Still playing

Alright, yesterday's recording was a little rough. Today's is a lot better. I'm learning how to squeeze more quality out of this relatively cheap microphone. I also threw in a little compression and reverb and voila! It almost sounds professional. Today I'm performing a little piece called Dee by Randy Rhoads. The guitar is a Spanish Guitar by M. Tatay.
Listen

new toy

When I was a little boy I was fascinated with tape recorders. I used to watch my father dictate into a "handheld" tape recorder a little larger than the earliest Sony walkman. On one of my birthdays he handed me his tape recorder and said "happy birthday son!". It wasn't wrapped or anything. He had probably forgotten my b-day and decided to grab the first thing he saw. But the thing is, I couldn't have been happier. I played with that thing for hours every day. One of my favorite films growing up was Blow Out by Brian De Palma starring John Travolta. After watching that I wanted to be a sound engineer for film. Now I do graphics work on computer animated films and my hobby is music and music production. And I'm still fascinated with recorded sound. So, I'm thrilled by my new toy, the Belkin TuneTalk microphone which lets me record directly onto my iPod. Here's my first test recording of me playing my acoustic guitar. A little noodling turned into a sloppy rendition of Mood For a Day by Steve Howe. Enjoy!


playingWithITalk.mp3

My Introduction

My name is Dan Shimmyo. This is my first blog page. Music is my hobby, a hobby that I take very seriously. I've decided to share some of my musical experiences in the form of this blog page if I ever get it working. Back in the 90's I recorded myself playing music in my home studio as my preferred (or most convenient) form of expression. Lately I've been more focused on the live performance, especially improvised. I am fortunate to work at an animation studio where just about everyone is a musician, photographer, painter, or rocket scientist. And that's outside of the work that they do for the studio. Anyway, I've had no problem finding people to jam with so occasionally around lunch time or after hours I grab my drum sticks and round up a guitarist and bass player and head down to the lower levels of our building to make some noise. I also play guitar but since the guitarist to drummer ratio is about 100 to 1 I choose to play drums. I'm not a technically impressive drummer but I do keep time pretty well and I'm learning new ways to spice up jam sessions by changing tempo and time signatures on the fly. If my fellow jammers don't mind I should be able to add content to this page in the near future.

To get things started I have an old rock instrumental track I recorded in 1999 for a project called Handz of Danz which was conceived by Dan McAvinchey. My Van Halen , Satriani, and Vai influences are probably the most obvious.

Here's extemporalis: extemporalis.mp3

While extemporalis and most of my previous work is pretty straightforward hard / progressive rock, many of my recent jams consist of rock/jazz fusion which is a lot more fun to play on drums. But I never know from day to day what style of music I'll be playing and that's what makes it so much fun for me. I hope this blog will be just as fun to read and listen to.