BYRON FRY

A Bracing of the Timbers

ADMIN — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:14:00 +0000

This, as always, is a hostile era for those who create for a living. Society’s professional dreamers and performers have long occupied the bottom rungs of civilization’s totem pole; save for the arbitrarily fortunate, or blatantly opportunistic, things have never been good for us. In the musical realm, we’ve always felt the pinch.

It was bad before the midi revolution tried to make string players and drummers obsolete. We bounced back.

It was bad before the digital revolution, when file sharing came like a Tyrannosaur in the night and ate the record industry and its family in their beds; many of us say good riddance, and understandably so. I’m not one. Many fell by the wayside, but the rest of us have adapted.

It was bad before AI got just good enough to enable the untrained and ungifted to feel trained, to feel gifted, and to proudly unveil works which, to those with developed senses, hit those senses like…well, art by a robot. Like sex with a robot. Like life, if depicted by machine: Really, the premise is absurd enough to not require comment.

It was bad before the gulf between creatives and the powerbrokers who decide our fate, and the fate of our work, got so astronomically huge that mergers worth 111 BILLION dollars started roiling the skies like uncontrollable tempests, so that we, as we struggle to stay afloat in an unregulated housing market, might as well be treading water a hundred miles off shore in a hurricane with 100-foot waves. 111 BILLION dollars: this is a sum so big it literally dwarfs the cost of the war in Iran by several times; so big it hits the senses like interstellar distances; so big that it exceeds the GDP of Idaho; so big that state attorneys general from all over the country banded together and sued, in an effort to bring Hollywood to heel before unimpeded greed drags the entire country, and the civilized world right along with it, into chained obeisance to centralized power, and inevitably, oblivion.

It has always, always been bad. And over the course of my lifetime at least, it has always been worse, every year, than the year before: more of a scrabble for more diminished returns. Same old daily news.

But here’s the thing: We have always, ALWAYS been up to it. And we’ve always had incredible value. That’s what I want to point out. We creatives are still here, will always be here, will always have that value as the only true human voice of civilization, of humankind, of history. No AI robot, no matter how convincing their imitative, derivative craft, will ever be able to do that. And no merger between the sun and stars will ever drown our voice, our value, in the sea.

When you’re lying in bed at night, whether alone or with your love sleeping next to you, you may be listening to your exploding doubts as the world’s madness rages outside your window. You may be wondering how the hell we’ll ever unfuck all this, how our future can be made to make any sense from such an extremity. What the hell were you thinking, choosing such a career? As if you ever had a choice.

But bear this in mind: You’re a badass. We all are. And the one thing we can’t afford, the only real sacrilege, is doubt. You may feel it in the night — I suspect many of us do — but when the sun comes through the window and you put your feet on the floor, it all goes away as you stand up. We find ourselves facing the world as we always have, with our hearts and ribcages, our minds and ideas, our eccentricities and scary odd quirks that make left brain folks fidget uncomfortably in our presence. Because we have to create. The world needs us to. The world will DIE if we don’t. WE will die if we don’t.

The world needs us to resolve, to carry on, to set our chins and proceed. It’s what we’ve always done; the show must go on. We set our chins, we move forward unflinchingly, into raging success and ticker tape parades, or youtube plays and the pretensive value of strong social media numbers (seriously?), or into obscurity and cobwebs, or into a spinning airplane propeller. We can only move forward unflinchingly, unquestioningly, undeniably, unstoppably. If we don’t fully accept that calling, that path, that fate, we have no value and the whole enchilada falls.

If you were ever going to fail the world, it would have happened by now. So don’t worry, don’t doubt. Your fate is to dream, to concoct, to create, to perform. Accept it with all the mad joy of the unthinkable; it’s the only reasonable way to make sense of all this.

Yonder is your windmill. Charge!

The Reluctant Success of Sal Bellows (short fiction)

ADMIN — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:36:02 +0000

Sal Bellows didn’t like cuteness, he didn’t like nonsense. He was a businessman where he really lived; he liked business, dammit. Having become a successful TV producer of daytime soaps, he now found himself having to deal with writers, directors, set designers, actors and even sometimes the odd composer or two. He always had the sense, in dealing with these creative types, that he might get a smell on him that wouldn’t wash off. It always reminded him of the time he found that tick burrowed deep into George Smalley’s arm, after they had gone hiking through some brush while on a corporate retreat in upstate New York, and how every random itch he felt for several weeks afterward made him want to crawl right out of his skin.

