Why everyone should learn an instrument

A persuasive essay for English.

In my experience, I’d say learning even the basics of my first instrument - the bass guitar - was as beneficial to me as learning the alphabet. First off, I will present some simple reasons why leaning an instrument is so rewarding.

Ø It’s a challenge, and it builds patience.
Of course, the level of the challenge changes depending on the instrument you’re taking on. But in any case, your instrument will pose some immediate challenges. For instance, on a guitar or bass, you have to develop calluses on your fingers - pressing those strings down hurts. But persistence pays off quickly - you can wake up in the morning with the ability to play something you couldn’t the night before. With these rock instruments in particular, you can learn to jam with other musicians very quickly, and jamming is some of the most fun you can have.

Ø You can have fun with it at any skill level.
Part of the reason for this is that more advanced musicians will gladly jam with a beginner - in my case, when I was just a young bassist, I had the opportunity to play with virtuoso guitarist Keston Barker, a fellow Windsor Housian, and this helped me to develop. You’re always on your feet when you’re playing with someone with more experience. Now when I’m playing with a beginning player, I find it not only lets me relax a lot while playing, but it helps me learn how to play simple things.

Ø Improvement is a constant possibility.
I went to a saxophone workshop in north Van a while back, and one of the instructors, who’d been playing for (about) 30+ years said, “If I ever run out of things to practice, I’m gonna quit playing.” They talked about a pianist friend of theirs, who’d died at around age 75, and they said that up until his last month, he would still come home from gigs at 2 a.m. and then practice until 4 a.m. Whether you’re just learning your instrument casually, or you’re a 70-year-old pianist named McCoy Tyner who played with John Coltrane, you’re never gonna reach a dead end.

Ø You listen to music in a totally different way.
Of course, if you’ve never touched an instrument in your life, it’s easy to take music for granted - not to say that non-musicians can’t like music, but I myself couldn’t appreciate a great guitarist like Nick Drake before taking up the instrument.
You start to listen to everything, and picture what the music would feel like if you were playing it. You start to ask, “How is that done?” And when you start learning theory, if you choose that path, you can recognize certain chord progressions, rhythms, or scales by ear - even in sounds that aren’t music, like human speech, or traffic sounds. Also, the theory can lead you to listen to music you wouldn’t have considered before - for instance, you could just be playing Nirvana all day, then suddenly become an Eric Dolphy fan. For instance.


Now, here are some arguments that I’d like to settle.

Ø An instrument? That’s a huge commitment! I don’t have time for that!
Not true. You don’t have to devote your whole life to it - like I said before, you can enjoy yourself with only four chords. And anyways, it’s a much better way of avoiding your homework than watching the boob tube.

Ø I like music, but I can’t play it. I’m not musical.
Of course you’re not musical if you don’t try an instrument. If you try it, you are musical. No one is born with the ability to play. If you are inclined to play, you can play.

Ø But I can’t even keep a beat!
What do you think drummers and metronomes are for?

Ø I can’t read music.
You don’t need to be able to read music to play it, especially if you’re just starting out. Whatever you need to learn off the top, a friend can show you.

I’d like to conclude that music can not only improve your life in all the ways I’ve mentioned and more, but that it puts good vibes in the air and improves the quality of life of people around you. I have had two people in my co-op, people I hardly even know, come up to me and say almost exactly the same thing: “I love hearing the saxophone - I feel like I’m living in Europe!” People want to hear music. Give it to ‘em.

Journal from February twenty-second

Tea is the life-blood

When ya wake up, ya gotta have that extra kick. And while many choose to destroy their existence with coffee¹, tea is clearly the superior beverage.

Tea has meant a lot to me since I was very small. I started with regular, and remember clearly the first time I was offered earl grey tea. I was no older than five. Earl grey is one of my favourite teas², and some others are green tea with brown rice, peppermint, and Cambridge. What is Cambridge tea, you ask? Here’s how to make a cup for yourself: get a cup and fill it slightly less than halfway with milk, and fill the rest of the cup with hot water. Then, add a teaspoon of sugar, and a tiny amount of vanilla extract. To top it off, sprinkle some cinnamon and grated nutmeg on top. It’s the house specialty!

