Gary's Guitar Wankery

Owen's Baby Blues

January 8, 2008

Owen and I were jamming today (he sings, plays harmonica, and eats the mic) and it sounded so hot that we wanted to get it down "on disk" as they say. We pretty much banged it out in one try and I think the results speak for themselves. Lilly also got in on the act and did a great job as well.

We all hope you enjoy Owen's Baby Blues.

 

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BOSS effects pedals - for sale

January 5, 2008

CE-3 Chorus, DD-3 Digital Delay, OC-2 Octave, SD-1 Super Overdrive.



I've never sold anything on eBay before. I don't consider myself much of a capitalist so I kind of hate selling stuff. I dislike when people want me to give them a price. I want them to make me an offer, but they always want me to tell them how much.

Anyway, I figured I might as well advertise it here.

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High Density Purple Cheese

December 11, 2007

Well I'm back. I'm not so sure about this one, but as in previous recordings, I started it, so I must finish it, no matter how painful. ;) There are like a million overdubs on this thing. I really went overboard, but it was fun to do so screw it. My soloing is kind of sloppy and not structured real well, but I can only take so much before I want to kill something. The truth is I don't practice enough and I'm not all that great at soloing. Heavy rhythm parts where always my thing. Anyway, the two main solos are OK and not even close to perfect but after I had them I said ENOUGH. No more. I'm not all that interested in this! The general gist is there, so there is stays. I do feel like I had a nice guitar sound on this though. I messed around with my amp quite a bit before recording. There are 5 different amp tones and one tone that is a different guitar. I did some double tracking and panning to make a nice rhythm tone and also did some fake doubling of the solos.

OK - I doubt anyone will answer this, but where did I steal the main riff from? I mouthed it to myself before I started this project, but after I played it I felt like I had heard it before. I'm sure I have. It's so basic, I had to have ripped it off from some song, but I don't know where. Well where ever it's from, I tried to do my own thing with it...

I used the Parker for everything accept the first main solo, which is the Strat.

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Taking a break

November 26, 2007

I haven't felt like playing or recording lately so I'm just taking a break from recording until I do feel like doing it again. I'm sure it won't be long before I'm in the mood for it. I feel pretty good about my experiment in creativity so far. But like everything else I try to do, I reach a point where I want to stop for a while. Playing guitar has always been an on again off again kind of thing with me and I feel like that trend will continue. Eventually I'll get back into it and I'll go back to recording. Maybe next time I'll put more time and care into each project (which will mean they're take longer to complete) or maybe not. I'll just have to see when I feel inspired again. I'm pleased with a lot of what I managed to do in a few months. I think some of it is really pretty cool. I know I'm not the greatest player in the world, but I know a few tricks. ;) I hope someone else out there has enjoyed some of this, so far. Thanks to those of you that have been supportive. I'll be back!

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In The Middle - Yeah Right

November 9, 2007

Since I have nothing new to offer, I'm going back in time again to 1989. This weird ditty sort of has a latin feel to it. But not really. I don't know what to say about it other than I liked playing it. It was another step away from playing heavy metal.

 

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The Penalty

October 30, 2007

I enjoyed the sound of the whole tone stuff I did on the last track so much that I decided to go all out and just wank away for like seven minutes while the computer recorded. I kept the last four minutes or so, because that was when I was really getting into it. All that's going on here is a bass note changing back and forth from E to A and I'm soloing over it using a whole tone scale that sounds nice to me. No over dubs at all on this one. If it sounds weird to your ears it's because most people don't use whole tone scales exclusively (and I'm not great at soloing anyway). Another weird thing about this piece is that there isn't a comfortable pattern going on for the background. The beat is pretty standard, but the amount of times each section repeats is not the usual 2, 4 or 8 or whatever. So it switches around right when you're starting to get comfortable and when you don't expect it to. The whole thing is supposed to be somewhat disorienting and also should annoy most people. I like it because I find the more you listen to something like this, the more normal it starts to sound. And then when you start liking it you know you've lost your mind hahahahaha! :)� I used the Parker only.

