May 2006
Monday, May 29
The live room is begun.
Saturday, May 27
Mike and Marco, digging the wiring troughs. It is taking forever; we speculate that the concrete was originally poured in the mid-fifties for the garage. Hard as...rock.
Wednesday, May 24
ABOUT DAMN TIME...
Thursday, May 11
"It seems [Terje] Rypdal had a girlfriend at the time, “and she was going to meet a girlfriend in Sweden who was one of Hendrix’s numerous girlfriends. So I sent a copy of the Dream album” in hopes that it might get to Jimi, says Rypdal. All these years, he must have assumed it didn’t make an impression—maybe never even reached his ears. But in June of 2005, Rypdal received a letter from a record collector in the Los Angeles area who had purchased Hendrix’s private record collection the guitarist owned that was found in Great Britain, where Hendrix had spent time playing music. The Dream album was among the collected works, the collector said.
The collector sent me a facsimile of what I wrote. So I followed up and called. Not only did [Hendrix] get it—we didn’t know if he’d thrown it away—but he brought it with him to London. And this guy writes: ‘It’s been well played.’ That’s nice to know about."
- read the article in All About Jazz dot com (link is now fixed)
Saturday, May 6
I got a book a while back: "A Classical Approach to Jazz Piano." I looked closely at it in the store, to be sure that I could deal with it, and thanks to my brief tenure with Jocelyn Kasper, I saw that I could.
According to the author, there are ten primary and secondary chords in jazz, all sevenths and sixths. After the first two chapters, I realized that much of this results from the works of guys in the forties and fifties, like George Gershwin and Jerome Kern. Through the excellent works of these men and their peers, I think that they established this accepted set of standards. (I always question how these "standards" came about. They are no accident; somebody deemed it so - therefore I question it.)
I'm into voicings now, where you play a seventh chord, and omit the fifth. Say you're playing a D minor seventh - D, F, A, C. The left hand plays the tonic (D), and the right hand plays the seventh and third, C and F. By omitting the fifth, A, it opens a large space and creates a timbre completely different from a full seventh chord.
It gets cooler. With the left hand, play a D, then with the right hand, play the seventh (C) and the third (F). Then, with the left hand, play a G, and by dropping the right hand's seventh (C) a half-step (to B), suddenly you're playing a dominant seventh in G. Then with the left hand, play a C, and with the right hand, drop the third (F) to E, and you have a C major 7th.
The idea is to play chord progressions with minimal right hand movement, only shifting by one or two notes in either direction, while the left hand plays the tonic notes.
This is a very good thing to do on the Virus - kind of a late-night smoky bar by way of analog subtractive synthesis.
Thursday, May 4
Ceiling, layer one. In order: R-13 insulation, sheetrock, soundboard, sheetrock, making a triple layer. The horizontal metal strips are angled like a Z, so that one segment is bolted to the support beams, and the other segment is bolted to the sheetrock, for a de-coupling factor. The walls will have the same construction.
This ceiling and the walls are the first of two layers. Later, a layer of insulation will be added and the inner walls built. The second ceiling will be lower, with large baffles hanging between the two layers.
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