This is a piece from one guitar two, recorded during my recent retreat in the cave at the Prajna Mountain Refuge. The album was published to Backstage this week and will make its way to Bandcamp in a few months.
The piece has the working title Wednesday because that’s the day it was recorded. What would it sound like if the cave was really really huge? I used a plugin called Valhalla (perfect name, isn’t it?) to simulate a gigantic cave. The beauty of a simulated cave is that it can be turned on and turned off. What you hear is just my guitar… no other instrument was added. Some people imagine they hear synthesizers but it’s just the guitar and reverb. So now I want to give this treatment to all of the slow pieces from one guitar two, which means there will be a second volume called one guitar two – Big Cave Versions.
Today I posted the new album to Backstage. 14 tracks. 40 minutes of music. Exactly four weeks from start to finish, because I arrived at the refuge on Tuesday 6. August. I loved every moment of working on this album. One guitar in the wilderness… and my reaction to the surroundings and the sound of the cave and six hours of daily zazen. I want to make more recordings like this, especially now that I know the equipment does what I was hoping it could do. one guitar three… next year sometime, somewhere.
A big thank you has to go to Roshi Joan Halifax, who has been an important part of my life for two decades and who invited me to stay at the refuge. It was she who suggested the cave as a place to record my guitar. Many thanks also to Sensei Noah Kodo Roen, who built the meditation cave.
It’s been a week of putting my hand into a dark basket and pulling out things I didn’t even remember making. The dark basket was a folder that contained about 50 audio files I recorded in the Wilderness, time-stamped but otherwise untitled. I enjoyed that discovery process a lot. By yesterday afternoon the album had grown to 14 pieces and an overall length of 40 minutes… and there are a few more things to investigate. Discovered a piece I recorded while it rained. I can hear rain drops hitting the window, before I started playing. I left a few seconds of that, of course. While many pieces are quiet, there is also one rumba and one bossa, which is great because it creates a little contrast. Some of the quiet pieces have notes that just hang there in the stillness like water dripping from a pine cone in slomo. Or golden honey from a spoon. Just lovely.
Such an interesting way to make a recording: find a lovely location and spend a week recording anything that comes to mind, reacting to the space and its surroundings. I think I might want to make this part of a series of albums. I could rent a place somewhere and then proceed to discover how I respond to that particular place. I don’t think I have ever gone to a studio with every piece of music worked out. A few sketches, some chord changes… and the rest happens in situ. For some guitarists it’s all about the performance and how to record and execute it perfectly. One has the impression the result would be the same regardless of the recording location. For me it’s about the way I react to the room and what’s going on and my recordings are always tied to a time and a location. Pick another time or another location and the recording will be different. That’s what I hear in this music, the location, the surroundings, the stillness.
A technical note: I love the ability of the MixPre 6II to record 32bit floating point at 96kHz. I didn’t have to pay much attention to the recording levels. Many pieces would have ended up in the red – if they had been recorded 24bit. With 32bit floating point I was able to import a file to my laptop (last week), discover that it was hitting peaks of +4db… and simply normalize down to a max of -0.2db. Don’t ask me how that works, because I still don’t know, but that’s the magic of 32bit floating point. Since the MixPre 6II was designed for audio recording for movies, this was very important… if an actor starts yelling, no problem… just take down the gain afterwards. It’ll be fine. The MixPre 6II is amazing and I can’t imagine working without it.
I am sitting at my table, next to a fan because we have a heatwave, and am having my morning coffee. I followed Matt’s suggestion (in the comment section of this post) and boiled the water before adding it to the Moka pot. I think the purpose of this may be to make the extraction happen more quickly. What it made me realize is why the original design has those edges. I believe they make the pot more grippy. What I found was that I could not tighten my round pot enough while holding it with a towel and when pressure started to build up vapor escaped where the top and the bottom are screwed together. It is interesting that the designers of newer and stainless Moka pots didn’t figure this out! The coffee was good though and maybe I’ll try again with a silicon hot pad that affords more grip. For now I will switch back to adding room temp water.
Today the second single from “Bare Wood 2” was released on all streaming services and digital outlets. I use UnitedMasters for the digital distribution of my music. For each album or single UM autogenerate what they call a Master Link, which is supposed to make it easy for people to click on the logo of service they subscribe to and listen to the music right away. I guess it is considered too labor and time intensive to use the search function of any streaming service to find the piece. Okay. This is the master link for the new single “Saudade”. You will notice that there is a pop up that declares “I wanna get to know my fans better. Shoot me your info and I’ll add you to my contacts.”
Pause. Well, that’s not something I would ever say, is it. And I can’t figure out whether I can kill the pop-up altogether. It’s the reason I have never used the master link before. I did figure out that I can change the wording of the pop-up – but what should it say? (It’s probably also why I am not good at social media or promotion… most of the tools make me cringe…)
Let me know what you think of the master link. Useful? Bogus? Honestly, I don’t even know where that info goes, should you add your name and email to the pop-up. UnitedMasters database? Go ahead, I dare you! Also cookies… don’t you hate THOSE pop-ups? We don’t use them on this website. However, we will have to use them to make a subscription platform work better… so you don’t have to sign in every time you visit the page.
