17
votes
What music have you been playing recently?
Do you play a musical instrument? However well or badly, here's a place to talk about what you've been practicing or performing.
Do you play a musical instrument? However well or badly, here's a place to talk about what you've been practicing or performing.
On piano, I'm learning "Yellow Wurlitzer Blues" by Hiromi Uehara. A few months ago, I bought the sheet music from her Spectum album and they're all harder than I'd like (as expected), but thought I'd try this one since I like her blues recordings the best. I'm about six of eight pages in, playing at about half speed. It's fun and starting to sound good some days. (The recording from the album is on YouTube.)
I'm also going to Hiromi concert in October. She's reviving her previous band, "The Trio Project," with Simon Phillips on drums and James Genus (from Saturday Night Live) on bass. Looking forward to it.
Also, I got a new gadget. The Jamcorder is a recording device that you connect to the input and output on a MIDI instrument. It records all the time to an SD card, so you can keep track of when you practiced and play it back any time. Not that I ever play it back, but if I play something well I'll have it.
On accordion, as usual I'm playing songs for Mom every day, using Google Meet. I decided to start recording them in case I manage to play something without screwing up.
I had never heard of Hiromi, but I'm extremely glad your comment introduced me! I just listened to the Spectrum album and it is wonderful! Just so full of LIFE.
If we're considering 0 bpm "music" then I put out my 9th release last week on bandcamp and subvert. I create long-form meandering ambient noise albums with the following gear:
Befaco Oneiroi
Neutral Labs Elmyra 2
Make Noise 0-ctrl & Strega
And, yes, I'm on the spectrum lol.
I started playing guitar in my early teens, so now that would be nearly 20 years ago. Though I haven't always been practising regularly. These days I mainly just pick the guitar up for a few minutes a day's to relax and quiet my mind down.
Recently, I decided to try and start writing my own stuff again and bought some equipment to record it. So right now I'm on a journey of learning home music production, which is kind of fun. Though truthfully, I find starting a new project is very daunting each time. So at the moment I am sitting on a bunch of ideas for songs and am procrastinating the part where I finish writing it and start recording.
I'm using Reaper at the moment and am quite happy with it. Honestly just picked it because of the free trial and stuck with it.
At one point a long time ago I used ableton and played around with a few others but never got into producing as much as I did recently.
Still learning all that it has to offer but haven't found any reason to switch so far.
About a year ago I bought myself an electric piano off craigslist and have been loving it! I played a bit as a young child, and have played other instruments since, but never particularly seriously. Enough, though, that I was able to jump back in and make some progress this past year.
I've mostly just worked through practice/self-teaching books, but recently picked up Shumann's Kinderszenen on a recommendation from a friend who plays. I'll admit they're more challenging than were described... but I've been able to learn a couple of them so far.
Honestly, I'm just happy to have an instrument I can play with headphones and not disturb anyone else. It's really liberating to be up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, and just play around for a bit.
i recently replaced another bassist in an established band, so have been working my way through four albums' worth of material. I do a lot of subbing in other bands, so the problem of having to learn a lot of material in a short amount of time is not a new one. However in this case the previous player's style was a great deal different than mine, which requires spending some time figuring out how to replace some parts with stuff that I'm comfortable playing but which works for the songs and the current lineup of the band (which has also changed a lot since the albums were recorded). It's a bit of a balancing act since as a new member I think its important to respect the work that was done before I arrived, but not being too timid about experimenting with changes if I think I can make the band sound better live. And of course meanwhile not forgetting the existing arrangements and trying to bring some new tunes in as well.
I had gotten somewhat burned out on playing live this year and had taken a bit of a hiatus, so it has been nice getting my chops back together. However you never know whether situations like these are going to work out well or not in the beginning; I've had plenty of bad ones so I'm always nervous, but usually after maybe four or five rehearsals you start to get a sense of whether its going to be fun or not. So far, so good with this one.
I think the fact that I don't sing in any of these groups is probably the big difference. If I have the changes and the form in my head I can play the whole tune on bass, although when I'm learning somebody's book as in this current situation, its often difficult to remember the titles of the tunes, or how they start. Almost every time I do this there will be a few tunes I'm worried about and I'll think about maybe writing out the notation as a reminder, but if I'm not using charts on every tune they can be a nuisance since it might take me a while to remember which tunes I need the chart for, where it is in the book etc. So I default to no book and spending time memorizing the form when I practice.
That being said though, I struggle to even talk and play at the same time, much less to sing, so I think all of my memorization method would go out the window if I were trying to manage both. I guess one thing I am kind of religious about now as a consequence of embarrassing screwups on gigs, is to pencil in my first bass note on set lists for tunes where everybody comes in together immediately or the song starts with some kind of bass figure. Few things in my life have been more mortifying than playing a couple bars of some bass intro only to discover when the rest of the band comes in that I was in the wrong key the whole time. So whatever it takes is my theory :)