After a day of listening to the CD of my disappointing vocal track I've decided to delete the track from Garage Band and destroy the disk. I've learned what I can from it and now I'm just torturing myself.
I know I can do better than that, and I will do in the near future.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Diva Has an Off Night
Setting up and tearing down the recording equipment is getting quicker and easier, but re-building my faded vocal technique isn't quick or easy.
The plan last night was to record the 'final' vocal track on Is Truadh Leam ar Scaradh but unfortunately the pipes weren't cooperating. I was getting progresively more discouraged, so I decided to stop fairly early. Listening to the track this morning in the car, it wasn't terrible, but also wasn't something I would play for someone with pride.
In the WTF category was the fact that there are two places in the melody of the song where it goes up to the D above middle C (not impossibly high for a baritone like me). The first one I nail every single time. The second sounds like someone is jabbing a fork in my thigh. Grrr
Cut back on the smoking, walk around Greenlake more frequently and keep trying.
The plan last night was to record the 'final' vocal track on Is Truadh Leam ar Scaradh but unfortunately the pipes weren't cooperating. I was getting progresively more discouraged, so I decided to stop fairly early. Listening to the track this morning in the car, it wasn't terrible, but also wasn't something I would play for someone with pride.
In the WTF category was the fact that there are two places in the melody of the song where it goes up to the D above middle C (not impossibly high for a baritone like me). The first one I nail every single time. The second sounds like someone is jabbing a fork in my thigh. Grrr
Cut back on the smoking, walk around Greenlake more frequently and keep trying.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Dance, Cracker! Dance!
Last weekend, while getting ready for my gig as fear an taighe for some nice people's summer ceilidh, I realized that I had no appropriate recorded music for social dances. I thought I had a ready-made solution in the Féis Shiàtail songbook teaching CDs, but quickly realized that they were (for very good reason) limited to just the melody being played by an electronic piano.
Ooops.
Being pretty good at last-minute inspiration, though, I came up with the idea to rip MP3 files from the teaching tracks on the Féis songbooks and import them into Garage Band and then use them as guides. It worked really well! I recorded myself playing the tune sets on the fiddle multiple times (for that forgiving chorus effect) then added harp and bòdhran parts.
Sin agad e! My own self-produced CD of tune sets that I know inside and out designed for the specific versions of the dances that I know and teach. And the name? Dance, Cracker! Dance!
I know; I'm bad.
Ooops.
Being pretty good at last-minute inspiration, though, I came up with the idea to rip MP3 files from the teaching tracks on the Féis songbooks and import them into Garage Band and then use them as guides. It worked really well! I recorded myself playing the tune sets on the fiddle multiple times (for that forgiving chorus effect) then added harp and bòdhran parts.
Sin agad e! My own self-produced CD of tune sets that I know inside and out designed for the specific versions of the dances that I know and teach. And the name? Dance, Cracker! Dance!
I know; I'm bad.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Weekend Recording
Boy, it's hard to add a post after the one below. How do I put a chatty, about me one above my announcement of the Grand Plan to unite polytheistic religions in an urban framework?
Oh well. Maybe doing this will inspire me to write another First Restored-themed post afterward.
Anyway, I stayed in Seattle last weekend to do a gig as fear-an-taighe. I decided that since I was going to be here anyway, that I should make some progress on scrach tracks for my solo CD. I really want to get all my creative decisions on solid ground before paying a recording engineer.
It went pretty well! I'm realizing that each track is going to have its own unique issues around sequencing and I just have to jump in and get started in order to figure that out. For example, in a big epic song I would normally want the vocals recorded first so that as accompaniest I could respond to the singers treatment of the melody. But, if I'm the singer, then I need some kind of a reference track to keep myself on pitch. Kind of a chicken-and-egg problem.
So, I got a decent rough-draft of Is Truagh Leam ar Scaradh done. I was hoping to have more than that to show for the weekend, but there was a complicating factor; I spent three hours on Saturday recording dance music for the gig that night. More on that later!
Oh well. Maybe doing this will inspire me to write another First Restored-themed post afterward.
Anyway, I stayed in Seattle last weekend to do a gig as fear-an-taighe. I decided that since I was going to be here anyway, that I should make some progress on scrach tracks for my solo CD. I really want to get all my creative decisions on solid ground before paying a recording engineer.
It went pretty well! I'm realizing that each track is going to have its own unique issues around sequencing and I just have to jump in and get started in order to figure that out. For example, in a big epic song I would normally want the vocals recorded first so that as accompaniest I could respond to the singers treatment of the melody. But, if I'm the singer, then I need some kind of a reference track to keep myself on pitch. Kind of a chicken-and-egg problem.
