I used to be so focused, so driven to do something reasonably substantial with my music — driven to try and make a difference somehow, maybe make an impact on someone’s life, and to someday be able to earn a healthy living through writing, recording, distributing and performing my music. But these days that aspiration is just a vapor.

With an oatmeal stout in one hand and pen in the other I wrote the words:

Aspiration — it’s an unattainable vapor of hope materialized only by some freak act of circumstance, luck, and someone actually buying into the idea you’re trying to sell. What is greater — the death of your ideas or aspiration itself? I’m inclined to say the latter of the two, but with understanding that repeated crushing blows to the former leads to the latter. In addition, you cannot destroy one without destroying the other. Aspiration is undeniably linked to our ideas, our hopes, and our dreams.

God, who brought the shoe-gazer to the party?

But I ask the other musicians, song writers and performers out there — do you experience the same challenges to your ambitions? When no one comes to the shows. When the last CD you sold was eight months ago. When you feel your music isn’t penetrating into the markets that you would love to be heard in. What keeps you playing those empty cafes, writing the songs that few will hear, recording CD’s and mp3’s that few will buy? For at what point does it stop being about what you want to do and what you want others to see, hear, and take away from your music?

Anyway, there’s a lot that I’ve been thinking about these days, and contemplating if maintaining this site and any music aspirations is just a waste of time, energy, and passion.

It’s a short piece just shy of three minutes, so probably not long enough to fall asleep to unless you’ve got your mp3 player on repeat or have taken a sleep aid prior to downloading today’s improv piece. Either way, it’s a nice relaxing piece that might help bring a little bit of calm to whatever storm you may be experiencing today.

Enjoy. And as always, if you enjoy what you hear please leave some comments and buy an album or two.

I won’t be offering up a play-by-play of the tune today and just invite you to sit back, relax and enjoy.

0:00 - Admittedly, I take too much time getting the percussion track set up on my Boomerang phrase sampler, but eventually bring in the first set of rhythm track around the one-minute mark.

1:11 - Time to throw some laid back melodies in there to go with the easy-flowing shuffle. The music at this point is relatively happy and cheery, but slow like the sap from a maple tree in the tail end of winter.

2:05 - To help build up the tune a bit, I bring in the octave pedal, which consequently is kinda tricky to use with the acoustic guitar. Your EQ has to be set just right so that it doesn’t sound too fudged up and sounds as natural as possible. And if you’re able to get the tone just right — and at this point I’m quite happy with it — it’s a load of fun!

3:12 - Okay, we’re ready to switch it up and bring in some minor chords to give our music somewhere to go — some nice tension and release.

4:07 - Mmmmmm…. harmonics. Like a nice spice when thrown in appropriately.

4:36 - And throwing in the ebow here, because man, ebows are just a load of fun to play with on the acoustic guitar. If you can get it just right, it sounds like a cross between a clarinet, flute, and some sort of haunting stringed instrument. Additionally, though, it’s quite the challenge to get the placement just right or you get those shrills — and those are not as fun to have in your recording.

5:30 - Now we’re going to set up a harmonic pattern here, mirroring what we did in 5:20, but with a lower note and then a higher melody. Mmmmmmmm. Relaxed yet?

6:00 - Now that we’ve got our melodic and harmonic drone set up, it’s time to play a bit and bring it home. And coming up, you can just feel the end in sight, and so I start to end it with a repeating pattern and begin to fade both the Boomerang and my actual guitar playing — no fading done on the computer.

This was the first tune from my improv session on March 20, 2005, and I have a few more that I’m going to share and review over the next day or two. If you enjoy these, please leave a little love in the comment section and I’ll start working my way into doing more of these improv sessions and share them with you all.

So let’s get started by downloading this jam session that I created back on March 19, 2005 - part six. It’s nearly an eleven-minute song, so be prepared to wait a bit.

0:00 - I set it up with a kinda fun, schwanky combination of tennis ball and finger drum action followed by some basting brush hi-hat action.

0:24 - add a little bed of music to play against here at this point and a little playful lead line to follow, which eventually gets added to the loop

1:13 - with my octave pedal, I bring in the bass line to give some nice low end to this funkified groove and bring the melody line back in immediately once the bass line has been established

1:50 - I LOVE… L-O-V-E love distorting my acoustic guitar just enough to give it an edge that you just don’t hear from acoustic guitars. It adds dimension and variety from your normal acoustic tone AND doesn’t quite have the same tone from your run-of-the-mill electric guitars. It’s unique, and I love it.

3:30 - After the driving distortion, we bring back in the acoustic to add some lines that help tone it back a bit and introduce some more syncopation and ethnicity.

4:47 - And after doing some natural octave playing, I bring in the octave pedal again and drop the lower octave down even one more level for kicks. Remember this is just about playing around. There is no right or wrong, just diving in and doing. That’s what improv is to me.

5:40 - At this point I’m ready to change it up, so I’m slowing down the tone and fading out the pattern to prepare for a new canvas to work with. For continuity and the illusion of another loop, I repeat the pattern until about 6:31 where I start up a new loop pattern.

7:21 - And one of the more unusual uses of an ebow: on the acoustic guitar. I bring the ebow in to lay down an eerie drone and start layering that around 7:55 to give this ebb and flow of tone.

