I think I’ve addressed this before here on the blog, but I think sometimes you live life, and sometimes life lives you.
You feel like you have choices when you’re living life.
You feel like you’re just following a to-do list if life is living you.
Right now, it really does feel like life is living me instead of the other way around.
To be clear – some of the most fantastic things have been happening the past few months, from my 50th Birthday with surprise visits from my parents and a cousin I hadn’t seen in years to a couple of wonderful trips to North Carolina and Atlanta to see friends and band reunions. And reuniting with my best friend from high school who I hadn’t seen in over 20 years and finally meeting his wife and wonderful boys. SO MUCH LOVE!
But even as it’s been great, everything’s been SCHEDULED. My wife and I haven’t really had good alone time because we have a little kid and no good sitters. Work has been relentless for both of us, and SUPER STRESSFUL for my wife. Gigs have been very sporadic (which serve as a nice salve for my psyche, so that’s not good).
Some days I feel like I’m just driving people places and then sitting in a room for hours on a computer cutting up voiceovers I’m not particularly pleased with and mixing with music that’s ALMOST right for the commercials while periodically being interrupted by questions that have often already been answered.
I’m sure a lot of people go through this stuff, and honestly, I’m usually fairly good at forcing myself to be present and not just muddle through. But right now? It’s not going great. So I’m writing this at 1:41am to kind of put it out there so I can move on from it and take more action in my life.
Recently for the day job I had to create a jingle out of some really questionable a cappella singing, so I threw that pitchy mess into Melodyne (a wonderful software for naturally removing pitchiness), and wrote and recorded music to match the flow of the melody (which was a VERY atypical arrangement). Shockingly, it turned out fairly decent. I had polished the turd to a fine sheen (and they ended up going with the original a cappella…go figure).
The good part about that was discovering how quickly I can throw together music that is a full arrangement (the cleaned-up voice, along with guitar, bass, and drums I played on my Korg X50 keyboard). It really inspired me to possibly use those same techniques to get my songs done and start using my DistroKid account to make them available for people to listen and/or buy on all the streaming services.
So I know I’ve said it before, but I really do think that I’ll actually be finishing some songs in the coming months, and probably releasing them in chunks as EPs on Spotify and stuff like that.
That is, if I can manage to stop letting life live me and turn that shit around so I’m living life.
Wish me luck!
And if you also feel like life has been living you, I feel you. And I’m hoping for your sake you can turn that shit around as well.
Take care, and Peace be the journey! TMS
Museday Mumblings (Vol. 76) – A Case of The Musedays
Well, it’s a Museday. The last time I posted was in late September. Clearly life is having its way with me right now, as I’m not particularly inspired to even blather on here on the blog.
This series was meant to be almost a meditation – every Tuesday (or so) I’d post about some topic, whether it be musical or otherwise (but mostly musical), and it would keep me creating and creative. But a few things happened over the last year or so that really messed with my desire to share much of what’s going on with me publicly. People who are too sensitive. Beloved friends slightly younger than me who died suddenly. The tennis match-like back-and-forth of worthiness and worthlessness that is being a sensitive artist.
I desperately want to WANT to create. I desperately want to FEEL like people I depend on for music-related things are all on the same page. But time creates distance, distance increases anxiety, anxiety breeds worry, worry breeds resentment. I’m not saying anything is REAL about how I feel about the various things I’m doing or my relationships with music stuff, but it’s definitely making me feel less motivated in general, and kind of depressing me (and thus keeping me from working on stuff).
But let’s take stock. Let’s have ourselves one of them certified, Erin-phrase-coined “Gratitude Adjustments”:
In 2022, I played a PILE of wonderful shows with my boys in Chandler and The Bings. And I played my roles as bassist and singer well in the vast majority of them, which makes me very proud. We had a great bonding experience with our trip to Laredo that was only sullied by a bad stomach bug which led to the very first time I’ve ever left the stage to vomit…and then vomited off the side of the stage out of the view of the crowd. It’s quite a story that’s quite gross, and if you’d like to hear it, I’m happy to tell it in person.
