Last May, I described how I caved in to Guitar Envy and bought a cheap electro-acoustic nylon string job on eBay. Following that purchase, I had 60€ left on a PayPal account and thought I might buy myself a crappy electric guitar too, while I waited to treat myself to a decent instrument, some day.…
Catégorie : Making Music
Misunderstood
I’ve spoken at length on this blog about how my music tends to find a small core of enthusiastic fans, and irk a majority of others (and how these numbers seem to vary widely depending on geography). Despite the fact that I don’t create super-weird avant-garde musique concrète, I’ve proposed some hypotheses to explain this…
1 mot, 1 chanson: Canapé
1 mot, 1 chanson has a new contributor. My son Nicolas, 14, wrote the lyrics to Canapé, sang me the tune they should follow, and with great confidence and authority, told me what instruments and general vibe he wanted. Then all I had to do was to follow his orders, which I did with great…
Guitar Zero
As a composer, or at the very least as a songwriter, and as an increasingly old fart, I find it quite dispiriting to see the music scene degenerate steadily over time. This is happening in so many ways that I don’t know where to start. Popular music has rarely been anything but commercial mush, but…
Tenori-On
Check out this demo of the Tenori-On, a new electronic musical instrument, based on an innovative UI. It is well thought out and actually seems usable, allowing for an interesting mix of controlled music-making and random elements. A much simplified version is apparently due to arrive for the iPhone.
RP on the Air
Matt Love, a.k.a. Icepac of Remote Possibility fame played live with his daughter Kelsey on KPSU Portland College Radio last night. You can listen to the broadcast on line. That’s what I’m doing as I write this. The set was dedicated to the late Joe Sibley, who wrote the words to Remote Possibility’s War Record.…
Guitar Envy
As I’ve mentioned many times before on sknoblog, I taught myself the guitar a while back, so I’d be finally able to actually perform some of my songs without electronic crutches, should the need, desire and/or opportunity arise. I’ve survived all this time with two guitars : A beat-up electric guitar that I bought for…
1 mot, 1 chanson: Hedgehog
Hot on the heels of Minute, here comes Hedgehog, my first song in English for 1 mot, 1 chanson. I was reading Harper’s Weekly Review when I stumbled on this story of a new-zealander who was arrested for throwing a hedgehog at a 15 year-old boy. There was nothing I could do. I might just…
1 mot, 1 chanson: Minute
I’ve just posted a second song on the 1 mot, 1 chanson site. I wrote this one soon after the first one, but it took a while to convince Pamela to sing it (the story is told from a woman’s point of view). She’s horrified by the result and has been wearing earplugs while I’ve…
1 mot, 1 chanson
I’m launching a new musical experiment today: 1 mot, 1 chanson (a word, a song). Here’s the pitch: I like to write songs around lyrics. But inspiration doesn’t always come running when you call. So when the muses are playing hard to get, why not pick a word at random, tell the first story that…