Dealing with the inanities and eccentricities of creative types made him miss the clean, sterile math of the boardroom, and the no-nonsense men and paradigms that drove things there, where business made things make sense. Matters were quantified, and easily understood. No semi-abstractions, no ambiguous metaphors or symbolic vapors. Just the bottom goddamned line, in its unequivocal, black-and-white, elegant and unassailable truth.

The fluke that had opened the door into this job, and all its madness, had been a timely favor from a very well connected brother-in-law. In 1978, Sal’s thirty-million dollar investment brokerage had tanked due to no fault of his own, and the timing was too good for him to turn this down without being ostracised by his wife and family. Lo and behold, just like that: He had become a studio boss. But dammit, he didn’t have to like it. It had already been a year, and he was still here.

The lot smelled. During the long, hot walk from his parking spot to his office, his nose was assaulted by everything from fog machine glycol to the acrid edge of cordite from pyro; paint fumes and toxic plastic fumes from props and sets being perpetually built or struck; diesel exhaust, dust and chaos got kicked up into his nostrils from all sides…and it was noisy: Power tools, pounding hammers and skil saws, all killing his ears…even the ground itself was never guaranteed to be in a settled state. It was like running an obstacle course through a dirty construction zone. It made him miss, all the more, the stately poise with which the valet held the door of his limo open as he got out at the old office building he had owned in uptown Manhattan, and the quiet polish of the elevator ride up to his penthouse. This new office was no damned penthouse. It smelled musty, the air conditioning was noisy, the big picture window wasn’t tinted and glare from the afternoon sun irritated his eyes unless he closed the cheap blinds.

And nothing ever happened punctually. Sitting alone behind his massive desk and rubbing his temples from the glare, he was about to get up and close the blinds when the intercom squawked and Gloria announced the arrival of his 4:00. He glanced up at the gaudy wall clock he had inherited from the office’s previous occupant – a hideous homage to an emmy award, badly painted on a sun-warped pane of cheap, hi-gloss black plexiglass, the minute and hour hands helplessly plodding through their vicious cycles as they counted time. Counting down to what, he mused: until his first failure got him fired and sent him happily packing, leaving the clock to the next victim to inhabit this cursed place. As far as Sal was concerned, it couldn’t happen soon enough.

The Emmy clock said it was 4:43. Why did these people have such a flexible goddamned association with time? Then the timid knock on the door. It was Gregg Shearson, a faded-glory, award-winning screenplay writer who had fallen from grace, wound up here in TV hell, blown a deadline and been almost impossible to reach for several days.

“Come in!” Sal said a little too loudly.

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

“Yes, at four o’clock, dammit.”

“I’m sorry sir. I got here from the hospital as fast as I could.”

“Hospital?”

“My wife, sir. She’s very sick.”

Sal took a beat to consider the possible angles here. Gregg’s shirt looked like it had been slept in, not that that was uncommon. But his face looked like the drying mud in a moshpit the morning after an outdoor punk rock festival, and that was new. Sal couldn’t remember ever catching Gregg in an untruth and, though this was Hollywood, Gregg’s reputation was solid. Sal decided to grant the sick wife premise and take the ride.

“I’m very sorry to hear that. What does she have? Will she be okay?”

“Well sir, without oversharing, the best way to get the situation across is this: If she were an airplane…”

“Ohgawd” Sal thought, but remained quiet. Gregg moved to a point between Sal and the window, an animated silhouette against the glare.

“…she was cruising along in pretty good form at about ten thousand feet, took an unexpected catastrophic bird hit and lost both engines, entered into an uncontrollable flat spin and would have been dead within twenty four hours, if paramedics hadn’t been called to deploy a drogue ‘chute. ER docs were able to restart one engine and get her leveled off before she cratered, but not before she skimmed some treetops and took some pine boughs in the intakes. She’s currently limping laboriously along, trailing smoke in a very gradual climb, and should eventually be able to regain enough altitude and airspeed to resume a semblance of normal flight, but—and this is a big but—only if the upcoming terrain doesn’t rise up, or present unexpected obstacles. And begging your pardon sir, but we can’t see the future to know what that terrain looks like. You might say her instrument array is down.”

