The Flip Medley

I’m going to rant for a moment here about something that I’ve noticed about myself, and something that I suspect is a problem that afflicts many musicians.

Gear lust.

It goes something like this — you hear a cool riff or a cool sound on an album, and you find out that the artist used something like $3,000 worth of gear to create that eargasmic moment, and you realize that your piddly home studio can’t possibly render such luscious aural tones.

And so… you have to buy more shit in order to fulfill your full potential as an artist.

I call bullshit on this one.

Let’s set the wayback machine to 1986…

I got my first synthesizer back then, and if you want to hear some “We were so poor…” stories, well, let’s face it — if you can afford a synthesizer, you’re really not poor. But back then, I aspired to a Casio CZ-101, which cost something like $350 back then. By luck, and because my parents were willing to spoil me on this (and possibly because the salesman looked a bit like Chuck Norris, which is a bit funnier now than it was then), I got an Akai AX-60 synthesizer. Six voice polyphony, with the ability to do a “split” allowing me to set it up so that it could play two different sounds (patches) at once. Typically, this was so I could cue up a funky bass sound for my left hand, and play chords/melody with my right hand with a totally different patch.

Cool beans, right?

My first “band” consisted of myself, Alex Davis, and Lawrence Flack. Alex splurged the following Christmas and picked up a Casio CZ-1, a Kawai R100 drum machine, and a Yamaha TX81Z. Oh, and later on he picked up an Ensoniq ESQ-M rack mount tone module, and I added a Casio RZ-1 drum machine, and a Roland S-10 sampler.

And we made some great music and had fun times railing against the limitations of our “ghetto gear”. We experimented, and played with music from the gut, the heart, and the mind. All fun stuff, and I’ve got a bunch of old analog tapes that I’ll eventually convert to MP3s to show how talentless and yet how fun it all was.

I’ll probably wind up remixing all of that stuff… but more on that later…

You may notice that I made a big deal out of cataloging all of the equipment we used… mainly because you’ll notice that nothing there cost more than $1200 new. I think the Roland S-10 ran something like $1100 brand new. Later on, I bought a Korg Wavestation-EX, a Roland MC-505 groovebox, and, years later, after the Wavestation began suffering a stuck key, a Yamaha CS6X. I also picked up a 32-channel rackmountable Mackie Mixer and some very nice Mackie HR824 monitors…

All of which are collecting a nice healthy layer of dust in my basement

Why?

Because I got bored making music. My heart is, and always has been in computer programming and writing software. Music is my mistress, not my wife. I dabble in it, with no expectiations as to ever “making it”. Once you lose your hair, hopes of being a pop culture icon like, oh, Kevin Federline

*pukes*

…fade. Plus, I’m honestly not a very good musician.

Self-awareness is key, I might add…

So here I sit, 36 years old… still thinking I can make the odd funky beat with a throbbing bass line. Last time I really played with other humans, I was hanging with James and Terri Cubeta and Barry. Terri and I even had a bit of a percussion thang going as I’d throw something at her with the 505 and she’d play something back on her drum kit. Good times…

Then I had a Prince-like epiphany… one like the story I remember, vaguely, from an old Keyboard Magazine about how he got frustrated with all the electronic gear he had and just chucked it all and began rebuilding his studio from scratch to feed himself creatively.

See, the thing Prince and every other musician realizes is that — at a certain point, your gear can wind up becoming your prison. Creatively, you may become bogged down doing what you know and working with tools you’ve become so familiar with that there is absolutely nothing that can surprise you. And surprise, I believe, is part of the creative process. It’s always there — in that moment where someone plays something that catches you off-guard, and makes you bob your head. It’s there, when that one sound makes a shiver go up your spine. As cool as it is when you hear someone play slick lick on a song, imagine what it’s like to be in a room full of musicians when someone has the moment when they make something new, and everyone’s ears perk up and they begin adding to it!

That’s about as good as it gets. With your clothes on.

So fast forward to last week… I’m hanging out at Kym’s place, and met up with her roomie John who did some really cool shit with just his two turntables and a mixer. And here I sit with my laptop and all my techno stuff, and I realized that maybe, just maybe, I needed to get back to basics. Basics being — jam anywhere. Jam with whatever ever is at hand. Jam with the laptop. Jam with a spoon on my thigh. Just make music when I feel like making music, whether beatboxing or hand-slapping the railing on an elliptical machine while running.

And today, I realized… I can do cool shit with a cheapo MIDI controller, my laptop, Reason 3.0, and some old beat-up computer speakers.

Damn. I could have saved so much money if I’d figured this out earlier!

So here’s the deal… I’m going to try to get back on the music horse, ride it down the road a bit, and start posting MP3s of my stuff under Creative Commons licensing. I have no illusions about being a big-time recording artist, but I think it’d be cool to feed the world some cool drum loops and bass lines. And maybe the odd song, here ‘n there.