My solo shows were mostly pretty good, and I was VERY consistent this year, basically playing every first Saturday except for July. I love the venue, the staff is wonderful, people tip very well, and I really need to grow this side of my musicianship. I think it would be good for my development to have some bigger crowds to play to, though. So I’m going to work towards that in 2023, stacking up the wonderful venue I already play and maybe even finding some more…
I got some very cool new gear and some of my existing gear got an AMAZING update that inspires me to play more, which is good. I keep meaning to make videos about the guitar and little amp, but that’s another casualty of life in general. Just hasn’t happened yet.
My body has held up pretty well considering I packed on an extra 15 lbs this year. Going to do my best to get that off in triplicate this year, hopefully by my birthday in September. That might be too tall an order, but progress toward healthy living is most important. My health is paramount and I need to stick around for my kiddos.
To close this out:
I am thankful that I can still do this music stuff.
I am grateful that my health so far has remained pretty good (gotta figure out the heart flutter, but…)
I am hopeful that I can stay disciplined and make the necessary changes to lead a more healthy lifestyle.
Now that this is turning into a “Goals” post – completely unrelated to the fact that it’s a new year, mind you – my goals are now to get healthy, get better at playing the songs I perform, get working on my ear training and theory knowledge, get the worthy songs I’ve written recorded, mix the old ones that were already recorded better (and improve the performances if necessary), get some new songs together, release some new music (having one song on the streaming platforms seems kind of sad), get my goddamn ass in gear in general, and get some MONEY.
That’d be nice, right? Rent is EXPENSIVE. Shit, everything is.
Anyway, thanks for reading and I plan to get back in this Museday Mumblings habit again. Have a happy day whenever you see this, and may you stay healthy and safe.
Peace be the journey! TMS
Museday Mumblings (Vol. 68): Inspiration, Machines, Cranky Old Mofos
My musical mission thus far in 2022 has centered on a few things: Playing good shows. Getting my gear all in proper operation. Learning how to use my new tools (patchbay, Behringer X18 mixer). Forming inspirations into ideas into actual songs.
I’ve succeeded at the good shows part – I played great in both of my Bings shows, and at times was so locked in with Jay every bit of both of our performances made the other’s even better. Excellent crowd in San Antonio, too.
My solo show was a bit hit or miss, working my way through my first on-stage slow-motion anxiety attack. I couldn’t get air, which made it extraordinarily hard to sing. Then, hilariously, I used the altered tuning feature on my Line 6 Variax to play Wonderwall with a “Capo” on the second fret, and promptly FORGOT TO CHANGE IT BACK! So the next group of songs (Drift Away, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Always Something There To Remind Me, I’m A Believer, No Such Thing, and Hey Jealousy) were all played a WHOLE STEP HIGHER than I usually play them. Which made the whole “not having any air” thing even worse. And made it so I didn’t even end up playing one of my “standards”, the Turtles underappreciated classic “Elenore”, because there was no way in HELL I’d be singing that chorus in F#. I literally just stopped the song and moved on. I felt like such an unprofessional loser, and it ruined my evening. I came home a ball of nerves, and I think mildly freaked my wife out. Being someone who’s more of a depressive than an anxious person, it always freaks me out when the stress hormones get rolling, and it’s hard to recover. I think a pharmaceutical would have been helpful (perhaps a Xanax), but I don’t have that stuff. In the end, the venue was happy, and if I’m being honest with myself, even though I was falling apart inside, I still sounded pretty dang good. Just not as good as I normally would sound. I am kind of glad I didn’t record this one, though.
Moving on to the technical stuff – using the wonderful substance Deoxit, in the past few months I’ve cleaned the pots and jacks on a bunch of my aging things and it’s brought them back to life, particularly my “first guitar” – which technically was my brother Robert’s first guitar – now all it needs is to have its nut glued in properly and it’ll be a fun little pseudo-Telecaster to bang around on. I also cleaned up the pots on my basses, bringing them back to proper function, and even rescued a presumed-dead guitar wireless by merely cleaning the output jack. All I need now are some new strings on some of these guitars and basses and we’ll be in business.
