This past month has been a lot about getting back into the groove of a regular music writing practice. Every day, in some concrete way, I’ve written some sort of music – sometimes it’s just been playing around with rhythms and chords, other times I’ve written and re-arranged whole pieces of music. 99% of that should never see the light of day, but it’s all grist for the mill – musical success and experience is always firmly grounded in a mountain of erasure marks, ground down by experiment and discord. I suspect that for every note that gets played or written by a musician, 100 notes have to die (poor little notes. Won’t anyone think of the NOTES!)
I remember holding onto the illusionary chic of being a musician in my teen years. I spent so much time fantasizing and dreaming about being a musician that I did little to actually realize that dream. Now that I’m a little older (and a little balder), it’s gotten much simpler for me:
“Self?”
“Yes?”
“Did you write, perform, practice, or work on music in any form today?”
“Why….yes, I do believe I did!”
“Well then….you are a musician”
We are what we do, not what we dream, or say, or hope, or wish upon wish for. We are our deeds.
And finally, I accidentally collided with a bit of personal folk wisdom today – I’ve discovered that it’s best for me to know what synth patches are on deck rather than stumble upon them, as the results can be disastrous. A new horn section patch found in Kontakt today resulted in the tell-tale trill of that 1980′s Crime Against Man and Nature – Europe’s, “The Final Countdown”. I did not mean to stick this brain worm of a song in my head for half the day long – the musical virus took hold on it’s own
