Tales From the Road

Want to hear something funny? It may actually be more financially responsible to add six weeks to my Italy trip than to tour the American southwest as I'd planned. Who am I to fight against that tide?

I've been extraordinarily productive today! I sent out a lot of performance inquiries to potential Cleveland-area venues for the winter, I've been doing a lot of academic reading for an SCA research project, and I'm well on my way to memorizing the second half of Bach's Allemande in Em. This evening I'll do some more work on my medieval dulcimer project, to top it all off.

I'm busking four days a week, with various social activities and the occasional Day of Sloth intermixed. I've cobbled together a schedule that I'm really enjoying, and thought I'd share.

6am wake with the sun.
6:45 actually get out of bed.
7:15 commute (walk, bus, walk)
8 arrive Byward Market and sign up for pitches
8:05-10 Starbucks coffee and wifi
10-11 breakfast and tuning
11-1 first set
1-3 lunch and more coffee
3-5 second set
5-6 commute home (thank you Danielle for hosting me!)
10:30 bedtime most nights

The glamour is more in where I go than what I do there :-)

I did my income taxes last night and it looks like my 2011 was almost identical to 2010. This despite making some deliberate choices this year designed to raise my grosses. Yet another reminder that following my bliss is my most effective business strategy.

I have to remind myself that, while this forum is ideal for expressing deep thoughts and profound ideas, not every post needs to be thus. I'm in Colorado, south of Denver, and about to play my sixth weekend at the Colorado Renaissance Festival. It's a gorgeous show, and it's been a great pleasure to spend time with old friends. Of course, part of that means lying quietly while I nurse a slight hangover this morning, but a small price to pay for a delightful evening of conviviality.

My fall schedule is coming into focus, though October is still a little hazy. After Colorado ends on 31 July I'll hightail it to the outskirts of NYC for the New York Renaissance Faire in Tuxedo Park. I performed as a guest there last year, and I'm delighted to be coming back for two weekends.

Between those two weekends, though, I'll be at Pennsic. My tenth time, and the fortieth held, it's always a pleasure. While I normally get to spend 10-12 days, I'm thankful to be able to make it for the five I'll have this year. After Pennsic I'll be making my debut at the Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival, and while I'm not quite solid on October I'm quite set to end the season at the Louisiana Renaissance Festival in November and December.

I'm hoping my finances will allow me to take a short trip before Christmas, to be determined by how those finances work out. I've got two huge vacation ideas and a bunch of small ones, and I'll see what I can afford as the time approaches. After Christmas I'll record my next CD, which will launch me into a new year!

The past month has been a bit hectic, as I'm sure it has been for most people, and a lot of that has had to do with my upcoming album. I spent much of December rehearsing in Louisiana and went into the studio towards the end of the month. Then came several days of editing what I'd recorded, even on Christmas Day between family gatherings. A week off allowed me to refresh my ears before doing some more tweaking, and now files are downloading so that I can get them to Ben Deschamps for final mixing and mastering this week. I'm aiming for an online release date of 1 March, and I've gotten all the paperwork from Oasis (http://www.oasiscd.com) to make it happen.

Most of the CD will be original music including 14 of my tunes, 2 written by friends, and 3 traditional. The title and concept, Mosaic, comes from the disparate influences that make up my style in the same way that simple and discrete elements can come together to form a detailed image (is it obvious that this is kind of a mission statement?) It's stylistically similar to Labyrinth and L'Inverno Italiano, though with a little more of a Celtic twist.

Mosaic breaks new ground for me in several ways, particularly in that it's my most collaborative effort thus far. Ben is doing mixing and mastering, and it was harder than I'd expected to give up that much control over the process but I'm really confident in his expertise. It's the first time that I've ever covered music that wasn't either traditional or my own, with a tune written by Heather Dale and another by Tim Jennings. Third, it's the first time I've taken vocal music and arranged it instrumentally, which applies to Heather's (The Road to Santiago) and Tim's (The Veil) songs as well as Scarborough Fair and The Foggy Dew. And, finally, it's the first project where I'll feature another instrumentalist, with Heather guesting on recorder on several tracks.

I'm incredibly proud of the material, and I'm really looking forward to releasing it.

