Guitar Set-up and Maintenance as Therapy

When something catches my fancy, I tend to go all-out for it.

People who know me best know this about me. This has been true for most of my life. Whether it’s sports like basketball or American football or Formula 1 racing, or my love for high-performance machines of every conceivable type, or music, if it turns me on, it becomes a significant part of my life.

I was chatting with a friend online the other day, and somehow our conversation turned to our fathers and how they are (in my case, were, since Dad’s been gone for three years now) so similar. Anyway, during this conversation we got to talking about not copying our dads’ negative tendencies. Funnily enough, he and I agreed on almost everything. The detail that caught my attention the most, though, is that we both said we don’t tend to get bored.

It’s certainly true for me.

I guess I’ve got too many hobbies to enjoy. While I’ve dropped a few for various reasons, there are always other activities that take their place. For example, when I was young, I loved building scale model cars. While I still see this hobby as a type of artistic expression, I just don’t have the time to enjoy it anymore. Moreover, I’ve also come to accept the negative impact this hobby has on our environment (I’m talking about the plastic and paint required to engage in this activity), so I choose to not (further) contribute to befouling our planet.

Presently, few things satisfy me as much as having my hands on a guitar (or a bass guitar). While I haven’t played music on a stage for quite a few months now (although I am writing a few tunes presently), I still crave the experience of holding an instrument and working with it.

Or, more to the point of this piece, working on it.

Yeah, yeah, I guess I’ve touched on a similar topic before. In the two or so years since I wrote that blog post, I’ve only expanded on my knowledge and experience even further. Back then I was just working on setting up instruments. Not that that’s something to sneeze at; if it was so easy there would be no need for guitar techs and luthiers at all. And, honestly, knowing that I’ve grown to be far less dependent on someone else to set up my instruments gives me tremendous satisfaction (and saves me money as well).

These days, I’ve expanded my skill set to include more intricate aspects of guitar maintenance, repair, and set-up. I’ve now done a couple of fret leveling jobs on a couple of my guitars that sorely needed them. Moreover, I’ve also learned how to dress frets, so each time I’ve changed strings on an instrument I’ve taken the opportunity to make those frets smooth, shiny, and crowned properly.

Along with learning how to work on the frets, though, I’ve also grown to love working on the electronics of an electric guitar/bass. It all started last year with my Epiphone Firebird. The stock pickups just sounded so muddy and uninspiring. No matter what I tried to do to get good tones from it – changing string gauges, spending countless hours on optimizing the pickup heights, etc. – nothing truly worked. So I decided to learn how to change pickups. Along the way I also learned how to swap out the stock electronics and put in new components of my choosing.

That was a daunting challenge at first because, well, soldering skills are a prerequisite for doing electronics work. At the time I had never done any soldering; I didn’t own a soldering iron, either. I freely confess feeling intimidated with the prospect of needing to learn how to solder.

I got over that intimidation, though, by reading as much on the topic as possible, as well as watching many a YouTube instructional video on soldering, particularly in the context of electric guitars/basses. When I was feeling reasonably comfortable, I went ahead and bought an inexpensive (but nevertheless effective) soldering iron, some supplies, and a stock of necessary replacement parts and went all-in.

That first pickup and electronics swap was a bit hairy; in fact, I miswired the guitar and it made no sound when plugged in. I’m not afraid to admit that. I made some mistakes – plus my soldering was just so messy – but after that false start and studying what I’d done and finding where I went wrong, I gave things another try.

Imagine my utter joy when I finished the job, plugged in, and glorious noise came from the speaker! Actually, calling it “noise” is a bit deceiving. The new parts literally transformed this guitar into something much more musical and inspirational.

It also became a bit of a symbol of achievement and gave me a dose of confidence I rarely get in my life.

My Epiphone Firebird. I changed the pickups and electronics not long after I took this photo. She went from being dark, brutal, and way too specialized to more musical and versatile.

That success encouraged me to continue working on some of my other guitars whose tone I was not really happy with. And although I initially was not open to the idea of changing the electronics on my semi-hollow body guitars at that time (these are notoriously difficult to work on because access to the electronics is almost always challenging compared to a typical solid-body guitar like the Firebird), I gradually got enough courage to shed my trepidation.

