Graduating, Moving, and New Job

So here it is, the long awaited post on how drastically my life has changed over the past few weeks. This first post will be all of the changes. The post to follow this will be about what that means for my music.

 

 

 

It all began back in the fall of 2007. I had decided to go to Messiah College for Mechanical Engineering and was beginning my studies there. Move ahead about 4 years and my time at Messiah has come to a close and life just starts to go crazy.

 

I graduated a few weeks ago on May 14th. I had an interview set up with Alcon Labs, right outside of Reading, PA, where I basically already knew that I got the job. However, I was told it'd be a few weeks after my interview before I could start. After graduation I was supposed to have a nice relaxing few weeks to move out of my apartment, find a place to live, and move again.

 

Then comes the interview, Monday morning. Suddenly people are talking about having me start the following Monday. But it's alright. Kelly's (my girlfriend) dad works at the company and knows a guy with a huge house and a room he could rent to me.

 

But it's not alright. The guy is doing some house rennovations, installng centrail AC, so the whole house is torn up and won't be able to be lived in for quite some time. There's another guy who has a two bedroom apartment that I could rent a room from, but that's kinda cramped for me. I mean, I'm at 7 guitars right now. That takes up a lot of room - more room than a room in an apartment has.

 

So I hop on craigslist that night to look for something. I see a room for rent for a flat fee (covers utilities, cable, etc.) and decide to shoot the guy an email. 20 minutes later I get a call and the guy asks if I want to check it out that night. I check it out.

 

This place is pretty unbelievable. I didn't know there was a nice part of Reading until this. The neighborhood is in the +$250k range with a mansion thrown in here and there. So the house is pretty great with plenty of room for my guitars and even a hot tub. The guy is nice and his dog is too. It was what I was looking for in the time frame I was looking at, so then on Thursday, only a few days after finding the place, I moved in.

front of the house

some of the guitars and equipment

 

The following Monday, May 23rd, I started. Alcon is a pharmapseudical engineering company that works primarily with eyecare products. I'm currently working on a glaucoma shunt that's being brought over from Israel. You can see a video of it here (warning: graphic - it's an eye surgery).

 

Anyway, here's a broken down timeline:

May 14 - graduation

May 16 - interview

May 16 - find housing

May 19 - move

May 23 - start working

 

It's been crazy. I'm not sure what all this means for my music yet, but that will be explored more in the next post.

Negative Inspiration

As I mentioned in the last post, I just got a job (as well as a bunch of other big life changes). And I promise that I'll get back to all of that and post some more details. Right now, however, I've got stuff on my mind worth writing about, so that'll take prescedence.

 

So I'm here, at my new job, on my lunch break. They've got me down in the basement in this shared cubicle that kinda sucks, but it's what I'll have to deal with until they are able to make room elsewhere. Down here, and throughout most of the building, they've got music playing in the background. One of the few places where there's not music playing is where I'll likely be moved once there's room.

 

At first glance, this looks like a good deal - I'm trading the luxuries of upstairs for having background music. Sounds great? And I was sorta thinking that it'd be alright. I mean, it's fine, but I've got some concerns.

 

This isn't music that I have picked. It's some commercial-free radio; perhaps SeriusXM or a non-free Pandora. I don't really care what it is.

 

The main point is that it's some radio station playing radio music. Since no one can agree on music, there's some sort of weekly schedule with a different genre each day. From what I've gathered, today is pop, Monday is classic rock and soft rock, and Tuesdays are country. I hate country. With a firey passion. It is the worst.

 

But that's not what I'm [mainly] concerned about.

 

Radio music sucks. Maybe there was some diversity on Monday. Maybe. But yesterday and today, everything falls into this cookie-cutter radio mold. I've basically heard the same song like 10 times today - same chords, same melodies, etc. The radio really speaks to culture today, but again this isn't my concern.

 

What is my concern? Think of this: As a child, you repeated your multiplication tables over and over again until they were engrained in your memory. If you have to make a new password for something, you repeat it until you get it. The more you practice an instrument, the better you get at what you're practicing.

 

Could it then be postulated that listening to crappy music makes you a crappy musician? I mean, this isn't the occasional drive with the radio on - this is 40+ hours a week. Ideas are spawned from inspiration, but if your source of musical inspiration is the same idea over and over again, how does musical creativity escape that bind?

