why.

' ... You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again.
So why bother in the first place?

Just this:
What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above.
One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.
There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up.
When one can no longer see, one can at least still know ... '

~ Rene' Daumal, 'The Art of Climbing Mountains,' from Mount Analogue

reblog_001.

So when I first started this blog, I remember (at least I think I remember) writing that I would try to pull out some of the better posts from my previous blog that my brother had so graciously hosted for me for a few years before I decided to make the switch, pull the plug, and move to a blog that, uh, looked at least a little more personalized than his bare-bones site allowed. And I mean that with no dis-respect (since he might just read this).

But anyway, along those lines and because of that link from my last post I found myself randomly hitting a month on the left sidebar (wow it is absolutely dumping rain outside my living room window as I sit in the corner typing this when really what I should be doing is working on my house and yes it was completely random) and came across this little post that will be my first reblog ~

03/06/2007 9:41pm

Miscellany -

Rachmaninoff's pianism is generally considered among the finest of the twentieth century. It displayed features characteristic of the Russian school of piano playing: effortless technical ability; interpretative freedom that is now frowned on; creative freedom in dynamics and phrasing.

Agreed. It is sensational.

I was reading some reviews of David Helfgott's playing (of Liszt's Etude No.3 Un Sospiro which in pure Liszt tradition is impossibly difficult and marvelously beautiful played in that link by Sviatoslav Richter who is arguably one of the greatest pianists of all time with few exceptions one being of course Wilhelm Backhaus). Got me thinking.

So I realize this is getting off-topic with the bit about Liszt ... as I was just earlier banging on the Bechstein this afternoon coming up with this admittedly random chord progression using augmented chords, lots of chromatic notes, flattening thirds to transpose major chords to minor chords (a wonderful transition but not to be overused) the vocal bending to match chords that don't belong so much that it took a bit to figure out what the key signature and tonic were (C♯ minor) and it made me think a little to the other week getting together with a couple of guys to run through some songs and one of them commenting about how it made more sense if the progression went a different way than I had written it but really why should it make sense?

There has to be a boundary between a musical progression that yes makes sense and one that completely does not and is impossible to follow but in between those two extremes is that 'effortless freedom' Rachmaninov displayed in his writing. That creative freedom of dynamics (lots of triple forte!) and phrasing - random notes, chromatics everywhere, difficult to follow. Difficult - not impossible - to follow. A motif that is beautiful and textured and chromatic. Rich. Lyrical. But with unexpected harmony, melody, counterpoint.

There was an evening years ago alone watching Shine stumbling over to the rented piano along the living room wall the room dark only halfway through the movie to discover a completely new method of composition based heavily on the use of chromatics and motifs that did not convey to any structure or preconceived rule (not that I necessarily knew of any rules being wholly self-taught for better or for worse times like these and certainly lately likely for worse). Back to that comment someone had left on a video of Helfgott playing that Liszt Etude that his life was transformed after hearing Rachmaninoff. Dynamic. Interpretive. Monumental.

Well, mine too. Mine too.

another reason.

It all started with a new pair of glasses.

"You look like that guy from Shine."
"Noah Taylor?"
"Sure."

(I took this as a compliment, actually).

...

"I wish I played piano as good as he did. Well, his character anyway."
"He took lessons for years and years."

Touché.

My laziness and complacency in my twenties has officially caught up to me.

I once blogged about a quote from Ansel Adams. It fit then. It fits even more now. I could not say it any better.

So I won't.

glaciers on steroids.

Climbing season approaches. This is someone's pano of the northern Pickets. The most remote and wild slice of the North Cascades. Incredible. Yes.

From what I've read in the past, getting into and out of the Pickets takes a few days, but a basecamp (how about down there at Lousy Lake?) can be set up and then multiple peaks can be climbed over the period of another couple days - from Fury to Luna to one of the highlights of this pocket of ice-clad iconic Cascade peaks ... Challenger.

Matthew and I met at a pub last week to chat among other things about the upcoming season. Still want to do our traverse of the Stuart range up the north face Sherpa glacier, tag the summit then onto Sherpa, Argonaut, Colchuck, Dragontail and Little Annapurna. A marathon. And the north face of Buckner. I'm in. Those are definites. We threw out possibly the Mowich Face of Rainier, something that's been on my list since about the time I first started climbing and is, well, quite intimidating (it's on the right in that photo). Let's see, what else ... oh yeah, Bonanza (which was on my list last year) and would be awesome as it requires an adventurous ferry ride up the Lady of the Lake on Lake Chelan to the town of Holden deep in the North Cascades. I'd love to run up and down Ruth Mountain too, mainly for this view of Shuksan. Spectacular.

