Greetings fellow travelers.
One of my favorite moments on my new album This Worldly World
is the outro on Tropical Snow. That whole piece flowed out of me in a fun process of observing, really. I listened and let my hands do what was asked of them by the music as it emerged. Took a few short hours and was very complete, and the ending part was a delicious surprise.
Sometimes, sometimes and not always but sometimes for me, creating original music is easy and fun and satisfying. It’s almost always fun and satisfying in some unique ways, but not always so easy. Tropical Snow was all of these, and when I hear it, I hear a calm and peaceful place in myself which I’m glad exists, and that I can visit sometimes.
A nerdly guitar note – I used my Joe Meek VCQ3 optical compressor rather heavily on this track, especially near the end. Hard compression can be a really cool guitar effect, but I usually don’t have much use for it. For this, however, it was just the medicine on the lead line near the end, when the song fades into the sunset.
Semi-nerdly related notes – I used, on this album, three main instruments: a Martin acoustic, a Fender B-bass, and my one-off custom Telecaster-ish bit of magic which came to me by luck and circumstance decades ago. For the drum tracks, some of them are me playing hand-percussion at home, others are edited and looped studio tracks from some of the great drummers I’ve worked with in sessions over recent years. The vocals are almost all mine, and I still don’t use autotune for anything. It’s a choice, not one to be on a soapbox about, but a solid choice for me because I like the unique quirks in our human voices, and I do not consider them imperfections at all. I wish less recording artists and producers would squash the “real” out of their human voices, but that’s just me.
As for soapboxes, I will get on mine to say I think Ai-generated music and other Ai-gen content is a Bad Thing That Causes Harm. Caps for emphasis. Especially regarding artistic or creative work, it is antithetical to creativity. It makes me sick and I wish it would go away. There will be examples of gooder (sic) uses of it, but I think in sum it is Bad For The World (more caps, more emphasis). Part of my passionate opinion there comes from my knowledge of the joy and discovery involved in creating (ahem) CRAFT MUSIC! A term which makes me cackle – it came from a colleague of mine in jest – he said that’s what music made “the old way” or words to that effect may eventually be called, like Craft Beer and such. Slow food? Anyway I worry for younger folks who enter a world where this exists, where you can text-prompt a thing to make a thing and there it is and whoop, you’ve done little with your hands, little with your mind, and less with your heart. I hope instead they go to music lessons, practice their scales diligently for hours upon hours, feel the exhilaration of mastering a difficult passage which had once seemed daunting and out of reach, and then play it joyfully with their hands, with their hands. And I’m sure many of them will, and I hope folks encourage it. It does wonders for a body and soul. I guess I wouldn’t harumph so hard about Ai-slop if it were not for the absolutely horrible environmental consequences it brings, at a time when we should be actively and literally saving the earth from doom. This is of course, the kind of thing I rave and rant about in some of my songs.
Well, I hope you enjoy my Craft Music, Slow Food record, made by me mostly, with the help of a few great human friends, and a pair of wonderful cats. Still waiting a few days til I finalize track 14 – which will have a few more voices chiming in at the end, per this fun. Then after that I’ll send it to all the streaming services.
OH! Also, streaming release of Russ Ellis‘ Songs From The Garden album TBA soon, in another post. It’s been available on CD and on Bandcamp since November of 2021, and along with being a personal favorite of mine, it is also Berkeley Cat Records’ biggest seller. It too, was made by human voices and hands! Quite a great bunch of ’em, in fact.
Til next time, Good morning and good luck,
Eric
