Glad I finally caught up on this thread, so awesome Martin. Wish I could be at the party, can't wait to hear about it.

Great read - thanx for taking the time

Great to read you again. And what a read !

Great posts and story. Keep up the good work and GL

always thought it was pretty cool when you talked about walking into hotel rooms and just sitting down and playing on their pianos. like that there is this informal understanding that when something as potentially beautiful as a piano exists, sitting in a room - if someone comes along with the skills to adequately play it, at that point the piano ceases to belong to anyone...

good stories.

MOAR

you've gotten more handsome, martin

Great read, you seem like a very cool dude

how did this resolve?

this might give you an idea

Good stuff Martin.

So i left Chicago around August. In September not so much happened. Actually quite a lot of time passed before i played the open mic the first time, since that was March 7. I went home for Christmas for a couple weeks and composed the first movement of a piano sonata but still haven't recorded that yet, and i spent some time working on music, but mostly i was just practicing guitar over this period and trying to stay sane.

A few things happened over this period however:
I moved into a new apartment, a large loft space where i had no neighbours.


open shower in loft that people always seem to end up dancing in during parties!

This ended up being a great decision.

I also bought a drum kit, even though i don't know how to play drums; i figured if i did this it would be extremely tempting for drummers to come jam with me even if they were flaky and didn't necessarily think i was any good; if you play drums, it's gotta be hard to find a place where you can just wail for a couple hours without getting noise complaints or even roommate complaints.

Over this period i spent a bunch of time hanging out with some McGill students who were in bands of various descriptions, most which had been playing a lot longer and were a lot tighter than the sort of stuff i was messing around with. Although their music was far more indy rock / student style music, they had some motivated people in them so seemed to get quite a lot of gigs, playing basically anywhere (lots of student art gallery or fundraiser stuff, they hosted the open mic at the bar Gerts i mentioned earlier, etc).

The two main bands in this group were the Pinyin Pals and The Argyles. You can check out their music videos here:

Headfull- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmK0pah3Hj8
this is The Argyles on top of the roof of their place. There's a giant octopus on the roof made of sheet metal that is quite impressive, but no one really knows where it came from so i guess they decided to use this as the focal point of their music video which is made by another buddy, Arthur.

Scum- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJv3tMcBW0E
this is The Pinyin Pals; i don't really know wtf is going on with the music video, but i like it and the song is catchy.

http://grooveshark.com/#/s/January+F...y/3JtD9k?src=5
You can see the Argyles self produced album here, its great given that they're all young and its recorded with really basic gear by Greg McCloud (@loudgreg on twitter if you like it!).

I mention these bands because it's really because of them that i ended up finally being absorbed in a musical community of some kind. It instantly became significantly easier to find people to play music with, these guys were creating regular opportunities to play to audiences, they were cool to hang out with and always supportive. It's through them that i met the guys who are in the band that i am most serious about now, ALEXEIMARTOV.

Since these guys had their own bands, they would regularly hold 'HOOTENANNYS', Facebook events where about 50 people (their friends) would come and just listen to each others bands etc and bring friends, hang out, and get really drunk in someones living room until the cops came. It's at these Hootenanys i met the Dorfmen brothers (THE DORFMEN RHYTHM SECTION) who i am currently playing with.

The first show we played was for someones birthday. A local venue. Trois Minots. Great location, but it never seems full. The owner basically just lets bands play for free but doesn't pay them. You just have to organize a set list and you can usually play there. If you want to charge a door, thats up to you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIQOvFpMMW4&feature=related
This is the Argyles playing there.

Anyway, i lived next door to Trois Minots, and the Argyles and Pinyin Pals had both borrowed my drum kit a lot to play there since it was so convenient (actually i had sat in with them on the unmiced piano at one point lol!), so since this was a pretty open gig, they invited me and the Dorfmen to play if we wanted to, which we did. That was our first real gig together. We played some originals and Manic Depression by Hendrix (obv) and it went pretty great!

I had long had on my bucket list "play a guitar solo to a wasted audience in a bar' and this was the time i achieved that goal:


Ask me thread from 2008.

I'd like to say that as i played a masturbatory guitar solo with my guitar held behind my head and my drunk friends screaming YEOWWWW that i had a moment of clarity and suddenly realized that i was ticking off number 1 on that list and really the only one i was very serious about but i didn't, i was very much immersed in the moment, and after the show i didn't realize it either.