Speaking of guitars and basses, I sold one in December. A Dean ML bass (looks kind of like the guitar Dimebag Darrell from Pantera used to play). It never worked for me, and it was a four-string, so I wasn’t using it, it was basically just collecting dust, and since I only paid $49 for it on a blowout sale at Guitar Center over a decade ago, I still made money on the deal, selling it for $100. I probably could have made more off it, but I just wanted it gone and the dude seemed nice.
Last Thursday I had to head down to San Antonio for the day job and on the way home decided to pop by the Guitar Center down there, and discovered a two-pickup version of my “#1” Sterling by Music Man Ray 5 bass that I use in Chandler and The Bings. I couldn’t believe it. More than that, it was on sale for the same price as I picked the #1 up for back in 2018 (that model has since gone up in price, and this version was even more). I decided to snag it. I couldn’t help myself! Pics or it didn’t happen:
She pretty.
It desperately needs new strings and a cleaning/set-up. But I already love it, and that’ll only make it more awesome.
Back in 2021 I got an amazing deal on a Behringer X18 mixer and am just now learning all the little things it can do. It’s going to be central to the new studio setup as I streamline and get things in order. It has amazing routing capabilities and some really cool built-in effects I can play with for doing live streams and stuff like that. This with the patchbay and my ATEM switcher will definitely enable me to do some really cool, interactive stuff from the studio in the future. I just have to get it all plugged up and learn how to make it all work together. I think my Edirol M-16DX, which has been my trusty studio sidekick for over 10 years now, will become the center of my live solo acoustic rig, making setting up and running all that much simpler, because it can live in a rack bag that I can keep set up and basically just plug my guitar and my vocal mic into it and still have effects and stuff I can use.
The last goal is inspiration – and translating that inspiration into new material. I’ve already written down multiple new ideas for songs – concepts more than phrases, really, but really good, inspiring starting points. And I’ve got a bunch more I’ve collected over the past few years that will be worked into songs. I might even use music that I liked from my old songs and replace the dodgy lyrical content with something based off these new ideas. (It won’t be the first time I’ve done that.) Time will tell for all of it.
I was listening to WTF with Marc Maron and his interview with John Mellencamp, and it was really fun listening to two cranky old motherfuckers talk about all kinds of stuff relating to John’s career, music in general, and how to exist on the planet. In fact, two of the aforementioned song ideas directly came to mind as a result of their conversation. So I’m already snagging that inspiration wherever it may show itself.
In summary, I’m excited for the new year at least as my musical experiences are panning out. I love learning new things and feeling energized when it comes to this stuff, so I’m very optimistic that if I make sure I’m investing time in this instead of sitting on my ass watching Rick Beato videos (not that those aren’t awesome), I’ll actually make some headway getting my shit together and creating things. I like the progress my friend Mandy has made with her dedication to live-streaming on Twitch, and I think maybe I’m going to try and make a Musical Schizo concert there a regular part of my week, once I decide on a day and time to do it and get more used to how all that live-streaming stuff works.
Thanks for reading, take care, be safe, and remember to love one another.
So I got me a patchbay. What’s a patchbay? Well, it’s a rackmounted (in most cases) device that allows you to have your instruments and interfaces all hooked up in a way that allows you to easily change their routing as you need. So if you have a bunch of guitar effects things, keyboards, whatever, you can have them all hooked up to the patchbay, and you can very easily plug them in to each other or into whatever inputs on your recorder, mixer, or computer interface you want to use.
So far, it’s not all the way hooked up, but I’m so stupidly excited about having everything hooked up and patchable from one place that it’s occupied a lot of my mental real estate related to music/production/etc. Thinking of the various ways I can get it hooked up, and what I’m going to patch into it, all of that…it’s so wonderful and exciting to me. And that’s very inspiring.
