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Is music the purest form of art?

This question was posed by someone on Quora. Here are my thoughts:

I wouldn’t say that any artform is purer than another, but music is certainly the most fleeting form of art. Unlike, say, visual art such as paintings or sculptures which have a solid form or the written word which is printed, translated, and passed down through generations, music is intangible. More than any other artform, it resembles death; each note is predicated on the death of the one before it, and once a musical performance is finished, it is gone, existing only in the space & time it was created. Recording is mankind’s attempt at capturing the intangible nature of music, but it’s a relatively new and imperfect science - tape deteriorates, mechanical recording devices break, digital music data gets corrupted. Also, as much as I love and revere the art of music engineering & production, in many ways it removes the listener further and further away from original moment a piece of music was created (which you could argue is music at its most pure).

#music #recording #music production #art

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What makes a good guitar solo?

My answer to a question on Quora.

Apart from “good” being a highly subjective matter when it comes to any artform, it’s highly dependent on the context of the solo and how it works with the song it’s in. In general, a good guitar solo doesn’t drown out the rest of the song, but rather adds an extra layer of harmony & melody to it. This isn’t an iron-clad rule, however; there are many great songs in which the guitar solo is pushed to the front & center of the mix and all other instruments are in service of it. David Gilmour’s solo in “Money” off Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon is a textbook example of this - the entire song ramps up and shifts from its 7/4 time signature to the standard 4/4 for the guitar solo, then ramps down and shifts back to 7/4 (as Gilmour admitted he wasn’t comfortable playing lead guitar in unconventional time signatures). In addition, the solo sits much higher in the mix than anything else. But does this make it a bad solo? Not at all; it’s well played & produced, creative (two separate guitar tracks playing near-same notes to produce a slightly dissonant echo effect), and it suits the song very well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kcet4aPpQ

On the other end of the spectrum, take a more minimal solo such as Kurt Cobain’s in “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” He plays a note-for-note reiteration of the vocal melody in the verse & pre-chorus down to the string bends & vibrato - a staple of traditional pop songwriting. While some would see this as simplistic, it’s actually a brilliant solo - Cobain had the chops to shred if he wanted to, but he far more often chose to play solos that cut straight to the point, accentuated melody and emotion above all else, and eschewed the kind of masturbatory guitar playing (several minute long solos featuring excessive tapping, vibrato, hammer-ons/pull-offs, and other techniques simply there to show off, adding nothing of substance to the song) of a lot of ’70s hard rock and ’80s glam rock in particular that bands like Nirvana were rebelling against.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sqL8dVIG2k

So, what does make a good guitar solo? The short, universal answer is one that is expressive and suits its song well, not the amount of notes per minute played or advanced technique it showcases. Creativity and soul will always trump virtuosity.

#music #guitar #guitar solo #rock and roll #blues #electric guitar #music theory #nirvana #pink floyd #kurt cobain #david gilmour #rock music

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Atomium (2018)

After a couple decades of using nothing but pre-assembled consumer PCs (some of which I later modified), I completed my first computer build on January 5, 2016 using parts I acquired during sales over the course of 2015. Since then, I’ve added to & expanded upon it as I could afford to, doubling the memory to 32GB (quad-channel), adding a 4TB storage drive, and upgrading the video card from an R9 390 to a GTX 1070. I consider it foundationally complete, though I have plans for future additions including an M.2 SSD (ideally a 1 or 2TB Samsung 970 Evo) and higher-end GPU & monitor (either a GTX 1080 Ti or RTX 2080 with a 1440p or 4K 144hz G-Sync display). I use this as a workstation & gaming PC and as an all-around media hub in place of a television, including running various music production and image & video editing software and videogames. It is also my main writing tool in conjunction with a mechanical keyboard. This build performs great, with stable overclocks, low temperatures, and very fast, near-silent operation.

Here are the specs (including accessories & peripherals) as of September 2018:

CPU: Intel Core i7-5930k Hexa-Core @ 4GHz

GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G

Mobo: MSI X99-A Plus ATX LGA2011-v3

RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB DDR4-2666 (4x8GB)

SSD: Samsung 850 Evo 500GB 2.5″ V-NAND

SSHD: Seagate Hybrid 4TB 3.5″ 5900rpm & NAND

HDD: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5″ 7200rpm

ODD: LG 24x Super-Multi DVD-RW with M-Disc

Cooling: Corsair H50 liquid CPU cooler & HD120 RGB fans

PSU: Rosewill Bronze 1000W 80+ semi-modular

Case: Thermaltake Core V31 windowed ATX mid-tower

Monitor: Asus VG278HV 27″ 1920x1080 144hz LED LCD

Keyboard: Corsair Strafe RGB with Cherry MX Brown switches

Mouse: Logitech Proteus Spectrum with optical tracking

Gamepad: Microsoft Xbox One with wireless USB adapter

External Drive: Western Digital My Book 2TB USB 3.0 (backup)

Headset: Logitech G430 7.1 channel surround sound set

Speakers: Boston Acoustics BA745 stereo speakers & subwoofer set

If I built this today, I would’ve used an i7-8700k with Z370 motherboard, but the rest would remain mostly the same. The last thing I needed was another time- and money-consuming hobby in addition to my music equipment & record collecting, but I find PC building very enjoyable and have been educating myself on it to the point where I’m confident enough to recommend parts and build PCs for other people, more and more of whom are opting for a gaming PC over a console and for very good reason - PC games are more numerous, affordable, and modifiable, there’s a much larger backlog of them, and extensive parameter control you won’t find on consoles is commonplace, as are far superior operating systems, graphics, and hardware & software customization. Building your own PC is also a good long-term investment, as you can expand your system over time to meet the needs of newer games & software (in my case, primarily music & video editing software; apart from gaming, that’s the most processor- and memory-intensive stuff I run). I’m not into the PC Master Race thing - I have a PlayStation 4 and play a lot of Sony exclusives on it - but the PC will always remain my primary gaming platform.