And I’m glad I did, since I eventually did change the electronics and pickups on my main play-out guitar, a bootleg Gibson Trini Lopez semi-hollow. Again, the first tries were a bit challenging (it took me a while to refine my soldering skills, and a few attempts to route the wiring just right), but with each attempt I was gaining the all-important experience I needed to know and anticipate where the potential pitfalls are, as well as learning some useful tricks that made the job easier.

Unlike the Epiphone Firebird, which has an electronics cavity in the back which is easy to access, semi-hollow body guitars like my bootleg customized Gibson Trini Lopez are notoriously difficult to perform electronics and pickup swaps on. Even professional instrument techs have told me that electronics work on this type of guitar is a big challenge for them. The problem is the inconvenience of getting to the electronics; parts have to go through the diamond-shaped sound holes. I used to send my semi-hollow bodied guitars to a great tech to do jobs like this, but I eventually learned how to do it myself.

I’m so grateful for acquiring these guitar maintenance, set-up and repair skills, and not just because I’ve become far less dependent on someone else to do the job for me. For one thing it takes away any worries or concerns I might have in buying electric guitars/basses. As long as the wood is good, I can take care of pretty much everything else.

But the biggest boon, by far, is working on instruments is tremendously therapeutic.

Just to be completely honest now, I suffer from depression and anxiety. When I’m working on instruments, though, I thankfully am able to focus on the present moment and zero in on just what’s in front of me.

“Living in the moment” is one of those techniques and philosophies I’ve learned in psych therapy to help me deal with my D&A (depression and anxiety). It seems like it’s a simple mental state to get into, but I don’t mind admitting that sometimes my negative thoughts are more powerful than my desire to just be in the moment. Sometimes, no matter how much I may want and need to, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot ignore those negative thoughts.

But things are so different when I’ve got an instrument to work on. That’s all I care about right then and there, and nothing else seems to exist. I imagine I’m a surgeon with a patient in front of me, and I have to be really careful as I do the work needed to make sure this patient comes out better than they were before I started.

So, yes, from tasks as simple as working a screwdriver to remove the access panel into a Firebird’s electronics cavity, to a job which demands a lot of fine motor control and concentration such as using a fret crowning file with precision, working on a musical instrument gets me into a mode where I’m just in the moment. It’s a wonderful place to be in.

I’m so grateful that I have this avenue to get relief from my D&A. I shudder to think how I’d be if I didn’t have this in my life.

As an aside, it’s kind of funny that I never concentrate this much or this well when I’m actually playing the instrument, or when I’m singing.

But maybe I should learn how to.

Using Mics To Paint With Sounds: Experiments in Recording

So, yeah, lately I’ve been spending a good chunk of my free time experimenting with recording, not to mention a decent amount of money on the necessary equipment.

If you walk into my apartment, the first thing that will catch your eye, probably, is the black 2 x 12″ Laney speaker cabinet sitting horizontally on top of a cream-colored Panama 1 x 12″ cabinet. The Laney cab is mic’ed up with a pair of dynamic mics, and on top of the cab are two Vox amps: My treasured AC15 head unit and its grittier cousin, a 15 watt Night Train (Gen 2). Sitting next to the Night Train G2 is Weber MiniMass attenuator, which helps immensely in making sure I can get the aggressive rock guitar tones I want that you can only get with a tube amp set with its master volume on full blast without the expected amplitude. Without that attenuator, I would have had my neighbors breaking my doors down and getting my inconsiderate ass arrested by now.

To the left (as you walk in) of this set-up is a folding chair, in front of which is any one of my electric guitars leaning against the kitchen counter. As I write this, I’ve got my bootleg personalized red Trini Lopez plugged into the rig. I’ve not had my hands on this particular guitar for months, so I’m getting reacquainted with her with a view of having her return to active duty as my main play-out guitar.

As you take a seat in the folding chair (I don’t have much furniture, and my apartment resembles a laboratory more than it does a domicile, for the most part), you’ll see an assortment of guitar effects pedals sitting in front of the Panama cabinet. The first pedal in the signal chain is a tuner pedal, so when you turn the amplifier on, Job 1 is to make sure your guitar is tuned properly.

