Following the Pathway
I keep starting blog entries during fleeting moments of inspiration but never finish them because I have so much going on. I know people occasionally stumble across this blog so here goes with the latest.
Life is good. I'm busy and have enough energy to keep up with everything right now. I've discovered a pattern where my UCTD flares in the springtime, perhaps caused by allergens. From end of January until the start of June, I feel like utter shit - no energy, difficulty breathing, weak muscles, just flaccid. Looking back, I can pick out numerous springs where I just dragged ass until school was out. In college I remember not being able to finish a final college project because my hands were so weak and painful I couldn't hold a pencil. When I was working at the hospital, I remember looking at the budding trees and wondering when my energy would come back (remember folks, I spent 75% of my life in the Northeast US). This year's been different. I'm not perfect but I'm better than I've been in a long time. The pain and weakness are only threatening to happen - I'm not in full blown agony like I usually am right around MDF time. I'm grateful. Perhaps the allergy shots have helped. Perhaps knowing why the symptoms happen is helping me not dwell on the whys. Either way, it's been a good spring.
Morgengrau is 5 days away from recording "Exstrinsic Pathway", our first album. We'll be capturing tracks here in Austin at Amplitude Media. The atmosphere in the band is caught between gleeful excitement and finger-chewing dread. We don't feel ready but also know we'll probably never fully be at that place. Perhaps if none of us had school or work, allowing us to jam for hours every day for weeks on end we'd feel exactly right, but that's not how it is or ever will be, so we have to work with what we've got. The whole process of getting this band off the ground over the past 18 months has been formative for me. I've been in bands for 17 years, but this is the first time I have had to pull the music out of the Non. All my other endeavors were simple compared to this: Here's your tape. Here's your CD. Here's your mp3. Go write lyrics and melody lines. No sweat.
It wasn't until I sat in my office, a metronome clacking away in my ear and utter cosmic blankness in my mind that I really began to appreciate what it takes to write good music.
Dictionary.com defines a music as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color." Good music, a good song, seems so simple - it flows, goes either where your soul expects it, or heads in a direction you didn't predict but are utterly delighted to discover. Like a beautiful painting (any style, insert your preference), you experience it and go "Ahhhh." It feels like it existed forever. There was never a silence where the song now exists.
I've spent the last year sitting in that silence. It's a terrifying place as there are three other people in it with me, willingly sacrificing their time, money and energy, waiting for me to pull a thread of riff out of my tinnitus and give form to the vacuum. I certainly didn't feel capable. While I love death metal, I didn't really know how to write it when I first started Morgengrau. My ears love chromatic progressions and atonal melodies, but my brain likes to think in whole numbers. Everything must be divisible by two. Notes should stay minor, but they follow the scale. Ok, so how to start? Fuck if I know. The metronome ticks, the cat chews on my velcro cord minder and my cell phone rings. Mundane life fills the vacuum, a tsunami washing away the hint of a thread. Empty, thin air.
I started resorting to something I never, ever thought I would use in the creative process: math. Let's play with numbers and see what I get. I've got one cool riff, it's contains these fret positions, so I've got 2-4 on strings E, A and D to work with. Play everything backwards. From the middle out to both ends. Trem picked notes instead of chords. Chords instead of notes. Mixing and matching like one of those infuriating "what number comes next in this series?" IQ questions.
Mechanical, perhaps. But the next thing I knew, The White Death finally had a starting riff.
I'm describing something a million experienced musicians already know. Whatever. Detailing my journey and may help someone else who is struggling. It's helped unlock what makes a song good - take a riff or two, and then use those components as your palette. Don't go dicking around up at the 12th fret because you think you're spending too much time at frets 3-8. Don't go grabbing the tube of white paint and adding that to your predominately blue and orange painting just because you can. Ask yourself, should I? Does this drive me further into the fury of this part or am I doing this because it is simply challenging to play? 90% of the people in the crowd can't see what I'm doing anyway (due to cell phones in the way, or no club lights, not close up or just being half blind) - they're LISTENING. It needs to SOUND RIGHT. All listenable songs MAKE SENSE.
I've spent endless hours this year listening to and dissecting songs. Incomprehensible riffs, once I figure them out, unlock the entire rest of the song. When I was a teenager, I didn't understand any of this. I'd try to play songs, jumping all over the neck like a retard. Fail. How the hell does he play this part? There's no way I can get up here that fast. Well… that's because he's not playing it that way. My brain likes to stereotype certain notes and progressions. If I play to that perception, I'm a supersized bag of failure on the clearance rack. If I force myself to feel what makes sense, and simply take in the note without trying to hear it (hard to explain but it requires me to disconnect interpretation from what my auditory nerve is sending) then the puzzle clicks into place.
I certainly haven't solved the puzzle of teasing threads out of the Non, but I feel like once I've found one, I've got a guide rope to lead me through the vacuum and stay on track. My appreciation of music composition, not just death metal, is so much deeper now. I will never be a truly intuitive composer, as I was never an intuitive artist, but I can leverage these new insights to find paths my binary brain may not have noticed before. I can feel my dendrites twitching, which, at 40, is a good feeling. This is what it's like to walk the Extrinsic Pathway.
