For my birthday, my brother gave me a MIDI keyboard controller... and a head cold.
…The world is not prepared for the sheer volume of hallucinogenic-rock-organ-synth-space-electronic currently barreling towards it.
To get into the right mind space, I've been consuming a steady diet of cough syrup, 9 Inch Nails, and the GameCube soundtrack to Metroid Prime (supplemented with hourly naps and the occasional foray into Vangelis and/or ambient sound scapes from Thief: The Dark Project. Oh, and Conan the Barbarian.)
It's been an interesting time.
For the longest time I thought of music as a kind of alien, magical world that belonged to other people – I could enjoy the things that came out of it, but to venture into it myself was totally impossible.
This might still be the case, but I've got enough cough syrup and overdrive buttons to not notice.
Seriously, you can hook an amp up to anything in here. Oboes, clarinets, saxophones, NOTHING IS SAFE.
To be fair, I started dipping my toes in the water a couple of years ago with this cigar box stick dulcimer that I bought off of Etsy. It's fretted to be just a scale, so you can't actually play any wrong notes, which makes it pretty amazing for the beginner. It took me months just to get the coordination down to actually strum in anything vaguely resembling time (I still can't quite do it without catapulting the pick across the room. I mostly just use my thumb now.) However, once I (kind of) figured it out, I discovered some interesting effects. First, I found myself (as I usually do) developing a taste for the things that were in my reach to create even though they weren't necessarily the sort of things that I had been hankering to bring into being before: I started composing a lot of weird little melancholy Renaissance dance tunes. (My taste conforming to my abilities is one of the big reasons that I haven't dabbled in AI art.)
Second, I found that I began picking out the rhythm in things totally outside of my semi-drunken melancholy Renaissance strummings. It actually began to change the way that I write: where I used to care about specificity and exactness, I found myself choosing words more and more purely for the rhythm of the sentence. Rhythm has now become the primary factor behind basically all of my word choice in almost any writing project (try reading one of my weird little stories like Vim out loud sometime.) It was a really surprising… synergy of hobbies, and one that has really cemented for me the fact that we are whole human beings experiencing life as a whole rather than a collection of discrete compartments each dedicated to its isolated subject. (Poetry also makes a lot more sense to me now that I can't stop hearing the rhythm of things.)
There's been some other musical adventures along the way, but they haven't had as much cough syrup and distortion. (Chopping up 90-year-old banjo music and then slowing it down 500% is still a kind of outsider-looking-in approach to music.)
There was something else I was going to say, but it seems to have slipped off into the 90% of my brain that is currently goop. The nice thing about having most of your higher reasoning drafted subpoenaed for mucus production is that you no longer have the brainpower to think things like, "Really, I should watch 10 hours of music tutorials and read a book and learn all the terminology before I dare to touch an instrument." Instead, you just start hammering keys with your germy fingers and going, "Huh, what kind of terrible noise does it make if I do THIS?"
After all, we call it playing.
I think sometimes it's easy to forget that, but play is how we learn. (It's very rarely how we teach, but that doesn't change the fact that it's how we learn. Just watch kittens, or children before we feed them to the iPhone gods.)
Hmm. Maybe that's what I was going to say after all. Or maybe my brain is just a warm bowl of tapioca pudding that will conform to the shape of whatever last idea was presented to it.
...Why yes, I do want to spend $27.50 on phat 90s RNB drum loops!
I can't wait to hear what they sound like hooked up to this guitar amp.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go throwback some cough syrup, set this thing to church organ mode + overdrive, and pretend to be a diabolical B movie supervillain.
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