That was the river, this is the sea

Me, I’m still screw­ing around with my Por­tas­tu­dio… — Roddy Frame

Last night, for the first time in months, maybe even years, I recorded myself impro­vis­ing on the keyboard.

A life­time ago, I left col­lege to “fol­low my muse.” (Well, there were other rea­sons, too, but let’s stick with the poetic sound­ing one for now…) It was a cre­atively fer­tile period of my life — hell, Husher still speaks well of one of the songs I wrote back then. I saved up money from my crappy part-time job at TJ Maxx to buy bet­ter equip­ment to nur­ture the muse.

One of the first things my money got me was a Tas­cam 424 4-track cas­sette recorder, which became my scratch­pad and stu­dio all-in-one. I recorded dozens of tapes and full songs with it, until my song­writ­ing took a back seat to play­ing in a band. Even­tu­ally the band dis­solved, I moved to Maine, and my key­board stands became catch-alls for dirty laun­dry, until my father-in-law upgraded his com­puter and gave me the Sound Blaster AWE64 sound card and MIDI sequenc­ing soft­ware he had been work­ing with. This opened up a whole new horizon.

Over the past few years, I’ve become accus­tomed to dig­i­tal record­ing and sequenc­ing, cre­at­ing well-arranged beds of MIDI and sam­ples to rest my voice on. How­ever, I’m still using the same com­puter I recorded much of Prodi­gal Songs on, and the wear of old age is begin­ning to get the best of it. As a result, I can’t really do much actual record­ing on the com­puter these days (not that I’ve been writ­ing much to record anyway).

Luck­ily, I still have my old friend the 424. Scratch that – years of neglect have ren­dered it impos­si­ble to record on track 4, so I now have func­tion­ally a 3-track. But hey, <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgt._Pepper” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘en.wikipedia.org’]);“s_Lonely_Hearts_Club_Band”>the Bea­t­les recorded Sgt. Pep­per on 4 tracks…maybe I can use this lim­i­ta­tion to my advantage.

Any­way, with all my work-related stress lately, I’ve known I need to change some­thing. A com­mon theme in the pod­casts and blog posts I’ve been read­ing lately has been art and its capac­ity to change us. Maybe I’ve just not been let­ting the art or music in enough to change me.

That in itself needs to change – it may be dif­fi­cult to fit in the sched­ule, but I want to com­mit to more times like this, of just explor­ing musi­cally with no set agenda other than “see what sounds good.” I need to find, as Osenga so beau­ti­fully puts it,

The pulse that is always there beneath me, above me, behind me, before me, wait­ing for me to ride within its heart­break­ing, breath­tak­ing, dark and beau­ti­ful waves.

The waves that will carry me from the muddy river into the wide open sea.

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