Finding new ways to work can be such a wonderful thing to light the fire around creating music. This new way to work really has opened me up to the possibility that I don’t have to get behind stuff and plug and unplug things to make them all available to me. I can just patch them on the front panel, or if they’re already hooked up to the specific input I need to use, just leave them there. It’s great and I really can’t wait to get it all set up and ready to go.
So find something that shakes up your workflow to get you inspired to get in there and make some music. It’s working for me. (Now if I could only do that with my songwriting…)
The first quarter of the year was pretty lame. Not a whole lot going on that was new.
Started back with gigs in May. (YAY!)
Joined an awesome Yacht Rock band but punked out because I had to accept reality the playing level expected didn’t fit with my current lifestyle. It still makes me sad when I think about it.
Blogged many, many times but got super inconsistent at the end of the year (depression does that to you).
Made many great improvements to my home studio building on all the great improvements from 2020. Hey, I figure if I live in this room for work, it might as well be decked out, right? Upgraded the live bass rig from a little HX Stomp to the HX Stomp XL, which has more footswitches. Very happy with the change.
Went to California for a family vacation. It was more of a trip than a vacation, because it was the opposite of relaxing, but it was wonderful to be back “home” and see some California family and friends. The Golden State is as much a part of me as anywhere else I’ve ever lived, and I still miss it. If I win a large sum in the lottery, I will buy property there.
Discovered great new music – Mammoth WVH’s debut album is EXCELLENT, as was their live show. I Don’t Know How But They Found Me (aka IDKHOW) somehow escaped me when they were the alternative music press’ retro darling a few years back, but now I know who they are (thanks to my bud Dennis) and dig the SHIT out of their stuff. They’re 80s in all the best ways, but current – if you like the idea of Duran Duran and The Cure having a baby, you’ll probably dig this.
Wrote ZERO songs. Didn’t even compose riffs or anything this year. Not sure why…just not all that inspired. I did do some livestream noodling.
Returned to the stage as a solo act thanks to my friend (and excellent livestreamer) Mandy Prater recommending me to the awesome people at 360 Uno.
And I think that’s about it.
Definitely going to get things set up in the studio in 2022 for easier musical creativity and make it a point to make stuff. I might even make videos of the process since I have that awesome-but-basically-unused live streaming mixer. And Bathroom Schizo videos!
Or not. Since I like to believe I’ll do creative things but I rarely come through because life and my mental state often get in the way. STAY TUNED!
One thing that’s definitely happening in 2022 is a return of the weekly format for the Museday Mumblings. I slacked hard in Q4 and I find that embarrassing.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful 2022! TMS
It’s weird to be sick. I haven’t been sick in a long time. But whatever’s going on with me right now is…well, it just sucks.
I assume it’s not COVID, being that I’m all vaccinated and stuff and I’ve been Mr. Careful. It’s like my body has a cold. I don’t have a runny nose or anything, but I’m just – weak and hurting.
I felt alright for band practice yesterday, which was SUPER FUN even though it was kind of hard work, and we’re super excited to play our first big show back on May 1st (assuming the rain that’s supposed to happen all week is gone by the weekend, like the forecasts are saying). So, YAY Chandler and The Bings!
I watched a great tribute to Adam Schlesinger that Rachel Bloom posted on her YouTube. Makes me want to go back and do a actually good recording of my tribute song to him.
If you have time to kill, check the tribute out and maybe it’ll help you understand why I loved this guy so much…
Back to the couch. Have a wonderful day. I’ll have a Museday Mumbling for you tomorrow, probably. As usual, I’m not even sure what the topic is going to be, but hopefully I’ll come up with something interesting.
Peace be the journey! TMS
Museday Mumblings (Vol. 19): Creativity Doesn’t Care About Your Tools
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
Museday Mumblings (Vol. 14): Just let me WORK, for F—‘s Sake!