Life is good. I'm busy and have enough energy to keep up with everything right now. I've discovered a pattern where my UCTD flares in the springtime, perhaps caused by allergens. From end of January until the start of June, I feel like utter shit - no energy, difficulty breathing, weak muscles, just flaccid. Looking back, I can pick out numerous springs where I just dragged ass until school was out. In college I remember not being able to finish a final college project because my hands were so weak and painful I couldn't hold a pencil. When I was working at the hospital, I remember looking at the budding trees and wondering when my energy would come back (remember folks, I spent 75% of my life in the Northeast US). This year's been different. I'm not perfect but I'm better than I've been in a long time. The pain and weakness are only threatening to happen - I'm not in full blown agony like I usually am right around MDF time. I'm grateful. Perhaps the allergy shots have helped. Perhaps knowing why the symptoms happen is helping me not dwell on the whys. Either way, it's been a good spring.
Morgengrau is 5 days away from recording "Exstrinsic Pathway", our first album. We'll be capturing tracks here in Austin at Amplitude Media. The atmosphere in the band is caught between gleeful excitement and finger-chewing dread. We don't feel ready but also know we'll probably never fully be at that place. Perhaps if none of us had school or work, allowing us to jam for hours every day for weeks on end we'd feel exactly right, but that's not how it is or ever will be, so we have to work with what we've got. The whole process of getting this band off the ground over the past 18 months has been formative for me. I've been in bands for 17 years, but this is the first time I have had to pull the music out of the Non. All my other endeavors were simple compared to this: Here's your tape. Here's your CD. Here's your mp3. Go write lyrics and melody lines. No sweat.
It wasn't until I sat in my office, a metronome clacking away in my ear and utter cosmic blankness in my mind that I really began to appreciate what it takes to write good music.
Dictionary.com defines a music as "an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color." Good music, a good song, seems so simple - it flows, goes either where your soul expects it, or heads in a direction you didn't predict but are utterly delighted to discover. Like a beautiful painting (any style, insert your preference), you experience it and go "Ahhhh." It feels like it existed forever. There was never a silence where the song now exists.
I've spent the last year sitting in that silence. It's a terrifying place as there are three other people in it with me, willingly sacrificing their time, money and energy, waiting for me to pull a thread of riff out of my tinnitus and give form to the vacuum. I certainly didn't feel capable. While I love death metal, I didn't really know how to write it when I first started Morgengrau. My ears love chromatic progressions and atonal melodies, but my brain likes to think in whole numbers. Everything must be divisible by two. Notes should stay minor, but they follow the scale. Ok, so how to start? Fuck if I know. The metronome ticks, the cat chews on my velcro cord minder and my cell phone rings. Mundane life fills the vacuum, a tsunami washing away the hint of a thread. Empty, thin air.
I started resorting to something I never, ever thought I would use in the creative process: math. Let's play with numbers and see what I get. I've got one cool riff, it's contains these fret positions, so I've got 2-4 on strings E, A and D to work with. Play everything backwards. From the middle out to both ends. Trem picked notes instead of chords. Chords instead of notes. Mixing and matching like one of those infuriating "what number comes next in this series?" IQ questions.
Mechanical, perhaps. But the next thing I knew, The White Death finally had a starting riff.
I'm describing something a million experienced musicians already know. Whatever. Detailing my journey and may help someone else who is struggling. It's helped unlock what makes a song good - take a riff or two, and then use those components as your palette. Don't go dicking around up at the 12th fret because you think you're spending too much time at frets 3-8. Don't go grabbing the tube of white paint and adding that to your predominately blue and orange painting just because you can. Ask yourself, should I? Does this drive me further into the fury of this part or am I doing this because it is simply challenging to play? 90% of the people in the crowd can't see what I'm doing anyway (due to cell phones in the way, or no club lights, not close up or just being half blind) - they're LISTENING. It needs to SOUND RIGHT. All listenable songs MAKE SENSE.
I've spent endless hours this year listening to and dissecting songs. Incomprehensible riffs, once I figure them out, unlock the entire rest of the song. When I was a teenager, I didn't understand any of this. I'd try to play songs, jumping all over the neck like a retard. Fail. How the hell does he play this part? There's no way I can get up here that fast. Well… that's because he's not playing it that way. My brain likes to stereotype certain notes and progressions. If I play to that perception, I'm a supersized bag of failure on the clearance rack. If I force myself to feel what makes sense, and simply take in the note without trying to hear it (hard to explain but it requires me to disconnect interpretation from what my auditory nerve is sending) then the puzzle clicks into place.
I certainly haven't solved the puzzle of teasing threads out of the Non, but I feel like once I've found one, I've got a guide rope to lead me through the vacuum and stay on track. My appreciation of music composition, not just death metal, is so much deeper now. I will never be a truly intuitive composer, as I was never an intuitive artist, but I can leverage these new insights to find paths my binary brain may not have noticed before. I can feel my dendrites twitching, which, at 40, is a good feeling. This is what it's like to walk the Extrinsic Pathway.