There are a lot of cables on the floor. Some are guitar signal cables; some are mic cables; some are power cables that lead to the amp and to a Fostex digital multi-track recorder. The Fostex sits on a couple of boxes next to the folding chair, within easy reach of anyone in the chair. Finally, a set of headphones is plugged into the Fostex.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in that folding chair in recent days, the headset perched on my melon, strumming familiar riffs, and moving mics around, just acquiring experience with the effects of mic placement on the signal captured by the recorder. At this point I can’t say that I’ve been making music, per se, but all this is me building something up brick by brick.

The latest experiment has to do with studying the effects of recording guitar parts with multiple mics. As I mentioned, I’ve got two dynamic mics made by different manufacturers aimed at one of the Laney’s two speakers. Each mic is pointing at different spots of the speaker itself, so each one is picking up a different frequency range. I’ll start varying mic positions more before moving on to repeating the experiments with yet another different dynamic microphone.

After that, I’ll be repeating the exercise with a cardioid condenser microphone, which is an altogether different type of microphone.

Some people, maybe even most of the ones I know, would think all these experiments is a waste of time, and boring. I disagree (obviously). Honestly, experiments and tweaks of this ilk might be tedious for most folk, but I find it all fascinating. The world of sounds turns me on. I imagine visual artists share a similar fascination with lighting and shadow, or gradients of color.

That’s really what I’m doing right now. I’m trying to learn how to paint with the sounds I’m getting from all these different mic positions and options. Once I get enough experience, then I’ll start using that acquired knowledge to best capture the music I make.

So, yes, right now I’m just dabbing on a stroke here, a line there. Hopefully it’ll all come together into something beautiful (or two, or maybe more) someday.

Really, art in any form is endlessly compelling and fascinating.

 

 

My First Electric Guitar

In my most recent post, I shared some thoughts about my very first guitar, an instrument that was a literal pain to play, but one that I remember with great fondness because of the fact my dad bought it for me.

Today I’d like to share some thoughts about my very first electric guitar.

My first electric guitar looked a lot like this: a red Squier Stratocaster with a white pickguard

I bought a Squier Stratocaster from the sadly now defunct Dr. Music store in Pasadena, CA sometime in mid-1996. I remember it cost me $300 + tax for the guitar, instrument cable, and a Peavey solid-state amplifier. In retrospect, I think I overpaid for the whole lot, but at the time I definitely had an excess of enthusiasm and a deficiency in knowledge, experience, and guitar-playing ability.

(As an aside, I think that today I have even more enthusiasm, a lot more knowledge and experience, and just a little bit more guitar-playing ability than I did back then! Ha!)

I’ll freely admit that I was enchanted with the idea of owning and playing a red Stratocaster with a white pickguard. I knew I wasn’t that good at playing guitar at that time, but I wanted to emulate heroes like Buddy Holly and Bryan Adams, who played Fender Strats. Indeed, a large part of wanting to play a Strat had to do with seeing Bryan play a red and white one in his video for “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You.”

(Yeah, yeah, I can hear some of you laughing right now. Laugh if you want, but I’m just being honest here haha.)

I remember that Squier Stratocaster being a little tough to play. It certainly was not a finger-buster like my first guitar was, but for an electric guitar it sure was a challenge. You see, electric guitars tend to be far easier to play than their acoustic relatives. Not only are the string gauges smaller on electrics, but electric guitars born after, say, 1950, are designed to be adjusted (or set up) for optimum playability.

My red-and-white Squier Stratocaster was no different. However, I didn’t know it could be set up according to my preferences. Indeed, at that time, I had no idea how to articulate what such preferences were (beyond saying “I want this thing to be easier to play”).

Terms like “string action,” “string tension,” and “intonation” were completely alien to me. Indeed, tuning my guitar was a bit of a challenge back in those days.

Surplus enthusiasm allied with a deficit in knowledge and experience is a less than ideal combination.

I can’t really say I had a lot of fun with my Strat. A part of it had to do with its (lack of) playability; a bigger part of my dissatisfaction with it came from the sounds I made with it.