 

 edit - 11/5/07

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Whole-oween, Hung Over Dubbed Part 2

October 27, 2007

Woof! This one is a dog. It's got a face only a mother could love. From the title you can deduce that: it's an experiment with whole tone scales, it's somehow related to another tune I've done, and it's creepy. I noticed last night while playing around with it that the one riff one kind of similar to the riff from Hung Over Dubbed. Oh well. I had already put in a bunch of time on it and I wasn't about to trash it, since I have no ideas lately. So while playing around with it, it went from having pretty standard soloing to me deciding that I liked how it sounded to play a whole tone scale over the main riff and also over another part. The thing that surprised me was that I could play over an E bass note with a scale that didn't even contain an E in it and it still sounded good to me. Now it may not sound good to YOU hahaha, but I don't care. I threw in a standard scale kind of solo near the end so your ear could sort of recover from whole tone stuff that came before it. The more I messed around with it the more I liked it (sounds like lyrics to a King Crimson song hahaha) and I noticed that it had a creepy kind of sound. So it's now my Halloween song. Sure it's ugly and sloppy, but I love it. OK maybe love is too strong a word hahaha. I used the Parker only.

EDIT - 10/29/07  - I did a remix with a different drum track and uploaded it today. Just added some cymbal crashes and some transition drum fills to make it slightly less boring. I've decided that I like this weird thing, so I felt it needed a little something extra.

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F You

October 19, 2007

Here's another little thing I threw together in a couple of days. And by that I mean it took me that long to finish it, but it wasn't like I spent all day on it. A couple hours on the drums and bass, a couple on the guitar and a little time just playing around with it. But I don't have a lot of consecutive hours to play around with and I also just get tired of these things and let them rest a bit. I did some guitar yesterday and then just decided to quit for the night. I felt like I'd be more fresh the next day. It didn't really work out that way, but I tried. ;) Anyway, on most of my little songs there's a lot of echo and/or reverb and other effects going on. I've even been putting some reverb on the drums when I felt like that's what I wanted. This time I decided to go bare bones and have minimal effects. There's a tiny bit of ambient reverb on the guitar and drums and a tiny bit of delay on the guitar. You can't really notice it unless you listen to the guitar without it. The only other effect is some wah wah. Oh and the title refers to the key. I used the Parker.

 

 

"The video is from 1988. The tune is from 2007. They don't go together at all. I don't care."

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A Lost Land

October 16, 2007

Just a little something I whipped up before I start working on a more involved project. I think this will be how things happen pretty often. One or two small scale recordings before I work on something with more to it. I did on the drum and bass parts last night and recorded the guitar parts this morning. Don't know why, just did it for the hell of it. Lot of reverb and digital echo going on. The digtal echo makes a swirlling effect. There's also some heavy phaser on the guitars too. I used the Parker only.

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Pink Fog

October 13, 2007

Yikes! This is a bit of a mess, but what the heck? It is what it is so I'm putting it up here. I worked for two days on it so if I must suffer, so will you. HAHAHA ;) OK maybe it's not so bad. I'm not sure yet. Sometimes things grow on me that I didn't like at the time. Like "Hung Over Dubbed" for instance. I didn't like that one very much when I finished it, but now I like it much more. Anyway I felt like I needed to do something and quick because I went a whole week feeling like I didn't have any ideas. And I guess maybe I don't have any ideas. But I keep thinking if I force myself to try I'll get my brain in gear and things will happen. This time I just couldn't play guitar to save my life. I feel like I'm getting worse instead of better. But I've been in this place before. Usually it passes and I'm better than ever. Or at least not sucking so hard. Anyway, I had been enjoying improvising in G# minor over E and I felt like I should do something with that. This is the result of me trying to create something to solo over in G# minor - and yet there is hardly any real soloing going on, because of the previously mentioned sucking. I felt like most of it is gimmicky or lame. So I hammered away at what I had and locked it down before I became angry at it. I played the Parker exclusively.

