09.08.08
Underground
Well, it hasn’t started yet, but it will, so I’ll head it off now:
I’m not dead yet 
From time to time, I really have to stop what I’m doing and focus on my music. Right now, I’ve started some preliminary work on my fifth Jamendo album. However, I’m nowhere near ready to run with it.
This summer was hard on me. I’ve moved to another state, and now, I’ve started teaching at a new school. For that reason, my posts here on WordPress have been kind of scarce.
Whenever this happens — and it has to happen, or the music won’t improve — I get mail from folks who are concerned about what happened to me. It’s ok.
I’m somewhere beyond the Woodshed right now. I call it “Underground.” (A bit of a sight gag, since my new studio is on the 4th floor of our townhouse.) As in, “I’ve gone underground with my music.”
I’m shooting for something special. When I look back at my albums, the most popular one so far has been handmade. However, the one that really sticks with me is La vie sous la mer. There are some songs on that album that take me away to another place.
I want that again.
See, there’s a reason I do Creative Commons music. It’s about freedom. I may not make much money at it, but I have the luxury of not caring. I do it to make something new and worthwhile.
And until I’m ready, I’m underground.
Like a sequoia seed.
03.31.08
Jamloading…
It’s on. Points of Departure is on its way to Jamendo.
Indeed, it has been a journey.
I played every instrument on the album, with the exception of the drum tracks. Last time, I used live drums; this time, I used Hydrogen and Renoise for the percussion tracks. I made this decision so that I could make use of a wider range of drum sounds: I only have a minimal kit, and since we’re about to move to Virginia (probably to a smaller house), there’s no point in giving myself a packing problem later. Already I wonder what I’m going to do with the three conga drums.
Jamendo has been good for me. It’s a good home for my music, and a great place to find the type of music I like to listen to.
Today I took a look back at the performance of my three previous albums. Below, I’ve given the download statistics for each of them as of today, March 31, 2008:
| days on Jamendo | total downloads | downloads per day | |
| evolution | 490 | 1117 | 2.28 |
| handmade | 414 | 972 | 2.35 |
| La vie sous la mer | 167 | 482 | 2.89 |
For each album, I calculated how many days it has been available on Jamendo. This allowed me to determine the average number of downloads per day. Since evolution was my first album, it makes sense it has the most downloads. However, when the downloads per day is considered, the newest, La vie sous la mer, is clearly in the lead.
None of this would have been possible without Jamendo. Also, I have to give credit to my computer system. I run Linux (a combination of Kubuntu and Ubuntu Studio). There is a lot of high-quality audio software for Linux, all free. Further, finally, a few companies are starting to offer commercial audio products that run on Linux (such as Renoise).
The good news is: Jamendo fully supports free software. Right now, I’m uploading my tracks in .flac format. They will be available for download in both .mp3 and ogg vorbis format (which I recommend). Even the software program I’m using to upload my music, Jamloader 3.0.4, is open source — and even comes Ubuntu-ready as a .deb package!
With all the changes I’m about to go through — ending my life in Florida, starting over in Virginia — the future looks pretty uncertain. Jamendo has been going strong since January 2005. I hope that, wherever I go, it remains my home.
11.27.07
The Shape of Things to Come …
As you can guess, I’ve been busy.
Today, by the way, is the anniversary of the release of my first album on Jamendo. It’s hard to believe — I can remember the hopeless feeling of the summer of 2006, thinking that all the music I was making would never find an audience. It was a leap of faith for me to go public, but I’m glad I did.
I am working on new material. Last Spring, I gave up on recording completely and focused on practice and learning new skills. This time, I have incorporated recording into my practice routine. I spend part of my time developing new skills, part creating new ideas, and part refining existing tunes.
Perhaps early next year, I could be releasing my fourth album. I had a certain concept in mind, originally, but the music is going in a different direction. You can tell from the early song titles: Falling into the Dream and Vale Avis Tenebrica. The last album was jazzy; I have a feeling the next might lean toward blues rock and . . . possibly even darker regions.
Ah, did I mention I’m also learning to play trumpet? And violin?
Further, last summer I developed a Python module called pcsets. I have been working quietly on it, in the background, trying to create a module that bridges the gap between traditional chord / scale theory and musical set theory. Well, my work so far tells me one thing: I need to revise the basics of the pcsets module to make the programming more fluent and intuitive.
Ultimately, I want one single function, pc(), that will take a list of numbers, a string of digits, a string of notes, whatever, and return a pcset. I want the set to be indexable, iterable, comparable, searchable, and of course transformable. Also, I am working on a framework for indexing and comparing pcsets — things that make use of the fit_in() and harmonize() functions, in other words.