I’m sure we’ve all been there. We think we can just hop on the computer and knock something out in two minutes. We think that because we got a NEW computer, that our issues are solved. But every damn time you just want to quickly get something done and walk away, something doesn’t load right, or it won’t save right, or that network resource isn’t showing up the way it’s supposed to, or sometimes it’s us – we just can’t perform what we need to perform at the moment – we can’t talk, type, sing, play, draw precisely, edit, whatever. It happens to me all the time.
Now I’m sure the Apple crowd will chime in and say, “my Mac just works”, which is nice. For you. But I don’t have that kind of money, so I live in PC-land. And Macs are just as susceptible to software not initializing properly, crashing, network issues, and all the other crap. About the only real benefit you have is that you won’t have driver issues. In theory. But we’re not talking to you right now, so you can go watch the rainbow ball spin while ProTools crashes on you again because it sucks at managing memory.
(Wow. Someone’s got a chip on his shoulder. Sorry about that. I do actually have a strong fondness for Macs, and I might make the switch if I had a lot of money. It’d be worth it for the more-stable drivers.)
Anyway…back to the point of all this (was I even near a point?) – I just want things to work so I can do whatever work I want or need to do. And they sometimes, if not most of the time, don’t. In the past (and occasionally in the present), I would get REALLY MAD about these developments. Now (most of the time), I’m pretty chill about it, but just sad and frustrated that the thing that should work doesn’t work, especially when I’ve set it up correctly and it’s a new piece of gear. It happens to even the best stuff, unfortunately.
One interesting “opposite-day” thing in my “SHIT DON’T WORK” world was when I made the transition to Windows 10 on my new machine with a very old but awesome piece of gear I use as my interface – the Edirol (Roland) M-16DX Digital Mixer. Turns out it’s WAY more stable on Windows 10! The driver in Windows 7 would crash ALL THE TIME, and now I never lose connectivity. It’s great. I really thought I’d have to buy a new interface/mixer, but I didn’t. So that’s more of a “SHIT DOES WORK” for once. But those moments are rare, unfortunately. ESPECIALLY when you’re in a hurry, it seems.
A few weeks back I was trying to get my day job work done – I had to take a break right around the time I usually wrap up to get my kids, so I came back home to finish up (I had about 20-30 minutes of work left) and everything was jacked up. The network didn’t work – figured it out and fixed that. Took about 30 minutes. Then the system I use to organize all my work simply wouldn’t load any data. Tried everything to figure that out – literally for two hours, when all I wanted to do was go to bed – and it never came back on-line so I had to give up and punt until Saturday. The next day – all was perfect. Everything worked. Took me 20 minutes to finish.
And this isn’t restricted to computers – sometimes, your baby can break. Yeah – if you’ve got a little kid, it’s a crap shoot. Sometimes (like my dude the majority of the time), they sleep consistently and well. And other times, often when it seems creativity is striking and you really have to get the ideas down…every five minutes he’s crying or calling for me. It’s like every time I hit record, it sets him off. Like he KNOWS… So I run to him and help and hope that it gets better. Sometimes, they settle, and sometimes, forget about getting that idea down. It’s not happening. That was Sunday night here. Still haven’t gotten the idea down…because it’s gone. Ah, well. If it’s truly great, I’ll remember it.
In other news, my brain is broken. I hopped into the studio Sunday night thinking I’d be rocking out some new tracks for the two new songs we’re working on for the band, and then I went to the shared folders and saw that I’d already recorded my parts. I’m not sure exactly why I didn’t remember that at all…but it was WEIRD. I had apparently completely blocked out that on March 31st I had recorded the two songs. The parts were good takes, too! Only had to fix one little thing before I sent them up to Jay for mixing. So that’s nice. Like past Brian paying present Brian a little gift… (“yeah, I got you, boo…”) These new ones will probably blow your mind and make you laugh. I can’t wait to get them all done and out to everyone.
AND I can’t wait to get my own music recorded! I have no excuse now. I have great beat-making software (that I just have to figure out how to make my MIDI controller run), so I can create awesome drum tracks (when I’m not physically playing the drums on my little electronic kit, of course) and get my songs together finally. I’m going to release an album this year. Even if it’s December 31st, I’m making that shit happen. Consider this gauntlet thrown down!