I started thinking about this recently though, after the most recent Hootenanny (which ended up having well over 100 people) and it came to my mind that my first thought after playing this event, in which i was truly immersed, the conduit of the music i had been obsessing over for weeks before was 'hrm, i really have to improve my guitar tone, i haven't been practicing enough, i've been to focused on our arrangements, otherwise how will i ever deserve anymore success? MARTIN GET YOUR **** TOGETHER!!!'. I quickly dealt with these thoughts by consuming a large quantity of space juice, a beverage i found on the internet and had provided many litres of for the party, that is made from Absinthe, Blue Curacao and Lemonade and looks a little like what you would imagine a swimming pool in Chernobyl to look like, but that is besides the point.

The point itself i feel Jim Jeffries can sum up much better than me, so i would simply recommend watching this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLjyo51qmrI&feature=related


So anyway, after pondering this for a little while recently i zoomed out a bit and realized things were going pretty well, i had found a band, we were having some pretty epic parties, and that i should just enjoy myself more. I still have trouble doing this, because it is clear that for me happiness definitely involves a lot more than just enjoying being a pig enjoying the squalor of its muddy confinement, and that i put a lot of value in the work->payoff process (I mean my whole poker career up until now has been about that and i have achieved the huge pay off in the last few years of essentially having unlimited freedom) but if you're not getting anything out of the payoffs either, what's the point? It's just a masturbatory quest to see how high you can climb the stakes of life but if you're never enjoying the fruits of your labour then you're going to get scurvy.

As always, if you enjoyed reading this, and especially if you found it via Twitter (please retweet! we are trying to play SXSW next year and we need to GROWWWW) you can follow me here @ALEXEIMARTOV.

THANKS! <3

Uhmnn SXSW 1 time please...

A+, good luck!!

I've always had the same passion, just keep pushing it back. Sometime soon ill start the journey

i wanna be your friend, non sexual, but albeit creepy kind of way.
GL on your future endevours

Your thread inspired me to pursue my dream of becoming a musician. Hope to jam with you one day.

Ludovic

AWESOME!

missed this the first time around. good stuff

Martin,

This is awesome, man.

Congrats on what you've achieved so far and best of luck for continued success...

Keep chasin them stars.

If you're ever in the Bay hit me up, we'll jam.

-Nate.

Well looks like its been 2 months since the update. Sorry about that!

Since then a lot has happened. In the last 2 months we've played 4 times, nowhere near what i'd like to be playing, but we have played with some other bands, played a Friday night at a busy bar, that sort of thing. Obviously baby steps but that is really a reasonable amount to be playing for a starting band still. It's tricky because when the audiences are largely your friends, you don't really have a fan base so you can't really play non-stop. We have had some chances to play because of fundraisers for McGill etc, but in general, not a lot. In the New Year i think i will try to devote myself to playing an open mic a week just because playing live improves your ability to play live so much. Certainly worked for Jeff Buckley.


"I really like alexeimartovs conviction!" (lol i wish, rip buddy)

I also started doing classical singing lessons since i've really wanted to get a little better at the 'technique' aspect of singing. I basically just noticed on craigslist some advertisements for singing in the Musicians section, and after watching a few of them pop up frequently, chose this one, mainly under the logic that it would be impossible to teach someone to sing classical music well without knowing anything about teaching singing (I imagine getting taken for a ride by someone who is merely an ok singer in a choir or studying at university who is offering singing lessons on craigslist and just giving really vague advice on how to improve). I've increased from doing them 2x a week to 3x a week and have been going at it for about 2 months now. I have to say that i feel significantly more powerful and can see the possible future for my voice.


funny thing i have learnt is the main reason opera singers are always pulling weird faces is so they provide the maximum space for resonance in their head- i like an eyebrow raise combined with flared nostrils, personally- seems to put the voice in a nice place in my head...

Anyway… At first, it was pretty weird taking singing lessons. I wanted to for quite a long time and i'm kind of glad i waited in some ways, because it meant the first few times i sang live i was strongly concentrating on the emotional expression of the performance and i feel that is the most important thing. Now i stay mostly focused on that but i know a lot of singers who have always taken lessons from a young age find themselves concentrating on things like 'how much to open the vowel when it comes to this part of the song' or 'focus on the diaphragm support' or whatever. I have learnt all these things are pretty important but obviously an engaging performance that communicates human expression to the listener is the only real focus once the audience has decided that the singers tone is 'listenable'.

Anyway, i can't go into too much detail related to the personal life of the guy that has been helping me learn to sing, but he's an interesting Polish fellow with a huge soprano voice. He performed quite a lot when he was younger as a professional opera singer, mostly 16th Century Italian operas, but now he teaches full time, with his little dog, who occasionally joins in with a high pitched howl. It's quite a funny environment if you are not used to singing in casual situations, but after some time i have come to enjoy it a lot.