Now that I've switched gears from feeling bored to feeling energized I'm trying to figure out why. The biggest thing I can pinpoint is that I, as the aforementioned big-picture guy, finally found the big picture.

For the past few years I've been doing things on a very piecemeal basis, based on what seemed fun, interesting, and cool at the time. Which has been great and given me lots of fun, interesting, and cool experiences but left me feeling a little lacking in the substance department. I had vague notions regarding acquiring experiences as an investment in self-improvement, but little beyond that.

A few days ago, however, I had a eureka moment and started to get a clearer picture of how my disparate business interests were intertwined. It's not quite clear enough to elaborate yet, but I'm starting to get a picture of how busking, renaissance festivals, and house concerts can fit together not just on my calendar, but into my business plan. Instead of being different petals on a common flower (which is how I've been viewing them), I'm seeing things much more as a cohesive whole.

My metaphor clearly illustrates that I haven't quite put this into words yet, but I'm working on that part. More importantly, I can feel it coming together, which has done wonders for my attitude.

Last week I paid off my car. Yesterday, as I was driving to New Orleans, it occurred to me that it was mine now, free and clear. It struck me, moreover, that music had paid for it.

That’s a powerful idea. Music had paid for it. I feel very fortunate in many ways, but that’s a particularly notable one; that I have taken an ephemeral sequence of sounds and silences and turned them into a thousand pounds of useful machinery seems a bit surreal.

Over the next few weeks I will be recording my next Celtic CD, for which I've been seriously preparing since June.  I've had the basic concept in mind for about two years, since I tend to think three CDs ahead, but it was in June that I started diving into learning new music beyond my regular slow-and-steady acquisition.

Over the past few months I've done much more rehearsing than ever before, since my historical attitude has been to road-test new music and get it solid in front of an audience.  While I have been doing a lot of that, I've also been taking more time during the week to practice, and in a new twist I've been doing so with a metronome.  I cannot begin to describe what a difference that has made, and a musician housemate of mine in Massachusetts said that I inspired him to work harder on off days.

I'm also breaking patterns (you'd think I'd have things down by the eleventh album) also in trying to space things out.  Always before I've taken a really intense week and done all the recording, but that tends to burn me out really badly.  This time I'm taking more breaks and setting a maximum limit of three songs per day.  I've got the time over the next six weeks to do a thorough and leisurely job of it and I intend to take advantage of that!  Using my own digital console also gives me some serious flexibility.

So this is what my recording schedule looks like on a daily basis.  First I make sure the dulcimer is roughly in tune.  Then I rehearse for about a half hour, mostly music I will be recording on other days, with only brief run-throughs of the tunes on the day's schedule.  If I need more rehearsal for those tunes then they're not ready to be recorded, and if I rehearse them too much that day then I'll be bored with them before they go on tape (well, digitally speaking at least).

After rehearsing I do a fine-tuning of the dulcimer; it has to be as perfect as possible so that any mixing and overdubbing matches up.  It helps that I've just been playing it, so it's accustomed to humidity, temperature, and vibration changes that tend to affect things.  At that point I lay three good takes of a tune played entirely through, among which I'll edit and mix later to get the studio-quality performance I want.  Usually I'll pick my favorite of the three and then edit short snippets of the other two in to cover anything that I don't like (which can be anything from a mistake to a dog barking in the background or overzealous birds chirping outside).

Then I take a break, come back later and lay three takes of another tune, and so on.  It gets tedious very quickly, but I try to live a life separate from the studio so it doesn't weigh me down too much.  A lot of my nervousness is also alleviated this time by the fact that I've been rehearsing so much that it all feels like just another run-through (it's usually very intimidating to play something you intend to immortalize on disc).

And that, my friends, is my process.  It's always evolving, but I'm pretty happy with it so far!

I am often asked what I do during the weeks, when I'm not performing.  The past few weeks have been kind of crazy, between Pennsic and Sirius Rising and such, but I'm looking at having some time this fall to be productive and useful.  This is my to do list for the autumn:

Arrange and memorize 15 new tunes for recording in December
Study 16th century Italian basso continuo technique
Read up on Classical history
Learn German