Okay, that’s enough for now. Go check out my song on Spotify or whatever (it’s pretty much everywhere) and give it some plays or buy it on iTunes or Amazon. And go check out the Chandler and The Bings tune on Spotify or whatever as well. If you’re feeling really brave and want to dig into my OLD demos…those are on the main part of this site (which is going to be redesigned soon…)
Black Lives Matter. Wear a mask. Physically distance. Wash your hands. Love ALL people instead of letting the hate and tribalism consume you. Learn how to think critically.
Peace be the journey!
TMS
Museday Mumblings (Vol. 13): How to get through when you can’t do what you do
So live music has been dead since basically February for me. Chandler and The Bings did do one livestream concert at a venue with essentially no audience in May, but it didn’t go well even though we played well. Anyone who watched the show saw the sad results – audio problems, inconsistent video-audio synchronization, etc. And it made me so frustrated, because we played REALLY WELL and it didn’t make it through the internet tubes to the audience. Earlier we had done some live streams by ourselves at our respective houses with acoustic guitars, with varying results in quality (most looked and sounded okay at best).
As a result, I’ve been investigating options for setting up a workable live-streaming setup on a budget. I figure if you can gather together a few cameras that can do a live HDMI output (GoPros, fake GoPros, old point-and-shoots, etc.), get one of those switchers like the Blackmagic Designs ATEM Mini, which can output to a computer like it’s a webcam itself, and run our usual BingsNet system as the audio source, we could come up with something that looks good and sounds great.
The desperation of not being able to play together as a group and connect with people, even if it’s just over the internet, has driven me into the world of video production. Now, I haven’t had the funds to get the switcher, so as of now, we can’t really do anything, but I know it’s possible…and that’s the cool part.
We expended so much energy getting the studio song together, it was a nice distraction from actually physically playing shows together, but every time we talk, we talk about how much we miss playing live. I mean, come on. If your audiences were like this, wouldn’t you feel the same?
So finding ways to get through when you can’t do what you do is a tricky proposition. We’ve tried a lot of things, and they’ve served as reasonable distractions. But they don’t replace the thing that makes us love this so much – the crowds. And that’s just not something that is going to be real for a WHILE for us, because there’s no way we’re doing shows until this virus is close to gone or people can be vaccinated and protected.
The next step? ANOTHER song in the studio. Me investigating ways we can do actual shows using a video setup and streaming it over the internet. We can all stay six feet from each other and we’ve all been very good about avoiding contact and sheltering in place (as much as that’s possible for some of us). We will find a way to get through.
As for straight-up Musical Schizo things, I’m planning on doing a new run of Bathroom Schizo videos (yes, the Friday Flush WILL return soon!), and if I am able to get the switcher and get the multi-cam thing working, it’s going to be FUN. Multiple angles in the bathroom! As I’m writing this blog I decided it’s worth it – I’m selling some stuff I’ve been hoarding to try and raise fundage for the switcher. Yeah. Gotta make it happen.
As a reminder – Black Lives Matter, wash your hands, physically distance, wear a decent mask over your nose and mouth, and stay home if you can.
So Chandler and The Bings’ new song came out last Friday, and we’re all terribly proud of it. It really captures the overall essence of the band, though with the notable exception of not enough Alon mojo on the song. (Our next two should take care of that missing element.)
Now that it’s done and out in the world, I also created another thing to go along with it. I shared it with the boys, and am posting it here only because few people read this, and the ones that do are generally people I trust.
It’s a little video taking you through the song from a bass perspective, with some additional commentary. It’s more of an experiment than anything, but I figured I’d share it here, because I DID A THING. Yes. Created something. And it wasn’t terribly hard to do, which was nice.
I hope you enjoy it, and I hope that this blog finds you safe and healthy. C U Next Museday!
Black Lives Matter. Wear your mask. Physically distance. Wash your hands. Lead with love.
