on bands

Sunday Jul 8th 2007

As is stated on richmenga.com at the time of this writing, ZiON, my new music release will be coming soon. When I say “coming soon”, I mean “eventually”, and when I say “eventually”, I mean “when I get around to it.”

Nothing says “you can’t capture lightning in a bottle” more than sitting, by yourself, with your instrument of choice, trying to think up some new tunes. As a matter of fact, it’s amazing anyone can do it at all - but I manage somehow.

The entire reason I bought my first workstation synthesizer (Ensoniq SQ-1 Plus) is so I could have an entire band without the band. It started with that, then I learned guitars, grabbed a multitrack recorder and have essentially doing that ever since. Today I do it with an Alesis Fusion - but I still have the Ensoniq. :-)

These days it’s unbelievably easy and cheap to do the band-without-a-band thing because of the computer. Need a multitrack recorder? Get Audacity, grab a USB mixer and whammo; instant studio. Add a software based drum machine, tinker around with a few live instruments, and off you go. Heck, you could use a cheesy headset with mic for vocals. It’ll sound good if you work at it enough. The best thing is that you don’t need a powerful computer. If you’ve got a box with a 2GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive and a CD/DVD burner (for making CD’s and backing up sessions), you’re good to go.

Who knew back then that you could get pro-quality sound in 2007 for under 200 bucks?!

Amazing.

So anyway..

Aside from all that, I’ve been in and out of a few bands over the years. When I am actually in a band that I like, the music writing process happens very quickly. Things happen and move along at a very fast pace compared to doing it all by myself. The added influence of extra people helps out quite a bit.

Since being in Florida I haven’t really been looking to form or join a group, but I may start looking. Or not. It depends. Half of me wants to get in the social circle of musicians in the area, while the other half is perfectly content to create tunes on my own.

There’s a lot of drama (i.e. bullshit) whenever there’s a band involved. Even with the best people, the drama rears its ugly head from time to time and there’s really no way to avoid it. This drama I speak of manifests itself in many ways. Could be a bitchy girlfriend/wife from one of the band members, could be time limitations, could be any number of things.. you get the idea.

My goal is to attempt to find studio rats like myself in the Tampa Bay Florida area. Gigging, as anyone who’s done it knows, is a pain in the ass, so I’d rather start off with a more controlled environment.

This is all dependent on if I even decide to start scoping around. :-)

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