes are natural things; therefore they serve a purpose. Admittedly beyond our understanding at the moment, but were someone to find a "cure" for black holes I would tell them to abandon the idea. They serve a natural purpose as do ants and cockroaches and earthquakes and volcanoes and fires.

And two, to satisfy the quantum crowd I say this: your body and being would be reduced to the size of an atom in an instant. All the information is preserved, it just takes up far less space.
No spaghettification at all.
Galactic smushing.
If the universe is oscillating then the need for dark matter may be closely tied to black holes?

I haven't violated Einstein or Hawking. Have I?

And now back to your regularly scheduled blogging.

Band In A Box 2014 & Tumblr

The new and improved BIAB is out and boy, is it a winner.
The GUI has been completely redesigned. Things like the mixer, an integral component was somewhat hidden in the old layout.and now occupies close to a quarter of the layout.

Zones have been laid out - Songs, Views, Transport, Drop, Tacks, Tools, File, Mixer and the actual composition window.
Each has been made a little more intuitive; much easier to find what I need without resorting to having the manual laid across your knee as you try to build a piece from scratch.
Little things like a 'Tap' button to tap out the beat you wish to use.

From PG Music's website:

We’re very excited to offer one of our biggest upgrades! Band-in-a-Box 2014 includes over 50 great new features and enhancements, 101 more amazing RealTracks, 54 MIDI SuperTracks, 36 Artist Performances and that’s not all. 

The GUI has been redesigned with a great new look and many time-saving enhancements! The Toolbars and Song Title Area have been redone, and the chord sheet now has a “Real” looking handwritten font for chords. We’ve addedUserTracks. Now you can make your own RealTracks to add to your song. Plus there’s a handy Instant Preview of styles, RealTracks, and RealDrums so that you can quickly audition them to choose the best ones for your song. Loops now support Acidized Loops. A Legato Strings feature that automatically optimizes MIDI string parts to prevent retriggering the same notes, a new Master Volumeallows you to boost volumes of all songs with one setting, 8 new Hi-Q MIDI sounds, and many more…

I first discovered BIAB in 2009 and have been a fanboi ever since.
I cannot imagine trying to compose and then lay down backing tracks without it. It allows me to be creative with little overhead. A tiny learning curve for the basics to be absorbed; although mastery would take a good deal of time. It is worth the time spent.

Joez Blues

Throw together a blues progression (I, IV, V), pick a style; in this case Joe Zawinul and you're off.

A month ago I heard a rap piece in which I liked the progression a lot. I sat and wrote the chords down. Opened BIAB and laid it out. Changed the beat, and the style from hip-hop to a jazz thing and all of a sudden I have a great tune that sounds nothing like the original.
(Fine, I also changed a couple of chords - the resolution was major and I wanted more open ended, like sustained etc)

I cannot recommend this enough to my musical friends.

TUMBLR

I dislike MusicClout - the "services" they offer are of little reach, are over-priced and generally of no use to a musician trying to get their music "out there."
To fill the otherwise incessant barrage of ads with "content" they from time to time, offer advice via a blog style column.

One of them had a cogent suggestion. Rather than using a third party such as ReverbNation or SoundCloud that an aspiring musician needs their own website.
Not subject to the whims of the site owner as far as may be possible.

In this they are 100% correct. Just as MySpace used to be the premier site for self promotion, as times and content changed, MySpace's relevance as a music platform diminished.
I had been using FaceBook as a tool for networking. It came to naught. Today, my 3,400 "friends" have become a steady stream of what they ate for lunch, a pithy quote from someone taken out of context so that Ronald Reagan seems coherent and wise, or a plea to buy their latest CD, jewelry making or custom built guitars.
In short - FaceBook is now mostly an ad platform.

I moved over to Twitter as a way to promote and be engaged with the people who can actually further my musical ambitions. It has been fairly successful to this point.
I've gotten airplay on radio stations, found composition competitions worth entering, met a number of people who are flying higher and closer to the sun than I and have gotten the wind from their wings just by proximity.
But I still am just linking people to my page on Soundcloud rather than hosting my music.