Now, let’s get back to my love of tea from an early age. I recollect a time when I was just four years of age, and my parents and I had just finished eating supper. I had begun to walk away from the table, when my parents offered me a cup of tea. Naturally, I couldn’t refuse! So, I started back over to the table, and as I neared it, I fell forward, catching my lip on the edge of the table as I went down. I had to go to the hospital to get my lip glued back together! So you see the things I go through for a damn cup of tea!!

Some people, who think they’re really “hard-core”, always take their tea black. I, however, always take milk and sugar in my tea, whatever kind it is. It tastes better! Now, I’m going to finish this cup of mandarin orange spice tea.

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1: Alright, I have nothing against coffee - I enjoy a good old cup every so often - it’s just that the ‘morning kick’ is usually associated with coffee, and I had to make it clear that I much prefer tea for this purpose.

2: The best brand of earl grey is Ridgeway’s Organic. It comes in a blue box, and is obtainable at Donald’s Market and Capers. It’s about five bucks a box, and the boxes contain forty bags. Even with that many bags, we still go through a box a week!

Note: The title and inspiration for this journal came from a conversation I had with Phoebe on the bus today. I said, “Tea is the life blood of….” and she rejoined, “life!”

Another entry about jazz at the End cafe? Boring!

That may seem like the case, but it's quite different now, because I'm not just listening anymore. I wrote a journal about it on January 27th.

Original title:
"Why this journal is late"

The reason I couldn’t submit this journal last monday is simple: I didn’t have time to write it on the weekend, because I was getting ready to play at the End Café on sunday night. So now I figure that I ought to write about what that was like.

Two sundays ago, The Fab and I were listening to live jazz at the End Café, as usual. Then Jason, the tenor player, came up to our table and asked, “So, when are you guys gonna come and play?!” “When we’re good enough,” I replied. “If I waited until I was ‘good enough’,” he said, “I would never play.” He made us promise to bring our instruments the next week. So we did.

We had four songs in our repertoire: “Equinox” by John Coltrane; “Little sunflower” by Freddie Hubbard; “Tune-up” by Miles Davis; and “Mr. P.C.”, also by Coltrane. I had been nervous the whole day. When I stepped onto the stage, though, all my questions of “What scales should I use?” etc. just disappeared. The band was Jason, Ian (bass), Graham (drums), and Jim (guitar). Ian began playing the distinct intro to “Equinox”¹. I was standing next to Jason. Were we going to play the melody together, or would I play it on my own? I opted for the former. Then, when it came time for solos, Jason and I soloed at the same time (I guess you’d call that a duet). This went on for some time - the drums got louder and more intense.

One of the most interesting things about the experience was finally being able to hear what musicians talked about on stage. Jason was guiding me through it: “After this bass solo, there will be a drum solo, then there might be a vamp coming up, or we might just go straight back to the melody, so be ready for that.” The said drum solo was incredibly dynamic - during one insanely quiet bit, I was kneeling right next to the bass drum, wondering if anyone else could even hear it.

We then played “Little sunflower”, and took a break. Fab and I returned to the stage at about twenty-to-nine for the last two songs of the night - “Tune-up” and “Mr. P.C.” Both were much faster then we were used to, and the band was bigger - we were joined by Jerry (trumpet) and another Jim (alto). There was also a different drummer, Alicia. My solo on “Tune-up” was probably my best that night, and Fab’s solo on “Mr. P.C.” was explosive. Jason told us, “You’re welcome to come back and play any time you want.” It was an excellent learning experience.

And That is why I didn’t do any homework last weekend.

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1: “Equinox” is most commonly played in the key of C minor, but according to The Jazz Theory book, “the best players like to play it in its original key, C-sharp minor” (the latter being a harder key to play in). When Jason asked which key Fab and I played it in, he was quite impressed that we fall into the “best players” category.
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We played the following week as well, but only on two songs, and took a break on the third week. This coming sunday, we'll play again, and just an hour ago I learned a new song: "Maiden voyage" by Herbie Hancock. I'm going to aim to learn Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" soon as well.

Journal from December eighth

The subject was "An important leader" - however you interpret that.

