Sleepy after a good dance earlier tonight, I have another go at a Substack post. What am I aiming for here? A little update on my life with the main focus being on music-making.
Summer Solstice soon... cool. Nice things in my life: an exciting collection of non-fiction I’ve gathered in recent weeks from ebay and the postal service. I’m leaving all the old dull to-reads on my shelf. Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ would just soul in, stay for too long, and then soul out of my life before I depart shortly afterwards so I gotta’ be done with all that. And I got a new desk.
The desk is great. I can easily access and set up my MIDI keyboard on here. I just need to study/practice playing keyboard more. Sort of at it but not much. There’s lots of other musical instruments and similar to learn.
Keyboard with The Complete Keyboard Player.
Reading music with Learn to Read Music.
Ukulele with my weekly group and online study lessons. Going great. Gigged (group of us; not solo) in Southover Church recently in aid of Lewes and District Dementia Action Alliance.
Guitar. Jazz Up Your Blues is one of Justin’s better courses I think. It’s about playing arpeggios over chords.
Singing. Much harmonising with the linnets and larks of my hometown.
Ableton Live. A little.
Ableton Push. Less. Ableton are trying to hype Push 3 on the basis that it is now ‘completely free of the computer’ which seems a bit silly to me.
Writing lyrics. Yeah, a handful of pieces of paper with some words written on them.
Where it’s at, I don’t know, but I’m in Lewes so I’ll keep it local and post some pretty pictures of my hometown.
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What junk have I written here (showing off, showing off, showing off…)? I like to think the music is coming. Oh yeah, I recorded a ukulele version of Noah Kahan’s ‘Stick Season.’ I added and then removed it from this post. It’s less that I was unhappy with my version than that the song has become very morose and annoying to me.
I’m mostly coasting. Sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed, red-faced and frustrated by my lack of tears but that’s on a bad day. Wishing happy, peaceful times to you all…
Go let it out, as (they?) Oasis said or rather (Liam) sang. It wasn’t much of a song, maybe, but I agree with the viewpoint.