Tag Archives: blogging

Let The Music Speak

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As a guitar player, I write a lot of my own pieces of music but usually none of them turn into full songs. I’m a rhythm guitar player so I tend to write short bits of music known as “riffs”, but when I try to expand on them and add lyrics, vocals and other instruments, it often doesn’t feels right. It usually feels forced so I give up on it and I’m left with a ton of unused riffs.

I’m starting to work on my debut solo album made up of these riffs but instead of trying to force them into full songs I’m going to just concentrate on the music itself. No lyrics, no vocals, all instrumental. Some of them might not even have guitar in them, I don’t know. I’m gonna see where each song takes me and go with it.

I’m going to be playing multiple instruments and mixing them together. I imagine it will take some time for each song to reach completion but they’re going to be short. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to finish an entire album, I’m thinking probably a year.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time but have never found an approach that I was totally comfortable with and had complete confidence in. After playing guitar for more than 20 years, I have a lot of my own music saved up. I don’t know if it will all fit on one album, I think I might have as many as 50 riffs in my repertoire, though I probably won’t use them all.

I’ve started working on what I’m pretty sure will be the first song, all I have right now is the riff itself. I might post a sneak preview sometime soon. I’ve posted some of my other music in this blog but those were pretty much demos, they’re not completely finished songs. What I’m working on will be finished songs as I see them, I’m not really concerned with whether they’re conventional or not.

I’m really looking forward to working on this and finishing it on my terms. It’s going to be a lot of work since I’m going to be doing absolutely everything myself but it’s something I want to get out into the world. It feels right, I think it’s time to let my music speak for itself.

What Once Was Lost

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A couple of weeks ago, I found an old family picture that I forgot that I had:

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It’s a small picture, about 2” x 2 1/2.” In this photo is my mother, my father and me. I don’t know how old I was, but I’m pretty sure I was five years old or younger. The reason I can pinpoint it to this time period is that my brother is five years younger than I am, and he’s not in this picture so it was probably taken before he was born. Also not pictured is my sister, who is the youngest of us and obviously could not be in the picture.

Our father, sadly, passed on a few years ago. For this reason, it was an even nicer surprise to find this picture. Little did I know that, before long, I was in for an even bigger surprise.

Yesterday, my mother showed me this:

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It’s a bigger, 8” x 10” black and white version of it. Is that a surprise? Not really. The surprise is where this picture was found: in a thrift store.

Somehow, someway, our family picture found its way into a second-hand store in our home town and it just so happened that my sister saw it there. The store owner, obviously not knowing who we are, was trying to sell the frame with the picture in it. Apparently they were going to take the picture out and sell the frame but luckily my sister saw it before this happened. She asked if she could have it, since it’s her family in the picture, so it was given to her.

The question now becomes: how in the world did one of our family pictures end up in a thrift store? Especially one of our earliest pictures with 2/5 of our family not even born yet? It’s a mystery, I can’t imagine how that happened.

An even bigger mystery is that they were found so close in time. I found the color photo on March 29, 2013 and the framed picture was shown to me on April 11, 2013. That’s 14 days apart.

Regardless of the strange circumstances, I’m glad we found both copies of this picture and can preserve that part of our family’s history.

Closed Shave

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After buying 2 different brands of razors and not finding one that satisfied me, I went out shopping yet again. This time I bit the bullet and bought some replacement Gillette Fusion blades. Luckily, they were on sale. I was able to use my Save-On More card and got $5 off, bringing the total down to $14.99 instead of the usual $19.99 that I would normally pay for them.

On a side note: why is every price listed as a dollar amount + 99 cents? Why is it $14.99 and not $15.00? Not that I’d want to pay an extra cent to round it off, but why the 99 cents? My theory is that it makes it sound like you’re paying less than the full price. If something is listed as $99.99, it’s technically less than $100, thereby making it slightly more attractive. Seems a little redundant when there’s only a 1 cent difference, maybe that makes people more receptive to the price, maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know.

Anyway, the reason I broke down and went back with the Fusion blades is because I’d already spent about that much already on razors that weren’t as good. That was one determining factor, the other was that no other razor seems to have the precision blade on the back, which I find really comes in handy.

It’s still a little expensive though, even though I got 25% off, there’s four cartridges and that works out to $3.75 per cartridge. That made it easier to swallow than the $4.99 that I’d be paying if it were full price.

So after doing some exploring, wasting some of my money by not getting blades that gave me as close and as comfortable as shave as my regular razor, I imagine I’ll stay with the Fusion blades.

With that, you can consider this a closed shave.