EDIT - 10/14/07 - I had to redo the solo part near the beginning because it was making me ill. So the version up here now is different from the one I originally had up here. I think it's better than what it was.

I actually have just uploaded a third version. I wasn't happy with the last one either. I swear I'm done now. Time to step away and move on. Eeesh.

 

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Portales Blues

October 12, 2007

This is a short bit of some guitar playing that reminds me of sitting alone in my dorm room in New Mexico playing my acoustic guitar with one of those big metal tube magic markers, and wishing I was back home in New Jersey. Instead this thing was played on my beat up star guitar with the bottom part of a metal microphone. I'm also not nearly as blue as I was then. ;) I over dubbed some backing notes and a little melody line, using the strat. I felt like the week was rapidly ending and I hadn't worked on anything yet, so I threw this together in a few minutes. I'm hoping for some inspiration soon.

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The Ninth Power

October 5, 2007

See I told you I'd have something more substantial this time. This thing grew out of these cool sounding sus2 chord things I was playing (they're at the beginning of the piece). I was amazed that the four I picked, because they sounded good to me, happened to actually fit into a key. It was pure luck, or just me hearing things better, I'm not sure which. I decided to mess around with amp tones again and I used 5 different "amps" this time. I also decided to use a much less "heavy" or overdriven sound, since I had been so METAL on my last "song." For the backing rhythm I used four different sounding amps and paned each one to create a stereo effect/blend. That means I had to play the backing part four times. That wasn't much fun, but it was worth it for the sound, I think. I spent a good amount of time on the drum and bass parts but became bored of them after a while, so they don't vary a lot. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, although the solo is a tad weak, in my opinion. I was getting discouraged and kept the one that's on the track because it was OK. I have a hard time soloing to chord progressions. I prefer simple bass lines. I used the Parker for everything except the solo at the end, which was the strat.

edit - 10/06/07 - I did a re-mix of this tune today because when I listened to it again, I wasn't happy with the levels on certain parts. I also did some other probably inperceptible tweaking of the drums. Btw - this is the first tune to have piano samples on it. The funny thing is you can't really hear them hehehe. But they're there at the beginning of the song. It adds to the sound, you feel that they're there hahaha.

edit again - 10/10/07

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Bleeble

October 3, 2007

This came about after I hit the samples for bass C and D notes and then a jazz brush hit, in the drum software. I thought that it sounded like something and I decided to set up a loop. I then played the strat with the flanger on and used the expression peddle a little to vary the rate of the flange a little while playing. I just messed around for a few minutes and then saved a section. I then did a bit of guitar over dubbing and I was done. Yeah it's weird and kind of pointless, but so what? I'll be trying to work on something more substantial soon.

edit - 10/4/07 - Here's a little video I filmed today, with an even shorter version of the song. Why? Because I could.

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When Lies Kill

September 30, 2007

Most involved recording yet. This is my first attempt at a real "METAL" kind of sound. "The Metal Cheese Monster Attacks" doesn't really count because it's sort of anemic in comparison. I made a lot more of an effort to get a heavier guitar sound and also worked on the drums much more to make them fit the guitar parts. This time I actually came up with some guitar parts and recorded them so I wouldn't forget how they went, and then created bass and drum parts to fit those guitar parts. This was a challenge for me because the bass samples kind of suck and it's tough to make them do exactly what I need them to do. But it got close so it's ok. I definitely need a bass guitar for Christmas though. ;) After getting the drum and bass parts down (which I had to tweak considerably, a number of times) I started messing with guitar tones for the main heavy parts. I ended up using two different tones and recorded the same parts twice. Blended together, I think they sound better than separately. After that I began working on the solos and melody/harmony parts. I used a more modern wah wah sound and tweaked that a bit so it would be a little more extreme in the highs and not have the range of the default setting. I think it worked out ok, since the begining of this thing has some of the sickest guitar screeching known to man. I also used some flanger on one part. The wah parts are the strat and pretty much everything else is the Parker, though there is like eight seconds of the star guitar near the middle, just for the hell of it.

