Hey! It's me, Dacks - welcome to my blog. It feels like I definitely missed the boat with this medium, but maybe that's a good thing. This will just get lost in the shuffle, a tiny molecule in the interwebz horde. Absolutely no pressure! I'm not expecting an audience, and really just treating this as an online journal of sorts - but one that offers tools a regular journal (i.e. pen & paper) cannot.
Inside Tracks. What does it mean? Well, as everyone knows, a blog title is REALLY REALLY important. And the most important thing is... availability. You can imagine my dismay when I saw that both "insidetrack" and "insidetracks" were already off the blogspot domain board. The former has only one post, dated December 2003. The latter has absolutely no posts, but based on the subtitle, the author was going for a similar theme. Hopefully I do a little better!
Inside Tracks is about my great passion, NASCAR. Just jokes! It's about music, and more specifically, creating music. It's something that I really got into about five years ago. As a kid, I played piano (mostly classical, some jazz), somehow got stuck playing bassoon (oversized oboe most recognizable in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald") in high school, and stuck with it (music in general, not the bassoon) over the years because when creativity strikes, nothing is quite so simple and fun an outlet as, well, just making noise. Then, at the aforementioned five years ago, I met some groovy people who showed me the wonders of microphones, midi cables, and synth loops. We had a good time, laid down some tracks and reveled in our collective genius.
Flash forward to now. I've moved, gotten married, and started an awesome, music-unrelated career. I've got friends and family close by, and have to say, I'm pretty damned happy. But somewhere along the way, the recording stopped. It's not for lack of willing collaborators - there are always friends willing to jam. I've just "been busy" (lame excuse) and let it fall by the wayside.
A wake-up call came a few weeks ago. I had broken out my old songbook, and was trying to play through one of my "classics" when suddenly I couldn't remember the next riff. That's happened before, and had never been a problem. Play it again, distract yourself, play a different song then come back - usually your brain remembers. But this time, it didn't. I'd completely forgotten the riff. It felt like part of me had been removed. Why? Nobody had ever heard the song. In all possibility, nobody ever would. But it bothered me. How long before I just started forgetting complete songs?
So that's at least one element of this blog: it's a library. A repository for my music. But it's also going to be an inside look at how the music is made. How it's written. The creative process. I'll be documenting songs from their conception to the final track. This is important, because all my songs are still in that first phase, and I'm hoping this project will push me to complete them.
And if anybody else chances on this blog, I'm hoping it will accomplish something else - encouraging young musicians to explore their creative side! So many people have this talent to play music, but have never tried to write music. Maybe by showing how easy and fun the process can be, that will change.
Over the next few days, I'll be setting up equipment and re-installing some recording software. It's been boxed up for a while, let's hope it still works. And then we'll get to the first song, and I'll show you what goes on....
INSIDE the TRACKS.
Cheers,
Dacks
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