Studio Pictures

Gearing Up for eBay

Now that I have decided to update my studio, I have the challenge  of  selling off my gear. Before I can start I need to gather cardboard to fabricate  boxes for shipping to the people who purchase my equipment. I got so much stuff to sell I probably going to need a load of cardboard.

I am going to need to start up a spreadsheet to keep track of everything. One good thing will be that I’ll have more room in my living room.

Total Change Of Plans

Well I’ve come to a point were I have decided that trying to work with 20-30 old music gear is just not worth it. I need a more focused setup to make it easier and more efficient to write music. I haven’t written any music in a while because it’s such a pain to make anything happen. There are constant problems with just trying to organize sounds, fight noise and replacing bad cables, etc. I just want to make music not Therefore I have decided to sell almost everything my present studio setup and purchase a total digital system.

This is a big deal for me. I was clinging to that gear because I thought I would never get another opportunity to have a good up-to-date system. But again technology has come to the rescue. I have a lot of stuff to sell. I doubt very much if I’ll get even half of what I paid for all this stuff. Well it’s not bad considering I have had the use of this stuff forr a very long time.

I’ve put together a survivor, temporary set up so that I can pump out another instrumental CD in the meanwhile so I can through the transition.

I thinking about getting a Plasma Monitor, Mac G5 with LOGIC 8 and a bunch of cosmic plugins.

There’s nothing like a little bit of technology to get creative juices going again.

A Change of Mindset

It’s almost impossible to be objective about yourself and your work. Good friends can really come in handy by offering their honest opinions about ideas or other areas of your life. Sometimes you may have to apply a “filter” to what your friends tell you because they too are only human and therefore subjective.

That not withstanding, I’ve found that very often friends can help you extrapolate some kind of less subjective spirit of where you are at that moment in time. This valuable less subjective spirit can be leveraged against where you want to go and actually become fuel to help you get there.

 

Test Tapes

In my early years of writing music I use to create cassette tapes comprised of music of my favorite bands and composers. Every fourth or fifth song I would slip in one of my own. I would play these tapes when my friends came over to hang out. Every now and again (fourth or fifth song of course), I asked my friends their opinion of the last song they heard. And if they asked me name the composer of that “last” song, I’d tell them “I didn’t remember” (in order to sustain the objectivity of my blind experiment).

 

Nose to the MIDI Grindstone

Writing the type of music I do in a heterogeneous environment of digital technologies and the organics of guitars can be challenging enough. The real challenge of course is the aesthetic application of all this musical hardware and software.

Lately, I’ve been somewhat obsessive with remembering what it was like to hear music before I walked down this technical and analytical path. As I remember there were certain modulations and sounds that really grabbed me emotionally (i.e. emotional anchors). The 10,000 mile high view can be a tremendous asset. It’s very beneficial to be able to see the lay of the whole aesthetic battlefield (especially when your often busy digging the trenches).

 

Blogarama

Until now, I never really understood the reason behind why bloging was so popular. But I have to admit that I’m seeing a real change in my own mindset towards my music from just bloging.

Just throwing your thoughts out there can be very beneficial. It’s kind of rekindled an old passion deep inside me and has helped me get my second creative wind. I guess just talking about something you really care about to yourself and a faceless world out there and make you realize how important that something really is.

Cool!

 

Kevin Atwood

Composer

The Evolution of a Creative Dream

The Vision of Kevin Atwood

 

The seeds were planted about 43 years ago when my father dropped me off at my aunt and uncle’s house. I had a lot of fun playing around on their acoustic guitar and piano. My aunt asked what instrument I liked the best, I told her both.

 

When I was in grade 4, my music teacher was a classical acoustic bass player by the name of Gary Kerr. He was world class musician who for some reason had ended up teaching music that year. I wish I could go back in time and thank him for all those times he dragged his acoustic upright bass to class and played for us.

 

One day Mr. Kerr invited Chalmers Dome to speak to our class. Mr. Dome brought with him a reel-to-reel tape deck and his clarinet. Mr. Dome spoke to us about the wonders of sound-on-sound and multi-track recording. I found all of this really fascinating and was blown away when he played his clarinet with the four separate music tracks that he had created.

 

I can remember thinking,

 

“Wow one guy can do all of this?”

 

That was the most significant musical event that I can recall until I was about 11 years old. My father bought me a used Kent guitar and Regal amplifier from Buckley’s Music store in Halifax. I guess the previous owner of the amplifier used it a church because it was totally covered with a “stain glass” pattern, plastic Mac-Tac covering.

 

The guitar had a real chunky neck and little or no tuning or intonation ability to speak of and action like a suspension bridge but I felt very fortunate to have it all the same.

 

Between the ages of 11 and 13, I sung in the church choir and ended up playing my guitar in front of the whole church. I remember being very nervous and I played the song about 500 times faster than I should have!

 

In grade eight my music teacher Sister Margaret was instrumental in introducing to classical music.

 

In grade nine, I started to experiment with a little Radio Shack amplifier circuit board. Thanks to this little amplifier, I discovered the liberating joy of distorted guitar. At the same time I also discovered the wonderful world of oscillation when one of input leads accidentally made contact with one of the output leads.

 

I was ripping parts out old TVs to test their sonic weirdness possibilities when inserted between input and output of said amplifier. Eventually I had collected a bunch of capacitors, chokes, coils and semiconductors (and other electronic things that I had no idea what they were) which I deemed the “Stars of the Show” when it came to the sonic weirdness coefficient.