“I understand.”

“You do?” asked Gregg.

“HELL NO, I DON’T!” hollered Sal in his imagination, while biting his tongue and feigning calm empathy. For all his disdain of creatives, he recognized talent when he saw it, and knew how valuable Gregg was. He didn’t want to scare him out the door, didn’t need to fire him. The objective of this meeting was to redress Gregg enough to put some fear into him, then restore him to duty. But this sick wife thing required a different angle.

“Of course I do. You think I can’t understand a metaphor?”

Gregg’s silhouette seemed to smile ambiguously, and had the tact to remain silent.

Sal cleared his throat and moved things along.

“Say, what’s next for you after ‘Vampire Housewives of Hog Calling’ wraps next month?”

“Nothing, as far as I know. Why?”

“I think I’ve got your next project. It’ll be a bit of a change from the usual grind around here, but I think you’ll like it. I’d like you to head the writing team for a new action / adventure series centered around aviation”, he heard himself say.

“Really?” Gregg said, eyebrows raised in genuine interest.

“Yes, I’ll have my people get with you on the details. Now get outa here, take care of your wife, and for crissake, answer your goddamned phone when we call.”

“Yes sir, thank you!”

After Gregg left, Sal leaned back in his big cushy leather executive chair, feeling the pain it caused his lower spine, drumming his fingers on the desk in thought while squinting out the window at the Hollywood Hills for several seconds. Then he picked up the phone and buzzed the outer office. Gloria immediately picked up.

“Yes sir?”

“We need to arrange meetings with Gotlieb, Kramer, Roman…all the investors in the rolodex. We’re gonna do a new series on aviation. Tell Gregg Shearson I said it’ll be set in World War Two, focused on how the P51 saved our asses, oriented around an American pilot who’s the central character, co-starred by his girl, either Rosie the Riveter or a nurse, Gregg can decide which. Or maybe both…and there’s a love-triangle sub-plot…but we don’t wanna get too soapy. Supporting cast will be fellow pilots, airplane mechanics and ground crew, he’s got his rival pilot frenemy he’s in competition with for everything…there’s gotta be a squadron leader who’s always got his boot up our hero’s ass, and there’s a design team of eggheads in Lancaster and some test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base. Maybe they know our main character…or better yet, the test pilot is his brother. Yeah, that’s it: he’s his brother, and he dies tragically in an accident during the testing. But our hero goes on to become an ace once the P51 is a reality, and save a bunch of grunts on the ground in Germany, using the airplane that his brother died to help bring to the world. Real red, white and blue apple pie hero stuff. Tell him to start on a storyline for 12 episodes immediately, and to prioritize the synopsis for the sizzle reel, because we’ll need that for the investors. Got all that?”

“Yes, sir.” He could hear Gloria scribbling her unerring shorthand. Gloria was the one thing he was truly thankful for here in this godforsaken job: she was smart, fast, educated and highly competent at her job, a real engine of organization. She always got things done, in good form. And she seemed to know everything…the lady was a walking encyclopedia. Maybe he should give her a raise. Someday.

Sal leaned back in his chair, opened the lid on his hand-carved, gold-trimmed honduran mahogany humidor, and reached inside. From its cedar-lined interior, he took out a Cohiba Corona. Trimming the tip with a familiar expert “snip!” and lighting it from the perfect blue flame of his gold-plated cigar lighter, he once again leaned back and looked out at the hills, savoring the perfect laminar flow of delicious smoke as it curled delicately out from his mouth.

“Fucking creatives think they’re the only ones who can pull stuff outa their asses,” he chuckled.

Feral Godlings Run Amok

ADMIN — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:28:14 +0000

Walter Runge stood next to me on stage in front of a large, packed, thumping North Bay Area nightclub on a Saturday night, keyboard controller hanging around his neck so he could strut like the badass he was, up on the front line with the bass player and me. A wiry and athletic Irish-looking guy in his twenties, the ladies liked the way he moved and his perpetual smile. He didn’t belong tucked back behind a stack of keyboards and gear; not Walt. That would just be wrong.

“HEY BYRON!!” he hollered off-mic over the band, a shit-eating grin on his face.

“WHAT?!?” I hollered back, shit-eating grin on mine. I knew what was coming.

“LEAVE!!”