An Important leader

If you were to ask me, “Who’s Sun Ra?”, I’d simply say, “He’s a jazz musician from Saturn.” He was a pianist/keyboardist, and led an ‘Arkestra’ of about thirty members, though the personnel changed constantly.

The Arkestra lived in a house with him in Philadelphia. To pay rent, they operated a corner grocery store. Ra taught the Arkestra members not only about harmony (a subject on which he was very knowledgeable), but about his ‘Cosmic philosophy’. In Robert Mugge’s documentary ‘Sun Ra: a joyful noise’, we see Ra in interviews in an Egyptian exhibit at a museum - they couldn’t afford to fly him to the pyramids - saying things like (I’m gonna have to paraphrase a bit here), “Each of my songs tells a different story. The sunrise doesn’t repeat itself - why should I repeat myself?”, and “Some call me Mr. Ra, others call me Mr. E. You can call me Mr. Mystery.”

In an interview outside the White House, he says, “I’m standing outside the White House, and I’m looking across the street, and I don’t see the Black House. A thing cannot exist without its opposite.” You see, he’s just proved that the White House doesn’t actually exist, which works for me.

One definition I’ve found of the word “Leader” is “a person who inspires others” - Sun Ra was definitely this for his Arkestra, and for many others, to be sure. One of the few longstanding members of the Arkestra, tenor saxman John Gilmore¹ is asked in ‘A joyful noise’, “You’re one of the most respected saxophonists around - why do you stay here with Sun Ra?” He says, “Well, I used to play with Mingus and Monk, and I thought they wrote some mean intervals². I’d been playing with Sun Ra for six months, learning this song, but I’d never really got it. And then, all of a sudden….I just got it. And I said to myself, ‘My lord, this man is more stretched out than Monk!!’”

I’ve known about Sun Ra practically since I was born, but didn’t ‘get into’ him until just last year. Of everything I’ve heard by him (which is relatively little), the album Lanquidity is easily my favourite. Sometime in the new year, I’m hoping to do an arrangement of the song “Where pathways meet” at a Coffee House.

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1: John Gilmore joined the Arkestra in the ‘50s, and is now one of its leaders as Sun Ra has returned to Saturn.

2: Mean Intervals: An interval is the name given to the difference in pitch between two notes, either sounded in succession or in unison. For example, the interval between a C and an F is called a fourth, because they are four notes apart (counting the C and the F, not just the notes between them - C-D-E-F). Now, Gilmore is using the word ‘Mean’ in the same way I would use the word ‘Wicked’ when referring to the guitar technique of ‘dead-stringing’.

Journal from December fifteenth

It seems I write my best journals when Gary tells me, "Write whatever you want." I sat before my beputer for roughly an hour, not knowing what to write.... and then, it hit me! Given the subject, it had to be relatively long, but if I'd written everything there was to write on the subject....well, I'd run out of space on my hard-drive. And here is why:

Things that The Fab complains about

Like a life-support system, Fab always needs something to complain about. Get him started on any of the subjects I’m about to list, and he could literally go on for an hour. The reason for this is that he has the strange ability to segue seamlessly from one complaint to another, and the way he manages this will soon become apparent.

“Elephant talk”

The Fab and I are big fans of prog rock - Yes, Jethro Tull, and the like. A fave, though, would be prog veterans King Crimson (known to their enthusiasts as ‘Crimso’). Fab will endlessly quote songs like “Epitaph” or “21^st century schizoid man”. So, what’s there to complain about? Well, in 1974, ol’ Crimso called it quits, and then they resurfaced in 1981 with a new lineup, including the singer/guitarist Adrian Belew. They released an album called Discipline that year, featuring the lead track “Elephant talk”. Basically, the song is Adrian Belew pulling out his thesaurus and reading out all the words that have to do with talking. “Arguments! Agreements!” he yells, doing his best David Byrne impression¹. Each verse features words starting with a different letter - “A”, “B”, et cetra. He even informs us of this extremely complex formula in the “D” verse, saying, “These are words with a “D” this time.” The only reason this song exists, and the reason for its title, is that Adrian Belew had cleverly found a way of making elephant noises on his guitar, and needed a way of showing this off.

