Musician Diaries

All systems go for 2019! Here is a video I enjoyed recently. Dweezil Zappa (one of the human beings more at ease in his skin that I know; always a joy to see), reminisces his guitar lessons with Steve Vai. On his turn, Vai also mentions at the end how he once took lessons from Joe Satriani. A simple yet beautiful testimony of the transmission of knowledge and beauty, as years go by... Best of wishes for everybody for the upcoming year... :)

I guess it's connatural to this season to make plans, summaries, reviews... To pause and look back for a minute before starting to move forward again. In my case, this year it's meant to start keeping a "Musical CV", in other words a chronological (as much as I can) document that contains an exhaustive (as much as I can) list of all the music I've produced, and other noteworthy events in this noisemaker vocation that has happened to be the "one thing" for me. I started the document in order to get some clarity, and I've already got some. The first surprise -expected but yet a surprise- is just facing the heap of stuff I've already worked on, been involved in, and put out there already. I guess it's also only natural that we forget about the road we've already trod upon, always focused already on reaching the next stop. Even physically, we have eyes on our forward side, and a back, which is blind, on the backwards side. The improvement wor...

No, I'm not addressing here that dual, schizophrenic, Peter Parker/Spiderman kind of life that most of worthwhile people who want to bring their "dear thing" to this world are usually forced to live, feeding the ruthless machine by day and doing the actual, memorable work by night. That's a matter for another post. What I mean by "two works" today is the way in which followers of the Lean methodology frame their work. I heard such expression in an interview with the Lean consultant Jess Orr , who used to work for Toyota -the company that is the gold standard for Lean; and by the way, could we please have soon a Toyota in healthcare, in supermarkets, a computer seller, a political party, a... etc? :) -. The two works are: 1) "Making the numbers". Units produced. Outcome. Weekly production plan. 2) Work the system. Work your processes. Improve the way you do things. In this mental model, 1 and 2 are strongly interconnected. A super...

I should perhaps feel threatened or pissed about this guy, considering that one of my songs in the making has a strong and deliberate 80s feel. But he obviously tackles the most wussified-keyboardish side of the thing, and also, I think he is great...

This Maple Dye song, as the previous one and some of the others that will follow, was recorded in 2013, short after finishing the first Black Sheep Riot album. The effort that album took of me was tremendous -although in exchange, I learned a lot from the experience too-. After such intensity, I entered in a period in which I just wanted to "see countries", to move quickly and carelessly, so I recorded song after song out of my catalogue, heedlessly, doing only "the easy parts", still dazzled with the novelty of the things you could easily pull out with a DAW. Some of those recordings, as time has shown, are worth completing and putting out. This one was composed 3 years before the recording sessions took place. Its theme is those flashbacks of embarrassing moments that we all get sometimes, about stuff that is generally very far in the past and we can't do anything about, and yet it comes back again and again to torments us. A good remedy I've f...

Scoffing at all kind of seismic events, my production system continues alive and well, always advancing like alive creatures use to -even if some days only a bit-, and, like all alive creatures, always modifying itself, getting new branches and prunnings. One thing that this at-last-stable-enough system has allowed me to tackle is my long aspiration of using  metrics. (At the sound of the word, a big collective yawn overloads the interwebs... Please bear with me, I'll be light, I promise). The problem with metrics is that a lot of boring, horrible people has used them to do boring, horrible things. But the tool, in itself, separated from its uses, is neutral. And damn powerful. The simile with a sports match is a bit rough for my taste, but it is good as a starting point: imagine a [put your favorite sport here] match where there wasn't a score board. No way to track the points of each team, the number of periods, the remaining time for the current period... It would b...

 It didn't take a rocket scientist to notice, but hey, I gave myself a mental medal when I saw Jason Becker's second single, after having mentioned in my previous post about his adventures how he seems so strongly focused on love. Love not as in Hollywood love (i.e. control, power and prejudice). Not as in cheap novels (i.e. fear structures, mating game, stiff definitions of you, of me, of you-and-me). Love is a very bastardized word, like most of the important ones are. Love as in breaking the barriers, the chains that exist within us. The separations that burden us and make us unhappy. Love as in a connection that is already there and only awaits to be "unburied". Love as something whose meaning must be investigated by each of us, one by one, on our own; something to get better at. Like Emerson once said, we are not here to work, we are here so that a certain work is done upon us. Watching this new video, with the incredible performances of the players, ...