I remember forever twisting knobs on my Peavey amp and feeling a constant frustration with not hearing the sounds I heard in my head. I don’t think my amplifier was great, but the bigger problem by far was my ignorance in how all those controls interacted with each other. Remember, these were the days before the Internet; information was a little tougher to come by back then. I didn’t have any friends who had the knowledge and experience I needed either; not even my buddy John was helpful here because he had never owned an electric guitar + amplifier at this point in time.

Nevertheless, that red-and-white Squier Stratocaster represented a dream coming to fruition. Despite my frustrations, I was emulating some of my heroes, at least at an admittedly superficial level.

I even played that guitar in front of an audience of strangers (i.e., non-friends and family members) once. I wrote a song and performed it in front of my interdisciplinary liberal arts class with my Squier Strat slung over my shoulder. Perhaps for that reason alone it occupies a special place in my memories as it was one of those “firsts.”

Do I still own this guitar? Sadly, no. I can definitively say that this guitar has been destroyed.

How did this happen?

Well, in 1997 my parents bought me a Takamine steel string acoustic guitar; the following year I bought a Yamaha 12-string acoustic guitar. These two instruments essentially made me forget about my Squier Stratocaster, despite the fact that they were both very different instruments compared to my Strat. Funnily enough, both of these acoustic guitars were a bit easier to play than the Squier. It’s no surprise, then, that I basically stopped playing my electric (this despite getting a second amplifier some years before, a solid-state Marshall which gave me better sounds than the Peavey).

The Strat also somehow developed a crack at the neck-body joint. That compromised the guitar’s structural integrity. I believe the wood used on the body was far softer than was ideal; the stress from the string tension eventually resulted in that crack at that most critical part of the instrument.

I considered keeping the guitar for sentimental reasons, but when I had to change addresses I chose to just junk it. Again, ignorance influenced that decision; it never occurred to me that I could have kept the Squier’s neck, plus its electronics and hardware (the bridge, the tuning machines and the neck bolts and mounting plate, mainly), and mate the lot with a brand new body.

You really do get penalized when you don’t know enough.

Do I miss this guitar?

Honestly, not really. There was a time when I thought the Stratocaster was the greatest electric guitar model ever. These days, though, I can hardly look at one. It’s definitely my least favorite Fender model, and it’s not even close. I don’t know if my Squier ownership experience soured me so much on the Stratocaster, or if my personal preferences have just evolved to such an extent that I’ve just gotten so cold on the model.

At this point, I don’t think I’ll ever lust for a Stratocaster the way I used to, back in those days I didn’t know enough.

 

 

 

My First Guitar

First experiences of any type always stick with you.

Your first crush.

Your first kiss.

Your first speeding ticket.

Your first hospital stay.

Your first death in the family.

You get the picture.

Lately, as a way to show appreciation for the good things in life as well as per the suggestion of a couple of loved ones, I’ve been sharing pictures of my harem of musical instruments on Facebook. While it’s good to see reactions from Facebook friends and family, just the mere act of photographing my beloved instruments has been a bit therapeutic as well.

I guess that’s one of those wonderful side benefits of making art.

Anyway, as I’m photographing the various members of my harem, I found myself thinking about my first guitar. Sadly, I no longer own this instrument; I don’t even remember precisely what happened to it, actually.

Get ready for a story, one I’ll try to make as brief as possible.

My first guitar was a piece of junk. My dad had bought it for me because I signed up for a guitar class during my senior year of high school.

It was a classical guitar, with nylon strings, which was what the teacher either recommended or required (I no longer remember which was true, actually). My dad didn’t have a lot money, but he got one from a thrift shop in Burbank, as I recall.

When he gave it to me, I tried it out, and I very distinctly remember having a ton of difficulty pressing the strings down onto the fretboard. The reason for this was the action (the distance between the strings and the fretboard) was so high.

Despite this, I was still overjoyed about this gift from my dad.

I remember showing my guitar to my pal John, who was also taking the same guitar class with me. I’ll never forget the expression on his face when I handed him the instrument. You see, John was not a raw newbie with guitar; he had taken lessons back in the Philippines as well as in junior high here in California.

“Joe,” he said, “this guitar’s almost impossible to play.”

“Eh, it’s hard,” I said. “But it’s the only one I’ve got, so I’m gonna learn on it. Besides, my dad got it for me.”

