Musician Diaries

Hot from the presses, my latest work. Oh boy. Am I corny or what. The thing is: even musicians sing silly things to themselves now and then. The silliest of those musicians, even try to record that kind of silly stuff. In addition to all the rest they have in mind. This is like a little vice of mine, a distraction. But there's a part of me that will always be 5 years old (and probably without that part the others would never get anything done).

Damn, I just forgot about my weekly post and I'm remembering now. Even worse: in fact, I've been intermittently remembering it along the weekend, but then getting swept away by some other thing. Lots of waste there. So in the spirit of kaizen, a modification of my process is in order. In this case, the countermeasure to keep this problem from reappearing starts with a change of standards. In my initial working standards, I decided that this blog was going to be an informal, out of the map thing, and so it was going to be "that thing not documented". That idea, as romantic as it sounded, creates no value for the reader, and can even become a 'disvalue', as this mishap proves. So the countermeasure is including a reminder in my calendar on Sundays; so when things get frantic, I'll still find that warning to write the "broom" post. My hypothesis , considering how stable is my calendar checking process, is that it will be enough to kee

NOTE: this app is no longer available. Sorry... Jam Loops is an app for Android to help musicians loosen up and get inspiration through jamming. It contains bad ass rock loops ordered in gradual speed, to help your mojo get going. The app is free for download in the Google Play Store and can be found here .

lease ignore the un-lean cables hanging on the left side of the screen, and focus on the guitar on the chair. Yeah, that's right, a chair. After some experimentation, this has proven to be the best way so far to get and drop the guitar easily. The empty chair in front is the one I use to sit, and in front of it is my computer with the daw fired up. If every time I want to do something new with the guitar I had to go through the struggle of lifting it from the floor, it would mean endless experiences of the waste of transportation, in the form of struggle on my back and shoulders, and a lot of resistance adding up in a nasty, never declared of feeling of "oh god, not again, I have to grab the guitar again". At some point it can make the difference between "OK, it is what it is, let's move on", and "let's record one more take for good measure", therefore having an impact on final quality. That up-down lifting movement that I

Before I started documenting my music making processes, I have found myself time after time reinventing the wheel. Given that recording, production and the like is not my cup of tea, but something that I will gladly hand over to someone else as soon as I can, I tend to forget what I've learned from one time to the next. The consolation, then, is that this effort of documentation is the last one. At last I have learned how to accumulate the knowledge, the achievement and the failures, in a way that adds up. The stakes will stay there, put in a way in which they are good reminders, even if some time goes by between session and session. The part of this struggle that has taken my attention last week has been recording electric guitars. One of the notorious mistakes I've made along this process has been succumbing in excess to the temptation of technique. Just one more experiment that I had to run, in a way. My initial rationale was "cranking out stuff as quick a