When I played it for him, The Fab nearly died from being exposed to such repugnance. On one occasion, he complained loudly about the song for about half an hour on the bus, weaving it in with other complaints, as he is wont to do. I must agree - the song is of a very low quality - but I like the rock’n guitar solo (and admittedly, the guitar-elephant sounds), so I can stand it.

The lack of large trees on his block

Here in East Van, on 6^th avenue, there are some pretty spectacular trees. On The Fab’s block however, the trees don’t reach his high, high standards, which have grown to suit trees more along the lines of 6^th ave’s beauteous arbors. He says that when they were planting trees around Vancouver, they intentionally neglected to place large trees on his block, just to piss him off. He says that this allows his “worst enemy, the sun” into his room - so really, it’s the sun he hates.

Jaslene

Well, I’ll have to tell you straight up; we watch America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) pretty much every week. Last season, there was a girl competing named Jaslene. The Fab would see her on the screen and yell, “Eat a frikk’n sandwich!!” He felt she was too thin, and that she looked like a man. For most of the season, it was pretty fun for us all - The Fab liked complaining about Jaslene (because she gave him something to complain about), and the rest of us enjoyed laughing with him. Then something happened that totally wrecked it (for The Fab, anyways) - Jaslene won! I think that The Fab screamed when he saw that. Now, whenever he sees an image of Jaslene, even for a split second, he goes, “Ahh!! *&%^ing Jaslene!!!

“Tarantula”
“This dust makes that mud”

“Tarantula” is a book by Bob Dylan - over one hundred pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. I remember the first time I opened it, being in awe of how little sense it seemed to make;

“Aretha / crystal jukebox queen of him & hymn….”²

I challenged The Fab to make sense of the book - huge mistake. He looked at it and went, “That doesn’t make sense! Bob Dylan is a crazy lunatic!!!!!!” All the time after that, virtually every time he came over, he would pull it out and say, “Okay, I’m going to make sense of this!!”, and naturally, he would just wind up getting more pissed off.

“This dust makes that mud” is a song by New York-based experimental band The Liars. It is thirty minutes long. The first eight or so minutes are like a normal song (well, normal for The Liars, anyway), but the remaining twenty-two minutes drive The Fab up the wall. Those twenty-two minutes are entirely composed of a four-second loop, continuously repeated. It’s not noise - there’s a drum track, bass, guitar - it’s just a cool loop! But The Fab says, “It’s music for insane people!!!”

One day, The Fab and Cosima were over, The Liars’ album They threw us all in a trench and stuck a monument on top was playing, and The Fab decided, once again, to take another stab at ol’ “Tarantula”. After The Fab discarded it in disgust, Cosima demanded to see it, and quickly proclaimed, “This makes perfect sense!” I decided to read it aloud for a while, and I agreed with Cosima - it made plain sense. As this was happening, “This dust makes that mud” was playing, and The Fab was discovering his extreme dislike for it. These things combined must have made a significant impact on him, these things he detests so.

My Chemical Romance

A band that I, myself, have never actually heard. The Fab makes them out to be absolute criminals, though. He says, “You have to hear them, so you can know what I’m going through!” I say, “Why would I want to do that?” He says that as long as I haven’t heard them, I’m not allowed to complain about him complaining about them. Along with My Chemical Romance, he is ready to complain about Fallout Boy, Panic! at the disco, +44, Blink 182, Angels and Airways, and so on, at any hour of the day. You may wonder how he even knows about all these bands that he despises so much. Well, that leads us to the final complaint, the root of all evil, the thing that every complaint he ever had will eventually trace back to….

Graham

Graham may seem like a normal guy; enjoys a laugh, has some hobbies, likes his friends. Little did The Fab know, Pure Evil lurked below that funny, slightly portly exterior. By The Fab’s account, one day Graham came up, shoved his ear bud headphones in his (The Fab’s) ears, and said, “Listen to this My Chemical Romance, isn’t it great?” He also subjected The Fab to all the bands I mentioned above.

Now, regardless of what he is complaining about, The Fab will almost invariably end his rants (which we’ll get to in a moment) with, “Ugh, I hate Graham!!” To sum it up, I’ll give you an analogy that The Fab makes often; if The Fab was Jerry Seinfeld, Graham would be Newman.