 

I took all these electronic parts and tested their performance value when wired together in various combinations. I used the results from these tests to build a pseudo synthesizer using a bunch of rotary switches and linear taper potentiometers to switch and control and the various parts in the feedback circuit.

 

I mounted the parts and circuit board on a couple of pieces of plywood and submitted for my final year end music project. I wish I still had it. It made some of the weirdness sounds I have ever heard. I’m sure even Stockhausen would have been proud of me.

 

During time I joined up with the school choir. I meet these two very creative cool guys (Steve Bagnell and Kurt Hahn) who were also in the school choir and we decided to start a band. OK when I say band I should say music ensemble.

 

The earliest music we wrote consisted of some really way-out weirdness that provided a back drop for Steve to play the occasional Sax and read out some random passages from the Book of Revelation in the Bible.

 

Kurt, who played keyboards, gave me a Mike Oldfield L.P. for my birthday (Tubular Bells).

 

We played the LP as soon as I opened it. After listening to the first side, I remember I said

 

“I can’t believe one guy can do all of this!”

 

Over a period of about two or three years the three of us expanded our taste in music. We picked up a few more people in the group and modulated our direction from avant-garde to progressive rock. We became a legitimate progressive rock band (thanks to the intense influences of the music of Yes, Genesis, ELP, King Crimson and Gentle Giant).

 

After discovering the semi-distorted, cosmic tones of Chris Squires’ Rickenbacker 4001 bass I decided to switch to bass and let someone else play guitar with the band. My first bass was a Gibson Ripper. It wasn’t a Rickenbacker but it was close. Even though my mother thought I should have bought a bass from Sears for $40, I felt really good about playing a Ripper bass when I realized it was a great sounding and playing bass (and it was what Greg Lake was playing on the back of the first ELP live album). Validation!

 

Paralandra stayed together as a Progressive Rock band for about 7 or 8 years. The music scene in Nova Scotia at that time was mainstream Rock, Country or Disco. In hind sight we would probably have flourished in a New York or Toronto or Montreal.

 

In the beginning most of our songs were at least 20 minutes long and mostly comprised unrelated although interesting sections complex music. Common time signatures where auspiciously missing. A lot of our early music employed the used multi-layered, modulating time signatures. In fact there was a time I can remember thinking that 4/4 common time felt weird and unnatural.

 

There many times were no two were playing in the same time signature at the same time. I can remember playing bass lines in 13/8 while other music parts were whirling around me in a sea of metric and temporal modulation. At the same time I was also thinking about what I need to do to get ready for the next up and coming metric tornado while simultaneously playing my Moog bass pedals.

 

After seven very educational and interesting years and as many public performances I quit Paralandra. The other guys in the band started to head in different direction and I wasn’t interested pursuing a musical direction that I thought lacked emotional content.

 

It’s the emotional energy of music that has interested me. Always has and always will.

 

Since the Paralandra days (over 25 years ago) I’ve been working with music, audio recording and production and building up my studio.

 

Thanks to the development of digital and MIDI based music technologies my music vision has become a reality!

Kevin Atwood  – Composer

Cranking Up The Cosmic Machine

I’ve started this blog in order to help myself focus on the up and coming music projects I’m about to take on. If this also helps other composers with their careers, then I happy to have helped.

I find that verbalizing or writing out one’s thoughts can often help organize ideas as well as act as a kind of “sanity litmus paper” in order to make a judgment call on whether or not the idea is worth pursuing.

Are you in a band?

When it comes to creating music, I usually work alone. I put an aggressive demand on my myself and the music I create. When I try to explain that to people who wish to work with me they usually cower in silence.

Although I really enjoy the creative process I certainly don’t do it for fun. To me it’s important work that needs to be done. And even thought I can only work on music on a part time basis, I consider it the most important thing I do.

You sound really serious.

Yes I’m serious. I have to be. I’m the writer, producer, engineer, guitar, bass, keyboard player and drummer for the whole project. And now on top of all of that I’m in charge of audio mastering, art work, marketing , web page creation and promotion, sales, customer relations and shipping. It’s a lot of work but it’s very fulfilling and worth it.

Out standing in my field (alone).

It’s kind of weird situation with my music career. If I was a beautiful, young lady singer or even a rock band there would be precedent and inroads I could purse to success. However no one is going to kick down a door to see an unknown middle aged guy play a guitar on stage with a computer (pyrotechnics and free beer not with standing).

In order to make my music work live on stage there would have to be a bunch of multi-talented musicians on stage with me and a significant visual focus for the audience.

All this would of course cost money and would require a marketing and promotional infrastructure that would certainly go beyond the humble scope of yours truly. (If you have ever seen a video of a Mike Oldfield concert you’ll understand why).

All the same there is a great (but not impossible) challenge here. I believe that the Internet will help me reach out to those who will appreciate my music.

Lately I’ve been studying a bunch of documentation on Internet marketing, web creation, music promotion. Most music promotion e-books I’ve read are written with “bands” in mind.

I’m am not a band, I am a human being!

So it looks like I’ll have to proceed in the spirit of what I’ve learned and use fuzzy logic to fill in the blanks. I’m going forward with a plan to get my music “out there“.

As I figure it out, I’ll blog it.

Kevin Atwood  – Composer