George @ Berklee

Making the most of $40,000

Sunday, October 29, 2006

"Make it more baroque.."

Ok, so on Saturday night Matt and I decided to do a little bit of recording instead of going to a Halloween party like a normal person. Music college is GREAT. The title of this entry is something he said. Well long story short, I wrote a new song on Friday night called "Angelina's Getting Married" and I played it for Matt on Saturday and he was so jazzed about it we started doing some recording.

Check out www.myspace.com/frostbitefalls for the audio, you can download it too.

We had a really fun time. There's tons of mistakes on the track (and I really want to cut the vocal again) but there's a lot of cool ideas on it too. We used Garageband mostly and we rewired it with Reason to use the sampler. It really sounds like a Sgt. Pepper's style orchestra on it now. Check out the dual/backwards guitar solo :) I think I'm the guitar that starts on the right if you're listening with headphones.

Hopefully there will be more coming soon, I think next weekend we're going to try working one of Matt's songs. Eventually I think we'll do a good version of "Angelina's Getting Married" too. This week is super busy because it's midterms week so after the week of stress there will be more time for sweet music making. Wow, three 'weeks' in a sentence is weak. :D Take it easy everyone!

Monday, October 09, 2006

Getting settled.. finally!

Hello Funseekers! Sorry about the gap between updates but it gets pretty busy around here. The homework isn't bad but there's a lot of practicing that I need to do for my playing classes so that ends up eating up most of my free time.

To make up for it, I thought I'd snap a couple pics of the outside of the main Berklee building, 150 Massachusetts Ave. This is the front door (and some random guy, usually there's tons of people in front but I took this picture on the weekend.

This area outside the building is affectionately known as the "Berklee Beach." During the school week, a lot of people hang out here (mostly smokers). Nobody is exactly sure why it's called beach since there's no sand or water or fresh air here.

Let me tell you about what a standard day in the life of a Berklee student is like. Well first of all, there's a lot of walking. A lot of classes will be in really different buildings so you're always shuffling back and forth. The cafeteria is also in 150 Mass. Ave so you have to walk there for meals.
I actually have my Harmony class in a room inside this church. I also noticed that there's a classroom in the building where the McDonald's across the street is. A neat thing about the McDonald's and Wendy's here is that they have music themed decorations, there's notes and stuff like that painted on the wall. I'll try to get a picture of that for a future blog update.

Classes are pretty standard college fair. Well standard for a music college I guess. Right now I'm taking Harmony, Writing Skills (music writing), Ear Training, Guitar Performance Skills, Contemporary Styles Ensemble, Voice for the Instrumentalist and College Writing. I also get a once a week private lesson from a guitar teacher here. My private lesson is with Abby Aronson, she's really nice, I'll try to get a picture of her too. A neat thing is that Abby and Norm (my Guitar Performance Skills teacher) are married.

After classes, there's still lots to do. There's usually a cool music industry guest speaker to check out every couple days. Just in the past month, I've seen seminars from the President of Warner Records, Beyonce's main songwriter and the president of Songsalive.org to name a few. Berklee attracts a lot of really interesting people.

After a hard day of school, I usually finish my homework and settle into a practice room to get some guitar playing done. Here in the Hemenway Street building, the practice rooms are in the basement.



This is a picture of my home away from home. (Really more like room away from room). This is my favorite practice room. It's nice to have a little space where you can get away and just play some music.











The mysterious knee in the above picture is shown from a different angle here. Hey, it's Albany, Texas' favorite son Ryan! He came over to jam on this particular night.


So yeah, that's pretty much what I've been up to and the reason why nobody's heard much from me for the last little while. Hopefully there's going to be more time for updates in the future and hopefully some music. I'm getting the hang of this computer recording this slowly but surely so I will get some new music out for you guys as soon as I can.

Oh and here's the real reason anyone ever reads this thing: the girls.
This is Melita, the cutie with the flutie from Croatia (cheesy?). Anyways keep your eyes open for more updates soon and don't be afraid to leave a comment! :D