I was inspired to create this after watching the first four parts of Ken Burn's "The War"

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B Flat Canyon Blues

September 24, 2007

Another short piece that I whipped up in a couple hours for the heck of it. I felt like doing something today and I came up with this little beat and bass line. The day before I had been practicing a little with some heavy reverb on my amp and trying to play slow and pretty. It's not easy. And Blues is especially hard to do well. The notes of the blue scale sound good so that part is simple, but actually playing them well is something you can spend your life trying to do. I decided that I didn't want to work on this that long, so I only did like 10 or so tries (not including the little bit of octave doubling I did). I wanted the end of the thing to just sort of wash out in reverb, but I couldn't get it to quite work how I wanted. It's OK though. I played the white strat only.

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Hung Over Dubbed

September 23, 2007

This mercifully short piece is an example of what happens when I work on something for a while - in this case the drum and bass part - and then I don't like anything I'm coming up with to play on guitar. Then I feel like I put in so much time that I don't want to just completely scrap the whole thing, so I try to make it interesting but also keep it short. I didn't want to just double the bass riff, but I couldn't come up with anything else I liked. So, I ended up playing with amp tones to see what they sounded like. I used quite a bit of different tones and effects on the guitar. There's 3 different "amps" used and various effects. I'm not real thrilled with how it turned out but some of the guitar sounds sound nice to me. There's a lot going on in a short space. Each segment has like 4 or 5 guitar parts going on. I don't really consider things like this to be complete songs. They're more like song fragments that perhaps could appear again, or not. I used the Parker for everything except the little intro sound, which is the strat.

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In The Middle - Drunken Circus

September 18, 2007

I haven't had much time or inspiration lately, so here's another tune from the good ol' days. Back when I had really big hair. Of course this sickly little ditty doesn't make one think of hair bands or heavy metal. Instead it makes you a little queasy. I used to enjoy this one because it gave me a chance to relax a bit. When you're trying to play heavy metal songs, everything is so structured and precise and I'm not really good with that. I'm bound to make mistakes when something has to be perfect. In this case it's more about being loose than being tight. Here I get to play with some feedback and some chorus effect and hit the strings behind the bridge and bend the neck, etc... I even play a whole section using only harmonics. I also felt at the time that this tune and couple others we were doing were moving us in a different direction (towards who knows what) instead of trying to be a metal band. I felt like we should just keep trying to do our own thing and be weird, instead of emulating metal bands. As much as we loved that kind of music, I don't think we would have kept playing it forever, if we had kept playing.

 Here's the video of this...

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The Phrygian Middle East

September 13, 2007

OK, this time I had more fun doing the drum parts than anything else. I went nuts with different cymbals and other percussion samples. I think the drum track is the best part and I actually mixed it a bit louder to kind of hide the mess that's around it. The guitar parts don't really fit what the bass is doing but what the hell, the notes are the same so it's close anyway. This thing is another example of me saying "hey lets practice a scale/mode idea and make a tune out of it." In this case it's the Phrygian Major mode with a little Lydian #2 mode thrown in. As it turns out, the ancient countries Phrygia and Lydia were both in or near Turkey way back when, so I guess the names kind of fit the sound of the modes. I had no plan for this tune and after I got into it I realized that my soloing sucked and I didn't feel like doing 100 takes to get some halfway decent ones. So I came up with some simple melodies and did some octaves on some, and some 3rds on others. Then I gave up. I used the Parker exclusively.

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Harmony For Dummies

September 10, 2007

I have less time to work on these little tunes lately so I'm not sure how often I'll be posting them. It's taking me a few days to finish them now if not more.

