Weeknotes: November 3–7, 2025
Monday, November 3
It's hard sometimes to play fast, but we are a rhythmic species — if you practice enough, a fast part usually comes together nicely, at least in my experience. I think it's much tougher to play slowly. When there is more space between the beats, you have nowhere to hide — each note carries more weight and a whole menu of nuance opens up.
I've been trying to make some music that is very minimalist with few elements and plenty of negative space. The piece I'm working on is for two fingerpicked guitars, one playing a repeated chord pattern at a relaxed tempo and the other playing a very deliberate single note lead melody. More often than not, this is the kind of music I listen to around the house: sparse Nordic jazz records from ECM, solo acoustic guitar albums, ambient synth music, etc.
Most of the music I've released has been densely-arranged songwriter pop with clever arrangements, layered harmonies, and lots of percussion. I will make more of that, but I also want to challenge myself to see if I can scale down and still keep it interesting. It's making me a better, or at least a more thoughtful guitarist. Because there are no vocals and just one or two instruments, I'm thinking very hard about every note and asking questions like:
What part of my finger yields the best tone for this note?
If I can't finish this part today, will my fingernails be too long and sound slightly different tomorrow?
How long should I let these overtones ring?
Do I slide up to this note or hit it dead on?
A bit of vibrato heading into the rest?
Weeknotes: February 17–20, 2025
Monday February 17
Composing for hire remains a novel pursuit for me. I enjoy the challenge, but do it so rarely that I have to fight against my deep-rooted tendencies. I tend to overcomplicate things. Even when I'm writing instrumental music, I'm thinking about the overall structure and pacing of the arrangement, treating it more like a song than the mood-setting backdrop it sometimes needs to be. This piece I'm currently working on should flow unobtrusively behind a voice-over, but I'm struggling to keep it simple.
Repetition with very subtle dynamic shifts is what's called for, but I keep inserting rests, a bridge, and dynamic dips and swells. The first version I submitted had all those things and when I watched the rough cut, I was a little embarrassed; the piece itself is nice, but the extra parts felt obtrusive and showy. I then tried a version with a shorter rest and truncated bridge and it played a little better on the fine cut, but still wasn't right.
This morning I spend a couple hours on an edit that removes all chord changes outside the primary loop, but still has a sort of "bridge" moment about two-thirds of the way through. Why don’t I have it in me to kill that bridge? It’s not a pop song.
Weeknotes: January 13–17, 2025
Monday January 13
My limbs trundle reluctantly up the hill past the south edge of campus, the wind biting my bare face. The first half mile is accomplished by will alone, but it gets better. I gauge my footfalls gingerly over the ice patches and head down the ginnel that connects College Place with Pearl. By the time I cross onto Spring Street, my body feels relaxed and lithe. At Waterworks Park a woman stands over the hood of her blue minivan arranging loaves of supermarket bread to feed to the assemblage of ducks and geese closing in around her.
I think of my mom, a lifetime nurturer of urban waterfowl populations. I picture her tiny figure holding up a bag of hamburger buns to feed the squawking gulls. For a brief time she and I kept up a Christmas Eve tradition of emptying a large bag of cracked corn on the grass by the Brighton Mill Pond, a gift to the cold feathered peasantry. Even now when I go to visit my parents, she is constantly managing a half dozen feeding stations. Just yesterday I caught her scattering seed on the front porch for her favorite possum and then on a metal table out behind the kitchen for her resident doves. She loves her doves. My parents have always had big hearts for wild things.