OBSERVATIONS:

• This was a lot of work.
• I’m proud of some things and embarrassed of others.
• I learned a lot about myself and how I work.
• It was great fun and very satisfying to create work that I could share and perform.
• This project stressed me out a lot; though, that was kind of the idea. I needed a push to get this project done. The blog helped so much with that. It was my weekly accountability marker.

• “Weekly Blog Posts:”
  I decided early on that I wanted to do weekly blog posts to give myself motivation with a deadline. It was great way to use peer pressure to my advantage: tell everybody I’m going to do something, and then go get it done.The problem was that I don’t work this way. I often dive headfirst deep into a project and let it consume all of my free time and thoughts. My last project like this was my web-redesign. I worked so intensely, that I injured myself. I know I work this way, but rather than I embrace it, I tried to hide it.I wanted to show off that I could work disciplined and diligently on something to produce a product just like the “real people” do, with deadlines, work reviews, brainstorming meetings, etc.
  In the end, it didn’t work out that way. The weekly post showed how difficult it is to go against the grain. I ended up procrastinating and working from the wrong direction on a lot of this until it became too much.
• “Shared Development:”
  I feel like I missed the goal of sharing my creative process. I wish I had shared more of how a fragment gets developed into an idea, and then fleshed-out into a composition.

MOVING ON:
I have a lot of love for the music I created the past few months and hope I can continue the spirit of the WAlbum in the future. I think the next version of the WAlbum will take on a form that looks more like the “shared development” topic (mentioned above).

FINAL THOUGHTS:
From this perspective, the project feels like a work-in-progress way to find out what I want to do with writing tunes and bloging. There are some things that I really liked about the process and some others that I did not.

I feel grateful for the experience and for the lessons learned. It gave me a lot of inspiration, motivation and stress. All in all, I’m happy to have completed and excited to move on.

This week was mostly editing and re-recording. I’m a little behind (as usual) for recording all the tunes, but I think I can finish it up this week. I’m so excited to get the finished product out there. If all goes as planned, the WAlbum will make it’s debut on Wednesday, 2/31 sometime before 11:59pm.

Cross your fingers!

For a while I was feeling pretty bad about not reaching my goal of 10 tunes. I even thought about digging up some old tunes just so that I wouldn’t feel embarrassed for coming up short. Instead, I’ve had to come to terms with my own procrastination and poor planing. I’ve also recognizied that I set misaligned priorities for this project. My big goal was to write some music and stir up my creative juices. But instead of thinking of that, I was focusing on the specifics of the project rather than sum of it’s parts. Thinking and worrying about the quantity of tunes wasn’t connecting me to my vision for this project, it was just causing me more and more anxiety. As I prepare for a concert this week, I’m looking at the tunes I have and I’m proud of them. I’ve very excited to perform them, and pleased to have had the opportunity to write them. What more could I ask for?

And so here it is: this Thursday, the 18th of January at 7:30 at Bakalar Hall in Brookline Music School (25 Kennard Rd. Brookline, MA), new music will be performed. Valerie will be helping out on 3 tunes. We had our first rehearsal yesterday and I was very pleased with her contributions. We haven’t worked on a project like this in a couple years or so. It’s going to be great to play together.

Hope to see you there.

I’m thinking about going back to some of my tune fragments that didn’t get off the ground and reworking them into tunes, but that may be my overambitious nature creeping in again. We’ll see what happens next week.

The truth is, even though I gave myself an extension on this project, I would like to finish it up on time. I’ve been having anxiety dreams lately: performances where I have no music and other pleasant things like that.
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Okay, so things aren’t going to happen for 12/31/06. New deadline: 01/31/07. 31 extra days to clean up my mess.

I’ve got 7 tunes in the can, but I might have to re-record a couple tracks here in there. Then I need to mix it down and faux-master it. How did I get this far behind on everything? I should have been at this place around Thanksgiving. I need to have a talk with myself about procastination.

Happy New Year Everybody!!

Merry Christmas Everybody!!

Here’s a draft of a tune that I recorded earlier this week. It’s close to a good working version of the tune, except for the poor recording quality of the acoustic guitar and the bit where things start to sound out of phase.

I’m starting the week with ideas of multi-tracking in my head. I bought some strings for my uke, and I’m thinking of incorporating some piano into the recordings. I’ve more ideas than time to do them, so I’ve got make sure I stay focused. It’s crunch time.
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I did some recording tests with the fostex and I’ve added Valerie‘s ART Tube Preamp to my setup (it helps give my SM58 some juice). I’m using the line6′s XLR outs mixed with the SM58 on the unamplified Klein to get the guitar sound. Mixing an amped and an acoustic sound together is a Tim Miller trick. It’s a big part of his last album: Trio. I haven’t mastered it yet, but I like it’s potential.

After recording a quick example I transfered the tracks over to the Computer via USB. Playing around in Cool Edit Pro, I normalized the levels, added a pinch of reverb to the acoustic tracks and cleaned up the front and back of each track. Here is a quick and dirty mix down of my first recording test. I’m going to do a couple of things different on the next recording, but that is close to acceptable (from a recording perspective).

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I finished writing my first “ensemble” tune Wednesday night. I call it an ensemble tune because it was specifically written for banjo, guitar & uke trio. It’s a tune for my sister Megan, and it’s something I started in 1999. I was digging around in my old computer looking for some ideas and I found an old sketch folder for Megan’s birthday. The sketch that I liked had a chord progression and a very simple and boring melody. I kept the chord progression (not rocket science: | G Am | Bm C | D | D |), wrote a new melody and worked out a B-section. I think the piece may need a bit more polishing, but it’s mostly there and it’s a certified tune. The other pieces I’m working on are little more through-written than this one. I’m not sure if I prefer one over the other.

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Later in the week I recorded Megan’s tune using 5 tracks in a loose, live-type recording setup. I wanted to test the recording process… The things I discovered were:

• Recording a three minute song takes longer than you’d think
• After recording for an hour I’m not in the mood to mix
• This song needs a bridge
• I shouldn’t move so much when I play banjo
• My nylon guitar needs new strings
• My uke may be unplayable
• I should lay down a guide track next time
• It takes me a while to warm up to playing percussion

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One of the things that I like about this whole “Walbum-Journal” thing is that it’s a great way for me to learn about myself. It’s hard to hide from my procrastinating tendencies when I’m left with 20 days to record 10 tunes (let alone finish the compositions), and I had given myself 4 months to do it. It’s also showcasing my over ambitiousness (or at least that’s how I feel now). I have big ideas, but big ideas need big action; otherwise I’m just another dreamer.

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The end of the week finds me at the demo stage. I’m doing recording and composition tests at the same time. I have over a dozen tunes that I’m playing around with. I’m thinking of using most of them and focus on shorter recordings. But who knows? Let’s just see what happens next week…