It’s a very exciting time to be a PC enthusiast, as consumer components are more powerful & affordable than they’ve ever been - a roughly $1000 build that would’ve cost ten times that amount a few short years ago surpasses any gaming console on the market in every regard and puts professional-grade digital creativity tools within the reach of working class artists. I made a list of components for a good workstation & 1080p gaming PC build for roughly $1K USD with some wiggle room to lower or raise the price by around $200-500 depending on your needs.

#pc #custom pc #intel #intel core i7 #i7-5930k #haswell-e #intel x99 #msi #nvidia #gtx 1070 #corsair #solid state drive #sshd #rosewill #thermaltake #windows 10 #nvidia sli #pc gaming #computer music #pc build #digital technology #digital art #digital music #digital media #144hz monitor #1440p #samsung #seagate

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A large problem with the digital era is that technology doesn't know how to rot anymore. It either works or it doesn't, and things are manufactured to break or become obsolete so quickly that people are constantly buying new "improved" versions, instilling the mentality that the digital tech we own is temporary and forming a bond of any kind with it is futile.

On a musical level, I know one can, for instance, simulate a tape echo unit in need of service by adding vibrato & detuning to delay in post, but nothing sounds the same as wear and tear.

#millenials #digital technology #technology #music technology #digital era #obsolescence

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Guitar Store Altercation

I’m in a local guitar shop a few blocks down from my home playing some Fender Strat through a Line 6 HD500 digital multi-effect & amp modeling pedal board into a small Roland Cube practice amp (set totally clean with all modeling turned off) mainly to check out the HD500′s different modulation, filter, and delay & reverb sounds, and I’m approached this kid about ten years my junior (who likely got the job due to nepotism, as my hometown is small and guitar stores & jobs in them scarce, so in order to get one you need the right connections; qualification has little to do with it). He snarks:

“You know any Hendrix?”

Me: “A little. Not really by heart, but I know some riffs.”

Kid: “Oh yeah? Like what?”

Me: “Oh, I don’t know. A little of this, a little of that.”

Kid: “Like?”

Me: “Umm…’All Along The Watchtower,’ ‘The Wind Cries Mary,’ ‘Voodoo Child,’ ‘Freedom,’ ‘Little Wing’…you know, mostly the popular ones.”

Kid (who is now messing with the different overdrive presets on the pedal over the sounds I had dialed in and was playing with): “That’s all? Play some ‘Little Wing.’”

His cocky demeanor and the way he completely cut in on a pedal I was in the middle of demoing annoys me, but I figure this is his poor way of making conversation, so I play an abbreviated intro to “Little Wing,” having learned it by ear many years ago. It’s rusty and a half-assed attempt on my part, but my hope is that he’s just trying to be helpful in his own way and maybe even friendly. I’m being a pushover, essentially, which is a problem I’ve had all my life and which I’ve been working on improving, so none of this sits well with me.

As I’m playing, he completely annexes the HD500, dialing in a generic compressed Tube Screamer into Marshall JCM tone that would make bland, derivative bluesmen like SRV proud. I have no interest in hearing more of that crap, so I put the Strat down and go to buy the strings I was there for in the first place (my usual D’Addarios; nickel wound electric & phosphor bronze acoustic guitar strings). As I’m selecting them at the counter, out of the Roland Cube comes a note-for-note rendition of the “Little Wing” intro, as if the kid practiced it over and over again to be able to perform every single nuance exactly like Hendrix originally laid down on tape (albeit much more slowly). As he’s playing, he shoots this smug expression at me as if to say, “Yeah, that’s right. I’m younger than you and better at guitar. How do you like that, newbie?” At this junction, there are several retorts I could choose, including explaining to the kid that what he just did was akin to masturbation and doesn’t make him a good musician or simply taking the guitar back and showing him up with an improvised virtuoso fest. But instead, I pay for my strings and, as I leave the store, give him the most boldly sarcastic, insincere applause I have ever given in my life. In retrospect, I’m pretty satisfied having gone with that option.

Sometimes I really hate the ego & attitudes many rock musicians and guitarists in particular possess (reference my blog entry My Definition Of A Musician).

