Collaborative music project ?

The sad fact is that a lot of "musicians" out there... aren't. You get tied in to doing a collaborative piece with someone who can't play bass, can't keep time on drums, or has no imagination. I've done collaborative tracks with people who just add one repeating bassline throughout a five minute piece - same four bars over and over again - or just take a track, add some kind of totally inappropriate distortion filter to it and viola ! - that's their contribution. 

Then you have two options - either to say "Well, thanks very much" or "To be honest, I can't use that." Politeness means you end up using it in most cases. 

I'm a multi instrumentalist. Jack of all trades, master of none. Part of the reason I play so many instruments is that it's difficult to find other people who - really - think along the same lines that I do. Music works properly when you're all thinking along the same lines. This used to be possible when (I'm thinking 1970's) there were a lot of skilled and creative musicians around, but the bar has got lower and lower and it's very rare to find someone who can actually *play* nowadays. By *play* I mean actually improvise, come up with ideas and execute them to a high standard. When you've got that, the whole band bounces off each other and you create something special. Life is too short to just produce crap. 

Referring back to "talking shop" - whilst this thread has been going on, a friend of mine has released six full albums. All very good stuff. All of them have been solo efforts. 

Dave ... I'm gonna work on a small VISUAL piece ... and will post it here ... I might even film it with my small video camera if it develops good enough. Let's see if this helps a start ... however I can see a problem already .. if I go outside, I already do not see a loud guitar part ... though some crows bark a lot in the morning. Let's see if I can do this ... it is VERY backwards from the way I work, which is 100% intuitive and not influenced by anything else but what is with it at that very second. It has its own "continuity", story wise, for lack of a better word.

I'm a bit tougher to explain, in that I came from a literary family, and have a very educated/academic style of look at things, which I can not help at all ... it's there! I tried learning the bass, and still have it, though I have had to switch hands due to a shorter pinky on the left hand, and have a midi board (which I have not exactly learned) and various VST's I goof around with on my favorite sounds, which (of course!!!) I can never find ... I'm not gonna find the smooth textures that Tangerine Dream has created which go through 100 details before you hear it!

Not having had the financial ability to learn more music, I turned to theater and film. I could not do film because my English stunk (came to the USA at 15) but I ended up in theater and did really well ... well, the language issue kinda stopped the acting quickly, and I concentrated on directing ... which I was already fond of in FILM ... the world over.

My major was Directing in Theater, even though UCSB grossly cheated me, and a year later sent me a piece of paper that simply said BA, not BFA ... bunch of crooks and losers anyway ... they did not like that my dad was the Chairman of a Department in the same University and was getting upper level seminars at Stanford and UCLA ... and they always made it look like I was not good enough. With one exception ... the best professor was English and he had come from the 50's theater stuff and Dr. Harrop knew right away that I liked those folks as I mentioned it in film directors who had taken so many actors off the stage.

The surprise, for many, was that only one of their directors got my attention ... Peter Brook ... and he ended up doing some insane things, like create an experimental school in Paris ... that had different folks from different places from all over the world ... they could not exactly communicate together, but ... somehow, I don't think you will find that an issue in THE MAHABHARATTA .... at all ... but his opus for me was Marat/Sade, the most explosive of plays ... and I figured out that those actors did what they did because of the free form efforts and improvisations ... you can NOT by any stretch of the imagination detail at least 50 different characters in the play, as tight and strong as the play ... see the film, sure, but turn off the screen and JUST LISTEN ... and there was my clue to it all ... the words were driving it all, but how to bring them alive is the trick ... and I succeeded magnificently in directing my last 3 pieces of work because of it, even trying some "psychic" exercises one time, which ended up being the thing many wanted to try! And the last piece I did, I got a massive review from the local newspaper guy who did all theater and he disliked UCSB because it was too pompous and too fake for him .... when that review was read, at least a couple of professors immediately said that the reviewer was a jerk ... but the only thing I did in directing that piece was ... showing the dog his character ... we went during lunch and walked around campus ... yep .. I want that ... yep ... that too ... ohh we definitely have to have that ... and guess what ... it all came alive and exploded on the stage and a lot of folks loved it, including that reviewer that compared the character of the dog to some characters in Santa Barbara theater scene going back almost 10 years ... 

But for me, it was over ... I did not want to fight the worst side of mankind in my imagination. I did not want to be near them at all ... and I turned to writing, the "internal" side that I knew I had a knack for, and used while directing and helping the actors do their work smoother. And I wrote a lot of poetry (90's ... with the Ygdrasil Journal of Poetic Arts, with 30 years of monthly issues and I edited several ... and then ended up writing several short stories and a couple of novels I'm still working on.

Music, however, was the woman that never left me ... I never married, and lived for the music! I (probably) would rather select some of the music than choose any woman I spent time with, except one, and one of my Improvisation works is dedicated to her, although I doubt she will ever see it, or understand the depth of how much I cared for her ... it was a glorious 2 years, that ended sadly ... as she was not able to continue with the acting at UCSB by not having passed the tough standards to make it to the exclusive upper level class where, really, only 20% of the folks trying out had a chance to get there!

My studies, though, "continued" ... I never forgot my schooling, and what I learned ... and still work with it time and again, and say something here or there in a thread or two ... but sadly, in my experience, musicians are the toughest to spend time learning the notes and details of the chords ... to them it's all mechanics, and many still don't know you can play the C note on your guitar at least 100 different ways ... and all I get, sometimes, is ... it's not rock'n'roll ... which in some ways, I tend to think that it spells out how much and how far some of those folks really want to go with their instrument and music ... it's NOT all about the practice, although sometimes you have to prepare for it, but a lot more about how it feels to you and how you can express it ...and of course, in the commercialized area that is a ticket to dropping you off the bridge and out of the music ... no one wants to play with you ... but it takes imagination to hear Keith Michell deliver one portion some 200/300 times in several years, and Peter Brook that he never found him saying it the same way ... and that is TOUCH and FEEL about the time and place ... and if all you know is "rock'n'roll", I don't think you can learn a whole lot more ... maybe another trick, so that now you have a few more chops in your tank!

Can a musician do that? YES ... but it has to be in character and touch with the piece, and that is about something Robert Fripp mentions about the band ... you tune to each other, and reply, not to the scale ... though I'm sure that this is 2 different things ... he's talking about the communication within the band ... they have to be tuned to each other, not wait for one guy to finish his 4 notes, and now you have the moment kind of thing ... it's very different and something that is very hard to teach, because everyone comes expecting something that sounds like the commercial sound ... not what would be considered the sound of "themselves" in pure reality.

In this sense what Dave wants to do is not going to be easy, but it will only be tough if there are too many no's and not enough ... let's at it, and have fun with it ... even if we end up sounding like Art Bears, or Henry Cow ... so to speak ... 

I suppose that we need to let go of "ideas" and just go with one comment, or moment in time ... and that's it ... it will develop by "itself" at that point ... and that is what creativity is all about ... not much of anything else.

Sorry ... I think I wrote too much ... hope this helps, but I think Dave is not gonna like it much ... and he is, by far, one of the few members on PA that has music that I have actually enjoyed! He probably has no idea why, but then, that is not the composer's job or concern!