 

Is this idea of negative inspiration a valid theory? If that's the case, then is silence more inspiration or as detrimental to the creative mind?

 

Thoughts

Noise

Maybe you've been wondering what I've been up to for the past two weeks. It seems as though I just dropped off the face of the planet. I haven't blogged, haven't been on facebook much, and haven't tweeted quite as often as I usually do.

The past two weeks have included: graduating, getting a job, looking for a place to live, and moving. Actually, that's all been within the past week, but senior week prior to that was jam-packed with friends and whatnot. Sometime soon there will be a post dedicated to all of these events.

In the meantime, I have a more normal post.

Today, as I completed the setup of my new room, I decided to play guitar and bust out the good 'ole pedal board. Right now, that's a Boss GT-10, Boss RC-20XL, and a PreSonus TubePRE preamp.

This was just a for-fun time for me. A chance to play around with some new sounds and experiment. It wasn't about practicing and it wasn't about writing. It was about sound and music.

I list sound and music separately for a reason. Music is notes, rhythm, meter, and structure. Sound, in this case, is how music interacts with its environment. There is a lot of overlap between the two, but it is important, in this look at things, that they be viewed separately.

As far as the music side goes, I began with some riffs that I have been working on. This includes some real neat math jams as well as some live looping. Once I got into the live looping, as it often times does, it got out of hand.

One of the beauties of live looping is that it allows structure alongside chaos and meshes them seamlessly. When you have effects out the wazoo, you can incorporate this into your jamming. And it's beautiful. The structure/chaos coupling is the basis of a lot of experimental music, including more experimental post-rock.

This is stuff that I live to play. And I use "play" rather loosely. By the end of the jamming, "play" included things like heavily processed feedback loops, rubbing the neck of the guitar on the amp, etc.

This is where music and sound begin to diverge and is why a lot of people don't get or can't handle this type of music.

The music began as the notes and continued as the looped material. The whole jam was music, but only loosely through that structure.

As the jam progressed, parts of it diverged from music to only be sound. The way a guitar feeds-back with delay, reverb, vibrato, and distortion is often times noise; sound free from music. As the sounds build on themselves and take shape, though there are musical undertones in the looped material, the vast soundscapes in the foreground are what you feel.

You feel the music in the sound, but, more prevalently, you feel the sound. It's almost a form of sensory deprivation in that it is all that you sense. You hear sound and connect so deeply that you forget to smell or taste - you only hear.

And then you remove the droning; you turn off the amp suddenly or stop the loop. And there is silence. You go from being entrenched in the sound to being overwhelmed by silence. The noise ends so abruptly that it disorients you and the silence becomes a part of noise.

Review: May First Friday Overview

So last night was the last First Friday of the school year here at Messiah College. I've mentioned these events a few times before. These are the legacy that I intend to leave behind here. Since it was the last one ever, I had 10 acts over 7 hours. It's was a ton of work, but getting to sit down and listen to the outcome of this makes it worth it.

Ablen - This is a duo comprised of Abby Madden and Helen Furry. Abby has a smooth voice that works well for the singer/songwriter getup. Helen's voice is a great compliment to Abby's, with a bit more range, able to reach a bit higher. The duo both sing and play guitar, with Helen on violin for a few songs. Being able to switch up the instrumentation a bit like that really helps keep their sets interesting. As far as songwriters, they've got things down pretty solid. As far as performing goes, you can tell that they're young performers and could use some better flow, but that's the point of the First Friday events.

Billy Arboleda - Billy's a singer/songwriter to the tune of the band U2. His song structure isn't too bad and his chord progressions are better than the average singer/songwriter. His voice has a hint of the modern rock sound to it - maybe just a bit more mellow. When it's on, it's not too bad, but vocally it was like the same song over and over. Billy definitely has a ways to go, but he's got good ideas. It was definitely interesting getting to see him in a setting where he's got a whole set. I think that's where you really see an artists strengths and weaknesses. In the case of the first two acts, they need some fine tuning and need to learn better crowd interaction.

