Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Guitar Process

One day at a time, though sometimes twice a day

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Been working on my guitar practice. I remain a terrible guitarist, but I enjoy the learning process and have been trying to use my practice time more effectively. I take lessons weekly. Current areas of focus:

  • Working on 7th chords, and some 9th chord forms, as well
  • Working on a mix of holding the pick with two fingers and using the remaining three fingers for individual string picking and arpeggios
  • Working on better recognizing which notes in a given chord form are the root, third, and fifth
  • Still trying to memorize the fretboard (in EADGBE), which continues to elude me
  • Still working on one song at a time over an extended period of time
  • Voice leading remains a big priority for me
  • Still working on using my guitar through a synthesizer, but not mistaking the time with the synth as guitar practice, per se
  • Ordered a nifty device that will, apparently, let me isolate each of the six strings for individual processing and/or recording, something I’ve previously attempted to approximate with equalizers and filter banks
  • Now I need an audio interface with sufficient inputs to take advantage of the above nifty device, likely something like this

New Susie Ibarra Book

My review in The Wire

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

My review of percussionist Susie Ibarra’s new book, Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm (Habitat Sounds, 158 pages), is in the current issue of The Wire, the one with Tomeka Reid on its cover. Here’s the first paragraph:

The great drummer and composer Susie Ibarra — born in Anaheim, California, home to Disneyland, among the most artificial environments on Earth — has long embraced the natural world as intrinsic to her music. In 2002, her Songbird Suite, released by John Zorn’s Tzadik label, teamed her with a supergroup (the label’s term) of Jennifer Choi, Ikue Mori and Craig Taborn. Uncredited were additional participants: the birds whose music could be heard on the title track, not merely sampled, but having provided evident inspiration for her antic percussion and for Taborn’s impressionistic piano playing. Two decades on, Ibarra’s Walking on Water (Innova, 2021) melded a larger ensemble with more birds and, trenchantly, the sounds of glaciers in decline. At times during Walking on Water, a listener might think Ibarra’s music had lost a battle with the field recordings, before coming to recognise the water is, in fact, the music.