Shed - To Do

Long tones
Overtones

ATTYA
Triad Pairs
Klose 1 & 2
But-subs
Augmented scale

Shed Journal Entry

The past few days have been a bit out-of-the-ordinary for me.  I've had a lot of free time, so this is a bit over the top when compared to my usual shed time.  

Started at ~12 pm and stopped around 3 am.

Metronome is usually substituted with a track of some sort, anything with a groove.  Had to use quiet metronome yesterday.

Saxophone:

Overtones

Improvising w/fx and without.  Used things that are difficult for me as the thematic material for improvisations.  Covered more ground that way; improvised and dealing with fundamentals.

Only had 45 mins to shed horn due to noise level.

Guitar:

MBQ heads

Then basic warmup; 

1234->4321 permutation exercises, entire fretboard - alt. picked, half starting w/downstroke half starting w/upstroke.  Oh, and hybrid picked.  String displacement on same exercise.  [Concentrated on good technique (small, smooth movements) for 5 mins (timed it), then improvised with them for a while focusing on 'good time', thematic development, and evolving momentum.  Worked w/metronome and without]

MBQ heads

Alt. picking drop two voicings, then econ. picking same voicings; stacc. and legato.  [Concentrated on good technique (small, smooth movements) for 5 mins (timed it), then improvised with them for a while focusing on 'good time', thematic development, and evolving momentum.  Worked w/metronome and without]

MBQ heads

One excerpt from Walt Weiskopf's book "Around the Horn", and one from "Beyond the Horn".  Both great books, but Beyond the Horn has some very fun things in it.  [guess what.. "Concentrated on good technique (small, smooth movements) for 5 mins (timed it), then improvised with them for a while focusing on 'good time', thematic development, and evolving momentum.  Worked w/metronome and without"]

MBQ heads

Some augmented gestures from the Slonimsky book.  [same approach as above]

MBQ heads

One-hour improvisation in Ab, all eighth notes, no-stop.  If I goofed, I had to start over.  The more time went by, the looser I had to make my standards of "messing up".  At some point I'll make it all the way through with the same standards I start with.

MBQ heads

Triads all over the neck; as 'chords', picking variations, voice-leading note-by-note to next triad, etc, etc.

MBQ heads

Podcast in the Planning Stages

...named after this blog.  It'll consist of interviews of great players, composers, arrangers, music students, etc.

11/15/1999 5:33 PM

1. Take more of a macro view of what the primary voice is doing, there is no need to shadow everything it does.  
2. When playing an ostinato, don’t ‘play in time’, but instead groove.

11/15/1999 5:33 PM - One thing that I have realized is how much the life that my father led and things that he exposed me to has influenced my music. He lives out in the middle of nowhere on the river. As a child when I would go visit him I would lay at night and listen to the frogs and crickets spray the air with audible dust. At first this was seemed very loud and disturbing, but after a time I started to notice rhythmic patterns. I would spend much time trying to focus on either the frogs or crickets. In doing this I was struck when it became apparent to me that at times they would synchronize***. This is what I have come to notice in many areas of these recordings (MBQ). I never noticed it before and it is not deliberate. As a matter of fact, the areas that it takes place in I generally disliked what was happening musically. All along it was the most natural truth. I am glad that I don't get in the way of the music as much as my hindsight would have me.
.MAtt Butler 

***After noticing that I became enamored with the sounds around me and would listen to car brakes, dryers (hair and clothes (the doppler effect from a sisters hair dryer in the morning...)), literally everything that made any kind of sound. This was years before I started "studying music" at the age of 16. By that time I was well on my way to driving myself crazy.