(I've been a bit under the weather these days so I decided to write something light today...) The other day I was working in a song that has two bridges. In order to locate it easily, I named the second one "Bridge 2 acoustic" in the DAW. However, at some point it dawned on me: a name like that breached the "don't make me think" principle; each time I read that definition, instead of quick mental access to the part, what I got was having to decipher a small puzzle first: "just a second, I'm up to my ears in keyboards right now - what part was that exactly?" "Lemme think, does the part I'm thinking of have an acoustic guitar?"... An invisible burden that adds each time. The solution was easy. After all, I'm not a manufacturer or an engineer, mostly concerned about data accuracy; I'm a musician, a poetic being, fueled by thunder-like intuition and creativity; as a plus I'm a goofball, too, with a strong and healthy...

I've always found that many musicians, even many musicians that I adore, constrain themselves too much into a certain genre. Music making, in my case, certainly does not work that way; I listen to lots of different kinds of music (and not like a tourist: the moment you get chills out of a song, there's some serious stuff going on there, that song becomes a part of you, and such phenomenon has happened to me, and happily still does, with a wide spectrum of genres). So when the moment comes and this music lover moves into music making mode, the sources of influence are many and the results are therefore diverse. However, I've also felt for some time now a need to "divide the ocean", to give some additional pointers to the audience, as a sort of courtesy. That's how I decided to create this second "band" (I hope I can kick out the quote unquote at some point), for my let's say more "classic", hard rock influences. As another way of ...

In times of darkness, remembering this story and its moral brings me a huge relief. I've been going through some rough patches in my musical development lately that certainly feel like "broken legs". When everything should be ready to go and I should be, at last, pumping out material consistently, my audio system keeps on pooping on me, with abstruse problems that are too geeky to explain to audio people, and too audio oriented to interest the average computer geek (and the worst part is: NONE OF THEM FUCKING BELIEVE ME.) So I try to see it as a challenge to become better. No problem can be solved from the level of thought where it was created. So this can also be seen as an invitation to evolve. Don't wish for easier stuff, wish to be better. Oh, how I wished to be better right now... Anyways, by now I know well that time corrodes everything, even the tighter wall of shit. This too shall pass, and looking back I'll even see it at some point as a good thing. ...

I remember reading some time ago about a brilliant guitar player in David Lee Roth's band who had to step out from a tour, a recording session or something like that, because he was diagnosed a disease. The guitarist was Jason Becker, and the disease, as I've come to find out recently, was none other than the splendid shit sandwich known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. For those unfamiliar, it's a disease in which the neurons in charge of sending orders to your muscles start to die, one after another, until you get completely paralyzed. I've been recently digging into Cacophony, the band mr Becker formed in his teens with the also supernatural guitar player Marty Friedman. In such early ages, and he was already doing incredibly technical stuff. I cannot imagine the horror that must have been for an extremely gifted player like him having to lose at first his guitar ability, and knowing what came next (and what a loss for music is this, too! Imagine what world wo...

Some kind of "coincidence" has gathered very close in my production line two songs that are very unlike each other, but somehow both very similar to Dead Kennedys' "California Über Alles". This one was written 2 years before "Zombie Barf", and in a very different frame of mind; one of the "moods" I get into when I try to write a little linear punk song is a persona I would call "the moron with a stick". Such moron was within me this time when I grabbed the guitar. All I knew was that it had to sound stupid, frontal, obtuse, as unequivocal as a stone hitting in the face ("Oh, a stone in my face... I wonder what is he implying...") All of this while keeping things humorous and far fetched, of course; humor is one of the most subversive tools I know. So the guitar was played almost as a percussion instrument I intended to break (therefore the retarded, semitone-after-semitone, monotone riff, the first thing that came ...