Certainly that’s a lot of projects. But unlike last year, I’m free of the sleep apnea — there are many more hours available to me each day. I’m continuing my series on the songs from La vie sous la mer, but understand — if a few days pass between posts, I’m not dead, I’m just busy
07.20.07
Jamendo: 1000 total downloads
I’ve been really focusing on my summer projects for the past week — the Pitch Class Set module for Python, you’ve heard about. Every now and then I mention the third Jamendo album, which I’m in the process of recording — but I try not to say too much, because with the luck I’ve had this summer, all I need is to hex it
Well, while my attention was focused on these projects, things kept moving along on the internet. I reached another milestone. As of today, my albums on Jamendo have been downloaded more than 1000 times!
| .mp3 | .ogg | total | |
| evolution | 428 | 150 | 578 |
| handmade | 358 | 66 | 424 |
| as of 20-jul-07: | 1002 | ||
06.26.07
Enter Sandman
Last night, I had another sleep study.
If you read my previous post on this subject, I have been diagnosed with sleep apnea. No matter how much sleep I got, I was always exhausted. It has led to a number of other problems, including high blood pressure.
Well, last night the solution came.
But before I get there, let me tie this in to my music — a bit of history that I’ve kept hidden.
In November of last year, I released my first album, evolution, on Jamendo. At the time, I was struggling with exhaustion in the afternoons. I would counterbalance that by drinking an entire pot of coffee. This allowed me to avoid taking a nap. I did not want my days “wasted” by sleep.
That first album proved to be pretty popular. Even today, I still get positive reviews — and believe me, the words of encouragement matter. If you are a fan of independent music, sometimes you do not realize how much you really and truly matter — the words of encouragement can often get us musicians through even the darkest times.
Just 3 months later, I released my second Jamendo album, handmade. The reviews weren’t as great, but the downloads keep on coming. Some people have apparently liked it a lot. In May, I even had someone contact me and tell me they had used “A Spy in the House of Pancakes” on a student film project! I was honored.
But at the same time, May was an awful sort of turning point. Years ago, I had a problem with high blood pressure (mostly related to stress). Since then, I had been monitoring my blood pressure at least once a month. Well, in May, I tried it, and the number was high — 162 / 103. I thought, Well, this is just a fluke. I’ll try again next week.
Next week it was even higher.
In fact, every time I checked, it was high. And so I scheduled an appointment with my doctor. I also stopped drinking that entire pot of coffee.
Unfortunately, that meant I found myself too drowsy in the evenings to get anything done. I tried practicing, I tried composing, but I found myself — well, the feeling I could best compare it to is drowning. Imagine you are at sea. There’s been a shipwreck. You can only keep afloat by paddling. The sun burns you, and the sea is cool. Your arms and legs are getting tired.
Better to sink and end the pain.
Or so I felt.
I had just completed a three month long project I called the Woodshed, an intensive practice period. During May, I accomplished almost nothing. Then, the end of school came: I had a week of teacher training to suffer through, followed by a week of vacation in the Baltimore area.
Months ago, I planned on starting recording for my third Jamendo album in June. As of today, I have plans, but no tracks. As I said in my first article, the album is partially named for that drowning feeling I’ve had all year — La vie sous la mer (”Life Under the Sea”).
But last night, there was a solution.
During my sleep study, they started me on a therapy called CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure). I’m happy to report that it worked — I woke up this morning and, for once, didn’t feel like I’d been the piñata at a particularly psychotic kid’s birthday party. Even now, as I sit here writing this, I see it is nearly 1 pm — the time I have been conking out. But I’m wide awake.
For me, it’s a new beginning. Enter Sandman, and this time with open arms.
[This article was crossposted to my Dandelife blog.]
05.20.07
Music Update & Site News
In the last few weeks, I’ve begun two new projects on this blog:
- Music theory, primarily focusing on chord voicings for guitar; and
- Python, focusing on learning the programming language.
I haven’t dropped my other projects — I just don’t want to be the type of blogger who keeps on posting even though there’s nothing new to say on a subject. For the record:
- Yes, I’m still learning French. My wife and I were watching Babylon 5 in the evenings in French. Unfortunately, this was only a language option on the first season DVDs.
- I am still in the Woodshed, practicing and improving my skills for the two albums I plan on recording over the summer: my third Jamendo album (working title: “La vie sous la mer”) and my third DMusic album (which will probably be highly experimental).
- With all the above projects, you can see how I’ve had very little time to do reviews.
While I’ve been focusing on all these tasks, people were still reviewing and downloading my albums. Today, I had the pleasant surprise of finding a new review of handmade by theirry44 — it was very positive. But the person who has undoubtedly helped my music the most, at this point, is K. Mandla, who published a recommendation on their blog; as of today, I’ve gotten at least 43 hits from this source alone.
Then, finally, I was surprised that today was a triple milestone. Have a look at my download totals (as of this blog posting):
| .mp3 | .ogg | total | |
| evolution | 376 | 125 | 501 |
| handmade | 241 | 61 | 302 |
My first album, evolution, just hit the 500 download mark; my second, handmade, just made it past 300; and both of them together add up to more than 800.
So on the music front, things seem to be going well. Personally, well, my high blood pressure issues aren’t exactly helping me see a bright and shining future. As I’ve said in the past, music has been my shelter from the storm, a place of refuge. Do I ever need one now.
05.03.07
Inspiration & the Creative Commons
I use a Creative Commons license for my music, in the hopes that someone else will hear it and be inspired.
