datamusicata

Checked last night at 5 pm and we’d crossed 240,000 hits for Datamusicata. Thanks for hanging in there with me and for your comments, criticisms and contributions. It’s been a great eight months putting this page up and keeping it up. Didn’t realize that I had this much discipline. I would like to invite you all to give me some questions about things that I might have a clue to answering for you. Looking forward to hearing from you.

I just finished a couple of hours of practicing for my shows this weekend in the bay area (see the appearance tab to the left there if you are interested in coming to the gigs and you live in and around San Francisco and Santa Cruz). Today I not only did my usual drill of putting the songs in a completely different tempo and making the stay there til they grooved, but I changed the keys of a lot of the songs, just to see what my voice would do with the new placement.

As we do the songs that are the most requested, or our favorites, we get into the rut of doing them the same…or else we do them so differently every time that no one know what in the world we’re doing. Dylan tends to change the arrangements and the melodies to his songs at will, so you never know what you’re going to get when you go to one of his shows.

The last time that I saw him, he was into playing lead guitar. While he did himself proud, it really wasn’t why I was there. I came to hear those great songs that changed my life, but Dylan always does what he wants. The upside is he gets to do what he wants whenever he wants it. The downside is that his audience stays smaller than it could be, but frankly, I’d be deliriously happy with an audience the size of Dylan’s coterie of fans. But I digress.

I like to take all kinds of chances and changes when I’m rehearsing and then do the best, most polished version of a song when I’m performing. So I change the tempos, sometimes the time signature (like 4/4 to 3/4), and today I dramatically changed the key on a couple of songs that I’ve done one way for twenty years.

This is a very fun and informative thing to do. I recommend it to you all. Go outside of your comfort zone. Put the song in a key to high or to low for you and see what happens. Experiment with the melody and the chord pattern in the new key. It’s good for your musicianship to change the key and try to play it in tempo doing the transposition in your head and playing in the groove. I guarantee it will wake you up.

Another thing that I did in today’s practice session was to play songs that I’ve never really performed on stage. Songs like the hit, “Coming Out of Hiding” that my sister took to the top of the dance charts. It’s been in movies and compilation CD’s and TV Shows and tho it was a hit in 1984, I still get checks every quarter from its usage. But I’d never done it myself. I mean I recorded the demo, but I had a keyboard player who did that end of it and I just sang.

So I came up with an acoustic guitar arrangement for it. It’s a much better song than I realized and very fun to do. Don’t forget to go over your entire catalog of songs when you are rehearsing. Sometimes you find a gem, or you find something that you can use in another song. Practice time can be a wonderful adventure if you make it so. And all that shows up on stage, in your preparedness and your spontaneity. The more fun you have up there, the more fun the audience has and that’s what brings them back.