It was the best of times... for music listeners. Case in point: the other day I thought "hey, I'm curious about that group Gar Samuelson was in before joining Megadeth. I think I read somewhere they were technical and a bit jazzy..." I didn't even have to remember the name of the band. Just type in the tube "Gar Samuelson", and in about 8 seconds I was listening for the first time to Fatal Opera. The whole album. About 10 years ago, the exact same typing would have probably generated only excerpts, information about the band... In fact, I still remember the moment when this switch in accessibility happened for me. It was 2011; I knew that a certain band was about to release a new album, so I shyly made the query on the album, hoping to find some info on the release, track listing, some interview... To my (bittersweet) amazement, I found the whole thing was already available online; it almost "jumped" on me. Going a bit backwards, in the pre-Interne...

I've noticed a terrible affliction in some "extreme music" albums I've been listening to lately. It's about yelling/growling. Put in a nutshell, I've noticed plenty of vocal passages, in plenty of songs, where the expression used is way bigger than the actual sentiment it is intending to convey. That, if I'm not wrong, would be a good definition of the word "affectation", which is always a sign of bad art. Of course things are always multifactorial, and I can detect this kind of flaw in a piece of music that is, still, crazy good in other areas, with great chops, instrumentation, general lyrics, etc. It's just a matter of listening it for what it is and not fooling yourself about it (in my case, those moments sound to me almost "cute", as you would feel in front of a kid struggling to tie his shoes: "aaaw... so big and they struggle to express emotion..." And if this sounds too condescending of me, let me add that I'm ...

All along these process-focused series, I have been singing the excellencies of the TWI Job Breakdown list, and I thought I'd discuss in some more detail my experiences with such a deceptively simple and powerful tool. Firstly, here's a bit of (50,000 ft) history: the TWI (Training Within Industry) program was created during WWII by the US to face the sudden need of training huge masses of inexperienced population, in a way as quick and efficient as possible, in making war machinery. The bulk of those trainees happened to be women and child, as men in those days were busy... well, using the machinery. (This is one of those cases of that frequent historic phenomenon where the biggest achievements of the human race have to come attached to the worst of its moral bankruptcies: a war; humans killing humans. Another more audio-related example of this sad phenomenon would be the sturdy SM58, microphone of choice even to this day for millions of musicians -me included-, in its mom...

Here is "Zombie Barf", a song that has taken me a particularly long time to finish due, I think, to the combination of the (unofficial but very real) upgrade of equipment and systems I've been through in the latest 1.5 years, plus the intricate nature of the particular song. As I've mentioned in former posts, the songs in the upcoming Black Sheep Riot album will show a series of different layers of technical proficiency. This one would be in the layer 2, with 4 being the most modern. In other words, sonically, there are things about the final result that don't make me very happy (as a consolation, I try to think that perhaps this is the way it always is with your music; the stuff you put through the door is never the most perfected, because you already have something else in the works, and now you know how to do things better...) But this song was way past overdue the "it it what it is" stage, and I decided to keep it and release it wit...

I thought I'd discuss a couple more details about my system that I couldn't address in detail in my previous, more overview post. Those not interested right now in putting some kind of system in place for their music will probably find nothing of value in here (and perhaps dismiss the whole thing as something in the nearby of OCD land, I'm afraid). But for those who feel it's time to add some "bone" to their "muscle", I think these additional details can perhaps inspire you and shave valuable hours off your learning curve. A few cautions, though, before starting. 1) My system is a dynamic entity, changing as I write. This is not about putting a machine in place and then sitting on your fat butt and "let the cash roll in"; every experience, every situation you encounter as you use your system will teach you something, and it will serve you well if you get in the habit of incorporating the new lessons back into the process. Other...

I've discussed several times in this blog the need of a certain periodic "cooling down" that seems to go with the territory when you're writing, producing and everything else your own music. I've found this kind of "cooling down" is necessary in, at least, two areas: 1) "Cooling down" of a particular song: as in "no, I cannot work on Song A right now". You've listened to it too many times in a row, and you simply cannot tell right from wrong in it at this moment (and by the way, what a delicate torment for the DIY musician this is: you get your biggest kick out of blasting your way through a song, always different, rejoicing in the uniqueness of what happens... and immediately after comes your biggest torment: having to relisten to the same thing time after time after time after time...) 2) "Cooling down" of the process you're currently in : maybe you still can listen to a certain song with a modicum of o...