The Summer Drum

Summer's almost gone, you Doors fans, dang hippies!

The summer is almost over. And what a hot summer it was. Too hot. The planet is experiencing the worst global warming ever. But that's not the point of this blog. 

Today I went to guitar center to play some real live drums, a real drum set. The first week or so I've only had a practice drum pad, which was too expensive, 30 bucks! For wool. 

Okay, so I've been intimated by drums forever. 

In fact, when I first played drums the first day at guitar center I was so self conscious that when people came into the room I stopped the cymbals and silenced them with my hands like Bill Bruford LOL.

But you can learn to get confidence on a new instrument. I just started playing the best I could and somehow they were impressed. The guy even asked to hold my stick to see if there was magic in it. He tried it and he wasn't that good. 

Two weeks later I went back more determined but when I sat on the kit I was still self conscious and fearful. 

Then I remembered some rock song with a 16th note hi hat pattern, it was like a Zappa thing or something. Or like Deep Purple's Ian Pace. So I hit the 16th note pattern on the hi hat, then copied it across the entire kit, from the hi hat, to snare, to toms, to cymbals, and walaaaaaaaaaaah, polyrhythms are born! 

Then suddenly I was playing lighter and faster, and I was starting to get more jazzy. 

Just goes to show you that you need practice really to have the confidence. They go hand in hand. 

I don't have much time to practice, what with working 48 hours at the retail gig, but the time I do use, is spent with great listening and patience, that I sort of can copy things somehow. Must be all the practice from guitar. 

Get me a different drum for every different emotion, it's go time. This is like therapy lol. Cathartic. 

The Piano And The Guitar

Hello Music Enthusiasts, 

Today, I'd like to discuss the differences and similarities between the guitar and the piano. I just started playing the piano seriously over the weekend and I've made a momentous leap in my playing. I've learned songs and tons and tons of chords, jazz chords, inversions, and some major scales. It's been a blast! Playing the piano and practicing it is as much fun as playing guitar. It's definitely more relaxing. You get to sit down. Maybe it's even better. First the similarities. 

Chords

The piano and the guitar are both primarily chordal instruments of the chordophones family. Meaning that the piano and the guitar both can play multiple notes [or chords] on it at the same time. Unlike a saxophone which can only produce one tone at a time [or if they use free jazz over-blowing technique, they can get overtones, giving them a chord-like sound, but this is rare in most jazz, classical, and pop]. 

Accompaniment

As well as both instruments being able to produce and play chords, both instruments are used primarily for accompaniment, or as we say in the jazz world, for comping [comping is short for accompaniment]. Think about great rock songs that feature piano like With a Little Help From My Friends by the Beatles. The piano is holding the song together by comping chords throughout the song. In addition, think of how the piano in a jazz song becomes a focal point of introductions for songs into comping for the horn lines of the tune. 

Easily Accessible to Everyone

The piano and guitar are both great standard starter instruments for virtually anyone and everyone. Most parents get their young kids to play the piano or guitar at a very young age and let them develop an interest in the instrument. Once they get serious they become good musicians and may later form bands and possibly have a career in music. I would say the piano is more accessible to everyone than guitar because actually playing the piano chords doesn't involve as much finger dexterity, strength finger bending, and finger arching, although the piano's touch and feeling really has to do with what type of piano or keyboard that you are playing. A weighted grand piano will be much harder to play physically than a cheap plastic keyboard. 

Differences

Chord and Scale Fingerings

The main difference I've found between the piano and guitar is a hardcore difference of philosophy in terms of chord and scale fingerings. On the guitar, once you learn a chord voicing fingering or scale pattern, you actually know the chord voicing or scale in every key. Why? Because the guitar is built on patterns. You play a G major barre chord and then you move it up a 5th and you're now playing a D major chord. You can use the exact same kind of chord voicing and all of a sudden you know that chord in literally every key. The guitar is based on a concept, in a sense. You don't have to know that there are 2 sharps in the key of D.

Piano, however, is less based on concepts like the guitar, and more based on the literal notes in front of you that you need to play. Most chords all have different fingerings. Most chord inversions have different fingers. Most scales all have different fingerings. This is where you can see that the piano is a much more serious instrument that requires and demands more attention to what are the actual notes in the chord [the names of the notes], the notes in the scales, the sharps or flats in the key signatures, and you have to know all of this. That's the biggest difference in my humble opinion. 

Of course there are more differences but to keep this short I'll keep things simple with this. I'll stay in the loop and keep you all updated on my piano progress. I can already play simple jazz standards like Autumn Leaves and All The Things You Are. In terms of rock I've tackled Lennon's Imagine and Pilot's It's Magic. I recommend everyone reading this to try out the piano. You might like it. You might even learn to love it. 