Regardless of what we all end up climbing this season and since it is doubtful we'll make it out there this year, the Pickets will continue to lure. Like the Winds' Cirque of the Towers on glacier steroids.

mastering.

So I originally got this dual 1.0GHz PowerMac G4 I call Carbon, what ... seven years ago or something? So I could learn InDesign and Photoshop. It came pre-installed - Photoshop 7 and InDesign 2. The Apple 17" Studio LCD monitor is now the proud display for my 800MHz PowerMac G4 server I call Iridium (the minimum G4 CPU that boasts gigabit ethernet). Upgraded last year to a 23" Apple Cinema so I could have some more screen real estate for Logic (should have gotten the 30"). Done with Photoshop and InDesign. They aren't even loaded on Carbon, kept lean with minimal apps (OS 10.4.11 is enough of a resource hog) to keep Logic humming with twenty-plus instrument tracks, busses, masters and such.

And so tonight, a new art ... mastering.

The subject is that minute-forty I posted a couple weeks ago (even though I have continued working on the multi-track adding more and more music to it but have not yet bounced that down to two tracks). Brought in the two-track mixdown and then bussed in an adaptive limiter on top of a multi-band compressor to the stereo instrument track then some linear EQ on top followed up with a second adaptive limiter to eke out just a little more headroom to the master channel. Just trying to bring up the noise floor and dynamic range. Awesome. Called up the spectrum analyzer to check out the frequency range as I looped the loud intro and the quieter middle. Over and over. Add a multimeter to really check out the frequency distribution. And Logic of course lets me save all of my plug-in settings so when I ultimately finish the song I can re-apply all of them to that new mastering session. Maybe tweak them a bit more.

This G4 never fails to amaze. Neither does Logic. Seriously. I get made fun of periodically for my older Macs and my three-versions-ago software. Whatever. I keep my machines lean and mean. The fact I bought this piece of software on Ebay for something like a hundred-forty and it is seriously a recording studio inside of my Mac is incredible. This particular song is definitely taxing that very Mac, but I am making sure to run the Onyx cleanups and keeping it at peak performance. Have to go in and periodically freeze tracks but all is well.

Hmm ... now I would like some bigger monitors. Yes, definitely. The key to mastering is listening on lots of different speaker sets. Headphones. In the car. Little speakers. Big speakers. But it is decidingly difficult trying to master on little M-Audio 4" monitors. They're good, but not that good.

Soon.

just an example.

So I have been thinking a lot about stuff and the fact that I have been writing music for a while now to myself in my living room on my Bechstein and in my head and in Logic and that is all well and good except it is no longer good enough. When I was in my twenties I was writing music. Songs like Radiohead or Suede or concertos for pianofortes and orchestras. When I was in high school I was writing piano sonatas and this instrumental concept album of sorts. All of eighteen years old or so I went out and wrote a letter to the guitarist Marty Friedman to ask if he would want to collaborate with me. A year later he replied sure send him a tape. I never followed through. When I was ten I wrote my first song. Uh, yeah. And up until roughly three years or so ago I was convinced it was all crap. Well, maybe not all of it. The concertos for pianoforte and orchestra were impressive albeit incredibly daunting and I had come comfortably to the realization that they would end up being finished much later in my life when I had lived and had time to fully ingest and then reformulate into music and motifs and orchestral power larger than life all of those experiences and ideas which to me was perfectly fine.

But these songs that have been going on in my head and now transposed onto the Bechstein and in Logic have been bugging me because I am quite convinced they are actually not crap. Which is believe it or not one incredibly huge step for me. I tend to think everything I produce is crap.

But anyways this is all really just to say recently I finally stepped out from behind my walls to start networking to find other musicians that may see and understand my vision and be able to collaborate in a way that is impossible just me at my piano in my living room. It was tough posting MP3s. Not because I think they are crap. Well, partly they are because they are a fraction of what I hear in my head. But sharing does not come easily. But since it is out there ... I felt like those MP3s really did not give a glimpse at maybe what I really have been working on.

So I threw together this minute and forty seconds of sound tonight to hopefully give anyone who comes across my reaching out to get a better sense of what I mean when I say however it is that I describe this stuff in my head. 'Symphonic Rock.' Something like Muse. My often-used adjective 'furious.' I don't know.

After the intro and the time/tempo change the singer comes in. Moments of delicateness. And then it builds. And builds. And builds. Overdriven guitar arpeggios up and down. Furious piano arpeggios and those big fat chords! Drums beating harder and harder. The driving bass line comes back in. Vocal line soaring. Rising and rising. Crescendo. Crescendo. Crescendo.

It is not finished. It is still just a fraction of what I hear in my head. It is just an example.

Linked file is here.

cheers