A brilliant day. I played distorted guitar to Beethoven's 7th Symphony last night, which was joyous in every sense. I slept well but woke briefly in the night, from a dream of raining pieces of porcelain falling onto a grassy and muddy field. My stomach felt odd, but not bad, empty, healing. I took a sip of milk of magnesia and sat up.
I became aware of a breakthrough in my singing that I encountered when guitar earlier this year. After a few weeks of daily practice, I had sufficient knowledge of the layout of the instrument to practice in my head at night. I do this with piano too. I could feel the instrument in my mind and start to play scales or other things in my imagination, mentally feel how it feels to play. This is a great way to practice and learn anything. These early hours, the magic time between the two sleeps, are perfect for learning for a few reasons.
Firstly, the brain is open, the cells pull apart, for cleaning by the tiny brain cleaners, astrocytes. I surmise this is a key purpose of sleep; filing, tidying and ordering by the tiny librarians. This opening up allows clearer and more agile thoughts. Sometimes at night, at this time, we can recall things that we just forget next morning, or we can see paths and possibilities that are normally obscured. I think that this is due to this parting of the cells. This makes learning faster and more efficient. Rather than push through the hedge in our brains, we can more easily build the pathways we desire. We can't just get up for night training though. When we move from sleeping there is a rush of blood to the head that sounds the water of a river, this is our brains going back to normal - so we must practice only mentally. A second advantage to this is that the concepts are more firmly laid because they are placed deeper into the brain.
Last night I became aware that I could feel this muscle memory in my singing. I wasn't sure I would because it's a self-skill, not involving an instrument or physical object. I imagined singing a few notes and so did an test-sing in silence. What a great secret this is!
I slept again and awoke very rested past 9am. I started quickly on new music, the last Sisyphus track which is called The Exploratory Farmer. I didn't know what the music should be, so became stuck at first. I began with mood, then: rain, mud... it was clearly the 17th century. I even named the wind '17th Century Wind'. A scene from the old Hammer film 'Blood on Satan's Claw', a childhood terror, came to mind when writing this song.
Musically, I wanted material from elsewhere in the album so I visited the chords from the opening rock song, but slowed them down a lot. The rhythm is crucial for the mood of a song and I struggle with it sometimes... I seem to want songs to have no regular rhythm, and somehow go with 'feeling' like a moody piano in one of Beethoven's 'raptus' moments. Regular rhythm can constrict feeling. Well, I heard some hissing in my moody wind and decided to make this regular, so the wind itself evolved into a rhythm, and then strings. I then played some piano over these simple chords and worked out the melody for the verse.
For the chorus I had noted to use the chorus from The Invisible Man, so I edited that out and lifted the section directly. This worked well enough but needed a little modification. The music so far is quite glorious actually, and reminded me of Comfortably Numb. That led me into thinking about an epic guitar solo, so I spent the rest of the day experimenting with my new THR30II amplifier. I recorded a great solo on the Zoom H4 using it, but it was horribly distorted, too loud (so sadly lost). I then started to experiment with other Zoom and amp settings to get the volume right - and try some of the factory presets on the amp - how good it sounds!
It's more like a synth controlled by guitar than an amplifier (they could add white noise generators, filters, or other drones or tones controlled by the amp, if they ever felt like pushing this concept). My biggest criticism is that it would be nice to have more knobs rather than so many (about half) of the settings set only in software... I'd at least like a speed knob for the chorus/flangers etc. even though I'll never use them in recordings, I'd apply my own effect, but for live it would be nice. Also the volume on my guitar seems redundant now... with my old amp, it went smoothly from silent to gentle, to distorted, so I could modify the timbre live. The amp seems to do this now, but perhaps I can get my old tone and control back with a little experimentation.
Anyway, I remembered that I could plug a jack rather than a XLR into the Zoom, so tried that and, with settings of Low for the input level, it seemed to record fine yay! I might need to turn the Gain and Master knobs down... but this also affects the tone. It's tricky... it would have been nice to be able to trim the output volume a bit, but yes, that is unusual for instruments. Usually the onus is one the recording device to set the levels. We're lucky to have recording outputs at all on an amp.
One downside is that now I could easily re-record all of my current guitar parts... but no, all music or art is a document of the current times. I don't want to destroy the old amp's contribution before it's even been heard, but I might re-record some guitars on some tracks, partly to stop the newer ones sounding too different.
Then singing practice and a nice vocal and facial steam afterwards. My singing hasn't really improved over these past three days, but I can feel some muscle changes so I expect things are improving in intangible ways. In any daily training, some things will improve. I can't measure an improvement in vocal range or volume, but is that important anyway? Pitch accuracy and sense is perhaps the most important thing and this has certainly improved a lot.
Onward with joy!
