"Thomas Sankara playing his red strat into a Peavey amp."
https://imgur.com/gallery/thomas-sankara-playing-his-red-strat-into-peavey-amp-vfGZCtC
guitar
Adventures in Recording Music 1:
As someone who initially became a musician through my vocals, hearing myself ‘correctly’ is a lifelong struggle. Sensory overload is a big problem for me, but generally when I think of sensory overload I’m having to tolerate a negative input. Making music is a blend of positive sensory overload and negative sensory overload and of learning to process the difference so I can harness the sounds I’m looking for and filter the sounds my brain is negatively amplifying.
I have a horrifying memory of hating hearing my voice on recording for the first time and having no sense of the technology, the atmosphere, or the setting driving the character of the sound as much as my own vocal cords. The way sound travels from my mouth to my ears is highly distorting itself. Its normal for artists to vacillate between hating and loving their work. But day to day changes in how my brain processes sound makes pinning down ‘audio reality’ very difficult. Now that I’m diving more into recording guitar, the ‘black box’ technology of acoustic pickups add another layer of interpretation.
Past attempts to record my guitar straight into a microphone have given me good results but I want to be able to produce more complex sound profiles. The pickups on my acoustic guitar, I’m learning, are not built for my playing style. I have a rhythmic playing style that generates a lot of pick-noise on the internal pickups. In the time it has taken me to figure this out, I’ve been obsessing over my playing style, thinking that the difference in sound quality has been a result of poor technique, starting to convince myself that it was revealing fundamental flaws in the way that I play and that I have to re-think everything. This is all despite the fact that I have many years of direct to microphone recording that says otherwise. Suffice to say I’ve been giving myself headaches.
A lot of this comes down to the way my brain processes sound. Once my ear picks up on a ‘flaw’, and begins to hyper-focus, I lose the ability to properly filter and balance the sounds that I’m hearing. I’ve had to walk away from playing guitar for a couple days because I know that right now, I cannot objectively listen to my music. This can be extremely frustrating, when I’m feeling such a drive to make progress on this, but I’m trying to remind myself that learning to interpret sound is a musical precursor to recording.
I’m not here to hunt rabbits…
https://amf.didiermary.fr/not-here-hunt-rabbits-various-artists-botswana/
A whole community of musicians from Botswana playing guitar in a way most of us have never thought possible… and they’re not here to hunt rabbits…
A community of African country blues masters with a totally original technique. For one thing; the left hand reaches up and over the neck of the guitar, instead of […]
Edited 28d ago