Matt Wagner - Matt's got a good bit of experience coming into this. He's played 2 or 3 First Friday's before and I've seen him promoting various gigs that he's had near campus. Again, a singer/songwriter. However, Matt's also got a band that he brought up for a handful of songs. Andrew Algier on some sort of hand drum thing, Craig Kyle on melodica, and a brief appearance by Kyle Kraft. It kept things interesting. They played a handful of covers from people like Sufjan Stevens and Elliott Smith, but mostly Matt Wagner originals. And he's a good songwriter. Like his songs are ones that you could see yourself singing along to. Songs like Vienna and October are the kinds of songs that make it. They've got that raw indie feel to them. But it's good. And well written. He's got a future with this stuff, and that's good because he's a music major with a guitar concentration or something like that...

Trey Overholt - Trey was one of the "featured" artists this month. He's a Messiah grad still doing music on the side every once in a while. Unfortunately, he doesn't have any studio recordings. That's something that needs to be done though. He's got a slower style that mixes smooth soulful vocals around sparsely placed chord textures. His songs tended to be pretty long, but I didn't notice this until a friend pointed it out. They were long songs, but I didn't notice. I mean, I like longer songs, but often times with singer/songwriters, a long song means a repetitive song. Not the case. Trey doesn't play out often, but he's someone worth tracking down and checking out.

David Hampson - Actually, David wasn't after Trey. I played and then the Lost in the Sauce Trio (David, Chris Yoder, and I) played. It was fun, but I can't really review my own material... So then we get to David. I may have written about his music before. David's a great story teller. His songs are stories and are excellent. His downfall is in his admittedly poor guitar skills. I've worked with David a bit and I'm trying to help him out with that, but there is still a long way to go. Overall, his deep grisly vocals and captivating stories keep you listening and engaged.

Camela Widad Kraemer - Camela does this for a living. From small solo gigs to gigs with a full band to organizing festivals, this is her life. And she's good at it. It's unfortunate that there were so few people out to hear her, but she didn't let that get her down. She kept her stories engaging and even had some Messiah related stories. The stories were interesting, but to make it as a singer/songwriter, you've got to have more than that. The songs themselves were great. She's got a voice that will melt you that's dialed in on each inflection and every note.

Anthony Francesco - Anthony was supposed to play first, but due to some technical issues and him being sick, he wasn't able to play. Thankfully, Natalie Ness was gracious enough to lend him the beginning of her set to play a few songs. He only got two in, but it was enough to make note of. Anthony's got a great feel for both blues and folk music. I'd compare him to Iron & Wine with vocals that are a bit more meek and timid. Usually anytime that you see Anthony play, his first few songs are notably full of stage fright and nerves. He told me that he had been working on that and it showed. Though he only got two songs in, they were two songs that were solid and comfortable.

Natalie Ness - I've heard Natalie a hundred times before. And it never gets old. She's covering stuff like Alicia Keys and Beyonce and nailing it. There was also an Imogen Heap cover, Phantogram, and Bon Iver... But then there's her original stuff. You've got this white girl with the vocal chords and charisma of Beyonce with an acoustic guitar with skills to match. She does some stuff on keys as well, but the guitar work is where she shines. Her live show is good, but she definitely needs to work on the professionalism. She'll be taking next semester off to work on music, so I'm looking forward to seeing what that brings.

Albums vs. Singles

As many of you know, I'm a big fan of the Lefsetz letter. In a recent post of his, he condemned albums and endorsed the idea of just releasing singles (you can read the post here). However, if you know me well, you know that I hate singles. I need a whole album to listen to, in the order that it is in. So I wrote him back. This is my message with a few extra pieces thrown in after the fact. Let's get some discussion going on this one, okay?
------


Most of what you say I can jump on board with. Not this.

Yes, an album will lose traction faster than a string of singles. Yes, an album will cost more. And yes, artists like Katy Perry have proven the value of the single.

But music is more than just the numbers. Music is art.

The photographer, when featured in a gallery, will be showing a series of photographs that convey an idea or message; not a single photograph that "says it all." They wouldn't think of showing one piece at a time, because the art is the entire project. It is within that project that you are able to see the subtleties between images. In order to keep you coming back, you would need a series of images that all punched you in the face, getting your attention.

Releasing singles is the business of releasing hits. Sure, we all want to write hits. But the idea of a hit is that it's its own idea - stand alone. Seldom are hits dealing with developing thoughts that stand alone.

You can't have much of a well developed thought in music in 3 minutes just as 3 minutes often isn't sufficient time to develop your side of an argument. A good hook and catchy melody are really all you need for a single. If you want to be thought-provoking, to develop dynamic, and to tell more of a story than a headline, you need an album.