This was codespeak between us. He’d sometimes shout it at me, I’d sometimes shout it at him, and the result was always delirious fun. “Leave”, to us, meant to not only take a solo, but to leave everything behind: the band, the chords and harmony, all the stuff you learned in school, all the years putting that high level of theoretic structuring in place so that you could solo over difficult chord changes, all the rules and regulations, just leave it all. Put your ears back and go hell for leather, chasing those demons and angels up into the thin air while the band stayed on the ground, holding down the dance floor. Find your own keys, your own truths, your own Gestalt, your own Tao. Contrast anything and everything that might be expected of a cat who follows rules, or who stays within the confines of convention. Any Jazzer worth his or her salt is well-familiar with the concept. It’s a respected imperative among us that we call “playing out”.

And behavior like that is not common to packed nightclubs full of pretty young people gyrating on the floor in efforts to get laid. It’s a jazz thing, more endemic to a setting of poised listeners sitting at candlelit tables, dressed in the understated finery of the urban sophisticate, than to a crowd of drunken hooligans jumping around while hooting and hollering, doing shots and puking in the toilet. But in rowdy environs, presented with screaming mini-moog and howling rock guitar sounds, it can bear wonderfully justifiable talons.

The reason we could bring such antics to such a setting was that Walter and I were half of pretty slammin’ four-piece funk band, playing mostly around Northern California, sometimes also scaring the cows and their owners in Nevada. It was the gig where we initially met. We hit it off immediately, and in a big way: he had gone to Berklee, I had gone to Grove, we each immediately dug each other’s chops and had a common love of Miles, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and other gods of The Craft. We both had backgrounds in classical music that had long since taken a back seat to our exploding need for expression. We understood each other in many ways, and shared a perpetual unspoken need to run amok and burn the carbon out of the cylinders; any song was fair game. The bass player and drummer were helpless but to put up with it, and though it struck me as a bit odd–then as now–they kept their griping to a minimum.

And the carbon in our cylinders wasn’t all musical. Out on the road, we needed a physical outlet through the days. That’s where we invented what we call “Take Off and Die Frisbee”. We were twenty-something wildlings, both of us part scholar, part coyote; part intellectual, part feral marauder. And we could both of us run like the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed wind.

The concept of Take Off and Die Frisbee was not complex: one simply threw the disc as hard and far as one could, at a trajectory at least ninety degrees away from the recipient, who had to do whatever was required to catch it, even if it meant jumping off a cliff or diving in front of a passing semi truck, hence the name. Neither of us ever broke a bone while playing that I know of, which also seems odd. But we were young godlings, unbreakable in every meaning of the word. We had our whole lives before us, all the yawning potential of the future beckoning with promises of The Great Unknown. We could feel that unwritten contract between us and the universe, with all the nonchalant certainty of our age: it was as real as the sun on our shoulders and the breeze out of the west, blowing the clouds and our frisbees through the sky.

Over the years we gradually lost contact, then reconnected over social media. We’ve both been up to good things so far. It pleases me to see Walt sitting at a piano nowadays, playing his ass off as always, blowing minds and hearts by engaging in a more elegant, pure form of what it is that he was put on Earth to do. Casting pearls before drunken yahoos is cool in your twenties, but at some point music gets a real effort at honesty and truth from the musician, or the bond gets severed and the musician dies. I know a thing or two about that, and will forever bear the scars from surviving those lessons. So it does my heart good to see Walter following what I can only assume is a more musically pure and elegant path than what tends to unroll behind musicians here in Los Angeles.

For my part, I’ve gone from committing the crimes of a feral marauding guitarist / vocalist to more stately things, things that matter more, things more in keeping with my training: for the last couple of decades I’ve been committing the crimes of a composer / arranger / orchestrator / producer / guitarist, slithering through the greasy bowels of the music industry’s maggot-ridden remains. Fortunately, for both of us–for all of us musicians–the health of the industry, in the classic sense, is irrelevant in this brave new world. There are many ways to make a living while bringing great music into being, and Walt and I have both found some surprisingly cool paths through our respective forests.

