Music: "First Thoughts"

So since I'm going to use this blog to highlight my music as well as my writing, how about a music sample?

I've never been a digital guy when it comes to guitar effects, but as part of the process of getting back into it and joining the church band, I needed to upgrade my effects.  I wanted something small and compact that could give me multiple effects; be able to offer headphone, amp, and direct out; not break the bank; and give half-way decent tones.

I looked around, compared several options, and ended up buying a Zoom G3X last month.  I'll talk more about this later, but suffice it to say that for $200 it's a great deal, and it also came with the ability to plug it into a PC via USB, and they even threw in a free copy of Steinbeg's Sequel LE.

Wow -- the ability to do multitrack recording on my PC?  Sounds awesome!  Let's try it out!

Well, this was my first attempt.  I put together a short drum loop, added a backwards fade-in to the beginning, and repeated it 4 times with a 1-bar pause in between. Then I messed around with some MIDI bass (MIDI -- that's a whole new thing for me) using my PC keyboard as, well, a keyboard. Then I threw up a quick rhythm guitar and slapped on some lead parts, including a backwards-delay effect track -- I told you I had a new digital multi-effect, right?

So then I had my first PC-recorded multitrack thing.  Nothing too amazing in terms of playing -- I'm a little rusty -- but still a lot of fun.

This is is.  As a video.  For some strange reason Blogger won't let you upload an MP3 into a post, but you can upload a video.  So I had to experiment with Windows Movie Maker to put this together. The sound quality is compromised a bit from uploading it to Blogger, but you can still basically hear all the parts.

So, to summarize what I've been up to creatively in the last month or so -- a dust-off of the old guitar and playing enough to start building back the calluses, a new guitar multi-effect to play around with, the new ability to record digitally on my PC, new programs to learn (Sequel LE and now Reaper -- MUCH more powerful), the world of MIDI to explore, and now even a new toe-dip in video making.

No wonder I haven't done any writing... :)

Thanks for listening!