Jazz Duo Project

Here I'd like to share some of my recent music projects. I've been doing a jazz duo, myself on guitar and Jason Thomas on alto saxophone. We're doing standards but we're also doing a lot of free form improvisational stuff. Check out some of our music. 

https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/all-blues-2 
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/all-blues 
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/st-thomas 
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/improv-1 
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/funky-improv-1 
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/freedie-freeloader 
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/blue-bossa 
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/jazz-duo-metal-jam 
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/body-and-soul 

Also, we performed last week at an open mic at Petie's Place, a bar in Tarzana, CA. 
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/footprints-live-at-open-mic
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/all-blues-1
https://soundcloud.com/orlando-figueroa-17/blues-jam-dminamaj7-vamp

I actually thought the live open mic recordings weren't so hot when I played it. However, when I look back at it I see that there was a lot of inspired playing there. My guitar tone was especially good during Footprints, that greasy chorus-infused synthetic sound adds a lot of flavor to the modern jazz guitar sensibility. Likewise, the alto saxophone sound is unique, clean, but full of all kinds of permutations. We played especially well on the improvisational blues jam vamp, where there was an extended alto saxophone solo. The drum solo really adds a lot of momentum to the jam. It was here rather than in the two jazz standards that this impromptu band started to sound like magic.

The Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

I read this cool book that just came out in 2017 called The Dawn of the New Everything, written by this computer programmer named Jaron Lanier. Lanier and his startup in 1984 (coincidence) created VPL Research Inc, the first VR company ever in which he was the CEO and creator with a bunch of ragtag electronics experts. They created the idea of VR, avatars, VR gloves and suits, and made it what it is today. The book focuses on Jarons' life spectacularly, from his dark child past where he lost his mother in a car accident, to having a goat farm, and eventually going on to learn about computers and electronics at the closest University. He was a musician who was cool with the avant-garde classical scene, he used to hang out in John Cage's circle.

After the more biographical parts of the book he focuses on VR. What it is, the science of it, the dark side of it, his thoughts on everything about it. For me the idea of VR is that it will probably be mostly used for porn and video games, at least that's what its like now. However, Jarons' view on VR is much more optimistic and beautiful. He sees the human side to VR. He isn't interested so much in the creation of VR and the science of it as he is in the workers working together and learning through each other about VR-the humanitarian side of modern technology. That's something that isn't really talked about in the dozens of Wired articles I read. This guy is onto something, something interesting and spiritual, albeit a sort of electronic/human hybrid spiritualistic approach.

I enjoyed the very last ending of the book very much. In the Appendix he talks about ideas that he only touched lightly on in the book. For example he talked a lot about the idea of algorithms choosing things for us. What we watch, what people to be friends with, what music to listen to, who we have sex with, what events we should go to, etc. He believes that because of this we are allowing the computers to become smarter than we are. We aren't informed enough to make good decisions about all those things so instead we rely on Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Tinder to decide all the 'hard' choices for us. In the long run I think he's right. The tech industry is dark, the whole thing with net neutrality is a good example. On the internet he has much to say.

He believes the internet was created for good intentions, with the sales of goods, trade, and expertise for trade between people. Instead some people make tons of money from the internet while others just have a really cool Facebook page, tons of Twitter followers, or write a great informative blog (like this one, I'm talking about myself). He talks about the history of the net and how links and web pages were supposed to go both ways. You were supposed to be able to click on something and tell where it came from, and they were suppose to be able to know where you came from upon finding it. Things like that. And the early ideas of monetization for the net was that people with trades skills were supposed to use it to exchange goods and services for cash, a sort of free enterprise for everyone. Of course it didn't turn out that way. The companies control cyberspace, the term coined by William Gibson in his 1980's science fiction novel Neuromancer. In many ways William Gibson was writing about Lanier (and his computer friends') lives.

The most fun part was reading his ideas on virtual reality within the universe. For example, if an advanced civilization could create virtual realities within a universe, the existence of one or many universes wouldn't matter because we would believe the virtual reality to be the universe. In the Appendix he talked about this idea that aliens could have some sort of compiler that could create VR within the world they or we live in. Sort of reminds me of the matter compiler in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. In the book the matter compiler is a device where you can get anything you want from thin air.

No matter what you think of VR or computers the fact remains that our world is shaped by these things, especially right now. In a speech on Youtube, Jaron talked abut the ideas of VR coming to fruition around 2030 and 2040, which isn't that far off. We're already almost there. From the beginnings of Orwellian 1984 to the Fake Russian News of the Trump Era, the times they are a-changin'.

In the book Jaron says the most technologically advanced 'computers' we have today are musical instruments. Maybe one day playing a musical instrument will be like computer programming, a valued and highly sought after skill. The musicians will have more jobs!