Musicking

Today and tomorrow are Music Days. I will be doing a bit of engineering of a song of my brother's that I recorded yesterday in my iPhone, and rehearsing songs for Thursday night's little singer-songwriter gig at the Rocksteady in Dalston, where I'm going to try out a couple of new songs in my set before Saturday night's gig in Rochester.

I'm not used to standing up to play a guitar and at the moment my fingers are complaining a lot. I remember when I broke my elbow in 2018 I had to learn to play guitar again standing up- the weight of the guitar affects all your upper body muscles. I could only manage to play for about 30 minutes before my arms started screaming. I had been doing a lot of drum kit playing until the pandemic kicked off, and I had become really fit. I will start again in January, lockdowns permitting, but until then I need to make sure there is time every day for standing up to practice!

If there is music time left over, I will do some more work on my own recordings. One of the songs sounds really good and I've now set a sonic standard to live up to. Rather than being daunting, this is fantastic. I know it's going to need mastering but the mix is great and I sound exactly what I want to sound like, vocal-wise. I hope I manage to get more decent vocals recorded before 'teacher-voice' sets in: that's  harshness that comes into your singing voice because of taking a lot to groups of students. I might even be able to overcome it this time around because I have been doing so much singing.

Meanwhile, our Equal Parts 2 EP is in the pipeline. It is going to be stuck in a vinyl waiting room for a while, because there is a world shortage of everything because of Covid/Brexit/Government incompetence (strike out the first two). Us DIY musicians need to invent a new recording format just for ourselves, and refuse to sell out to venture capitalists. Something like Bitcoin that they can't get their hands on. Spider's webs, maybe: I know they have sonic possibilities, and their fear of spiders might keep the greedy corporate sociopaths at bay.