More significantly, after 2 months i believe that i am actually starting to be an ok singer rather than just getting through the songs. Like playing 25c 50c and seeing that 'hey, i can probably do this at least at $2/4' i am starting to feel that at some point i will sound how i want to. I have a pretty good idea how the mechanics of the body work when singing correctly, my voice doesn't get as raped after singing, and i just sound a lot better in general although i am learning to integrate everything into what i was already doing a little at a time (what i mean by that is i have no intention of singing classical music in our band setting although i learn and sing Arias as part of learning the classical approach as i feel it improves musicianship immensely versus just vocalising).

Sometimes there will be another student in his apartment, or his assistant (also a student) and everyone will be randomly vocalising or singing as the lessons transition from one to the other, the dog joining in at appropriate moments. Despite that casual atmosphere, he takes the lessons themselves very seriously; this is his job and passion now, not some way to make money while he tries to make it into a show.

So that's consuming a lot of my time now (5 hours a week). I also started taking a guitar lesson once a week just to hang out with one of my favourite guitarist/songwriters in the city, he can really wail and i enjoy spending some time shooting the **** with him. Pretty cool really to just be able to do that…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRvuG...eature=related
Shane Murphy toolin around at a local irish pub he's actually super epic but pretty funny guy to see live like this.

Anyway, next year is an exciting time. We're going to run into some band issues because one of the guys has just finished University but hopefully he can stick around Montreal for a little while longer and we can make a big push. We'll be recording very soon so stay tuned! I know you all want to see an audience of burn victims our next recording so i am working hard on my guitar chops for y'all. I really feel like we're starting to kind of sound awesome.

On the recording note actually, i recorded a little jazz a dif buddy yesterday, it's nothing like what we play in the band (well, some of our stuff gets a little proggy but you know… this is instrumental jazz standards) but it came out pretty good for something we just decided to do spur of the moment; might help if you are tilting like crazy.

Here's some links:
http://soundcloud.com/alexeimartov/my-funny-valentine
http://soundcloud.com/alexeimartov/s...ce-will-come-3

As always you can check updates and **** on my twitter here: https://twitter.com/#!/ALEXEIMARTOV

Thanks!

ALEXEIMARTOV -> OUT!

she's cute

good stuff man.. looking forward to hearing some 2/4nl voice recordings..

Stringstorybook is sweet.. was really hoping it was gonna bust into some dirty electro house music (just my taste) but I liked it nonetheless..

haha that was for thatplayapfunks wedding, played it as his girl walked down the aisle...

Not one of mine

Sorry if this has been asked, but how many hours of guitar do you think you've played? care to guesstimate on what the major "time milestones" are?

hey mate.

Over the Course of the last two weeks, i watched crossfire, ghost and pregaming and then crossfire and ghost again. lol
and i didnt think that i would say this after playing for a living for quite some time, but some stuff you said really changed my game / thinking about the aforementioned!

since i finished the vids now, i googled you to see what happened, and im really glad that it was music, that got you!
once upon a time i was a musician myself (was flipping between studying music or math... went with math), and still enjoy smashing some jazzimpro or tickleing the ivorys with a random rachmaninoff.

guess what im trying to say is big ups for doing what you love, listened to a couple of stuff, loved to walz , and thank you very much for the inspiring vids you did back in the days!
wish you all the best, subbed, definitely love to keep hearing from you
cheers

It's really hard to estimate how much guitar i've played. I started as an adult basically since i remember at about 20 learning for the first time about pentatonic shapes, the blues scale, etc. My knowledge of classical piano at that point was primarily based on really liking music, having a pretty comprehensive understanding of the history of classical music, some ear training (but very poor scoring academically in this area), and a pretty solid performance repertoire. But what i would like to mention is that i really never learnt anything about playing the piano or playing music in general over this entire period despite a couple thousand hours of piano playing.

Actually, i do realize that i achieved a reasonable technique over this period, i improved my ability to focus and practice for longer periods of time (knowing the rewards would follow mentally; e.g. if you have never spent an hour practicing in a day you are probably going to be like 'time for some reddit' after 15 minutes. if you play 3 hours a day for a year you will be like 'man **** reddit i'ma play piano A LOT because this **** is DOPE' and that work ethic really stays with you) and i guess i grew to love music. But in terms of the various aspects of taking it to the next level, i never really learnt anything.

I'll probably write about this again at some point since it is pretty axiomatic regarding my life view, but the way i see things, basically everything is the same. At least everything i have the slightest understanding of.