You've also seen to overlook the fact that you can release a single off of an album. An album can be full of singles, but the entire entity is so much deeper than the individual songs that it is comprised of.

Singles are great. They are a great way to reach out to new fans. YES! But a single wants to be part of something bigger artistically.

Look at other art. The wall in your house could be a really pretty shade of blue. However, strokes of different paints are what make paintings. It takes a lot more to create a museum quality painting than to come up with the color of paint that will be used to paint the museum's walls.

I realize that this is a dying way of thinking, but I still feel that there is a lot more merit to releasing an album. A lot of the problem is that proportionally fewer and fewer good albums are being released. There is an excess of really crappy music being released - singles and albums alike. It floods the market, overwhelms the senses, and makes it difficult to make time for an entire album.

Rather than discouraging people from writing albums, I'd much quicker just tell people to give up if they can't make good music. Whether their way of conveying their art is in using singles or writing albums, there is a time and a place for each.

-Alex
alexbrubakerguitar.com

Prepared Piano: Performance Time

Way back when I first started blogging, I posted some Musical Experimentation Thoughts. Innovation and experimentation in music is what I'm all about. I'm constantly looking to do something out of the box.

Not to be a gimmick. A gimmick is something that's done to wow people. It's smoke and mirrors for the sake of being smoke and mirrors. Sure live looping and guitar percussion can fall into that category, but with my playing, I use those elements because that's how I think.

I play guitar, but it's been a long time since I've looked at a guitar as a strummed instrument with which you can play pretty chords. And the more I play like this, the more I see other instruments having greater potential.

Like the piano. The post I mentioned earlier briefly talks about how I've prepared a piano. It was a lot of fun to prepare, as well as to write for. This past semester, Mark Hunsburger, Matt Wagner, and I have written for prepared piano. We've got a 3 piece suite consisting of guitar, percussion, and prepared piano.

As we're practicing tonight, I got to thinking. Has this ever been done before? Has anyone ever written for this arrangement? If it has, I doubt it's been done too much. Nothing on youtube with all three...

Then at one point Matt leaves. It's just guitar and drums - a typical pairing. I start to play with some delay and then some looping and then Mark joins in on drums. It's reminiscent of Russian Circles and Red Sparrowes - post rock icons. Then Matt gets back and joins in.

And then I realize - we just had the first post-rock jam to include a prepared piano. Ever.

The first ever. That's innovation. That's creativity. That's what music is about.

If you want a taste of it, Musica Nova is tonight (Tuesday) starting at 7:00pm in Climenhaga at Messiah College. It'll blow your mind.

LAUNCH: Panel - Booking and Touring 201 (5 of 6)

So I've written all of these way ahead of time, but just haven't released them. Getting blasted with 6 posts in a single day is just kinda crazy, though. If you've missed the first few posts - check it out:
(LAUNCH: Intro)
(LAUNCH: Panel - Licensing Your Music)
(LAUNCH: Panel - Getting Sponsorships For Your Band)
(LAUNCH: Panel - Marketing Your Band)


Also, note that this is "201". 101 was around 11am and I was coming from Philly in the rain and fog, so I missed the first half.

Panel:
Billy O'Brien (Anchor & Hope Music)
Todd Erickson (MasterKey Management/More Music Group)
Nick Storch (International Creative Management)
Mike Mowery (Outerloop Management)
David Silbaugh (Grammy Chapter Board Advisor/Summerfest)
Jason Malhoyt (Outerloop Presents)

Discussion: Booking and Touring 201

• How would you appeal to larger opportunities (colleges, festivals, etc.)
• BO: An agent
• Develop live shows
• you shouldn't pay to play anything
• BO: Have an online presence
• NS: Depends on the vision of the band
• be great
• JM: Be extremely aggressive, but be polite
• look up emails and phone numbers and use them to make contacts
• BO: Take any and every opportunity as a young band
• MM: Being on a festival lineup validates you as a band
• BO: Promote your set creatively
• DS: Love what you do
• play that way no matter who/how many are there
• remember that people are spending time to see you

Yeah, this is a shorter one. However, it'll be followed up by some of my own insight in a day or so. It's always nice to have a backlog of blogposts to keep a steady stream with.