So I took a site at TUMBLR:

The Importance of Being Ernest Page

And quickly posted three of my tunes. As time progresses I will fill the pages with content that may be somewhat of an overlap with this page. So be it.
(Apologies to Mr. Wilde)

Grateful For...

My head cold, stuffed head and attendant tickle starting in the throat.

Music.

Lou, Gregg, Dave Lou Sr - Styles Music, Pomona

Music

Sunny days, frigid nights.

My green thumb.

The twists and turns the life metes out to each of us may seem daunting at the moment, but most episodes become cherished memories.
It may be a product of aging, or just the wisdom that comes with it, or even the realization of a childhood dream.

Music.

It has been a tight year in terms of the material - and yet, not.
For every 'no,' there seems to be two or three, 'yes;'  we're laughing!


Merry Christmas,

And be happy for your lot in life.

My Network is a thing of...of...Hell if I know...

What is a verified account?

Any account with a blue verified badge on their Twitter profile is a verified account. 

Twitter is the network tool. Facebook was a failed promise.

I joined MySpace and that was not helpful to me as a musician, it did link me with a few people from high school. Well, why not join FaceBook and just maintain contact there?

So I left MySpace for greener pastures. Those pastures are barren and devoid of real life. It DOES serve to keep me in contact with cousins I would not see or talk to regularly otherwise. More like its intended purpose.

Along came Twitter.

Someone infinitely smarter than I told me that Twitter was the future. They sat patiently, and explained how to organize contacts and what to watch for. I dove in. It took a bit for me to find my footing. But it was not as much "work" as FaceBook. Much more intuitive. And as it turns out, useful.

Not looking to have "followers" for their own sake, I wanted meaningful contacts - A&R people, radio and television personalities, anyone that can teach me, reach me, offer me a gig.

Twitter verified accounts are the people they purport to be.
All of a sudden I find my network collecting check marks the way I used to agree to friends requests on FaceBook. 

All I do is post music, express an opinion - Twitter is a cocktail party. I mingle. And dang it, payoffs have been seen. I have garnered airplay on three internet radio stations. I have submitted works for a rock compilation album. I am doing exactly what I thought I would be doing.

One of these people is going to hear me play or engage in conversation and it will be that link I have been looking for. I can filter "A&R" as a search criteria when looking for people to follow. I mean, how much better can it get?

Let me tell you...I can talk to Don Rickles.

I See God

I look at branches of trees and see patterns...fractals...mathematical imagery.
I hear a beautiful song...mathematical imagery.
Language is math in that they are both symbolic languages. Conveying higher order from symbols. Feelings from hieroglyphics.

To see a pattern in chaos is part of , wait for it - The Chaos Theory.
If you wait long enough, even seemingly random chaos begins to exhibit patterns.

God is therefore the ability to see a pattern in everything.
Focus on the large enough picture and you see what God sees.

Math and music and God.

Gödel, Escher & Bach?

Like Rand Paul I seem to be plagiarizing.

When applied to music, the formulaic reply becomes trite. You have to step outside that box.

Well, to math as well...and language. Crepe...it is a never ending circle.

The name George fascinates me...GE...OR...GE...OR...GE...OR..like pi, it never ends.

Infinity scares physicists, it is not a reality but only a way of expressing what is beyond us.

To them real infinity does not exist.

Go to a street corner and listen to a busking musician.

Look at the stars.

To talk to God is to make humor where sadness could live; to see order where chaos seems to prevail.

God...is a choice.

Lord Jesus on a Jumping Bean, Horse Hockey too!

I go to play my guitar. I am always in the midst of a project, the actor waiting tables.
TURN THE LIGHTS OFF

S'cuse me?
TURN THE LIGhts off...wait - remember when you were 15? Playing air guitar or after you got the strat...what was the first things to set the mood? Before I lit a joint. Before I got the guitar from its case.
I turned the lights in my room off and left lighting to the one desk lamp I had.

How brilliant must I be to see the tree in front of my face?

Maybe I should make the background picture on my PC an audience shot?

Maybe not?