#guitar #electric guitar #music #music anecdote #guitar anecdote #anecdote #guitar store #music store #jimi hendrix #fender stratocaster #line 6 #effect pedal #rock n roll #musicians #personal anecdote #narcissism #musician ego #kurt cobain

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Stratocasters vs. Les Pauls

Somebody on Quora asked, “Which is better, a Stratocaster or Les Paul?” I wrote this response in the hopes of putting this unanswerable yet widely asked question to bed (at least on Quora):

Coming from someone who plays and appreciates both: neither is better than the other. Though they are the most popular solid body guitars ever created and the majority of recorded electric guitar music features either one or the other, they are very different creatures, each with their own unique features, specifications, and pros & cons, and each coming in a variety of configurations deviating from their standard form. Stratocasters (Strats) come in a much wider range of prices, from various third-party copies to Squier entry-level and budget models to Fenders made in Mexico, Japan, or America (in order of least to most expensive). They also come in a wider variety of styles and are more easily modifiable than Les Pauls. The standard Strat design is comprised of a triple single coil pickup configuration (low output pickups with a very bright, snappy, clanging tone) and vibrato bridge (which Fender incorrectly refers to as "tremolo"), though they are also commonly manufactured in SSH (neck & middle single coils and bridge humbucker) or HSH (neck & bridge humbuckers and middle single coil) configurations and with hard-tail or Floyd Rose bridges. Fender also makes them with either maple or rosewood fretboards (maple being brighter, harder wood). Its body shape is less blocky than a Les Paul’s, featuring curves & contours that more naturally rest against one's body and make extended playing sessions a bit more comfortable.

Les Pauls are generally much more expensive for a number of reasons. Unlike Strats which use a "bolt-on" neck that screws into place, Gibson Les Pauls have "set necks" which are attached to the body using a tightly fitted mortise-and-tenon or dovetail joint and secured with adhesive. If irreparable damage is done to the neck (or if it's cheaper to get a new neck than it is to refret the particular guitar), it is much easier and less expensive to replace a Strat's than it is a Les Paul's. The Les Paul is also a much heavier guitar with more sustain and overall resonance - this is partly because of the build (Les Pauls are larger and typically made with mahogany as opposed to the Strat's typical alder or ash bodies, with mahogany being a much heavier, denser wood) and partly because of the electronics. A standard Les Paul comes with dual humbucking pickups (which have a higher output than single coils and a warmer, darker, fatter, more compressed sound than Strat single coils), though they sometimes come with a third humbucker or dual P-90s (which is as close as you can get to single coils on a Les Paul apart from coil-tapping the humbuckers, though that only approximates a genuine single coil sound). The bridge design is usually a tune-o-matic & stop tailpiece combination (similar to a hard-tailed Strat, which improves on tuning stability and intonation due to the lack of movement), though some models have a Bigsby vibrato unit in place of the stop tailpiece (similar to the standard Strat vibrato bridge, though the strings remain on top of the guitar instead of going through the body, and the Bigsby is designed for much more subtle vibrato and doesn't pull off heavy detuning maneuvers like dive bombs [think Jimi Hendrix's rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner"] as easily). Les Pauls also have a single cutaway (though some copies like the Yamaha LPs come with dual cutaways) while the Strat has a dual cutaway design; some would argue that this makes reaching the higher frets easier on a Strat, though I personally find it to be simply an aesthetic difference.

There are other differences such as fretboard radius (the Strat is more curved with a 7.25" [vintage-style] or 9.5" [modern-style] radius while the Les Paul is flatter with a 12" radius) and scale length (Strats have a 25.5" scale compared to the Les Paul's 24.75" scale, meaning there is more space between frets on a Strat than on a Les Paul) which make selecting between the two guitars even more of an individual preference. You simply can't compare them because they are, as I've pointed out, entirely different animals with distinct designs, tones, and feel that are not better or worse. You can, however, take a specific Strat model and a specific Les Paul model (since they come in so many different variations and from so many different manufacturing plants apart from just Fender's and Gibson's) and compare them in terms of overall quality of build and parts. That would be the more appropriate question to ask in terms of putting the two up against each other.

#quora #question #music #guitar #electric guitar #fender #gibson #stratocaster #les paul #single coil #humbucker #guitar geek #music instruments

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Why Does Ambient Music Make Listeners Emote?

My answer to a question on Quora:

Almost all ambient music lacks words; it speaks entirely in the language of music, much as classical music does (and a lot of contemporary classical music is considered ambient, e.g., Stars Of The Lid, Rachel's, Esmerine, Eluvium, etc.). Different music elicits different kinds of emotions from its listeners - for instance, more rhythmic, percussion-centric music will typically make people feel active and want to dance & move their bodies. Ambient music has a lot of qualities that elicit reflection and introspection, that make listeners feel nostalgic and even draw out specific memories from them. These qualities include the amount of negative space a lot of ambient music contains (the absence of certain frequencies and long silences & pauses between notes have an effect on the listener, as the subconscious mind will process those along with the audible sound), the textural nature of the music (while most people listen to ambient music passively [e.g., while doing other things such as homework or cleaning], active listening reveals a world of nuances that register subconsciously even in the passive mind...it feels strange referencing myself here, but I wrote another Quora answer about ambient music that goes into more detail about this), and the general way ambient pieces create atmosphere. Unlike, say, pop music or Rock & Roll, ambient music is largely unconcerned with grabbing the listener's attention and more with taking its time establishing a mood and either maintaining it throughout the entire piece or having it transition into different moods through musical passages. So much of the genre is atmosphere- and mood-driven that it is extremely emotionally evocative, but the beauty is that there is often no specific emotion that ambient music attempts to evoke - different listeners will have different responses because ambient music most often lacks an inherent context (due largely to its lack of lyrics - music is a much more ambiguous language). Unlike lyrically-driven music, it doesn't tell you how to feel about it...it just is. This ambiguous, often abstract nature makes it completely open to individual interpretation, especially when so many ambient composers give their work vague titles (Brian Eno's "Music For Airports," Growing's "The Sky's Run Into The Sea," Labradford's "E Luxo So," Tim Hecker's "Harmony In Ultraviolet," etc.).

