things i learned working on my record
1. It can be difficult to hear an acoustic guitar playing five feet from you and pointed straight at you in a large flat-response room.
2. Kuma's, hyped for its hamburgers, may actually be underrated. What an incredible sandwich.
3. When you want to figure out what you think of something, there's a time for listening to everyone else's thoughts and a time to listen in solitude to the thing itself.
4. Robbie Gjersoe's jokes are like photographs, in that a thousand attempts go into making one good one, and also in that the one good one is completely worth it.
5. It's possible to stick an allen wrench into a truss rod hole and not be able to get it back out for one half-hour.
6. No matter how many simplicities I try to design into a project, complexities stream in like water finding its level. By "complexities" I don't only mean unanticipated problems but long-established, less-simple procedures. Say you have an idea for a two-finger piano sonata. It's not enough to write it so that the mechanics are plausible; you have to go to the trouble of amputating eight digits. Comes the inspiration, as the cleaver is unsheathed, "What the heck, why not just do it the same way it's always done."
7. Deciding, in listening back to your own playing, whether to present to the public a hard trick done with 90% accuracy or an easier trick done with 100% accuracy: really tough.
8. It sure is crazy-boring to perform the same thing eight times in a row. I knew this already. Have never figured out how to avoid it altogether, except by being too poor to continue.
8 comments
By all means, go for the hard trick with 90% accuracy.
Push that damn envelope!
As long as there isn't an Allen wrench sticking out of the guitar...
I agree with Tom. Some of the best guitar players ever take the approach(I'm stealing this from Danny Gatton) but it applies to Roy Buchanan, Redd Voekhart(sp?), Alberta Lee, Brad Paisley etc). "I prefer to go for something I'm not sure I can pull off, sometimes I fall flat on my face and sometimes it works, but in the end if it makes me laugh it was worth it".
9. You are calling it a "record". You are officially old. Unless, of course, it will make it to vinyl. In which case you can do some scratchin'.
"Record" is short for "recording." Robbie is making a "recording," and after seeing one of the three shows he did with his phenomenal acoustic band, it should be a great record.
Gjersoe can't play the lick at 100%? I don't believe it. Seriously though, I'd rather hear the tough lick at 90% than the easy one at 100%.
And is that quote really from Gatton? There's nothing that man couldn't pull off.
Love it all; but could you please expand on #5?
Cath
Hey Polly, I'll be happy to put some new Robbie on the ole Victrola :-p
Robbie, plz don't forget Richmond! Love you man. Looking forward to some new tunes...
Can't wait to hear the new record. I hope I can buy it on cd.