Musician Diaries

With certain loses you die a little, a part of yourself goes away. This is how I feel about Chuck Mosley's passing away. I know he wasn't a mainstream musician anymore, and all I got to know of his work was two albums, but I consider him a big influence of mine and always respected him as a very original artist and free spirit. As most of my peers, I got to know Faith No More through "The Real Thing", and later "Angel Dust", both already under the Mike Patton mantle. A bit later, in summer 1993, I made my first big travel abroad, to a town in Maryland, US, and one of the first key locations I pinpointed after arriving was the record store. That summer for sure created the foundation of my musical taste. Among the myriad of records I acquired that summer, I grabbed and listened with great curiosity "Introduce yourself", FNM's second and last with Mosley's vocals, to find that FNM had replaced a singer of great personality with a...

I have to become better at finishing. The muse I serve is cruel, the road is paved with the bodies of my predecessors. Suicided, OD'd... and all they thought they could handle it, and they all thought they knew better. As long as I don't put stuff out there and call it "finished", there is a terrible psychic tension within me. So the way I see it, the options I have are: either getting better at finishing, or calling the whole thing off, which in my case is not possible--being able to create music is such a blessing in my life, where would I be without it? I feel dirty for the things I had to do yesterday to make the rhythm guitar sound decent. Still this shitty affair with the guitar emulation that sounds well while playing but harsh and horrible when listening to the recording later. Aaaarggg!!! Anyways, at least it's done. Today, faced with the grim perspective of doing comping work (which is just another name for "office work"), I th...

Got the keyboards recorded, courtesy of Yoshimi. As usual with keyboards, most of the time went to finding a good instrument; I always feel as if I were auditioning people for a musical; "Saw+chimes" -- "Thank you, that's enough". "Space Ethereal #9" -- "Don't call us, we'll call you". Etc. Once I got the sound, and the choice for the chord inversions, the recording itself was trivial. Got a hint of how my musical mind works in what has happened with the rhythm guitar; for more than 48 hours I've remained unaware of the fact that the track was still in a crude DI state, the recording that I used for the basic initial metronome demo. It's like, my mind knows the content is there so it doesn't care so much about the "dressing", it disengages. Although in this case it's understandable with so much stuff happening all of a sudden in the other tracks, with the new solos and all. Today I'll record ...

I keep surprising myself at how incapable I am to foresee how long will things take. For today's session, I intended to record the "reinforcement" guitar track, plus the keyboard -just a few ambient notes here and there, so no big deal-. And I felt a bit guilty for cutting myself too much slack doing only those two things. Yeah right. It's turned out the guitar track has grown on its extremes two solos, which inhabit the gaps between words in the vocals, and logically they have taken some time to adjust. The song already had a solo, and heaven knows I'm by design very sparse arrangement-wise in my songs -sometimes too much for my own good-. In this case it's like the solos have found me, rather than the other way round. To compose them I've naturally turned to this technique I've used several times before of recording myself time after time, then listening and keeping the "hints": discoveries, unexpected vibes... A couple of mist...

What I did yesterday, after considering several options, was starting a new song from scratch. I live by my intuition and along the years I've learned to listen to it and follow it, sometimes very blindly. But I've found that it is very powerful and it serves me well (it's a miracle that a peculiar creature like me has hit his forties relatively intact). Intuition is immediate, boom, while logic, on the other hand, lives within time. Sometimes logic has taken years to catch up with why it was a good idea to do X. (Also, in other occasions, I've mistaken the signs; in the musical realm you have aesthetic clues that tell you if you hit the target; in real life not always, so sometimes intuition is easy to be mistaken with that other tiny voice of plain desire...) Deep water navigation to try to explain what I did yesterday. Here's a more superficial explanation; I've found that it is a great practice to document things; together with that, I've fo...

Got to listen the whole Bandcamp thing. After giving it some consideration, I think I'm going to scrap "Zombie barf". I believe in the song, it doesn't deserve the poor audio treatment I've given it; plus I don't want to ship junk. When I was in my 20s, it was enough for me to get the song good enough so that others "saw what I meant", the vibe I was aiming to, and the execution was only in second place. Now I find that approach too lacking; I can do better than that and I know it. I try to see it as a "failing forward"; I've created a new category for songs like this, unpublishable, but good as elaborated demos, to show to one's band when or if I ever get to have one again. After this listening I've made a lot of reflection. "Zombie barf" took like 20 hours of "production" (the term including everything besides composition and rehearsal). AB tests in different speakers, all the different plugins...