So, I got a decent rough-draft of Is Truagh Leam ar Scaradh done. I was hoping to have more than that to show for the weekend, but there was a complicating factor; I spent three hours on Saturday recording dance music for the gig that night. More on that later!
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
First Restored Temple of the Gods
What do you think? Snappy, eh? Just to get this out of the way, the 'short' version will be "First Restored" not "FRTG." Acronyms are nasty. The name took a lot of thinking. I want it to be explicit that this is a new chapter in polytheistic religion, not an attempt to recreate a bygone era. However, I also want to be explicit about the fact that it won't be a Wiccan temple, neither Druid nor Dodekatheist. Everyone who honors the multiplicity of divinity is welcome.
So, the general idea is to create a framework which will allow polytheists of many flavors to meet and honor all the old gods with rituals old and new. I'm calling it "Big Tent Polytheism." Unlike many neo-Pagan efforts, I want to start with the building! I was discussing this with my friend x-Father X and after describing the temple of my dreams, he pointed out that I had just described the Pantheon in Rome.
Inside the temple there would be niches in the walls for statues of gods. I think it would be cool to group them together, but some kind of an organizing principle would have to be created.
A crazy dream? Maybe. Even if it doesn't happen in my life time, thinking about it and imagining it makes me happy.
So, the general idea is to create a framework which will allow polytheists of many flavors to meet and honor all the old gods with rituals old and new. I'm calling it "Big Tent Polytheism." Unlike many neo-Pagan efforts, I want to start with the building! I was discussing this with my friend x-Father X and after describing the temple of my dreams, he pointed out that I had just described the Pantheon in Rome.
Inside the temple there would be niches in the walls for statues of gods. I think it would be cool to group them together, but some kind of an organizing principle would have to be created.
A crazy dream? Maybe. Even if it doesn't happen in my life time, thinking about it and imagining it makes me happy.
Friday, July 25, 2008
A Line in the Sand
I think that in the previous post I may have answered the underlying question that has been bugging me for so long. If Abrahamic monotheism is so poisonous, why has it been so successful for so long? I think the answer is the same as the one to the question social workers, families and friends have so long asked about the victims of parental and spousal abuse; why does she (or he) stay with him?
Undermine their self-esteem through the doctrine of original sin and convince them they have no other options through monotheism.
If that's really the answer, then it's time for me to move on from diagnosing the problem to envisioning a future that I would like to live in. Maybe it will never come to pass, but one might as well try.
Now... for a really catchy name....
Undermine their self-esteem through the doctrine of original sin and convince them they have no other options through monotheism.
If that's really the answer, then it's time for me to move on from diagnosing the problem to envisioning a future that I would like to live in. Maybe it will never come to pass, but one might as well try.
Now... for a really catchy name....
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
No One Will Ever Love You But Me; Yahweh as the abusive parent
Did it ever strike you as strange that the Christian right wing (not to mention Islam) are always flipping out about single parents and gay adoption when they themselves condemn the entire universe to being from a single-parent family for all time?
We know from the Ugarit texts that Yahweh once had a consort and was part of the Caananite pantheon headed by his father, El. Current Abrahamic monotheism, however, makes out that there is no Mrs. God. So, not only did Yahweh ditch his spouse, but he tells us that we never had a mommy. Nice.
So let's look for a second at some of the typical patterns in the relationship between an abusive parent or a spouse and their victim and how they are paralleled in the ways that monotheists want us to see their god.
No one will ever love you but me
Central to the abuser's success in controlling their victim is convincing her or him that she or he has no other options. If she or he were to run away, or divorce that she or he would be alone and helpless and most likely die. Because the victim believes this, he or she follows the logic that accepting the abuse is her or his only option.
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me [to which I can be compared unfavorably]" — Yahweh (paraphrased)
But he's really a good person when he isn't burning me with an iron
Abuse victims who are caught in the cycle of low self-esteem will sometimes defend their abusers because there is a component of caring in the relationship. The abuser wants the victim to continue to accept them, and that is a kind of caring even if a very twisted one. For someone who has been convinced by an abusive parent or spouse that they are unlikely to get love anywhere else, even that poisoned kind of caring is preferable to the utterly bleak landscape that has been painted around them.
Abrahamic apologists (Hi Pete!) will respond with variations on "Well, we can't prove that God isn't there, so we should all worship him just in case he's real.". Which, of course, assumes that the only choices are to worship Yahweh or be an atheist. I hope it's clear, dear readers, how strenuously I disagree with that view.