This time I had a little guitar riff that I liked a little and had saved. I tried to make a drum part for it but I couldn't get one that seemed to fit. I worked on it anyway and tried to expand the resulting bass part into something song like. What I ended up with didn't really work though. I had trouble playing along to it and my rhythm guitar parts just sounded awful. After all that work I didn't feel like just soloing over the bass and drums (after doing that for most of the last tune) or ditching it completely, so I decided to come up with a little melody line that I could practice playing harmony to. This is the result. The original guitar part that inspired it isn't in the piece. I played the Parker exclusively.

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My Lydian Hell

September 6, 2007

OK it wasn't THAT hellish but man this was more frustrating than everything else so far put together. This thing started out as an exercise I set up on the drum and bass machine so I could practice an idea that was made more clear to me after years of sort of understanding what it was about. What I'm talking about is scales and modes. In this case the Lydian mode of major scales. If it sounds a bit like a rip off of Joe Satriani (except that my playing isn't anywhere near what he does) it's because the main part of the tune is in the same key and mode as his song "Flying In A Blue Dream" which to me is an example of near perfection in guitar playing and composition. In my defense I used a different key than he does to switch to and then I also switch keys again and play a pentatonic-ish blues rock section. Oh wait I think he may do that too, but not in the same key. Whatever. He Goes C to G sharp, I'm going C to G. Anyway, the Lydian mode gives an almost major scale (happy) sound but with a little twist that makes it a little mysterious sounding. Basically for the main part all I'm doing is playing over a C bass note, but instead of playing a C major scale or C minor I'm playing in G major. C major and G major are very close, only having one note difference. Over the E bass part I'm playing in B major and over the G part I'm playing G minor pentatonic or blues-y kind of scale. That part sounds more familar to people who listen to rock music. I felt it brought things back to more familar territory for a little bit.

The hell part came in when I tried to record parts that actually sounded kind of OK. Not great, but just OK. I did many many takes on each solo part and finally settled on ones that I felt didn't completely blow. I ended up using twenty tracks in Cool Edit. Also since this was originally a practicing thing, I never really had and ending so I just decided to fade it out. I used the strat exclusively.

 

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edit - 10/10/07 - here's a cheesy video I made:

 

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In The Middle - In The Middle

September 4, 2007

Since I have nothing new ready, I thought I'd dig out this moldy oldie. It's not really a song, it's just this thing my old band played one time while messing around. In The Middle was the name of the band and I call the piece In The Middle as well because of the stuff people are saying at the beginning. This was recorded on video back in the spring of 1989 and can be seen on YouTube, HERE. I always kind of liked this thing because I was really relaxed and not thinking much and I like the notes I played. Even the mistakes sound good to me. The guitar used on this later became the beat up star guitar. Everything on it is the same except for the body.

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Song For Owen and Aidan

September 1, 2007

Wow this one took a long time, and a lot of it is because I can't play well enough for my liking. Well, I can play OK to amuse myself but when it comes time to actually record something that I'd like to hear then it becomes a lot trickier. Actually this song took like 20 years to record. ;) The little into thing is something I came up with many years ago. I still can't play it without flubbing it, but there it is mistakes and all. I just embellished it a little with some high chord plucks and it sounds nice enough. The more "rock" sounding thing has some roots in the past, but the chord progression I made up yesterday. When I was doing the drums and bass I had no idea what the guitar melody parts would be like and I came up with them today. That was probably the most frustrating part. I'm finding that it's really hard to improvise a solo that goes on for 30 seconds without cheesing it at some point, usually the end after the begining sounded great. I was unhappy until I tried doing harmony parts for the simple melody, and then suddenly I didn't care so much about my lame soloing. Then I just wanted to finish it. I think I probably put in 10 hours on it. I mainly used the black Parker, thought there's some strat on the clean intro.

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Bomp Chicka Womp Wah

August 29, 2007

This time I felt like playing around with the wah wah pedal effect and also using a less heavy kind of strat sound. Just for the heck of it, to see how it would record. I think it sounds pretty cool and cheesy at the same time. I've never really used wah wah much and like anything else it take a some practice to make it sound right. I think I did OK, but sloppiness abounds on this thing. I'm finding that by the time I get the drum and bass parts worked out I'm pretty bored of it and I just want to record some guitar quickly. I didn't go as nuts on the drums, but did a few new techniques with it. I actually ended up doing a lot more guitar parts and edits than I had planned but what the hell. I used the white strat only on this one.