#quora #question #music #ambient music #drone #contemporary classical #soundscape #brian eno #stars of the lid

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Getting creative with icons (thanks to Icon Archive). I’m still getting used to Windows 10 (my previous computer from 2010 came with Windows 7 installed and I’d planned on holding off upgrading to 10 until Microsoft worked out more of its bugs and compatibility issues, but I decided to make the jump when I put together my new PC this January). I went a little crazy customizing not only the system’s OS, BIOS, and software, but also its aesthetics - there is hardly a single default icon left in any frequently used directory. I love how accurate and detailed some of these .ico files are...the “Recordings” directory icon features the exact same Sennheiser HD280 Pro headphones I used to mix & master a lot of the files contained in that directory, for instance. So much neater and more meaningful than the plain yellow folder icon Windows uses by default. I’m having trouble finding guitar & effect pedal icons, though...I only have a few vintage fuzz pedals and some different colored Strats & Les Pauls. Anybody know where I can get more music equipment .ico files?

#custom pc #computer #windows 10 #windows icons #icon archive #ico files #microsoft #os #digital art #home recording #cpu-z #gpu-z #piriform #auslogics #avg #google chrome #open office #storage drives #sennheiser #media player #media files #amd #intel #winamp #vlc media player #steam #windows start menu #windows apps

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Fender or Squier?

On Quora, someone asked this question in an area of expertise of mine:

“Other than the writing on the neck, how do I tell the difference between a Fender and a Squier? I'm looking to buy a Fender on eBay, and I was just wondering if there was any way to tell that someone had just stuck a Fender neck on a Squier body?”

I thought this was a good question that deserved an answer, as there are con artists who will try to pass off budget or standard edition guitars as higher-end or vintage models through various methods of deception. Here is my response:

It's difficult to discern a Fender from a Squier from images alone - necks can be changed, headstock decals can be sanded off and replaced with authentic-looking Fender ones (they're sold directly from Fender for custom guitar builds), specific parts with the Fender logo etched into them can be installed - but the dead giveaway is body color. For instance, Fender's version of Sonic Blue is much more aqua seafoam-hued than Squier's, which is more of a light bluish off-white. Fender's Candy Apple Red has a much more vibrant red hue while Squier's is more of an orange-hued red. Fender colors also differ - often subtly, but sometimes a great deal - from one manufacturing plant to the next. They can look markedly different depending on whether they're made in America, Japan, or Mexico, not to mention the Korean or Indonesian Squiers. In addition, Japanese-made Fenders are often manufactured in different plants throughout Japan that use different assembly methods and parts, so there are additional variations between those as well. Take a look at these different Jazzmaster models in the same color scheme as an example:

Fender Jazzmaster, original model from 1965

Fender American Vintage Reissue Jazzmaster

Fender Japanese reissue Jazzmaster (late '90s model)

Squier Vintage Modified Jazzmaster (2012)

Notice how the tones on the sunburst finishes and the colors & patterns on the tortoiseshell pickguards differ? Your best bet in telling if the Fender you're purchasing online is the specific model the seller claims is to request images of it and look for telltale signs - color being the most consistently obvious. Ask for the serial number as well and look that up - specific letter & number combinations correspond to specific regions and periods. Look up images of models from different manufacturing locations and historical periods and familiarize yourself with the differences between Fender and Squier color schemes and finishes. An excellent reference for this is Fender Color Chart as it lists every Fender color from the company's inception, has images of each color and variation, and categorizes them by color and region.

However, if given the choice, always buy guitars (and especially second hand and vintage or high-end guitars) in person. Not only does one guitar differ from the next even if it's the exact same make & model; it's the only foolproof way to know you're getting the genuine article. If somebody is motivated enough, they can find a way to make a Squier or low-end Fender look like a vintage or high-end Fender and scam a buyer on eBay.

#fender #squier #guitar #electric guitar #fender jazzmaster #fender jaguar #fender stratocaster #fender telecaster #fender mustang #fender japan #buying guitars #ebay #quora #forgery

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I almost never post anything not of my own creation, but this summed up my New Year’s Day so perfectly, I had to share it. Originally from Nihilist Memes.

#2016 #happy new year #forrest gump #lieutenant dan #gary sinise #nihilist memes #depression

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What book will change my life?

Actually, the complete question as it was written on Quora is, “Which book can I read in one hour which will change my attitude towards life?” My answer came to me almost immediately:

I could recommend several, but most of the books I'm thinking of are ones that changed my attitude toward life and wouldn't necessarily have that same effect on others. For instance, I'd recommend the textbook I used for my literary theory class that helped to crack my then-21-year-old brain wide open and radically change the way I perceived the world and the people and institutions it's comprised of, but that would probably take a year to read in its entirety as it's extremely densely written and academic in nature. The first book that comes to mind that is relatively short and would have a universal attitude/perception-shifting effect on the reader is Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

There is a lot of philosophy in here dealing with issues such as human civilization, culture, ethics, societal institutions, and global sustainability, but it's presented in a very easy-to-absorb prose fiction format, the narrator being an "everyman" (the type of character practically anyone can easily relate to and see themselves in) being tutored by an intelligent, enlightened gorilla whose telepathically communicated teachings are relayed to us via lines of dialogue. If you like it, I would also recommend reading Quinn's more directly written nonfiction follow-up, Beyond Civilization.