John hesitated a bit before asking the next question. “Couldn’t he have picked another one?”

“I don’t know. He did say that he tried a couple of others, and this one was the best-sounding one to him.”

John handed back my guitar to me and said, “Well, it does sound good. It’s just so hard to play.”

I guess I didn’t know any better, but I did learn the basics on how to play with that guitar. I used it in class, and everyone who had ever tried it told me the same thing John told me: My guitar was almost impossible to play.

Maybe ignorance was bliss, or maybe I just really wanted to learn how to play, but despite the difficulty in playing it, I pushed through the pain barriers and learned not just from the class, but from John himself. Indeed, I learned more from John that I ever did from our teacher.

As I said earlier, I don’t remember anymore exactly what happened to that guitar of mine. I think I’m correct in saying, though, that it got donated to another thrift store just before one of our several changes in address.

There’s a part of me that misses that guitar, only because of the fact my dad gave it to me. He picked it out, judging it to be the best-sounding one among a selection of guitars, and gave me the most precious gift of not a junk guitar, but an enduring love for playing the instrument and for making music.

Everything I do with a guitar started out with this now lost instrument, and so everything that has to do with my love of playing and of making my own music has their roots in that humble piece of junk that was so so hard to play, but sounded so sweet. It literally did hurt to play that guitar, but I think the pain I had to endure made me appreciate and love music even more. That piece of junk guitar (I say this as a term of endearment now) also just reminds me always of how much my dad loved me.

That’s the greatest gift of all.

RIP Anthony Bourdain

I can’t say I knew Mr. Bourdain.

I’ve never read his books, but I’ve read about friends loving Kitchen Confidential that I feel compelled to read it sometime soon.

I don’t have a TV, so I didn’t watch his TV shows on CNN and the Travel Channel. I only saw episodes of his programs whenever I visit the family homestead and my sisters were watching.

But I always came away feeling like I learned something whenever I did.

Sometimes I learned about the various foods he sampled, always with a wonderful enthusiasm and sense of wonderment. Often I learned about the people who made the food he enjoyed, demonstrating that there really is something to the adage “you are what you eat.”

You see, it wasn’t just food to him. The foods he sampled, I think, were metaphors for the various and wonderful facets of humanity. The diversity of his experiences, on one level, showed how our myriad cultures all differed from each other. On a more profound level, though, I think that Mr. Bourdain’s adventures demonstrated that we are all connected. We have far more things in common.

Fried insects and balut (developing duck embryo, a delicacy from my native Philippines) may turn some of our stomachs, but for people who enjoy them, they are no different from the hotdogs or spaghetti or caviar we might love.

See, that’s the thing. I think that when people put love into whatever they do, people who share in that can also feel the love.

What’s wonderful with Mr. Bourdain’s adventures is that he tried everything with an open mind and a rare enthusiasm. I don’t ever recall him recoiling at anything offered to him; he tried everything at least once. What’s more, I can’t ever remember him not finding something positive with whatever he sampled.

We can all learn a great lesson from following that example.

To be honest, I felt a bit envious of Mr. Bourdain. I’ve often told friends and family that if I had no responsibilities to tie me down and no limitations on spending capability, I would travel all over the world. So although I felt that pang of envy, I also loved that someone like Mr. Bourdain could do something I wanted to do, and that he shared all his adventures with the rest of us.

It was a huge shock to me, as I’m sure as it was to a whole lot of people, to hear Mr. Bourdain took his own life; I also never knew until today that he battled against depression. This hit really close to home since that is something I have in common with him.

(Before someone gets the wrong idea, I have never been suicidal. I’ve sometimes thought of suicide on purely a conceptual basis; I’ve imagined what a suicidal person might be thinking or feeling because whatever I’m writing needed me to do so. But I’ve never ever thought of taking my own life.)

Quite a few people on social media offered the thought that no matter how successful or rich or accomplished someone is, you just never know what demons they are fighting against. To me, this is a call for kindness and empathy. What seems like something automatic is actually something not; what is supposed to be a component of common decency is sadly not as common as it probably should be.

I will miss Anthony Bourdain. I hope he finds the peace that eluded him in this life in the next. And I hope we all can learn something and not forget.

