It’s Saturday again and I’m in the studio today with Jo Webb making some promo video clips for our album ‘Acrobat’. It’s a lot of fun making video clips, although editing them is a time consuming pain in the arse. You can make a lot of funny stuff happen in the editing stage and there’s room to be very creative but man alive, it takes a lot of hours.
The Easter break has been fun, interesting, musical and very difficult, depending on which day you talk to me. In the first week of holidays, I was in the studio most days with Dario Cortese, doing some work on a top secret project that is so top secret I’m not gonna mention it. Other than to let you know that it involves Dario and is top secret.
I’ve also been working on the next Cd, soon to be available from Justinguitar.com The first CD that we did in 2008 was called Jam Blues and featured 12 songs, each 5 minutes long that followed a strict 12 bar blues format, so if you wanted to practice your blues guitar playing, you had a solid hour in various keys and feels.
The new CD, Jam Major has 12 tracks, all in Major keys for those of you who are just getting to grips with the Major scale and the modes derived from it. I’ve got 11 tracks written and demoed, with 1 left to go. and so far, it’s sounding sweet. I’m getting to grips with Pro Tools 8 in a big way and it’s a great challenge to come up with 1 hour of good tunes, without slipping into repetative patterns, or just ‘dialing it in’ compositionally speaking. I’m seeing Justin for some sessions next week to start comitting guitars, which should be fun.
The difficult part of my Easter came via what I suspect was either food poisoning or some sort of super bug. It’s enough to know that I got out of bed at 4am on Easter sunday night and then woke up again with one side of my face touching the carpet. That means that I collapsed. Not fun. Ended up being sick and losing 3 days by being completely spaced out. Most of the time, I generally didn’t know what was going on.
I’m better now 
Lots of gigs coming up and lots of tunes to learn within the same few weeks. This is one of the most challenging aspects of being a sideman – you need to learn a lot of songs and make sure that you retain the parts well enough to recall on the day of the gig. I think I’m gonna transcribe all of the songs.. probably something like 38 songs in the next few weeks. Head down, Sibelius up! In case you don’t already have it, check out the software app ‘Transcribe’. It’s an awesome tool – very simple, but a great help.
