Man, after three hours of rehearsing with the trio - four takes of Not Today (working name for The Aaaaay song), three takes of She Believes, and four Triage songs... where I was especially pounding, competing with the volume... I woke up with very sore hands! And I think a bruised cuticle or something on the outside of my right thumb. Not very pleasurable to be typing right now. Might need to take a hand break today.
If any of you are looking for music to listen to on Martin Luther King Day, I have a couple that I listen to that I like quite a lot:
I listen to them every year on MLK Day.
Well, about a week ago my hard drive died and that was a lot of fun. I didn't lose anything in the way of music - just two revisions of one of my piano musings, when the one I wanted to keep is still around. And some recordings from my jazz trio rehearsals, but I've already uploaded them on a website so I still have them. Still, annoying. I think I've just about decided to invest more in to an actual desktop computer system so I have some redundancy.
The other advantage of that is that I will be able to start getting back into multitracking. Right now the only multitracked song I have is Together, and I'd like to do more of it.
Saturday night, I recorded some more versions of All Aboard and Balancing Above The Air, with the intention of finally getting demo-quality songs that I could put up on garageband.com. I didn't quite get there, but it was still nice to come up with a couple more versions I can listen to and examine. These recordings have piano and drums. I might upload them here in the future - still letting them sink in.
I've been collaborating with Quoting Napoleon as their sometimes-keyboardist lately. They already have a cd released, and also have their songs available through snocap, which I think is a pretty cool system. You can browse clips of their songs here and then buy them for full downloads. These are the songs they came up with before I started playing with them more regularly, although I am working out some subtle keyboard parts for these songs, too.
In 2006, I had plans to go home for Christmas. I go to Colorado just about every year to see my parents and my sister's family, including my two nieces.
That year, there was a huge blizzard in Denver that snowed out the airport and canceled all sorts of Denver flights. My flight got canceled before it took off. I never made it to Colorado.
I spent Christmas at home in Portland that year, in an undecorated house and without many backup plans. On Christmas Eve I got the idea to try and work up a couple of recordings of Christmas tunes for my family back home. I hadn't done much recording of myself at that point so I wasn't sure how well it would work.
I found two to work on - one from a fakebook, and one just from scrounging up a guitar tab online. I managed to work up arrangements and learn how to sing and play them and record them and email them off to my family by Christmas morning.
I'm making them available here - I didn't write them, obviously, but I'm not releasing them for commercial purposes. Enjoy.
Well, it's been about two years and all good things must come to an end. Over the weekend I informed Deja Nu that I would be leaving the group. When I joined Deja Nu, it corresponded to the time when I accepted delivery on my grand piano, which is when music started becoming a big part of my life again. It's hard to say goodbye to a group that is so closely associated to my own sense of personal progress, but it was time to move on. I am looking forward to having more time for musical exploration now, before I decide what my next project (or projects) will be. I'm looking forward to looking around and making myself open to new ideas.
I came up with a new rendition of One For My Baby, kind of exploring my feelings about leaving - sad and destination-like. If you don't have access to my standards page, feel free to email me. I sent it along to the group to say goodbye. I wish them nothing but the best.
Fun day today - I went to Tony Starlight's to see The Swing Sisters perform this evening. They had a very short break between sets, and their pianist had just ordered a burger. It got delivered right when the set was about to start, and he wasn't about to abandon his burger.
So I got called up on stage to sit in for a song. I was that guy, the "guest pianist" who gets called up from the audience. That just tickled me, I haven't been in that situation before. So it was a lead sheet I hadn't seen before - wow, I don't even remember the name of the tune. We did the head once, then James took the AA and gave me the BA. The combo was pretty tight and we had some good energy rise and fall later in the piece. It was quite fun. I'm hoping I'll get to do some more combo playing in the future.
I also sat in with Quoting Napoleon the other night. They're looking for a keyboardist, and I'm still considering whether I want to be The Keyboardist, but it's a fun opportunity to consider. They're bass, drums, rhythm guitar, electric guitar, and fabulous lead vocals. They've got a great repertoire put together already and are completely receptive to new song ideas, cowriting, and working up songs of my own. It's a little different than the idea of me creating/forming my own actual band, but then again, I'm still working on building up my own repertoire, so it might be a good fit if it helps motivate me to write my own stuff even faster.
Taking a well-deserved vacation right now. My other job is as a software consultant, and I find that as music revs up, it is harder and harder to go a day without doing something musical. June was horrendously busy with two important client projects - one team-developed project built for uses internal to the client, and another project where the client I was helping was under the gun by a client they were selling to. That was probably the highest priority client work I've had since I've gone into business for myself. As a result, I didn't get to do as much songwriting as I would have liked. I'll be changing things around when I get back from vacation to have some assistants I can subcontract to when things get too busy.
All that said, I Have A Cold has been a big hit out here, especially to my nieces! I've subscribed various family members to my podcasts, and also gnashed my teeth at their choice to use Windows - which showed me there were some funky design things happening with this site on IE - I should have them fixed up now.
I have a few other songs in half-completed state, although I do find it is sometimes more difficult to finish those songs than the songs I start and finish within one sitting. Hopefully July will open some things up for me - pretty soon I hope to have enough repertoire gathered up that I can actually start rehearsing wtih a couple of other musicians. So far I'm thinking of bass and drums definitely, already have people lined up, but I'm also considering adding a good guitarist that can do both acoustic and electric... I'd need a good versatile multi-instrumentalist there to fit in though, and don't have many good leads yet.
Vacation's great and all (and I'm over my cold now!), but there's no piano around here! I almost brought my two-octave USB keyboard but it was too big for my laptop bag. I've thought about buying one of those midi controlled rollup keyboards too, but... oh man, I don't know. I just don't think I could do that.