 

Joe’s Lyrics – Invitation

Sometimes the song comes to you. It may come to you in bits and pieces – a line or two here, a melodic idea for the chorus there – or it may come to you largely complete, just in need of some polish.

Other times, writing one is an act of sheer will. You want to say something very specific, so you write a song to suit.

“Invitation” is one of the latter.

I wrote this song specifically because the music store I play open mic in, The Guitar Merchant, was moving to a new location. Well, one of the outstanding things about this place is that the theater seems to emit a vibe, an energy, something, that people can actually sense and feel. Several friends who have visited the venue all reported on feeling this presence in the room. What’s amazing about that is that these friends all offered these observations without any prompting from me.

This indescribable yet all-too-real thing is something I always experienced when I walked into that theater. It’s a warm, friendly, comfortable feeling, not quite as intimate as a lover’s embrace, but not too far from it. I felt it from the very first time I went to a Guitar Merchant open mic night (as an audience member, about six or seven weeks before I felt brave enough to take the plunge and perform there myself), and it was a huge reason why I felt like I belonged in that room.

“Invitation,” then, is literally an invitation to what Guitar Merchant owner (and bass player for Band of Brothers) Phil St. Germain and I have taken to calling “the Great Spirit.” I wrote it to invite the Great Spirit to move to Guitar Merchant’s new location.

It feels like a prayer to me; Phil thinks it feels and sounds like a mantra. I think we’re both right.

The Band of Brothers played “Invitation” on 2 May 2018, which coincided with the second open mic night at the new location. B.o.B. was the Featured Artist of the evening, and we opened our set with this song.

I’m very proud of this small yet heartfelt song. The fact that Phil loved it too from the first time I demo’ed the song to the band during our rehearsals makes me love it even more, since he was the one person whose validation I sought. I know he got this song from his first listen. I think the band – Roger and Al – like this song as well, since we’ve always played it well.

It’s simple and direct both musically and lyrically, but I think that’s why I love it so much.

INVITATION

GREAT SPIRIT – GREAT SPIRIT

YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN KIND; PLEASE FILL UP OUR HEARTS

AND OPEN OUR MINDS

GREAT SPIRIT – GREAT SPIRIT

WE FEEL YOUR VIBES. FILL US WITH WARMTH

AND GIVE US YOUR LOVE

GREAT SPIRIT – GREAT SPIRIT

WE’RE INVITING YOU NOW TO INHABIT THIS HOUSE.

WE CALL ON YOU NOW

GREAT SPIRIT – GREAT SPIRIT

GREAT SPIRIT – GREAT SPIRIT

 

Here’s Band of Brothers’ performance of “Invitation,” something that may never happen again.

It Was Three Years Ago Today…

First times, they say, are always special.

You never forget your first.

Your first crush.

Your first car.

Your first car crash.

Your first rock concert.

Your first kiss.

April 30 is a bit of a special day for me.

You see, back in 2015, I took the stage and played and sang in front of a crowd of mostly-strangers for the very first time in my life. April 30 marks the anniversary of my debut as an open mic performer.

I’d only ever performed music in front of classmates, friends, and family before. And even before such friendly audiences, I was still way too shy and just didn’t do it well.

So imagine just how big of a challenge it was for me to get up on a stage, have the spotlight on me (literally), with nothing but a couple of songs and a guitar and about ten minutes to do my thing.

It was terrifying.

But I did it.

I did it because I promised myself that before my fortieth birthday, I would take that stage and play a couple of songs. With my birthday just two days away, this was my last shot at meeting that self-made challenge.

I remember only one of the two songs I did that day: “Rain,” by the Beatles. I suspect I did another Beatles song – probably “It’s Only Love” – but I don’t remember it all that clearly, for some reason.

In two days, my friends and I (collectively known as “Band of Brothers”) will take the stage as the Featured Artists at Guitar Merchant’s May 2 open mic night. It’s still astonishing (to me, at least) that I’ve come as far as I have not just as a performer, but as a songwriter who shares his stuff with the open mic audience nearly every Wednesday evening.

