audiot

the guys at rpmchallenge.com want everybody to spread the word – so i do:

come on, sign up! and then spread the word as well…

….and unbelievably busy! i just signed up for the rpm-challenge ’09, meaning i’m gonna record an album in 28 days. i have no idea how or what yet so this will be a real fun experience – i really wonder what will come out of this…

and of course the ovotex will be launched on february 1st. there will be lots of ‘normal’ teaching as well and there’s still the ‘little garden’ record in the making – so during february i will be up to my neck, make that brow hair in really cool stuff. hopefully i’ll find the time to breathe every once in a while. wow!

The RPM Challenge – This is The Challenge – Record an album in 28 days, just because you can..

check that out! i found this through a friendly person’s link on twitter. go ahead! this is simply the best way to get forward. i’m gonna participate as well, although i haven’t really figured out how to best use the new laptop – and the software for that matter…. but who the heck cares, this is gonna be huuuuuuge fun!!!!!

alright i told you plenty of times: the deadline for the famous and unbelievably awesome ovotex (online-vocal-teaching-experiment for the ignorant ones among you) has arrived. one place is still left, so if you drop me a line quickly, you can still be in. i give you 24 hours and then that’s it…

so who’s going to be it?

have you experienced something like this? yesterday i sat behind my drumkit with time to practice. i haven’t done that in months because of the big move and the chaos surrounding it – there just was no time for this. but yesterday i went to rehearsals an hour early to work on technique a little. when i played drums during the last few months it was either for rehearsals or for recording – so just playing. but now i found myself sitting there, knowing i really needed to work on my technique, but kind of clueless where to start. so i took some really simple exercise (rrll for the drummers out there…), trying to make it sound nice and even……and failed miserably! no matter if i did it fast, slow, loud or soft – it just sounded like some wooden box had been kicked down a staircase, unbelievable.

and the funny thing is, i’m positive the grooves i play now are more groovy than ever before. so it’s not the overall playing that sucks, it’s just the technique. on the one hand i strongly believe that feel, tone, soul is so much more important than technique. however, technique is kind of your toolbox – the things you need to be able to express yourself on the instrument. so you need technique, but it’s not what it’s about – more like the way of getting there.

i wasn’t disappointed about my rusty technique, a rather obvious thing. what i couldn’t figure out was why the overall playing didn’t suffer along with the technique. ok, i have played a little during this period but not that much – so shouldn’t the result become worse if the tools get crappier? it seems i have grown as a musical drummer while i was shrinking as a drummer’s drummer.

anyway, i take that as a good thing. and although i’ll spend more time on technique (again) from now on, i don’t think this will make me a less musical drummer. because hopefully this experience meant that musicality grows over time, even if you’re not focusing on getting better – while technique suffers if not taken care of, but without a major impact on who you are as a musician. i hope that’s right……it sounds quite cool, now doesn’t it?

sorry, but there’s no chance of writing something today. and it’s not the chaos still surrounding me because of the big move or any work-related reason. but i just found the box with my last cuban cigar and the rest of that 18 year old speyside single malt scotch i found in that little shop about 5 years ago… so i lit up a fire and right now i’m listening to Tom Waits‘ “Nighthawks At The Diner” while enjoying life.

sorry again, but this just has to be right here and right now. if you’ve ever felt that way, you’ll know what i mean…

take care

i never liked music schools. and i had good reasons for that. when my parents sent me off to one it was a waste of time and money. there was just a large room with two rows of organs, one child sat at each one playing by him- or herself with headphones and about 2 teachers walked around and listened a bit here and there through another pair of headphones. i can’t remember it perfectly because i was 5 years old back then but thinking back this room must have looked like some children-enslaving-manufacturing-something. needless to say it was not efficient at all……..for the kids that is. for the others involved it was great. the parents bought the feeling to do something for their breed and to have them off their backs for a while and the school made money with minimal effort. well, i don’t want to do anybody wrong. my parents really wanted me to learn something, they just didn’t know it was the wrong way. and i knew the school’s owner, he was quite a nice man who honestly believed his school was a good thing…. i got out of there quick because i seemed to be the only one really interested in music, so one of the schoolguys told my parents to get me a private teacher which they did.

the next experience with a music school came about 15 years later. i wrote and recorded some songs together with an american singer/songwriter/vocal teacher who lived in germany and who used to teach at a quite popular singing school in the region. he stopped teaching there shortly before we both met and he gave me two reasons for this decision: 1. a huge drug problem at that school and 2. nobody of the school staff cared about the students. even better: the teachers were told to not teach the students too well so they would need to stay longer. it was a really expensive school that parents had their kids go to in order to impress friends and relatives. ugh!

then a few years later, when i started teaching myself, i talked to some guys at music schools if it would be possible to teach there. but then i decided to stay on my own. it seemed none of them was interested in offering some valuable teaching really. they all wanted to kill as many birds possible with one stone. i simply do not believe it’s possible to teach a group of people to sing at the same time. choirs or background sections are exceptions of course but the single members of those groups need to learn it for themselves first as well. every voice is different. easy as that. you can’t teach 2 or more people simultaneously without sacrificing the very thing teaching is about. it might be possible with instruments if you choose students who are on kind of the same level, this is still not the best way though. but with the voice this is simply impossible. i’ve yet to meet a student who would be a decent match for any other one i had ever before. and that’s where the talking always ended. i wanted to teach one student at a time, they wanted me to teach groups of 2, 3 or even more. end of story… so until today i’m still the private teacher i have been for almost ten years now.

and now the punchline: about 8 years after my last music-school-encounter it seems there is another one ahead.

i’ll keep you informed…….

feeling like some old rock-dinosaur right now. two bands that i was part of kind of merged together into one. it took 8 people and about 12 years to get to the point where we are now. both bands did mostly own songs with a few covers in between, but the styles were quite different. while the first one was kind of a dusty southern rock band the other one was a ….ida know…. hardrock band with lots of keyboards and ….i hate describing music – they were different. period.

as a matter of fact, due to some interesting incidents and one very sad and tragic loss along the way we’re finding oursleves united as one band. and this makes for an intriguing challenge. first, the songs need to be changed to fit the current lineup. but the really interesting thing is to get all the songs to work in this one band. we started with one cover and two songs of the southern style band and they ended up sounding quite different than before. the next rehearsal will be about one song of each band and one cover. and this time it’s songs we haven’t played in a loooong time. after fighting the memory problems it will be about stripping the tunes to what matters and dressing them up again in the new sound of the merged band and i have absolutely no idea what this will be like – love it!

i’d like to post some of the material here as soon as there is any. right now it’s mostly about finding out who’s playing what and checking out alternatives. but eventually there will be finished pieces of music, ready for your amusement….

yeehah! the 200th entry, how cool is that? thank you so much for being part of this !!!

on the other hand i noticed some difficulties with the site lately. it seems to take ages to load and there were some problems with the ability to post comments as well. i apologise for any inconvenience. i’m gonna do kind of a ‘facelift’ with the site to make it a bit fresher and to achieve smoother operation. not sure exactly when this will happen but expect a change in the next few days – as soon as i recover from the flu.

hatchooo!

yay. right now i’m up to my neck in work. there will be more students from february on and two bands of mine are warming up again. and of course, the online-vocal-teaching-experiment is about to start. i really need to find a decent name for this, maybe i’ll call it the ‘ovotex’……kinda sounds like some medication you read about in spam-mails though…

anyway, just a quick heads up to what is about to happen. i’ll keep you informed and don’t forget: there are still 2-3 places left, so if you want free online vocal teaching, don’t wait around – the deadline is the 25th of january…