#books #fiction #prose #ishmael #daniel quinn #philosophy #literature #postmodern literature #beyond civilization #quora

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The Death of Kurt Cobain

I typically don’t discuss this topic much, preferring to stick to the man’s music and art, but it’s gotten so much attention over the last year with its 20th anniversary, a whole new generation discovering his extraordinary music and life, and new evidence being released to the public, I felt I should weigh in. I used the question on Quora, “Are there any suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of Kurt Cobain?” as an opportunity to share what knowledge I have. Here is my response:

Many. There are so many conspiracy theorists and people who believe that Kurt Cobain was murdered and his suicide staged because there are heaping piles of evidence pointing that way as well as people close to Kurt who strongly believe that he was not suicidal and did not kill himself. For ease of reading, I'll run through some key points (some of it factual, some of it objective speculation) in bullet point format.

The Motive Nearly everyone in Kurt & Courtney's circle knew that Kurt was very unhappy with their marriage and intended to divorce her. If he did that, she stood to inherit half of his possessions at best - with him dead, she got everything, including the rights to his music and name which kept her very well taken care of for decades. Kurt Cobain has recently become the highest grossing dead musician in history, surpassing Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and John Lennon, and Courtney Love has benefitted extraordinarily from this, not only financially but career-wise, as the wake of his death left her in the center of the spotlight.

The Alibi Rosemary Carroll, Courtney Love's own attorney and godmother to her and Kurt's daughter Frances Bean, believes that Courtney was involved in a conspiracy to murder Kurt. Courtney had accidentally left her handbag at Carroll's house, and after Kurt's death, she decided to look inside. She found two pieces of paper: one was a note Courtney wrote to herself that read "GET ARRESTED." In the days prior to Kurt's death, she was indeed arrested for possession of narcotics - however, she allegedly designed it as such that she only had narcotic paraphernalia and no actual drugs, so she was released from jail a couple days later. This was supposedly her alibi. However, Kurt's body had not yet been discovered, at which point she hired private investigator Tom Grant to locate him (more on his investigation later), then called an electric company to install an alarm system on the greenhouse (the room in which Kurt died) as soon as possible. The electrician who got the job was the one who discovered Kurt's body. Many believe this was her new alibi she manufactured.

The Questionable Suicide Note The second, more disturbing note in Courtney's handbag was a handwriting practice sheet. Kurt Cobain's suicide note has been analyzed by handwriting experts who unanimously agree that the first portion, the bulk of the letter in which Kurt is addressing his fans and discussing why he's choosing to quit Nirvana and the music industry, is written in Kurt's own handwriting. The very bottom portion - the only part of the note that alludes to suicide - is written differently and has the look of someone trying to copy Kurt's handwriting style. Handwriting experts analyzed this portion of the letter alongside the "practice sheet" found in Courtney Love's handbag, and they found that the form & shapes of the letters match almost identically. In addition, she repeatedly wrote specific letters and phrases that showed up in the part of Kurt's note that identifies it as a suicide letter. Many people believe it was not a suicide note at all and that these four closing lines were added on to make it look like one.

The Accomplice A local Seattle musician who went by the stage name El Duce came forward after Kurt's death and claimed that Courtney Love offered him $50,000 to murder Kurt and stage it as a suicide. He turned her down at the time, thinking she wasn't serious, but after Kurt's death, he came forward and spoke out about this. He even passed polygraph tests attesting to it. In 1996, he died in mysterious circumstances, allegedly passing out on railroad tracks and being run over by a train. Another local Seattle musician who goes by the stage name Allen Wrench is believed to be the hitman that Courtney Love wound up hiring. He is known in that scene as a very temperamental, violent person, and had extensive training in martial arts and handling guns. Shortly after Kurt was murdered, he suddenly began living far above his means, buying two new cars and a house for himself.

The Botched Investigation Seattle PD did a poor job on the case - the chief of police at the time even admitted so himself and stated that it merits being reopened. They assumed suicide from the start, so any evidence suggesting homicide was dismissed. There were many errors in the official report (for instance, it was written that the greenhouse door where Kurt's body was found was locked from the inside making it impossible for anybody but Kurt himself to have been in the room during his death - this was false, as the door had no deadbolt, just a "push" lock that could be locked on the inside by someone before exiting). The lead detective in the case was a corrupt cop who quit the force years later when threatened with being charged with evidence tampering. Also, the crime scene photos were not even developed until earlier this year - a whole 21 years after Kurt's death, which is extremely unusual for a death investigation.

The Inconsistencies The amount of heroin in Kurt's system was so high (three times the lethal dose) that even a heavy user with a high tolerance such as himself would not be able to inject it, remove the syringe, place it back in his "works" box, roll down his sleeve, pick up a shotgun and use it on himself. He would simply be too incapacitated, as intravenously injected heroin takes effect within mere seconds. In addition, the prints on the shotgun weren't legible and appeared as though someone wiped it down - if Kurt handled this gun, loaded it, and shot himself, his prints would be all over it. The fired shotgun shell was also on the wrong side of his body - forensically, given the position he was found in and the way he allegedly used the gun on himself, the shell casing should've been on the opposite side of his corpse. Also, think about this - why would Kurt shoot himself in the head and leave that horrible image for his daughter, the love of his life, to grow up with when he could simply inject a lethal dose of heroin and peacefully drift off to his death?