But for all the stately professionalism of what we’re doing these days, I’d be lying if I said it wouldn’t be snot-slinging fun to be standing on stage next to Walt in some thumping venue right now, and holler over the band, at the top of my lungs:

“HEY, WALT!! LEAVE!!“

A Contest of Wills

ADMIN — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 17:49:12 +0000

“No worries m’Love, I got this.” I said to Roni with studied nonchalance, standing in our front yard on a beautiful spring day and looking forward to doing something with my hands: The assembly of the shiny new metal two-wheel carriage for her shiny new poop bucket.

A familiar contrivance to those of an equestrian bent whose daily efforts hope to slow a stable’s inevitable descent into an animal waste collection facility, the design of these things has progressed over the centuries from a wonderfully functional large wicker basket with no moving parts to today’s badly overthought design: An impressive array of powder-coated metal struts and braces, two wheels wobbling on their axles against their cotter pins, an ergonomically-angled dolly-style handle padded with foam rubber to absorb and help spread microorganisms, automatic climate control and gold-plated license plate frames. The actual bucket, for its part, is a large removable heavy-duty plastic affair which will be getting assimilated into the planet’s oceanic life or geologic substrate for millennia after humanity is dead and gone.

Most males know the urge to prove their worth by doing something for their beloved for which the male psyche is naturally wired (as opposed to, say, communication). And those of us who work excessive hours in the digital world understand the somewhat primal need to return to analog reality once in awhile. It’s hard to name a more analog area of human endeavor than the assembly of a poop bucket.

Standing in the front yard with the parts heaped at my feet like so much pot-metal spaghetti, I looked down at a badly wrinkled and blurred sheet of instructions in my hand: A single image of the final thing, drawn so poorly it had to be an act of sarcasm, rendered all the more indecipherable by the manufacturer’s having either printed a faxed image, or somehow gotten their hands on a cold war-era mimeograph machine to print the thing. Looking at the picture, it was impossible to tell what tubes were on top of or under, or in front of or behind other tubes, although one could more or less arrive at the most likely concept via a careful codebreaking process of the verbal printed instructions.

“Are you sure?” Roni asked, no doubt just an innocent offer to handle a task that she thought might burden my day, but a question that nonetheless registered on me brain as “Are you sure you’re competent enough?”

“Yes m’Love, please let me handle it.”

Having been involved for a year in the mid-to-late nineties with the assembly, and very occasionally the designs, of things like computerized impact-testing gear, explosive squib testing apparatuses, electromagnetic levitation devices and laser interferometer sending / receiving modules–most of which was created at the level of things built by NASA and way over my head, but in the service of whose creation I learned how things go together at the hands of mechanical geniuses–I’ve since been imbued with an appreciation of designs that are well-conceived and drawn, and not one bit more involved than absolutely necessary. By the same token, I have an abiding and healthy contempt for the type of tragic comedy I now encountered.

To my credit, I welcomed the entertainment value of what surely lay ahead. “Game on”, I thought. “Joo VEEL be made to BEHAFE!” I said aloud.

My darling Roni was still hovering, so I added “Seriously m’Love, you said you need to get some rest, so go inside and get some rest. I’ll take care of this.” She proceeded to pull weeds nearby. My wife is no fool.

In the world of competent mechanical design, things are commonly done with fabrication tolerances of plus or minus one thousandth of an inch. In aerospace designs, sometimes things have to be within one micron. More comfortably relaxed designs, for parts where things don’t really matter, might widen tolerances to plus or minus ten thousandths.

The mechanical design of this thing, such as it was, employed very thin-walled tubing. This was a good thing, because it allowed for quality control specs of plus or minus a quarter mile, the components having been bent to vague angles and crimped to arbitrary degrees at the bores for the screws. It was hard not to imagine the process as having taken place behind a thatch hut with a pair of pliers held by someone dressed in a loincloth and assisted by his dog, a large wicker basket looking on from nearby and chuckling.

Still, I was unfazed and resolute. “Pity the poor thing”, I thought. “‘Tis no match for my codebreaking and puzzle-solving skills, nor my dogged stubbornness. It shall be assembled in short order, and in good form.”

I’ve dealt with this level of design and manufacture before: One gets the holes into the same area code then pulls things together, bending the frame pieces into their intended shape by carefully tightening the chinesium screws while internally chanting the universal assembler’s mantra: “Please don’t strip please don’t strip please don’t strip”.

Amidst a progressively growing assortment of tools and much creative profanity, engaging all of my limbs in what can only be described as a prolonged game of Twister with metal frame pieces, I was able to achieve the capture of those various unwieldy shapes at their various unlikely angles, then somehow maintain them while installing the fasteners.