I guess there is something to the idea that you do something often enough, it turns into a habit. Not only that, but thanks to the encouragement and great coaching from the friends I’ve made through Guitar Merchant, I’ve grown so much. Where before I just had zero confidence, particularly in my vocals, now I feel secure enough to do my thing without any real qualms. Indeed, my biggest anxieties come from forgetting a part of a song while I’m doing it. There’s nothing more mortifying than forgetting the lyrics or the chord progression to a song that you wrote yourself. (It still happens from time to time! hahaha)

Whatever happens, though, I just push through.

Kind of amazing all this got started on April 30, 2015.

Word-Thought Salad – Mar 16 2018

Feels like I’ve been very tired lately. While I’m sure my current emotional/psychological state at least partly explains this, the manifestation is definitely physical.

Sub-par sleep will do that, I’m sure.

Signs I’m too tired:

• I can’t sing well (not that I do that anyway, but I really sound bad when I’m tired)
• I forget everything – chord changes, lyrics, whether or not I’ve already uploaded that document to my office’s website…
• I get super-surly
• I have no tolerance for bullshit
• I feel sleepy, but can’t fall asleep/stay asleep

*

You know you’re singing badly when you hate the way you sound when you sing in the shower. I mean, everybody sounds great singing in there, right? So, yeah, the suckage level is high when you just don’t sound good in the shower. Consider this: I shower first thing in the morning, so I should be rested, right?

Hahaha. Nope.

*

Ooh, then there was Wednesday evening. More often than not, I’d be at open mic night. This week, though, I was just waaaaaaaaaaaay too tired; I was so exhausted I had legit fears I might fall asleep on the drive out. So I decided I’d just stay home and work on a couple of songs/song ideas.

But guess who left his songwriting notebook on his desk at the office?

So, instead of writing, I settled for trying to record just private demos of covers and older original tunes. To my immense frustration, though, I just couldn’t muster enough concentration to remember the right chord changes, or the right words to sing, or the right strum patterns on my guitar. Yep, I was way too tired last night…

I actually wanted to take a nap after I got home from work, too. But, nope, couldn’t fall asleep. And I’m typically a world champion at napping. Way too tired…

*

Then there was exactly nine days ago, at open mic. I went there straight from the office. Pretty normal for me on most Wednesday evenings, as I’ve already said. But I was already exhausted even before I got to open mic. I played on my big brother Alan’s Featured Artist set on a couple of songs, plus served as one of the stagehands helping the other performers. Oh, and I had a two-song set as well. Happily I did fairly well on Alan’s set. But when I took the stage for my two songs, well…

My fourteen year-old nephew has gotten into the habit of searching out videos of my performances on YouTube; even he noticed how tired I looked and sounded last week. I’m not even kidding.

Did I mention I forgot almost the entire second verse of the second song on my set? Oh, and that this was one of my own songs? Yeah… way too tired…

*

Oh, yeah, one more sign I’m way too tired.

I’m bitching and complaining waaaaaaaaaaay too much.

The end.

 

Notes from a Songwriter

To be a songwriter is an interesting way to live one’s life.

Some days it’s a passive kind of existence. It’s like you’re a radio with an antenna. You’re just there, minding your own business, when you just receive signals from the universe. A little bit of fine-tuning, and you’re able to broadcast those signals back out into the world.

Songs born this way are gifts. To say that they write themselves is actually not that wild of a description.

On other days, being a songwriter requires you to impose your will on the project. You just choose to write, and you just accept that there will some degree of struggle in coming up with an end result with which you are satisfied. The universe has been very generous in sending me ideas for songs, whether they come in the form of a line, a song title or theme, or even quasi-complete verses or chorus sections. There are also those rare, treasured days when I get melodic ideas.

However, having song ideas is one thing; developing these ideas to completion is another thing altogether.

That’s where the struggle and effort and the imposition of one’s will come in.

You sit there with your pad and pencil and instrument (these days I usually use my guitar, although I’ve also been using an electric bass lately, just to explore those possibilities), and you try to match your lyrics with various rhythmic patterns, chord changes, and melodies. More often than not, the results are less than pleasing. So you try again, often starting from a clean sheet of paper. You keep on chipping away, like a sculptor does with a piece of marble, hammering and shaping the stone until you like what you see.

