this is matt

I have two projects that I am officially kicking off right now. One is going to be an instrumental electronica album that features only synthesizers, and one will be a more standard rock album that will feature vocals and (probably) no synthesizers. I don’t have titles for the projects yet, but that will come soon (I will at least need some awful working titles to refer to them by). Hopefully working in two styles doesn’t result in a Dark Half situation.

Anyway, here is the first track from the electronica album:

Enjoy!

My mom got me Mel Bay’s Complete Method for Modern Guitar for Christmas. I had Grade One way back when I was a teenager taking lessons, and I used it several years ago when I was teaching lessons, but sight reading has always been my weakest area.

I’ve finally hit the point where I’m more irritated that I can’t sight read than I am intimidated by learning how to sight read, so starting last Saturday (the 8th), I am taking guitar lessons… from myself. I’m taking myself back to the basics and forcing myself to go slow enough to really master them this time. So far it has been tough because I want to blast through everything and call it good.

But I know that won’t work, so I’m forcing myself to be diligent. And it’s paying off: I actually know some notes. Crazy, right?

I guess I just wanted to post this as some kind of public service announcement or something… If you find yourself hitting a wall in your creative pursuits, maybe you need to backtrack and fill in something you missed or forgot along the way. It could be the key to moving forward.

Pandora is wonderful. I don’t listen to it every day, but when I do, I tend to discover something amazing. This is “Casey’s Song” by City and Colour. I first heard this song a couple of months ago, loved it, and didn’t really follow up until the other day when I saw all these live performances on YouTube. I’m not sure why I didn’t follow up, because when I say “loved it”, I mean that I left Pandora to listen to the song about 20 times on YouTube (you know, since you can’t choose specific songs on Pandora) and listened to it obsessively for a few days.

This is my gift to you today.

Have you ever pulled out an old album that used to be a favorite, only to discover that five or ten years later, you kind of hate it? I had the opposite experience, and it requires a story.

Back around 1998 or 99, a friend of mine introduced me to a band called Further Seems Forever. I thought they were amazing and eagerly awaited the release of their debut album. Their lead singer, Chris Carabba, started a side project called Dashboard Confessional that I thought was pretty good. Then I heard he was leaving FSF to pursue DC full-time. Because I was a stupid teenager, I thought, “OMG SELLOUT!”, so when I heard Swiss Army Romance, I wrote it off as whiny songs for teen girls and basically never listened to it again.

For no apparent reason, I popped in Swiss Army Romance this week. It’s a burned copy, and two of the songs are scratched pretty bad, but I was amazed to discover that I love it. It only took me ten years to realize it.

The moral of the story: Don’t go into an album with preconceptions. You might be surprised at what you hear.

I wonder what else I actually like…

The album is out! Go forth and purchase it! Especially if you are a writer of fiction — I made this for you.

If you hang around enough rock guitarists, you’ll notice that they tend to hate sight reading and music theory — if they even know what you’re talking about. Many of our heroes were self-taught, so we stubbornly insist that we can teach ourselves to be equally awesome simply by learning our favorite songs and having passion. To do otherwise is to become an inferior sack of meat. I picked up that attitude and quit guitar lessons after three years, right when I was getting into sight reading and music theory.

Unfortunately, like many, I wasn’t very good at teaching myself. I don’t know if it’s the way my brain is wired, or if I just lacked discipline, but my skills flatlined for years until I got myself more formal instruction.

In the meantime, I convinced myself that all I needed was passion, because those soulless paper-pushers with their sheet music were just robots going through the motions of making music. True musicians didn’t need sheet music because our music came from the heart. I sat around learning Goo Goo Dolls songs and writing music that sounded like store-brand Goo Goo Dolls, thinking my passionate music would somehow convince people that it wasn’t horribly derivative. I scoffed at guitarists who were more skilled than me, telling myself that their fancy fingerwork was only there to trick people into thinking they wrote good music, even though it was hollow and passionless. Don’t get me started on those jazz a-holes.

Passion good; skill bad.

I’ve heard similar sentiments from the entire creative spectrum — writers who don’t read, artists who don’t look at art, game designers who don’t play games — and I think it’s time someone told us all to quit being so lazy. I nominate myself.

Listen: Our self-taught heroes still worked hard to get where they are. Their lack of formal training is not a slight against formal training, but an indicator of how their brains are wired — they learn better by jumping in and figuring it out as they go. If that’s how you work, that’s how you need to be working. If it’s not, quit pretending it is and go buy a book. Seriously, Mel Bay’s Guitar Method books are cheap and I’m thinking about starting over with Grade 1 to correct some of my awful habits (like writing notes above the staff shhhh I didn’t say that). Or sign up for lessons. Or do whatever it is that works for you.

I put together a wedding march for my sister’s wedding, which was yesterday. When I mentioned what I did on Twitter, there were some enthusiastic requests for it, so here it is!

Legendary Wedding March

this is matt – oh noes!

This is another gamey-sounding thing I was messing around with while on vacation this week. I like it. It reminds me of overcoming challenges and stuff, which is appropriate because the drive home felt like an end boss.

this is matt – Victory

This is me playing around with some of my new synths. Turns out my laptop is an okay workstation in a pinch.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve acquired some new tools for delicious audio goodness. It also occurs to me that I have never done the stereotypical musician thing where I talk about my gear, so guess what I’m talking about today!

I’ll talk about my guitars at a later point. Today is all about synths.

My audio software of choice is FLStudio, which was originally a drum loop program but has since evolved into a pretty amazing workstation. It’s good out of the box, but they also have a bunch of add-ons you can buy, like synthesizers, effects, and soundbanks. Stuff goes on sale periodically, and that’s when I strike.

When I started messing around with digital music, I was using SimSynth and WASP, which you can hear on The Evolution of Ezekiel Wallace. After I finished that one, I got an email saying a new synth called Harmless was coming out, and if you bought it right away you could pay whatever you want for it. I used Harmless extensively throughout the nanomusic project (spoiler alert: I replaced SimSynth and WASP with better Harmless sounds).

They did the same sort of pay-what-you-want thing for Drumaxx, a drum synthesizer, which I used a few times and love very much (it’s the faker-sounding drums, not the real-ish ones).

FLStudio synths went on sale this month, so I grabbed two more, Sytrus and Sakura. Sytrus made an appearance last Friday, and I haven’t used Sakura yet. At this point, Sytrus is still “the one with a million knobs” and Sakura is “the one that does strings”, but I plan to play with them some more in the coming weeks. They both seem to have loads of potential.

Finally, the newest additions were a result of my long-held desire to work with NES sounds. Last night I finally got off my ass and searched the FLStudio forums for chiptune recommendations. I ended up with Magical 8bit Plug,  de la Mancha’s basic, and everything from Tweakbench. I’m excited about all the new possibilities!