8:14 - I bring in an established tempo with my basting brush and finger snare to give me enough structure, before I bring in the bass at 9:04-ish.

9:44 - I’ve got my loop fully built out by now and am just playing around with the tension and building of the notes to try and create some unusual progressions that normally don’t fall under my status-quo. And after messing around with that for a bit, I begin to draw it back at 10:48 and fade out the recording. I can’t recall how much further it went on, but I think just shy of 11:00 was good for me.

This tune illustrates the flexibility and challenge with improv instrumental acoustic tunes — the challenge of how one can take a starting concept, make it evolve, and then completely transform it midway through to take it a completely different direction than when you first started. The thing that’s difficult to be aware of is when to say “when” and move on. I remember reading an interview with Phish’s former front man Trey Anastasio and the discussion he had about knowing when to stop trying to force something to happen and just ending the song. Sometimes you just run out of gas, and it no longer becomes interesting trying to force out what you don’t have at that moment in time.

In this case, this piece had plenty of gas to go the distance and lasted a while.

Did you get the memo? I didn’t.

Alright, download this little ditty, song 3 from my session on March 19, 2005.

0:00 - immediately starting off with a rhythmic reference, in this case some light basting brush action followed by a drone type tone, layering two different tones using my ebow. Some of the coolest stuff has a drone-like tone to it, that I can just get lost in. In this case, I’m revolving between two suspenseful tones and it allows a lot of possibilities for movement in the song.

0:54 - the cool thing, at least in my mind, is that it starts out leading you to think it’s going to be this Indian-esque kind of drone type song, and then starts to flip into this semi-spaghetti western, swung type tune.

1:20 - by this point, the rhythm track is set for my foundation and I start to play around in that environment a bit, and by 1:50 I have a good idea of where I want to go with it.

2:15 - I take a break from the melody line to build up the percussion track a bit and put more intensity into the loop track. I can’t recall what I’m using, but it’s most likely a tennis ball or my rubber mallet for the kick and finger for snare.

3:27 - Throwing in a bit of a change, I’ve got more direction for where I want to go and combine additional chords and melodies to build a solid “story” in the song, and by 3:54 I throw a nice change in there with the minor chord to build desire for resolution.

5:20 - The momentum is being built up at this point with taking the melody and chords up higher and bringing in delayed tension at 6:06, which kinda cues the listener that things are coming to an end. And with such a deeper tapestry of a loop, you have to fade that out slowly to make it work. So while that fades I layer in some ebow, but it got out of hand there and started distorting on me! Bah!!

This is a really simplistic tune — nothing elaborate and is another example of how music can be something simple as just a means of drifting away in your thoughts, meditations, and in prayer. It’s a nice way to escape or to connect and draw near, a great means of relaxing or engaging in what you’re doing. And for me, that’s what these improv sessions were — they were my way of relaxing, of engaging with my emotions, and creating in an evolutionary process and just seeing what comes of it.

They’re not perfect, and it’s really not that big of a deal to me. It’s the creation process and doesn’t have to be refined like the big boys in Nashville, LA, or NYC would like to produce. No, instead it’s raw, organic, and from the heart of the moment.

Tomorrow I’ll be sharing a few more tracks from my improv session on March 19, 2005.

First thing’s first — download the improv session from March 19, 2005 (part one). I’ll give a minute/second marker of some of the things I’m introducing in the piece.

0:00 - To star out, I’m using a basting brush for the hi-hat/brush snare effect and tennis ball/kick drum and finger snare on my acoustic.

0:30 - Adding a layer of “liquidy” acoustic guitar in there for sustained audio

0:43 - Using an octave pedal, I introduce a basic bass line in there to get me going and then eventually onto some melodic lines on the acoustic to start telling the story.

2:45 - For some contrast, I bring in the distortion pedal and do an on/off stepping technique and then come full on with some distorted melodies to continually build up the lines.

4:06 - Switching back to a cleaner acoustic tone to contrast with the harshness of the distortion pedal.

5:19 - I start contrasting between high and low patterns and then bring them together at 5:30 with an octave pedal.

The whole idea of this piece was simply just to explore some contrasts with a somber pattern as the foundation, exploring emotional waves and cycles within that structure. The thing that I like about improv is that it doesn’t have to be anything profound in my opinion. Sometimes, like in the case of this tune, it’s just meant to be one of those pieces you sit back and absorb, and drift off into your own thoughts or consciousness.

This song never made it onto either of my instrumental CDs, but I may take another stab at it, put some more structure around the phrases, and release it at a later date. But for now, enjoy this lo-fi recording.

I have to be frank and say that 2007 was a very difficult year when Crash Effect fell apart, taking with it my desire to pick up my guitar and create any music that was worth recording and sharing with others. And with little-to-no inquiry as to why I wasn’t doing music anymore, I contently let my musical aspirations fall by the wayside and chalk it up to a change in my life — one that I know I’d regret. For the past year, I can count on one hand the number of times that I had literally picked up my guitar — and that kinda makes me sad.

So with fall rapidly approaching, I’m re-arranging my priorities a bit and will be scheduling in some time to start playing again, and Lord willing will record and share those things with you. If you want to hear more music out of me, please do send along your encouraging words — they help prod me on to do greater things.

- michael