The Way of the Gong™

2021 is the 20th year of my venturing out from playing in bands into playing and recording solo percussion music. In this blog I plan to take a look back over the many recordings I’ve made in the past 20 years. This will not be in chronological order—I’ll just pick albums out by what I feel like investigating.  First up is a release from exactly 10 years ago on April 13, 2011:  Transparent Universe . (You can download or stream the tracks here ) Ensemble vs Solo All of my previous albums had been solo recordings in the truest sense: the music was all recorded live to 2-track with no overdubs. Essentially, I wanted to capture the sound and feeling of me playing a live concert (and also have the ability to recreate the same music on stage). So all songs were written and well rehearsed before entering the studio, where time is money. I always made sure to have a well formed game plan and generally stuck with it. This allowed me to get my previous studio albums each recor...

 I just read another Facebook thread on  the ‘432Hz’ tuning idea. This is actually something I’ve spent a lot of time and research investigating, because I find this whole idea of a ‘fixed tuning’ fascinating. I think too many people make a big deal out of tunings in the West, like it's some sort of academic thing filled with hidden meanings, or there's some sort of conspiracy behind it all.  Unless you play in an orchestra or band with other musicians, or you play to written sheet music, tunings don’t really matter much. Another aspect of this is that the Western world (Europe/USA/Canada) is but a small part of the world. If you travel to other areas (Asia, India, Africa, Central & South America, Australia, Siberia, etc.), traditionally, they have no idea of an ‘A=440/etc.’ tuning. They have different tunings, different scales, different modes. (unfortunately, today we find much indigenous music ‘polluted’ by our Western musical ideas) I'm very much into Asian gon...