There is something we can define as "Technique". This is something my singing teacher calls "routine in the voice" (when singing the same thing again and again means your voice just kind of does it automatically). It's exactly the same as auto piloting at poker. You've got some chops and you're probably better than most. That means you've probably got a reasonably good technique. You can do it without thinking about it and still you are better than the average guy because ultimately in any given activity some things just work. You can be thinking about the weather in Spain while cooking a steak if you know how and its still going to be 80% of your top steak game. You can muck your way through a Chopin nocturne and your mum will think it sounds like Horowitz is playing it. Once you know the motions in a given system, you're going to be better than the vast majority of people so the vast majority of people who see you operating in that system that don't have aptitude themselves will think you are 'damn good'.

The reason so many musicians get stuck on technique is because ultimately, without some, you just can't do anything. If you can't get your hand in the position to play a bar chord on the guitar, you aren't going to get anywhere really. A little technique is not that hard to acquire. But once you've got to a certain point, things change.

In fact, any given system with a significant level of complexity has such a level of scope that technique is basically irrelevant compared to the amount of time it takes to acquire anything resembling mastery.

The three biggest things i think apply to basically all areas, are TECHNIQUE, TONE and SENSORY IMAGINATION.

Now it might seem like a stretch to use the term TONE in my 'axiomatic world view of all things' but actually what TONE is in music applies to basically everything.

Tone is caring a lot about a lot of small things. I think the best way to sum up tone is that it takes such a tiny amount of pressure to go from a caress to something almost violent and that that concept applies to basically everything that has a tactile influence. Cutting up moose meat for example. Must treat it like a swedish lady.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L40f39bPII

I mentioned Steve Albini before in this thread and actually Tone is essentially Steve's Job. It's really really hard for a naive ear (and at times even an educated one) to hear any single thing Steve or any other audio-engineer might do in the recording process of music. But if you heard the end results of all these decisions e.g., the full song recorded by an amateur vs a professional, it would be instantly obvious. It is a bunch of little things adding up. How you hit every single note. To rape the poker analogy a second time, how every little play makes a difference. Tone is betting the smallest amount possible when their only play is to check shove or check fold and the perfect number when their only play is to check call and try to work out if you have it. Tone is the difference between 1011 and 1101 on the river in a $1300 pot. And great players make the right move the vast majority of the time because that little difference matters to them. And compounded again and again and again, it separates them from an amateur.

I was recently talking to a friend about piano playing. 'The piano doesn't have a lot of tonal options' he said. I mentioned that the default then should be to try to get the notes in any given passage to all sound the exact same volume if one didn't have an artistic reason to make one louder than another (eg if its 'pianissimo' all the notes should be the same level of 'really quiet'; if you're accenting something thats not written as accented, you should have a reason... this is incredibly difficult). Surely chaos isn't the answer. I had never even thought about that concept until the last year. To make that happen, requires a lot of work. As Steve Vai would say, you have to have the post code of every single note and make it work for you. Its funny that now when i read about masters talking about piano, all they really talk about is phrasing and 'colour and shading' (e.g. the loudness of notes relative to each other in passages with the intention of communicating emotion to the listener; super virtuosos have thought about how they will hit every single note in any given piece on the piano).

Once you realize this, it is a matter of someone showing you options you have on the instrument or for you to find them yourself. But obviously if you are still trying to hit the right chord, you will have trouble. I don't know how long it takes to develop some technique with the hands. I know just banging away thoughtlessly vs having a teacher is an insane comparison, as someone thats been mostly self taught but recently asked a lot more questions to a lot more great players.

I guess if i had to give a counter example to Gladwell's 10,000 hours, i would say that mastery of music is really more like 'mastery of what you know'. Being able to have a clear vision of what you want the particular song to sound like, and having a clear knowledge of the instrument to express the emotion you want to express, and having very high standards as to what is acceptable. You can master a song in a few weeks on guitar with great pedagogy i'm sure and you can probably spend a life time and never be able to play a Ramones song properly if you just bang away without thinking about what your doing (unless you happen to be in the exact right state of mind, in which case the raw emotion might just flow out of your being and you'll get it right on that day; i am a pretty big fan of the emotional performance ultimately being the only thing that matters, but you have to play SOMETHING and great tone seems like something all good players have).

If you're just banging away learning covers by osmosis, just like if you were playing poker with a starting hand chart, you're never going to spend the time you need to improve the little things; and tone comes from an obsession with the little things. And tone is key. Really, if all you aim to do is emulate, all you need is technique and tone. Follow the recipe and have incredibly high standards. Understand the repertoire and why people are writing it that way. But there is a lot more once you go beyond that but i have typed too much and there is no more beer left today. Next time.

ALEXEIMARTOV -> OUT.