More from my 30's

My approach to composition has changed over the years.  When I was a kid I was enamored with the idea of music as a science and so studied everything I could get my hands on.  Initially it was stuff like Walter Piston's books, which were very traditionally spun. This stuff was cool because it gave me the theoretical fundamentals that I would need when I moved to more modern harmonic concepts.  With each successive concept that I would study I would compose a piece based on it.  For instance, when I started reading about modal harmony, I set out to build a piece that would harmonically and melodically imply each mode.  One mode, one piece.  I did this through the major scales, melodic minor, harmonic major, etc…  From head to pen to paper.  Mind you, I wasn't playing any of this shit yet.  I wasn't really even shedding.  Study, compose, study, and compose.  At certain points I would have my mother play some of it on the piano for me or take it to school and have people play it (I was 16 at this time – I also dropped out of school during this time).  At the time I ran out of 'scales' to do this to, was during the time I realized that the music I was writing was impure.  By that I mean that I often times wrote the harmony first. I realized that harmony was the *consequence of melody* and that the first thing to be written should be the melody.  This caused me to completely change the way that I approached composing.  This was also the time that I was really getting into jazz.  Now, you can imagine the conundrum this created.  Everything that I was being exposed to when studying this music from a compositional/harmonic perspective was vertical and I had just had the epiphany that harmony was actually horizontal layers of melody that make an impression or halo around the main voice.  This didn't go over well in my harmony and arranging classes.  This is also around the time that I started really shedding my instrument.  I was shedding the pieces I had been writing for the past few years (which were angular buckets of crap).  When I had to play in ensemble classes the only shit I had under my hands to work with were my tunes, so I would take bits of those and try to use them in whatever way I could.  I used to get my ass chewed!  It was around this time that I realized that the only way I was going to be able to play the stuff was to develop a strong sense of time and rhythm (still working on it).  This carried into my composing as well.  I made exercises for myself to see if I could take something that sounded like crap and have it come across as convincing, it didn't always work.  At this time I was trying to write melodies that grooved.  Later on, I realized that the 'composer me' and the 'improviser me' are the same person.  When I play I am composing, and vice versa.

To skip ahead a number of years to now:  my composing now is almost entirely devoid of any harmony other than what is implied by the melody (I am not sure why this is).  Sometimes I may write a voice for the bass to play, often not, though (other than some piano quintet stuff from about 4 years ago, this stuff is so dense it will give you a headache).  The last batch of pieces that I wrote (which Life in The Washing Machine came from) I was leaning over my piano as a desk in candle light shaking from the adrenaline surges…

There is so much more (more on harmony, meter, cross rhythms, etc), but I will stop there…

Liberation from all of it

Another one from my early 30's. I certainly had a lot to say back then.

I sought liberation from position playing, patterns, 'chords' and such.  The way that I choose to handle this was in the way that I shed and what I worked on.  My first thought towards this goal was around the age of 17.  I believed that improvisation is, in essence, spontaneous composition, what I had not yet realized was that when playing in a certain context (such as the framework of a 'tune') the 'solo' not only needed to make musical sense unto itself (i.e. no 'licks' or formulaic playing) but needed to be a literal development on the head, or main theme, as it were (it took me another few years for this one to hit).

Anyway, as a means to this end, I started approaching my practice sessions as a time to learn to make strong musical sense with very few notes (this is by no means the only thing I worked on – there was the composing, reading, etc).  The only way to do this is to master time and rhythm (still haven't, but… it's gettin' there).  Anything that is played with good time and self-assured rhythmic intent will work anywhere.  Add a real sense of melody and you have a true voice.

I would by first choosing a rhythmic back drop (always!).  This often took the form of a metronome (or drum machine) or a piece of recorded music.  The next thing I would do is choose 3 random notes.  These would be literal notes, not a graphical point on the guitar.  In other words I would think to myself "Eb, D, and B", as opposed to "4th string 1st fret, etc…"  This way I had to use all of those notes from everywhere on the fingerboard… ah ha!  Yep!  And, I had to make the playing of them sit well in the groove and give the playing momentum.  So I was making music with every pitched inch of my instrument (well, at this point, the part with strings at least).

When playing with the recorded music (often times Shostakovich, or Bartok string quartets, various fusion albums) the goal was to interact with the music as though I were a part of it.  I am not talking about 'fantasy jamming', I mean that I would try to be an additional voice within the music (not *soloing*).  This was difficult depending on a few things such as: did the random notes I chose work with the music well?  If not, I would spend a lot of time trying to play in between the 'inside' notes on the recording so the movement between notes would make some sense.  Etc…  As time went on I started choosing 4 notes, 5 notes…  By the time I was using all twelve I had discovered the concept of tone rows and went on that tangent for a while trying to make them groove beautiful…

When I worked with the metronome I would work on the same thing, but an odd thing started to happen.  I noticed that I became sort of 'rain man-ish' using the 'nome.  I would come out of my practice trance and find myself obsessively regrouping the beats in bars of four by eights (5+3, 2+2+1+2+1, etc) and sixteenths (this became really bad, after a while I was doing it on a macro and micro level at the same time – partials, beats, bars, etc…), all the while maintaining a melodic/thematic/rhythmic mental mandate (needless to say, I had almost no social life as a kid – nor now).