At long last, I straightened up and stood majestically erect on the battlefield, knee-deep in a chaos of detritus and tools, not even bleeding and having triumphantly bent physics to my will in the name of all that is right in the universe. I was beholding the completed fruits of my labor and anticipating the presentation to the world of the completed conveyance, when Roni wandered up.

She took the thing in at a glance, immediately pointed and said, “Hey, that piece is on backwards!”

Damn.

Time: Screw the Bastard

ADMIN — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 20:31:03 +0000

As a species, humans are nothing if not overly preoccupied with age. Some of us buy into the latest gadget, product or fad being lauded as a savior against the inevitable; some of us handle it in healthier, more active and natural ways. But at some level or other, we all have that nagging clock loudly reverberating around the back of our theater. It alters the performance of everyday goings on up in our attic, as it counts down the seconds before the arrival of what Eliot called The Eternal Footman.

This has long been on my mind, even as a young man, not because I’m obsessed or unhealthy or overly morbid, but because I’ve spent my adult life in the Southern California entertainment industry. It’s is an oddly surreal culture, in that we’re conditioned to think that we have to be ageless. And I guess if somebody meets with the right level of success, they are–to the zeitgeist at any rate, in the same way that they’re quickly forgotten if they don’t achieve that success–but if we get visibly old, especially women, the phone tends to stop ringing. So hereabouts at least, it’s not a baseless concern. And most of us are smart enough to know how stupid that is, and resent the vapid aesthetic that devalues the most experienced sector of the creative workforce. And of course, the entertainment industry isn’t the only culture on Earth where this errant thinking holds sway.

I’m a staunch functionalist at heart, so it’s not actually as big a thing to me as it is to many around me. As I see it, those who would be concerned about age–as opposed to caring about what someone brings to the table professionally, or as a human–don’t have the right mindset to work with me professionally or to be on my cloud, anyway.

But whether viewed from inside or outside the plastic capsule of Hollywood, this stigma about getting older is a bad path: it makes us compare ourselves to who we used to be. And this focuses our energy 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

I had an illuminating conversation with a good buddy one night when I was living in Mammoth Lakes, and the subject turned to this. My promo headshot was dated and I needed a new one, but I was concerned about not looking as young as I had used to. I’ll never forget he said:

“Ah, no, my man…that’s not how it works, here’s how aging works: It’s not that you’re older than you were yesterday. It’s that you’re younger than you’ll be tomorrow.”

This simple sentence rocked me back on my heels, and has been my guiding tenet about the aging process ever since. Thus I herein impart it unto you, in hopes that it has the same effect on your efforts and life as it does on mine, namely:

Get out and do it now. Do everything you can, every day, with whatever you’ve got. Pursue your time, don’t be chased by it. The life you live–this incredible, mind-boggling thing that is existence as a living, thinking organism–will be fuller, and more fun. You can trust the Eternal Footman to be here on his own time.

Until then, screw the bastard…and screw father time, too.

A.I. vs. Composers – Part II

ADMIN — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 18:41:02 +0000

In A.I. vs. Composers part one, I outlined the horrible threat that A.I. poses to musical creatives, the differences between humans and software, and how there’s a path to where we can rise above the ones and zeroes.

The way I see it, this could be an opportunity to show the world why actual composers, arrangers, songwriters, etc are so absolutely indispensible.

We’d be fools, of course, to think that A.I. software doesn’t have considerable strengths. But by the same token it has its weaknesses, which I outlined in saying that it’ll “never be capable of really ripping the listener’s heart right out of their chest”, or “exploding in ballsy exaltation”.

And bear in mind: these are things that we humans CAN do to the listener.

But make no mistake—this is your come-to-Nebuchadnezzar moment, and a vital HEADS UP:

It just got more imperative than ever for you to become the best writer / arranger you possibly can.

If your music is going to survive what’s coming, you need to understand—in no uncertain terms—that technological chops and gear won’t save you.

And you may think that writing at the level of The Gods of our craft is only possible for other gods, but DON’T YOU BELIEVE IT.

I won’t pretend to have all the answers, or to be able to give you some kind of magic Great Idea Gene.

