Had to Start Somewhere…
Here’s how the sausage was made.
My formal music education largely has consisted of two years of violin lessons when I was in middle school in Houston, TX. I was fortunate enough to blunder into weekly lessons from a protege of Eugene Ysaye, which all things being equal should have been enough for the fiddle to stick. For better or worse, it didn’t.
Music mostly did.
For a brief couple years, every Tuesday at 4:00, Mr. Hess labored patiently to instill an appreciation for being a Musician (with a capital “M”) and a violinist (with a small “v”). Hopefully the capital “M” thing comes through in my music, that would be a good outcome. I think actually if you listen carefully, you will hear the small “v” in a lot of the pieces too, my approach to the guitar is idiosyncratic for sure.
My Own Way of Making Music
My family moved from Houston to Buffalo, N.Y. while I was in middle school, ending my happy tutelage with Mr. Hess. Without his inspired guidance, the violin lost its luster and I started to experiment with the guitar. I haven’t touched a violin since.
Nonetheless, in high school and college, I put in the obligatory 10,000 hours teaching myself the rudiments of the guitar by wearing out a pile of vinyl in the hope of assimilating whatever magic Leo Kottke, Jorma Kaukonen, Pat Metheny, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townsend, et al. captured in amber on record.
If nothing else, Mr. Hess’s focus on a systematic approach to learning an instrument stuck with me. I recorded things when I thought I had something good going, like as not though, what I was playing was not what I heard in my head. The tape deck provided an unvarnished window on my music making.
“Ball don’t lie” as the great Renaissance philosopher and power forward Rashid Wallace would say…
Predicably, but without apology, I drove family and roommates to distraction while I repeated the same 4 bars endlessly until they flowed right, or, I ran the white flag up the pole and moved on with “good enough”.
I am not by any means a perfectionist, after all, its just music, and I have always been more concerned about capturing a bit of lightening in a jar with recording. The energy and flow are everything, and when that ends up on tape, I have declared victory and went home…
I have recorded my guitar as much as anything to enable me to disentangle what I was actually doing from what I heard in my head, so as to fix the maladroit clams, bad phrasing, mumble-d articulation, spastic timing, grating tone and intonation issues and left-footed transitions.
The results clearly reveal the limits of the self criticism process. Ha.
An unforeseen bonus of this archival exercise was finding, when I started digging through the accumulated reels and cassettes in early 2021, 100 or so pieces that I had completely forgotten about. Many of the pieces came together with minimal effort – and for many I practiced them just enough to play them through and get on tape and then moved onto the next best thing. So they slipped my memory. Ha.
Some of these I have picked up where I left off 20 years ago, and modified, added to so as to produce something new.
I also stumbled across better versions of many of the known pieces, another plus.
All good!
Following the path of least resistance, I never bothered learning to read music on the guitar and therefore have never transcribed any of my music to paper. That is the privilege and curse of being an amateur.
I have used a couple dozen or more different slack tunings over the years which I am guessing would further complicate the transcription process. So what I hear is what you get, so to speak.
Electricity
As soon as you put a microphone in front of an acoustic guitar, and convert the vibrating air molecules to a digital signal, its an electric guitar.
With that in mind, 99% of the music I have created starts out on an “acoustic” guitar and then my so-called recording process takes things in whatever direction and state things finally end up in.
What you hear is what you get.
The musical sausage was made using the following meat grinder, spice and not much in the way of preservatives in the original analog recipe:
I recorded with two microphones (Shure SM57 and a nameless SONY back electret condenser) and either an old SONY TC-355 1/4″ reel to reel deck or an anonymous $100 TEAC cassette deck.
More recently I have recording music direct to digital using two antique Russian condenser mikes though a small Mackie mixer in combination with a 10- 12 year old DAC box, paired with a Dell laptop of similar vintage. I have managed to get OBS to do its thing on this set up to create the lo-fi videos seen on this site.
The echo effect you hear on many of the analog recordings was a child of circumstance created by feeding the output from the RTR deck back into its inputs and mixing with the miked source – Echoplex on the cheap.
About the time I acquired the Russian microphones I picked up an undistinguished digital delay/reverb/phase shift box. Many of the later recordings are embalmed with effects from this box
I recently had the folks at DiJiFi in Brooklyn, NY digitize this analog content on their professional grade equipment. Unfortunately many of the recordings suffered from some audio degradation – my music at the time was all natural and nitrate free – beyond their considerable skill to recover and sanitize. Ha, too little too late.
Woodwork
Back in high school, I scraped together $225 of my lawn mowing proceeds to buy a Rickenbacker guitar from Marsha McGee’s older brother Mike. This was my first guitar, and a keeper. I still play it, it has aged well.
Since then, I have used my pop bottle, under-the-couch-cushion and class action settlement money to pick up some decent “player” guitars, bottom feeding on orphaned inventory gathering dust at places like Elderly Instruments in Lansing. Nothing rare or exotic though.