The Private Investigator Tom Grant, the private investigator Courtney Love hired to locate Kurt days before his body was found, believed that the entire situation was very suspicious. He felt that Courtney's behavior was odd and that she knew much more than she was letting on. He felt so strongly about this, he conducted his own investigation using his own money and resources long after Courtney stopped paying him for his services. He eventually started up a website, CobainCase.com, in which he posted a variety of evidence (including the pieces of paper Rosemary Carroll discovered in Courtney's handbag which she told him about, breaking attorney-client privilege) that points toward a murder conspiracy. Grant is an ex-police officer with decades of experience in homicide investigation, and he so strongly believes that Kurt Cobain's suicide was staged that to this day he continues to fight for the case to be reopened and investigated properly.

The Possibly Related Case It's rumored that Kristen Pfaff, the bassist in Courtney Love's band Hole, was in love with Kurt and that they wanted desperately to get away from Courtney and the Seattle music & drug scenes (which were unfortunately intertwined and inescapable for them). After Kurt's death, Pfaff was devastated - she quit Hole and moved back to her hometown in Minnesota to get sober and recuperate. Two months later, she returned to Seattle for a couple days to pick up the last of her belongings and say goodbye to some friends, but she never left - on the day of her scheduled departure, she was found in her bathroom overdosed on heroin and with narcotics paraphernalia scattered all over the room. Prior to Kurt's death, Courtney had noticed her interest in him and publicly threatened her in front of numerous people on numerous occasions. If El Duce's mysterious death alone wasn't suspicious enough, this certainly is.

There is even more evidence I haven't mentioned here. If you're interested in reading into it further, look up Tom Grant's website I posted a couple paragraphs up as well as the website Justice For Kurt Cobain. Both go into great detail from the position of a murder conspiracy implicating Courtney Love and at least one other accomplice who committed the crime. There are also several movies and books on the subject (Who Killed Kurt Cobain?, Love & Death, Kurt & Courtney, Soaked In Bleach) that further explore this topic. Kurt Cobain was one of the most legendary & mythologized figures of the 20th century as well as one of the greatest artists & musicians who ever lived, so naturally, his untimely, unnatural death was bound to cause quite a stir. As for my personal stance on his cause of death...I prefer to keep my beliefs to myself and stay neutral until some definitive evidence surfaces. Besides, people speaking out on this topic have a long history of not turning out well.

#kurt cobain #nirvana #mystery #suicide #murder #overdose #conspiracy theory #courtney love #hole #el duce #kristen pfaff #heroin #seattle #music #frances bean cobain

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My Definition of a Musician

(from a question I answered on Quora)

I have many years of experience playing in bands and collaborating with other people who play musical instruments, but I do not consider all of them musicians. Many clearly do it because playing music - especially electric guitar and, to a lesser extent, bass guitar and drums - attracts the opposite sex. The guitar has been a powerful sex symbol for over 60 years, and many males are drawn to it simply because they want to attract females or because they think it will make them cooler and give them an identity. They often don't listen to the other people they play with or interact with them musically; they're in their own head, the star of their own stage. They're frustrating to play with because they don't care to take part in the group dynamic, take notice of what key or tempo you're in or when you want to shift to a new passage...things that come naturally when you have musical chemistry with someone who is a musician. There is little to no musical interactivity with these players. They are often extroverts who believe they are far more gifted than they really are, typically equate more expensive and renowned music equipment as "better" and will blindly purchase a lot of it thinking it makes them better players, and tend to stick to one or two genres at the most, identifying themselves simply as "metalheads" or "shoegazers," for example. Many of them think that they don't have much to learn, that they're far more experienced and knowledgeable than they actually are. Most of all, they don't see these things in themselves - if you asked someone who possesses some of these traits to look at this, they will likely not make the connection and continue to think highly of themselves as musicians. A musician plays music because he or she doesn't have a choice - music chose them, not the other way around. They appreciate music of all kinds regardless of whether it's something they're naturally drawn to or not, and they recognize the importance of understanding all types of music, that it helps them to become better at their own craft. They create their own music and are, more often that not, extremely critical of their own work, wrought with self-doubt about whether they possess true talent (I'm highly suspicious of an artist of any medium who isn't at least a little critical about themselves and their work - this is not to say that they're incapable of being proud of their work). When they improvise with other musicians, they listen to them, paying attention to the music as a whole and figuring out how they can best participate and add to it rather than trying to drown everyone else out and play over them rather than with them. They can give and take unspoken improvisational cues that communicate that the tempo is about to speed up or slow down or the group is about to segue into something different. They may be classically trained and read sheet music or they may be self-taught and play by ear, but they understand the inner-workings of music and are always open to learning more - more about the instrument(s) they play, more about the other instruments present in the music they like, more about music history and theory, about recording and sound production and tonality, more about other musicians from whom they draw inspiration and who help them to craft their own personal style, their voice. A true musician always has more to learn and will openly admit this, because it's true of everyone no matter what they do and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Music is an absolute necessity to musicians - it's their lifeblood, one of the driving forces in their lives, and as important to them as air and water. Without it, they are simply not complete. That is my definition of a musician.

#music #musician #quora

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What is your favorite guitar you own?

