April 11ths

4/11/2020

My version of April from Brand X Product (in D, not F) 

 4/11/2025

Every once in awhile I'll re-tune one of the basses and noodle around on it for ideas. The current tuning is “Drop 31” (E-G#-D-F#). I discovered that you can play wave-like patterns across the fingerboard resulting in 4ths, 5ths, and octaves and makes for an interesting mysterious harmonic progression. AI is also in the mix because I asked a large language model to create a haiku about waves and I used some of the results for lyrics. The tunings are unique in that you come up with things you wouldn't arrive at in standard tuning because you reject things out of hand as being "wrong". The title is borrowed from Rebecca Solnit's book, and was in the LLM results from "create a haiku about waves". 

All the tunings have unique characteristics but you have to explore them. You can retune a guitar similarly and leave the top two strings as they are. It's essentially an E7 tuning.

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When I think back on all the things I’ve done over the past 30 years, some of the things have threads in them, but some are just isolated experiments, which I move on from very quickly. So, in 2020, I put out an album that was mostly bass-oriented. But I don’t think I’ll ever do an album like that again, as I might not do an ambient record again. I want each one to be a separate entity. I think that’s probably the best way for artists to work if they can’t seem to latch on to one signature style or they get bored with it. Just do something different, or try to incorporate elements of previous forays. 

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One of the best things about playing an instrument–that non-musicians don’t realize–is if you’ve been playing an instrument for 40 or 50 years, your identity comes out when you play the instrument–but also when you remember your history of playing the instruments. For example, I’ll go back to 1979; if I look at an album cover from back then (like the Brand X Product cover), it reactivates everything. I know that people move on from things and become different people, but playing an instrument for a long time really keeps you grounded.