But I CAN point you to an incredibly powerful skill set, one that enables you to realize the full potential of your music, to the best of your ability, using whatever means you currently use in your natural creative workflow.

And it’s hard to fathom, but the vast majority of musical creatives do not have this skill set.

As I said, there’s a path to where we can rise above the ones and zeroes, and this skill set is a big part of that path.

So believe it: A.I. will never be able to write something as powerful as Copland’s Billy The Kid, Lennon’s Imagine, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Mozart’s Requiem, Tower’s Squib Cakes, Coltrane’s Naima or Zeppelin’s Kashmir. But WE can…IF we learn all the skills we need in order to unlock the potential of our musical voices.

You can learn more about that skill set, and how to get it into your life, here.

A.I. vs. Composers, Part I

ADMIN — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 18:10:15 +0000

I’m writing this on what might be the eve of human musical creativity receiving the final push off the field and into the sidelines by A.I.

It’s legitimately scary: Pretty soon here, we may be living in a world where all music is either A.I.-generated or assumed / suspected of being so, whether it is or not.

Many people think this will make it so difficult for composer / arrangers to find work that composing as an art form might go the way of the Dodo, having faded from educational curricula for want of student demand.

While it’s not impossible for that to happen, I don’t think it will…given a couple of caveats. Here’s why:

I think we can all agree that A.I. will never be able to write something as powerful as Copland’s Billy The Kid, Lennon’s Imagine, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Mozart’s Requiem, Tower’s Squib Cakes, Coltrane’s Naima or Zeppelin’s Kashmir.

Software simply lacks the humanity. It will never really swing like Duke or Bassie, never play the blues. But us? We CAN write that well, IF we learn the skills we need.

What sets our creation apart from A.I. is our humanity and our invention. A.I. will always be derivative. It will always be machine-generated, it will always imitate.

It’ll never be capable of really ripping the listener’s heart right out of their chest, the way Mozart’s Requiem does, or exploding in the ballsy exaltation you feel when you crank Kashmir on a good listening rig. That opening stanza from Orff’s Camina Burana? Holy crap, be serious. Software will simply never write like that.

But humans can.

Connecting to your listener in that visceral, emotional way is what will set YOUR music apart from A.I.

Believe it.

To be continued.

To Exist is Beautiful

ADMIN — Mon, 29 May 2023 22:13:32 +0000

I step outside to take Jesse on his midnight outing, my head looking down at things I need to look at, mind full of workaday minutiae. One more night in a week, month, year, life. Distractedly grinding the meal that comes along.

Then the purity of the night air hits my lungs like a bucket of cold water hits a sleeping drunk. And I look up.

It is the clearest and most magnificent night sky I’ve seen in years. Last night’s storm was the first real storm of the year…cold, windy and wet, it blew the hesitation right out. From beginning of fall to beginning of winter in one day, snow in the local mountains around L.A.

The air is so clean, the almost-full moon doesn’t cause any more haze than Mars or Betleguise, both of whom are nearby. The stars and planets are gathered and blazing in vivid electric blues, greens, reds and oranges. Hell, they’re having a rave. And to think I’d been oblivious to the invitation that’s been shouting to me from outside for hours tonight, just so I could be indoors sticking to my minutiae.

Until now.

Stepping outside into this timelessly majestic, indifferent and impossibly immense night leaves me reeling with the effort to get my head around how huge existence is, how unlikely MY existence actually is, and how miniscule we and our efforts are, in the unfathomable expanse and endlessness of the cosmos.

Whatever our wins, our compromises, our struggles, loves and losses…whatever ugliness our energies may dump upon the cosmic altar…whatever irrelevancies we waste our precious moment of life pursuing…this existence is incredible.

To exist is beautiful.

“I love you, universe” I whisper at the sky.

PICK vs. NO PICK

ADMIN — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 23:06:35 +0000

If you can’t play without a pick, we should talk. Mastery of the pick is essential to the well-rounded player, but it’s only one tool; your right hand is a whole tool box. Fingers hitting strings can get SO many colors, from tons of different funk styles to screaming rock (I sometimes play shredder solos with fingers) to Jazz to Country to Acoustic and Finger-Picking, such as Travis. Rhythmic articulation, cleaner arpeggiated lines, more aggressive accents; it’s all there. Don’t underestimate the capabilities of your fingers and thumb with no pick. And of course, I do teach this.