That’s a tough question that requires a detailed answer, as I use certain ones for certain things and go through phases where I’ll primarily use a specific one for months at a time, so I’m always switching between them. Firstly, here is a blog entry of a photo of nearly all my music equipment including all my guitars as well as my pedalboard (as of early 2015) and amp.

My Fender Stratocaster is the first electric guitar I owned (purchased back in 2001 when they still came in Midnight Blue) and the only one with custom pickups in it (Fralins), and it serves as a great all-around single coil guitar, getting everything from bell-like chimes and clangy, glassy cleans to growly high-gain tones. However, even with hotter pickups, a standard triple-single coil Strat always sounds like a Strat, and they’ve been used on tens or hundreds of thousands of records, so it can get kind of boring at times. My Jazzmaster I use more often as it’s just as versatile and gets a lot of tones the Strat can’t. It’s far more unique sounding as well, and I prefer the floating vibrato (or, as Fender incorrectly calls it, “tremolo”) system on it. Overall, it’s my favorite guitar made by Fender, and perhaps my favorite solid body guitar as well. Out of my three Fenders, I probably use my Jaguar the least - not because I don’t enjoy playing it, but because its short 24″ scale means that every time I do play it, I have to spend time re-familiarizing myself with the decreased space between the frets. It also isn’t as versatile, as it gets a much narrower range of sounds, though it pulls off those sounds incredibly. Like an actual jaguar, it can be difficult to tame - the treble frequencies, specifically in the bridge pickup, are ice-pick sharp, so it’s the only guitar I routinely use with the “bright” switch on my Vibrolux Reverb amp turned off and with my rig’s EQ set up very differently. It’s also the most troublesome to maintain of all the guitars I own because its design is so unorthodox. Still, I like it for some of the same reasons I like the Jazzmaster…it’s a niche guitar that has brilliant sonic and aesthetic appeal to me as someone who was weaned on ‘80s & ‘90s Alternative Rock, Shoegaze, and Dream Pop. Their offset bodies are also the most comfortable solid-body guitar designs ever created, so they are quite a dream to play.

As for my most used guitar, it’s a toss up between the Jazzmaster and my Delta King semi-hollow (a Gibson ES-335 copy made by Oscar Schmidt in the ‘00s). It’s also the cheapest of the bunch; despite no longer being in production, I found a second-hand model in good shape at a local guitar store for only a hundred dollars back in August 2012. I went to buy new strings, but I saw the Delta King and it was love at first sight (and then love at first play when I plugged it in). I chose all my other guitars - the Delta King chose me. Its playability is incredible, especially for lead guitar, as the action (string height above the fretboard) is able to be set lower than any of my other guitars and it has a much flatter fretboard radius. Its intonation & tuning stability are by far the most stable (at the cost of having a stop tailpiece instead of a vibrato bridge…like a phantom limb, I sometimes find myself reaching for a vibrato arm that isn’t there when playing this), and though its dual PAF-style humbuckers don’t satisfy all my needs as a primarily single coil player, they’re both very dynamic pickups able to get a wide variety of tones. In fact, using the middle pickup configuration with a scooped-mid EQ setting, I can attain a lot of the dynamics of a typical single coil pickup.

Also worth mentioning is my Blueridge acoustic guitar (a D-18 style steel-string dreadnought) which I’ve owned since 2003, replacing my first guitar (a cheap second-hand, entry-level acoustic I bought back in ‘98). It’s aged beautifully, with the solid Sitka spruce top getting more resonant the more I play it (you can notice a huge difference between the photo of it new and the one I took of my entire rig earlier this year in the link at the top of the page - that’s not lighting, the wood has gotten darker and richer from playing, as well-made hollowbody guitars do). It’s my favorite sub-$1000 acoustic guitar I’ve played, and I love it dearly. When I’m not playing electric guitar (which I consider my primary instrument), I’m playing my Blueridge. I’ve written & learned many songs on it, serenaded many girls with it, and have babied it over the last twelve years I’ve had it, and apart from replacing the tuning machines with stronger ones (the original vintage Kluson-style ones broke a few years back due to my use of heavy gauge strings and occasional hard strumming), it’s completely original. It has given me as much joy as any person in my life who is special to me, as have all my instruments. They all appeal to me in different and specific ways, so I’d have to say each one is my favorite…

…however, if it was a hypothetical scenario of my house burning down and having only enough time to carry just one guitar, it’d be a very close call between the Jazzmaster and the Delta King (interestingly enough, the two guitars in my arsenal I paid the least for). I would probably go with the Jazzmaster for its versatility, feel, and design, but if the Delta King had a Bigsby vibrato system on it instead of the stop tailpiece (an upgrade I have planned for it in the future), I would likely choose that. Although, amidst the flames and falling debris, I would probably try to carry both of those guitars in one hand and the Blueridge in the other while dragging my amp and pedalboard with my feet.