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1: David Byrne was the singer from the Talking Heads. His style was less singing and more yelling in a sort of preacherly way. When David did his thing, it was original and witty. When Adrian Belew, who played guitar with the Talking Heads, ripped him off, he sounded like a jackass.

2: See Bob Dylan’s “Tarantula”, p. 1.

End notes

The Fab’s preferred medium to express these complaints it The Rant. The Fab is a master of the Rant, which is no small achievement - if you’re a bad Ranter, you’ll quickly bore your audience, and The Fab is no bore. His ability to segue from one Rant to another holds one’s attention, and he never runs out of things to complain about. The Fab is an actor, so he sometimes finds clever ways of Ranting in a certain character. The supreme example of this is the Great Peeping Tom, an artful conduit by which The Fab Rants about Gangsta Rap. Peeping, as he is sometimes called, is an unfathomably prolific white rapper, releasing a new album every five minutes or so (all of them concept albums). I remember his birth; we were playing video games in The Fab’s room, and suddenly, he began talking in Peeping’s imitable voice. “Ah kiwed a man when ah was six yeahs owd, y’undestan? Ah was inna stoodeeo, recoydin mah firs EP, anna recoydin engineeah disst mah rahms, so ah bit his heddoff, y’undestan. An dat became th issperation fo mah firs album: “Bitin’ a man’s head off in the studio”.

It didn’t occur to me until recently to ask The Fab, “How is it that you wound up hearing all those My Chemical Romance/+44/whatever songs all the way through?” He said, “I was being polite!”

Journal from October eighth

Another "Write whatever you want" deal.

How I came to love jazz

An interesting topic, for it wasn’t as straightforward as it might have been had my parental units been jazz fans. My first real encounter would have taken place just before my birthday in 2005. I was dropping by a friend’s house, and her dad, Neill, had on this incredibly upbeat music. I was familiar with the sound, but I didn’t even know the name of the genre. I said, “I love this kind of music!” and borrowed the album.

On the morning of October eighteenth, my fourteenth birthday, my mother showed me an e-mail she’d received that she fancied to be quite comical, showcasing some ridiculous Halloween costumes. I, however, was quite un-amused, and elected to retire to the living room and listen to the album I’d borrowed; Misterioso by the Thelonious Monk Quartet. I had taken up the bass guitar two months previous, so my focus was primarily on the bass player, Ahmed Abdul Malik. The long, unaccompanied saxophone solos of Johnny Griffin also made an impression on me.

Now, I have no recollection why, but I returned the album soon after and didn’t ask to borrow any more jazz. It was not until sometime in mid-2006, when I began listening to Frank Zappa, that I became interested in jazz again. How this came about was simple; my mother decided that, since I was playing guitar, I should hear Zappa, and bought me a copy of Hot Rats. The thing that caught my ear more than anything else on the album was Ian Underwood’s sax solo on ‘The Gumbo Variations.’ Hearing this, combined with my discovery of the band King Crimson (whose early material features the sax prominently), made me think, ‘This is the instrument I have to learn.’

Around the same time, I was profusely studying music theory in The Guitar Handbook, which I had also borrowed from Neill. There was a short segment in the book describing everything a jazz guitarist has to know - virtually every imaginable chord and scale, and, importantly, he or she must be completely aware of what all the other members of the band are doing at any given time. (Of course, I didn’t know that this pretty much applies to jazz players on all instruments.) The very same day that I read this, I went to an opening at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where there was a live jazz trio playing - guitar, bass and drums. In retrospect, it was basically just ‘mingling’-type music, but I was still quite enthralled. I couldn’t fathom all the things happening in that guitarist’s nodding head.

I began listening to all the jazz that was available in my immediate sphere, mostly Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. I began taking saxophone lessons in December, 2006 with Colin Maskell, and attended a gig he played at The Main on, you guessed it, Main Street. This gig was my first encounter with Joe Poole, whom I’ve mentioned before as my favourite drummer. My second favourite drummer is Shelly Manne, whom I’ve heard on Sonny Rollins’s Way out west album. His solo on ‘Wagon Wheels’ is one of my favourite moments in music.