Well, it finally worked.
I received a message through MySpace from TLee, a student filmmaker from Syracuse University. He found one of my songs online, liked it, and used it in his sophomore film project!
The song is “A Spy in the House of Pancakes“, track #13 on handmade.
TLee’s message meant a lot to me. See, I’m only a musician because other people inspired me. I have found such joy in music, and here are some of the people I owe it to:
- Alligator Records, who made me love the blues. When I first came to Gainesville, my first visitors (in the band sense) were Little Ed and the Blues Imperials and Koko Taylor.
- John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jaco Pastorius, and Chick Corea, who innovated and created new styles of jazz.
- Jamey Aebersold, Jerry Coker, Mark Levine, and the other great jazz educators who taught me the science behind the sound.
- Marty Liquori, who helped me start my first band.
So I feel I ought to “pay it forward.” For years, I studied other people’s music — jazz standards. After all that time learning the language, I gained the ability to speak on my own. If it hadn’t been for the folks who created and inspired me, maybe I would never have found music . . . My Own Avalon.
03.25.07
Second Stage Strategy
As far as downloads go, my two Jamendo albums haven’t been doing too bad. Here are the totals as of today:
| .mp3 | .ogg | total | |
| evolution | 293 | 111 | 404 |
| handmade | 120 | 54 | 174 |
I look at these numbers and always get the surreal feeling that I’m dreaming; that any minute, I’m going to wake up. Isolated as I am, it’s hard for me to imagine my work has been dowloaded 578 times world-wide!
Well, when I look at the reviews, I come back down to Earth quickly
My first album, evolution, received overwhelmingly positive reviews, typically 9’s or 10’s. Not so for my second album. The consensus seems to be that handmade was only a 5 to 7, probably a 6.
It was an experiment. Part of the charm of being independent is being able to leap down conveniently placed elevator shafts of your own free will
The percussion on handmade was all natural — conga drums, cowbells, maracas. But most of the reviews pointed out something important: it’s difficult to innovate in the style in which I was playing.
So what next?
Clear the board and start over.
As I’m at the second stage of my Woodshed project, I think my next step is to develop a concept I’ve been working on here lately. Not drum machines, not pure hand drums, but a new concept for me — hybrid drums. That is, some of the drums produced electronically, and some of them played by hand.
I also need to go back to those bizarre and fantastic rhythms I used on evolution. Many of the songs on that album were in odd time signatures — something I excel at improvising over, but which annihilate many other musicians.
Maybe it’s time I start finding my strengths and focusing on them. I want the third album to be something so personal, so powerful, so unique, that no one can even begin to classify it as anything but mine.
03.19.07
Resolution.
Well, things have happened in a few hours.
My last post here was about a bad review I got on Jamendo; well, soon after posting it, this became two bad reviews — by the same reviewer, one for each of my albums.
I was pretty upset.
Now, I’m in a bad situation here. Right now, except for my two dogs, I’m all alone. My wife is away, out of town on business. Where to turn?
I posted my situation in the DMusic forums. I figured with all the great musicians there, someone surely had gotten plugged unfairly once or twice and could offer coping strategies.
Well, instead, a fellow musician named leedsquietman saved the day, singlehandedly.
Here is the thread I started on DMusic: Damnation. If you scroll down to the sixth post, you see he did something I didn’t — he considered the source. In fact he did a bit of detective work and looked up the other reviews this person had made on Jamendo.
When I looked myself, I saw that just as leeds said, 2 out of 3 of this person’s reviews were arrogant, abusive, condescending, and blatantly troll-like. As leeds said, it was as if he wanted to be the Simon Cowell of the online music world.
So what now? Not certain. Keep practicing and hope the wheel of karma spins full circle, I suppose.
I should have known that this day would come; I just wasn’t prepared.
Damnation.
Well, it happened. Only two days after posting my own review policy to this blog, I found myself totally hammered on Jamendo. Someone gave a fairly crappy review of handmade.
Now, as I said, it is not my policy to give bad reviews. If I don’t like something, I move on.
I don’t really have anything in place for being bombed to the stone age myself, since this is the first time.
I’m reminded of one of the articles I posted as a reference in my review policy: Ignorant criticisms (freejazz.org). There’s a lot of anecdotes on that page that make me feel a little bit better, but not much.
I see one grain of truth in the reviewer’s comment, that, yes, I need more practice — it’s why I started my Woodshed project. But the reviewer also said, “If you take every instrument separately - it sounds ok, but mixed all together they create a very messy sound, because they don’t live space to each other. Imagine a bunch of people, everyone’s speaking but no one’s listening.”
Nice. How exactly would that work, me being only one person, and having that almost autistic ability of mine to focus on a task for hours on end? There’s no one on the album but me, not even a machine. Did I grow a few multiple personalities over the winter? I have listened to the album again and again, and I just can’t see the merits in this statement.
So what now?
No idea.
I’m disappointed, I’m depressed, and I’m just shutting down things for a week. Catch you guys after March 25th.