#music #music instruments #guitar #electric guitar #acoustic guitar #fender #gibson #fender stratocaster #fender jazzmaster #fender jaguar #gibson es-335 #guitar geek #guitar gear #guitar rig #music equipment

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Why I Like Charles Bukowski

Several years ago in my English studies at University, I was in a creative writing class and given an assignment to pick one prose author or poet and write a short paragraph or two about why I liked them and then write a couple pieces using my own voice but in their style. I chose Charles Bukowski, who had been a favorite of mine for only a few years at the time when I’d picked up Ham On Rye and devoured it in a couple days. As I’ve been digging through old emails and organizing the important or interesting ones, I’ve been finding more of my older writing like this, and thus I share:

I am fond of straightforward writing and plain language, and Charles Bukowski epitomizes it for me. He takes the teachings of Hemingway and Salinger and authors of that ilk with a journalistic style and adds his own personal touch to it, painting portraits of himself - a man full of beautiful contradictions and deep, often cynical insight into the human condition - in much of his prose fiction and poetry. His writing is so deceptively simple, I wonder how many drafts it takes him to get his work to sound like the perfect first draft, but don’t be mistaken - there is profundity in its plainness. He rebels against writers who use flowery prose and elaborate wordplay by stripping his language of excessive adjectives and adverbs and relying on the strength of his nouns and verbs. It's raw and honest and makes me think of punk rock bands who turn their backs on several minute-long guitar solos and overly polished production in favor of strong basic songwriting and the power of a purely emotional aesthetic. It's like a shot of life. It's like a child's outburst, trying desperately to find the right sounds to convey discomfort or need or sadness or joy.

#english #literature #charles bukowski #prose #poetry #creative writing

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Defining God

I was cleaning up my archived emails when I stumbled upon this passage I wrote almost five years ago and never shared online, only sent to specific friends and people I knew in academia. I had completely forgotten ever writing this, but I felt it was worth sharing here:

This is a controversial and fairly abstract belief that you must feel in your bones before you can understand it in your head. Begin by imagining that what we call “God” — what we, as a species, have been sacrificing each other over and building temples, synagogues, and altars to for time immemorial — is not a single being with an individual presence, but simply the universe itself. Religious awe is triggered by our basic, fundamental response to the complex, inscrutable endlessness of the universe. The universe is not self-conscious, nor self-organized. It’s just a fantastically vast extension of the space we inhabit. Being made up of matter, it’s not at all different from us; we’re made of the same stuff. And if the universe is in fact infinite, no part of it is more important than any other. You are as relevant a part of the universe as the rings of Saturn, the stardust between galaxies, or your next-door neighbor.

It’s not a leap of logic to draw the simple conclusion that God is not an entity that exists outside of us (e.g., in the heavens beyond the clouds), nor is God an idea we have constructed to reassure and comfort ourselves amidst the meaningless vastness of the universe. God is, as Terrence McKenna so beautifully phrases it, “a lost continent in the human mind.” It is us. We’re a part of it.

#religion #theology #god #cosmos #universe #consciousness #spirituality

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Music Without Visual Stimuli

Go to YouTube, find an entire album of streaming music, and take note of the view count on the first track; if it’s a popular album with radio singles, take note of the view count on those tracks in particular. Then look at the view count on the following tracks. You’ll notice a trend that I didn’t need to actually see to know what was happening to our collective attention span regarding music - people are listening less and less to full albums, let alone individual songs. By and large, view counts after the hits or the first tracks (especially on older or more obscure albums) drastically plummet.

On a somewhat related point, I started this post to vent about something I commonly hear when people ask me how my music is going. A lot of the time over the last decade, I’ve gotten “Do you have a YouTube?” or “Do you have any videos?” along with that question. My response is usually boilerplate…“I’ve made some - mostly sound clips of specific instruments or effect pedals -  but the bulk of my music is audio. Some of it is available for streaming online.” On several occasions, the response to that has been like “Okay, well, let me know when you get something going!”, the implication being that because I choose to release my music in standalone audio format and don’t care to perform in front of a camera and upload videos of myself or bands I’ve played with that I’m not actually producing anything new or worthwhile. And it’s not a surprising mindset, being in an age where most people look up songs they’ve heard in movies or somewhere on the radio on Google and wind up listening to them streaming off YouTube either with an accompanying music video or a static image of the album cover (and sometimes poorly made JPEG slideshows of the band or musician). It’s become so commonplace that people are increasingly associating music with video to the point where music without accompanying visual stimuli is to some what a garden is without food or flora (I’ve done my fair share of complaining about certain genres and sub-genres of music being considered invalid or incomplete art forms unless accompanied by film). It's an especially prominent perspective if your music is instrumental (or worse, instrumental and abstract or free-form in any way), as the common attention span of your average music listener today can barely make it through a 3 minute pop song let alone an experimental soundscape, and having nothing to look at and help hold their attention often results in lots of unfinished listening experiences.

I’m not averse to the idea of combining music with film (in fact, I once recorded the soundtrack for an ex-girlfriend’s short film project) as much as I am to the mentality that music needs to be combined with film such as a video of its pantomimed performance. That I am uncomfortable with, but I’ve learned that a lot of growth as an artist comes from moving outside your comfort zone, so I’ve decided to shoot a short series of live videos of myself playing both my abstract, soundscape guitar music as well as my singer/songwriter stuff, but in a way that removes the emphasis from me and puts it on my hands on my guitar or the knobs on my effect pedals and amplifier. I’ve also gone through very prolific periods with photography and other visual art forms, so I could also work some motion picture into it. I don’t think of this project as me giving in to those people who don’t give credence to my music as it is alone (or to that notion about abstract music I’ve been fighting by purposefully keeping my music and visual art completely separate from each other, even during periods of abundant creativity when I’d be working on both) - this is more of a confluence of different mediums, a new creative outlet to explore. I started on something today and plan to have it up here (and on my YouTube channel - yes, I do have one, though I rarely upload anything to it) very soon.

#music #music video #film #photography #visual art #youtube #art