musical updates
A few things I’ve been working on…
I found a local vintage electronic repair shop willing to take a whirl at fixing the power board on my Tascam 246 (a 4 track recorder that I *might* someday get working). I tried pinpointing the problem myself, learning a fair bit about circuit boards in the process, but my small apartment (housing my small 3 person plus one dog family) doesn’t have any space to accommodate a lengthy teardown (at my skill level, the thing would lay open for months while I trial-and-error it to a pulp). Space and time are colluding to defeat me in my long term goal to recreate a vintage 1984 home studio…needless to say, I’m thrilled that an expert can look at it and help me realize this archaeological project.
Space and time are also working against me on so many fronts. Again it’s the small apartment, which we can’t really move from for at least a few more years, yet even then, on a professor’s salary, one can’t afford much more than a 2 bedroom apartment in a crap neighbourhood in this city. So I don’t have a clear path toward having a proper music studio space for anything. The rental situation for music spaces in Vancouver is dire, too, also because of the vastly outsized property values here.
Try practicing vocals in a small apartment! I’m auditioning a song in a couple of days, to hopefully be part of a show my choir is putting on. Every year, we do a winter show wherein members of the choir have an opportunity to perform a song solo on the bill between the regular choral sets. I’ve been working on Daryl Hall’s 1972 pastoral masterpiece, “Waterwheel” (here), which is quite a challenging song, vocally, for me. I’ve worked at creating a guitar accompaniment (adapting the general harmonics and rhythms of the original piano) while also striving to soften some of the rough edges in my falsetto. Man, that man had/has an extraordinary voice. My neighbours in my apartment building surely despise the song at this point. I’ll share a recording at some point, if I manage to capture a good take.
Started a local songwriting circle with people I have met through choir, as well. There are seven of us, and we’re meeting on a monthly basis. After some searching, I found a really great space for us to rent that isn’t a “jam space” (those usually smell bad, and it’s impossible to compete with the punk and metal bands in the next rooms – nothing is ever soundproofed well). Instead, we are renting a largish music instructional space that has some spare time open. It’s a good, comfortable find for our purposes for now. We’re sharing ideas, and doing challenges to sort of get to know each other a bit first. I was inspired to set this in motion by my wonderful experiences at fawm.org a few years back, which leads me to…
I have 5 or 6 songs ready to record and publish. The writing for most of them began in 2023 (for FAWM), but I packed em up and left them alone until now. I’m not sure how they’re going to land, but I’ll probably put em on bandcamp in a few months. Mainly guitar based and roots-influenced, but I’ve been pushing in a retrofuturist-70s-soul-rock direction with some of them, so we’ll see.
I’ve been patching together some oddball generative patches on the Empress ZOIA modular pedal. It’s a really great instrument. I’m working on a mutitrack looper, but the hard part is designing an intuitive interface page I’m comfortable working with.
That’s about it, but now I see that that’s kind of a lot going on. More soon!