Musician Diaries

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...