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The Metal Cheese Monster Attacks, in E minor

August 27, 2007

This is the result of I'd say about 6 hours of messing around, mostly with the drum and bass program. I found a drum pattern that sounded cool and started messing with it, adding mainly cymbal crashes at varying times and switching from hi-hat to some ride cymbal action. Adding the bass guitar is a bit of a pain in the ass so for my second attempt at it I kept it real simple, though a lot more complex than my first attempt. Parts of it sound ok though my playing is sloppy throughout.  All of it could be tighter but I get bored easily and I wasn't about to do ten takes on a rhythm guitar part or whatever. I used the black Parker p-42 for the rhythm and the ending psuedo harmony. I used the white strat for the rest.

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E Minor Pulse Thing

August 25, 2007

I decided to buy the PC Drummer program and an add-on that contains bass guitar samples. This is my first super simple thing with bass on it so don't rag on me because of the incredibly boring bass and drum parts. I just set up a simple loop with an E note and went off into space somewhere. I used the white strat.

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Cheesy Blues Rock Tune #1

August 24, 2007

My first recording testing out the PC Drummer drum machine software. Very basic and no bass guitar. I used the beat up star guitar and white strat.

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You Can't Hide From God

August 24, 2007

This is a bizarre cover tune I did a year ago or so, of an already bizarre song. This version though bears no resemblance at all to the original SubGenius classic by the Doktors For "Bob". I was trying out Fruity Loops software and I made this weird beat and bassline. I overdubbed some guitar and used a voice generator to do the vocal. The song made it into The SubGenius Hour of Slack 1044. Apparently they'll take anything. I used the white strat.

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Equipment used

August 27, 2007

2005 White Mexican Stratocaster. One bridge humbucker, two single coil humbuckers. Tremolo bridge. All stock parts

2005 Black Parker P-42. Two humbuckers. Stop tail piece. All stock parts.

1989 custom built "star" shape guitar. Seymour Duncan JB Model bridge pickup, Lawrence neck pickup. Stop tail piece.

Fender Cyber Deluxe with midi footswitch controller.

PC Drummer software with Studio kit add on (for more drum sounds and bass guitar etc...)

Cool Edit Pro

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Mission

October 2, 2007

I purchased an audio cable that allows me to record on my computer directly from my guitar amplifier. This gives me a much better recording than I could get without purchasing an expensive microphone and stand. This was important to me because I've always felt like recording was so unsatisfying when the sound on the playback was so poor. There's also no chance of any outside noise getting picked up and I can record at low volumes, which is important to me because the way my life is now I can't be blasting my guitar.

I learned about this blog/podcast service and I thought I might use it to have some fun putting up audio clips or me playing guitar. I haven't been creative and I felt like this would be a fun way to try to be.

After I started playing with the drum and bass software I decided that I should challenge myself to be creative. I felt like I needed a goal or goals. I thought about it and figured that if I forced myself to record something and put myself on a sort of deadline, it would force me to be creative and learn and also improve my playing. I decided that every few days should be good, that way I'd be under some self imposed pressure to come up with something.

This was during the summer and now life is a little different and I have less time. I'm now shooting for a minimum of one recording a week.

To the listener: if you hear things that sound like mistakes or sound sloppy, etc. you're probably right. Within certain limits of my own, I can tolerate mistakes and sloppiness. I also can tolerate less than brilliant solos. I'm not shooting for perfection, just some small amount of inspiration and creativity. When I'm recording, if a guitar part fits well enough for me and has the right energy or sound so I don't cringe, then nine times our of ten I'll keep it and move on.

Perhaps I'll get to a point where I'll want to work slower on a piece to try and create something more polished or with more depth, but for now I feel like this method of quickly creating something and then moving on the next idea is what I need to do to get my brain going.

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