I spend a decent amount of time on message boards and in Facebook groups watching conversations between gear whores desperate to find the “next awesome piece of kit” that will finally let them express themselves as an instrumentalist, and get those ideas out. Of course, it’s utter bullshit.

Creativity has nothing to do with the tools you possess. It’s a bitter mistress. I’ve been over this many times on this blog. I get new gear, and I get NOTHING new out of it. I have all my same shit, and I write/create new stuff. There’s no consistency. And sadly, more often, nothing happens.

Right now, I have a pretty nice little setup in my studio. I have a stable of guitars and basses that I find enjoyable to play and that bring out different facets of my personality as an instrumentalist. I have a nice little Alesis electronic drum kit that allows me to pretend I can play drums. It has a USB port that allows me to record the MIDI from the drums so I can change the sounds and fix my mediocre playing. I have a couple of keyboards (one Korg, one Yamaha) with some great sounds that allow me to pretend I can play keyboards. I am an avid and long-time user of modeling gear, which recreates real guitar and bass rigs and all kinds of studio gear so I don’t have to own piles of vintage amps and speaker cabinets. I have a mixer that allows me to record its individual channels as separate tracks so I have complete control of my sound and can record multiple things at once. I have a new computer with great specifications that allows me to run the most modern and amazing Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) and plug-ins (which are computer versions of those modeling things I was talking about earlier. All of these things are here, plugged in and ready to go. I could be recording music constantly.

But of course, I don’t.

Because I have been in a real creative drought. It started out with some self-editing, and then it just became a pattern of telling myself nothing is good enough. I’ve been trying really hard to allow myself to create without having any opinion about it as I go – instead judging it once I’ve gotten it out. This does work to some extent. But the problem I have now is that so much of what I’ve already done is kind of stuck, wallowing in its mediocrity. I don’t know how to make it better, and since I haven’t been creating new stuff, I have nothing to replace it with.

So to stoke the fires of creativity, I started writing on this blog on a regular basis. I talked about doing more videos like my “Bathroom Schizo” series, but couldn’t work out the details on that. Now that I have some new recording gear, that is DEFINITELY happening soon. I’ll probably start with a new one of those each week, likely starting the first week of October (I’m going to do a big pile of them and release them weekly). I’m trying to do my traditional daily “noodling” and I might start recording little videos of those noodles for Instagram. I feel like if I get in the mode of creating it will finally justify my outlay for all my wonderful equipment over the years. And it will assuage any guilt for doing nothing with the cool things I have to create stuff that someone with a ton of ideas could use to make great things.

In actually-creative news, my closest inspiration as a creator, my buddy and Chandler and The Bings bandmate Patrick Soler has taken the vocal stems from our “It’s Gonna Be Me” single and created his own version in a sort of synthwave-meets-trap remix. It’s rad, and it comes out on Friday. I will post the link on my Facebook page when it’s released. He also made an awesome video for it. Look out for that.

And please stay tuned for some more performances of covers and originals by your faithful Schizo. Definitely going to happen a lot coming up. Hopefully it will kick me back in to creator mode so I feel like I can express things and maybe write something good.

Plus, just posting this video because I thought it was awesome. I’m a big fan of Rick Beato, and his video from today was excellent, so here you go:

He has an amazing ear-training course available that I’m going to get once I have some extra cash. I feel like working on my relative pitch in this way, tied to the theory, is the key to a lot of other musical concepts for me. But we’ll see.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe and happy. Wash your hands, wear your mask, physically distance (not socially – we need each other, so get on the phone, video chat, whatever). And in case you didn’t remember – Black Lives Matter.

Peace be the journey!

TMS