I am still playing the saxophone, though Colin unfortunately is unable to teach privately anymore. As I’ve mentioned many times before, I attend live jazz nights every sunday at the End Café, and am reading The Jazz Theory Book by Mark Levine.

Journal from October first

The assignment was, "Write 300 words on whatever you want".

Musical Hooks

A musical hook is an identifiable thing in a song that makes you want to hear it again, or that gets stuck in your head. There are many kinds; melodic hooks, guitar riff hooks, simply awe-inspiring technical proficiency hooks, and ‘Wow, I love the tone of X’s guitar’ hooks - these are all available. I will list a handful of ‘hooky’ songs, or songs that I at least find hooky, and explain just what makes them so appealing.

Cadilac [sic] - T. Rex

Simplicity is key in rock music and indeed, hook-crafting, so we’ll begin with one of its kings -- Mr. Marc Bolan. This song features a simple yet effective guitar riff (one chord, an open D) and the most primary¹ message in all of music: “I love ya, babeh!” Anyone who’s known me for more than a week is likely to have heard me burst out with Marc’s declaration of “Babeh, I wanna buy you a Cadillac!” (I usually revise it to ‘Buy you a bayou’.) It’s in the melody and words -- ‘listen to this song again!!’

Psycho killer - Talking heads

I was in a record store one afternoon, the album ‘Talking heads: 77’ playing loudly from every corner of the room, and when ‘Psycho killer’ came on, everyone started dancing and singing along. It’s impossibly catchy. The pulse of the opening bass line, the nervously intoned vocals of David Byrne and the staccato guitar are inescapable. The strange addition of French in the chorus and the entirely French bridge also contribute to the hook factor. “Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est ?”

So, we’ve already looked into lyrical, melodic and guitar hooks. What about those “technical proficiency hooks” I referred to earlier?

Roundabout - Yes

It opens with the harmonic-laden guitar of Steve Howe, perhaps a hook in its own right. After this mediaeval-themed intro, roughly a minute long, we experience a falling feeling and are then caught and held aloft by the real hook: Chris Squire’s wondrous bass line. The bass guitar was my first instrument, so I have always felt that I have a deep connection with the bassist I’m listening to, especially because of how ignored the instrument is by the general pop-music listening public. I would say the reason for its being so underappreciated is that most rock bassists, in the lightest terms, suck terribly-- but that’s another story, as Mr. Squire is first-class. I listen to the bass line, and my head just snaps back-- it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that I Am In Love with it. Proving his talent even further (as though he needs to), Squire sings as well, inflecting a melody that is, once again, a hook. Yet many people could hear ‘Roundabout’ and be quite unaffected, nay, turned off by what they would perceive as bombast. “Puke” is a word they would use. But they know not what they do.

Now, let’s stop floundering about and get to the Granddaddy (what a terrible expression!) of all hooky songs.

Smells like teen spirit - Nirvana

Too obvious? Well, the song is all hook - un-emit-able (not inimitable). We are confronted right off by the hook of the guitar riff-- wicked dead-stringing in tow².

The loud drums and heavy bass enter, moshing ensues. When we reach the verse, another couple of hooks are immediately apparent.

First of all, the dynamic changes from loud to soft-- now a far-too-common hook, but effective, nonetheless. The two ringing notes of the guitar are serene, and the vocal melody is admittedly beautiful. The lyrics are quite open to interpretation, I think, but maybe I only say that because I have no idea what they’re about. But whatever it is, it’s intense, and it’s hooky. The chorus, coming back to loud, features the guitar riff and the sarcasm of the lyric “Here we are now, entertain us.” Between the chorus and the second verse is an extremely strange four-bar interlude. There are a couple of dissonant power chords, followed by Kurt Cobain slurring “Yay!”, sounding almost like a horn (the same sort of ‘What the #*!@ did I just hear?’ hook can be found in Radiohead’s ‘Creep’). When the guitar solo comes around, between the second strange post-chorus and the third verse, Cobain simply cops the vocal melody, note for note, allowing us to really notice how hooky the melody is.

A lesser-known song now, though it can easily stand up to any other song, hook-wise.

