We’ve come a long way from sitting around a campfire playing hollowed-out logs for entertainment. We have musical instruments of all sizes, shapes, tones, and varieties, and we have thousands of ways of creating a sound, massaging it to sound like anything else, and then delivering that sound to someone thousands of miles away.
As a consumer, I could easily be buried in all of the new music that exists in the world today and that keeps getting created, minute by minute. For example, I once saw a counter showing how many songs were on iTunes; it was adding a new song every couple of seconds. Wikipedia claims that there are over 14 million songs on iTunes now. At three and a half minutes average per song, that’s over 93 years of music, played 24/7.
That’s a lot.
As a creator of music, I’ve got plenty of options as well. It used to be just me and my guitar. Simple, right? Well, if I’m playing to more than three or four people, not all of whom are maintaining disciplined science, I need to amplify the sound somehow or lose my voice trying to make myself heard. 🙂 Hundreds of choices for amplifiers, speakers, mixers, effects…
And that’s not counting the number of options I have when I record.
Over time, I’ve found some gear that works for me and gives me a decent sound. And now I’m starting to branch out a bit into stuff that makes me sound like more than one guy with a guitar. I’m assembling tracks of the songs I do, as many as I can find – some of them I’ll have to do without or create my own. In my copious free time. 🙂 And I’m trying out other effects such as a harmonizer.
Will all these gimmicks and gadgets make me sound better, or worse? Come out to a show sometime soon and let me know.
Next show is Friday night (9/23), 8-10 PM, at Panama Bay Coffee, Livermore. Details on my Shows page. I’ll be trying out some of this cool new technology.
