Musical Explorations

Howdy, yall. I thought I'd write a post about music and projects I've been working on.

I'm in a band right now. However, the band has just barely formed with me as the guitar player, and they have only two songs. The band is called Modern Tongues. It's an alternative pop-rock band with a female vocalist. I met the drummer at my work. They're all pretty young kids, like 18-20, but I think this is a good band for me to work with because it seems like there's no rush, the singer knows how to do music production, and the drummer can pick me up and bring me to practices. 

The only downsides I can think of are twofold. For starters, they practice about an hour away from my area. That's pretty far. The other is that although the singer is talented with her vocals, it isn't clear that her songwriting is especially creative and/or noteworthy. But that's okay because that's where the guitar, bass, and drums come in to add their color to the tracks.

I like the fact that I'm basically something of a hired [but without pay] gun in a sense. There are no gigs as of yet so the whole thing is in its embryonic state. It's fun and it's a good experience for me to work in a band again after six years of retail, two years straight of open mics, and a failed death metal band. Boy, am I glad this isn't death metal. 

So yeah, things are moving along in the musical realm. 

In addition, I've been keeping my weekly jazz duo band going. We've been playing together for a whole year straight. We have really improved as a duo, especially my jazz improvisational skills. I've been watching this YouTube channel called Things I Learned From Barry Harris, this guitarist goes into jazz music theory and all these different ways on how to improvise, much of it not taught at Berklee. I've been using what I've learned from that and found that my improvisational skills over jazz changes have improved. I'm starting to get into Coltrane-Esque sheets of sound sort of thing.

I'm still taking my sweet time on learning Sequenza. Technically I can play the whole thing but I can't play it up to speed and I can't play it perfectly. But I'm still working on it. I need to work more on my piano playing, which always needs more work.    

I have a friend that I've been singing simple classic rock songs with as well. Acoustic guitars.

There's a lot of brewing. Hopefully, something comes out of the band this year. Shows, recordings, that's all I really want. I've spent too many years of my adulthood not playing in a band. It's hard to believe ten years ago that was one of my main things. 

Keep on groovin'.