Denise - Fountains of Wayne

This single opens with yet another guitar hook, again complete with wicked dead-stringing. Singer Chris Collingwood brings us back to The Primary Colours of Rock with the incredibly embarrassing opening line “I know this girl named Denise / She makes me weak at the knees.” The second part of the verse features the sure-fire hook of Sha-na-na-na, na-na, na backing vocals, and the equally embarrassing line “I can’t help myself.” We then reach the chorus and the post-chorus interlude, with their hooky vocal and keyboard melodies, respectively. The whole process repeats, and a rock’n guitar solo is included before the pop powerhouse is wrapped up.

Everybody thinks I’m a raincloud when I’m not looking - Guided by Voices

Robert Pollard is the singer of Guided by Voices, a gifted poet with a mind-blowing sense of melody. The chorus of this song combines these two superpowers perfectly. A notable hook besides this is the drum part building slowly during the opening, and dropping out in parts of the chorus as Pollard sings “Everyday, it’s another world”.

Saint Elmo’s fire - Robert Fripp and Brian Eno

I gotta admit, Brian Eno’s voice doesn’t do much for me, so there would have to be something in this song that really gets me for me to mention it. It’s Fripp’s guitar solo. Part of it is just the sound of his guitar alone-- it’s the most beautiful of sounds. Fripp has a way of choosing notes that contain so much emotion, love, resigned happiness….It’s something to behold. Other than the solo, I also enjoy the simple beauty of the lyric “In the blue august moon”.


Now, we’ve covered hooks. I said a hook is an identifiable thing that makes you want to hear a song again. Suppose you want to hear something again, but there isn’t a particular element that appeals to you. I guess it could be the tone of it, or maybe there’s something in it that bugs you, that somehow, you find alluring. I think the greatest hook is when a song makes you feel an emotion you wouldn’t otherwise be feeling. That is for another journal.

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1: See attached page on The Primary Colours of Rock. The primary that Marc is concerned with, in virtually all cases, is horny.

2: Dead-stringing is when a guitarist mutes the strings with her left hand while striking them, so that no discernable pitch is actually sounded, just a percussive chk. The technique is often found in funk, and is not to be confused with ‘palm-muting’, which is when the guitarist mutes the strings with his right hand, resulting in a more staccato note than usual. Inclusion of dead-stringing in a guitar riff always gets me, and I always use the word ‘wicked’ when referring to it.

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The Primary Colours of Rock

On April second, 2006, I formed a musical duo called Occupant with Stella Abdul. Here was our method: we would sit down and say, “We’ve got two hours to write, rehearse and record four songs. Go.” To assist us in this endeavor, I drew up a fascinating little device called The Primary Colours of Rock. Basically, I said the three emotions continually expressed in rock music are Aggressive, Self-pity and Horny, either on their own or in different combinations. We could then simply select one of the colours, or a combination of them, and our rock song would practically write itself. Occupant produced over sixty songs throughout April alone.

Where am I?

Why have I not written ene-thing in two months, you may ask. Well, that's not a valid question, because I have been writing outside of this blog. I have a life outside of you demanding leeches!!

I have been attending a school in the west end, City School, which is located within the King George school building. I am actually taking classes for pretty much the first time ever, English among them. This is where my writing has been going. Each week we are required to write a journal, usually on a topic that is chosen for us. The best ones so far have been 'A social outcast' (which I wrote about Prickle from Gumby Adventures), 'Musical hooks' (my choice), and 'My imaginary friend.' I will post all of these here.

I'm listening to 'Midnite Vultures' by Beck. I discovered that there are two other fellow-fans of this album at City School among the thirty or so students in attendance.

For art class, or rather in place of it, I am organizing a Coffee House with my new business partner, Tamlyn. It will feature music, poetry reading and, of course, COFFEE! I am planning on performing solo guitar pieces, which I will have to write, and jazz. I actually wrote one the guitar pieces yesterday - the whole thing. This is like a miracle for me! I used a riff I created a few months ago, and the ending is quite Yes-ish. It will appear either here or on glissando as soon as it's recorded. I have already performed it for The Fab and Sarrah, who both enjoyed it, in all its mercurial glory.