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Swayze on life and death >>

Wanting to think about getting ready to... ::

... make music! Yesterday I scheduled a visit from the piano tuner, which means the piano will sound so achingly great for about a week afterwards that I ought to record. That means that right now, I should start playing more regularly than I have been.

I’m thinking about what happened last time I used the piano tuning as a motivator. Part of the difficulty was that I was recovering from surgery. But I recognized something else when listening to Pat Metheny in a podcast about the making of the Day Trip album: they recorded most of the tracks in one day, and they didn’t listen to any of them during the session; they just trusted the engineer. For me, the trouble started with concern about microphone positioning, and continued into premature analysis and evaluation of the performances. There’s no place for the Rewind button in improvising.

It’s like writing: there’s a time to fling sentence after sentence onto the page (or screen), and then there’s a time to make sure it reads well.

<< The middle

2009 > September

Swayze on life and death >>

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