As I may have said previously, my passion is music. The recent channel for that passion, for the last 18 months or so, as I may also have said previously, is macidol.com. Making music and posting it at macidol has been a great pleasure and an interesting experience. There is a community there in the forums that I feel pretty strongly attached to. All but one of the blog links on the right side of this page currently goes to a macidoler.
One aspect of this style of musicmaking is that it is somewhat masturbatory. But so is solo folksinging, which I've also done for years.
But let me tell ya a secret about me. I used to be in bands, and in those days couldn't imagine making music any other way.
I used to wanna play fast & loud. I still do in a way, but I have developed into an acoustic musician. That's what I like & what I do. I do not own an electric guitar. I would like to at some point, but for now, I have a small collection of cheap folk instruments and as my ethic as a recordist is decidedly lofi, I do pretty well with that. I will brag just enough to say that I think I have a couple of good tunes. But not many of them are in any way collaborative. Collaborating is hard. You have to give ego space up enough that you can let someone else's ideas in.
I am not the best at this. But I'm trying to get better at it. I've done it a few times and it sure isn't easy. Everybody brings expectations to these things. Me, too. But I try to have an open mind and can usually (not always) accomplish it. In my younger days, when bands were what I wanted to do with my passion, I could be pretty hardnosed. And that is something no musician deals with well. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I understand that people get an idea of what they want from a collaborative experience. In a band, that could change over time. A band can evolve its memberships' expectations, and to some extent their expectations can be met. Makes me wonder what it's like to be in a totally democratic band like R. E. M. that is still sharing all writing credits, and still almost all the same people since 1982 (they lost drummer Bill Berry in 1997).
I have managed a few things, though, and some of them are in my jamroom, some are in other's jamrooms (look for "Greyhound Run") and some ain't nowhere.
Nature of the game I guess.