This (among many other things) has left me with the ability to be free from the imposition of the instrument to give more respect to the music that I am participating in by allowing myself to be moved by it and play accordingly.  Taking the head and playing an exposition...

I was going through some old journals and found this one. I may be bordering on illiterate. I was 32 when I wrote it. That was 2002. It was a reply to a post someone made about something. I have no idea what, but.. yeah.

Regarding composing, specifically:

I spent time studying other composers to the extent that I would bury myself in many recordings of the same piece until I could pinpoint what it was that moved me about it.  At that point I would 'look into' exactly what was going on technically to satiate my curiosity and leave an impression on me that would come out later – in my way.  Study is like sweating; we shouldn't be able to drink Gatorade and then sweat Gatorade, we take things in and grow from them.  As a young composer who wants to speak his or her own truth or sound, we should listen to music we like, allow ourselves to be moved, and study the basics of what makes music in general work.  Then we should apply it to our own context without romanticizing ourselves into 'writing a tune like –[insert heavy composers name here]- would have' etc…  I believe –[insert heavy composers name here]-  would want us to listen, learn the basics, and do our own thing.  Know that I am not saying not to study what others have done, I am speaking directly to the statement of trying to emulate a composers style.  When it's mentioned that a person can leave that behind when it's time to write in their own voice, that's a delusion; you can't just reroute your hard-earned neural pathways. You've programmed your brain to do things a certain way, hear things a certain way, etc.  There are very few people, statistically speaking, that can separate themselves from what they do when they are practicing something and what they do when it's for real (it should all be the same thing, do it for real *every* time you pick up a pencil or pen).  This is why *most* of the stuff by younger (and many older) composers sounds so similar to so many things already out. Still, there's the possibility that what you write will fall solidly within a 'camp'.  

Regarding composing on your instrument:

Unless you are a virtuoso and free from pattern playing etc (even then…), I believe writing on your instrument carries the germs of your limitations as a player into your composing, thereby infecting all of your music with your weaknesses as a player (though if you compose on an instrument that you are  totally unfamiliar with, the exploration can yield some heavy results). I believe it inhibits the imagination.  I am not saying great tunes can't be composed on an instrument, many have and many more will be, but working straight from the mind is much more freeing, and without the imposition of muscle memory and agenda.  None of this is to say not to write *towards* a specific instrument, at that point you would want to take into consideration the limitations of the instrument itself, not yours as a player of it.  Our playing can benefit from our progress as composers, what happens in our minds is often times much more advanced and moves more quickly than our control over the instrument.  Let your composer-self be an inspiration to your player-self.  Let the player self aspire to make the composer in you happy.

I agree about the "just for the doing" statement, but again, the above applies.  When I first started studying harmony I would write a piece of music based on every new scale (or anything new) I encountered.  Once I had extrapolated a melody from it I would then proceed to harmonize it in every way I could (I was a high school dropout who did nothing but study and shed, so I had all day, everyday to do this).  This harmonization included everything from a one note voice to the obvious 'diatonic' triads and chords, to what amounted to 'clusters'.  It was during this time that it made sense to me that harmony is the direct consequence to two or more *melodies* happening within the same ear-shot of a listener – which leads me to another statement/generalization:  It is ass-backwards to write a 'progression' first when composing.  Again, this is a generalization – there are times when we come across a progression that's beautiful that will hand us its melody
Etc.

This.

I've decided to start logging my thoughts, etc while composing in case I have to rebuild** again.

**Years ago I became very ill and couldn't play, nor compose for ~8 months.  When I went back to it, everything was 'gone'.  My approach to music had been completely forgotten.  Going to my practice journals helped me rebuild.