I imagine childbirth is a similar experience: It requires you to struggle, feel a lot of pain, all because there is something hopefully beautiful at the end of all that toil and effort and suffering.

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In my first life as a songwriter (from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s), I used to think that the most important element of a song was the lyric. That’s a bias informed by a love of words that I will always confess to having.

While I still invest a ton into my lyric writing, these days I acknowledge all the other elements of a song – you know, everything that’s not the lyric – are also all very important.

But perhaps one element that non-songwriters don’t readily appreciate is the sound of the song.

Some songs need the clean, clear tones of an acoustic guitar. Other songs need the growl and snarl of a distorted electric guitar. Then there are certain songs that need the sound of a 12-string guitar – acoustic or electric – to get that very specific bright sound only a 12-string can deliver.

The sound of the instrument is akin to shades of color for a visual artist. Part of the magic of writing a song is deciding not only if you want red or blue, but what shade of red or blue you’ll be using.

Imagine how famous songs would affect you if they sounded different. Take John Lennon’s iconic “Imagine.” The song’s sparse production features Lennon’s piano as the primary instrument; now think about how different “Imagine” would be had Lennon decided to give it a treatment similar to the original version of the Beatles’ “Revolution,” with its aggressive distorted guitars. Similarly, can you ever think of “Helter Skelter,” one of Paul McCartney’s greatest Beatles songs, performed with acoustic guitars instead of the snarling distortion-laden ones that have been described by some as “proto-metal” rock music?

The sound of the instruments give songwriters the ability to add textures and colors to the music they make. Quite often, the sound of the instruments are metaphors for what the song is saying. Canny songwriters take their time finding just the right sound for the songs they write, just like great painters take great care in choosing and mixing the right colors for their palettes.

 

 

 

 

 

Joe’s Lyrics – Drowning (Redux)

In the evening of Valentine’s Day 2018 I took the stage at open mic for the second week in a row.

I shared a pair of songs; the second of the pair was an old favorite.

The set opener, though, was an old song from my first life as a songwriter that the universe deemed fit for resurrection and restoration.

This song, “Drowning,” is today’s lyric.

The original version of “Drowning” was melodically similar (the verse melody is identical in both the original and the new versions; the melodies for the chorus are similar, but not identical, owing to the use of the same chords), but was an altogether different song compared to the new one.

The main difference is that the original was autobiographical; it was a description of my emotional and psychological state at the time of writing.

“Drowning” (Redux), on the other hand, is a work of fiction about a character I’ve imagined. In writing the lyric I had to come up with a backstory for this character to explain how and why she finds herself in the situation described by the song.

The night I finished writing the lyric I thought that this was easily the darkest song I’ve written yet. I think this is implied by the title alone, but I hope the substance of the lyric itself illustrates the point.

Here is footage of last night’s set, featuring “Drowning.”

DROWNING

SHE FEELS SO TIRED, SHE SHUTS HER EYES.

SHE’S SWEPT UP IN A MELANCHOLY TIDE.

SHE DRIFTS AWAY FROM WHERE SHE LAYS,

SURRENDERING TO ALL THE TEARS SHE’S CRIED,

SO LOST AND COLD AND FEELING SO ALONE.

SHE FEELS A PAIN THAT NO ONE ELSE CAN KNOW.

SHE’S SO AFRAID, SHE CANNOT STAY.

HER CHOICE IS MADE; SHE FEELS ALL HOPE HAS DIED.

SHE WALKS THE SHORE; THERE’S NOTHING MORE

SHE THINKS SHE NEEDS BEYOND HER CHINA WHITE.

SHE’S LOST AND COLD AND FEELING SO ALONE,

A SECRET PAIN THAT NO ONE ELSE CAN KNOW.

FROM HEAD TO TOE, SALVATION FLOWS.

SHE FINDS THE PLACE SHE’LL TAKE HER FINAL SLEEP.

SHE TAKES A LEAP INTO THE SEA

AND DROWNS HER PAIN; AT LAST SHE KNOWS SHE’S FREE.

SHE ALSO KNOWS FOREVER SHE’S ALONE,

A SECRET PAIN THAT NO ONE ELSE CAN KNOW.