I'm the only one who really understands him; you don't know what you're talking about
Right.
Alexandria Library. Witch burnings. Inquisition. Crusade. Extermination of native peoples around the world. Women subjugated.
If he acts like an abusive parent and the institutions inspired by his stories commit atrocities for centuries without any effective resistance guess what? Yahweh is an abusive god and he belongs in rehab. Asclepius might be able to help, but better not let Brìd anywhere near the guy or he'll wind up getting a Bobbet.
We know from the Ugarit texts that Yahweh once had a consort and was part of the Caananite pantheon headed by his father, El. Current Abrahamic monotheism, however, makes out that there is no Mrs. God. So, not only did Yahweh ditch his spouse, but he tells us that we never had a mommy. Nice.
So let's look for a second at some of the typical patterns in the relationship between an abusive parent or a spouse and their victim and how they are paralleled in the ways that monotheists want us to see their god.
No one will ever love you but me
Central to the abuser's success in controlling their victim is convincing her or him that she or he has no other options. If she or he were to run away, or divorce that she or he would be alone and helpless and most likely die. Because the victim believes this, he or she follows the logic that accepting the abuse is her or his only option.
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me [to which I can be compared unfavorably]" — Yahweh (paraphrased)
But he's really a good person when he isn't burning me with an iron
Abuse victims who are caught in the cycle of low self-esteem will sometimes defend their abusers because there is a component of caring in the relationship. The abuser wants the victim to continue to accept them, and that is a kind of caring even if a very twisted one. For someone who has been convinced by an abusive parent or spouse that they are unlikely to get love anywhere else, even that poisoned kind of caring is preferable to the utterly bleak landscape that has been painted around them.
Abrahamic apologists (Hi Pete!) will respond with variations on "Well, we can't prove that God isn't there, so we should all worship him just in case he's real.". Which, of course, assumes that the only choices are to worship Yahweh or be an atheist. I hope it's clear, dear readers, how strenuously I disagree with that view.
I'm the only one who really understands him; you don't know what you're talking about
Right.
Alexandria Library. Witch burnings. Inquisition. Crusade. Extermination of native peoples around the world. Women subjugated.
If he acts like an abusive parent and the institutions inspired by his stories commit atrocities for centuries without any effective resistance guess what? Yahweh is an abusive god and he belongs in rehab. Asclepius might be able to help, but better not let Brìd anywhere near the guy or he'll wind up getting a Bobbet.
Monday, July 14, 2008
We're All Experiments
One of the subtitles that's been given to the United States is "The Great Experiment." I think that all efforts at organizing society are experiments, and that if we viewed them that way there would be less motivation for armed conflicts.
It seems to me that we mostly view nations as organisms competing for resources and dominance, and I think that is true to a certain extent. (that's my social darwinism peeking out) On a larger scale, though, I think humanity is carrying out multiple concurrent experiments which are intended to answer the question: "What would society be like if it were organized this way?"
If we view nations that way, then it is in everyone's best interest that all the experiments continue uninterrupted until all useful data has been collected. Then we will assess the results and start the next experiment based on what we have learned. After lots and lots of tries, we'll eventually arrive at the conclusion that if society is organized this way, then almost everyone is OK almost all of the time. Check! Done!
The only way an experiment can really fail is if it produces no new data. The Soviet Union, for example, was not a failed experiment in my opinion. We learned that when enough power is concentrated in a central government to erase most economic inequality, that it is too vulnerable to manipulation and corruption. Good to know!!
So, perhaps we can hold these this paradigm in balance against the social darwinist one and reach our ultimate goal in less time with less suffering along the way. What do you all say, shall we try?
It seems to me that we mostly view nations as organisms competing for resources and dominance, and I think that is true to a certain extent. (that's my social darwinism peeking out) On a larger scale, though, I think humanity is carrying out multiple concurrent experiments which are intended to answer the question: "What would society be like if it were organized this way?"
If we view nations that way, then it is in everyone's best interest that all the experiments continue uninterrupted until all useful data has been collected. Then we will assess the results and start the next experiment based on what we have learned. After lots and lots of tries, we'll eventually arrive at the conclusion that if society is organized this way, then almost everyone is OK almost all of the time. Check! Done!
The only way an experiment can really fail is if it produces no new data. The Soviet Union, for example, was not a failed experiment in my opinion. We learned that when enough power is concentrated in a central government to erase most economic inequality, that it is too vulnerable to manipulation and corruption. Good to know!!
So, perhaps we can hold these this paradigm in balance against the social darwinist one and reach our ultimate goal in less time with less suffering along the way. What do you all say, shall we try?
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