Jeff Wahl: News/Journal

Thank you to everyone who attended the concert in Fort Collins at the library. What a great night that was. Wow. So much fun. Thanks to Norman as alwasy for booking me on that concert.

Also, thank you to all the people at Center for Spiritual Living in Lafayette for having me there last Sunday. Always great to play for you all.

And the performance at the Firestone Library on Saturday was great too. Thanks to all of you who attended and stayed for the whole show. That was fun, and the cookies were great!

The fabled Jeff Wahl Christmas album was finally completed this month. It was a bit late, but I had to set a deadline to get it done. I'll have it available online for sale by next Christmas at least! Thanks to everyone who bought the CD this season!

O.K. It's Christmas Eve. I don't think I forgot to buy gifts for anyone and I sent out all my Christmas cards. What a wild time the holidays always are!

Jeff

Wow. I played a great, absolutely terrific concert at Little Tree Acoustic House Concerts in Lafayette, CO on Friday night. It was a combined show with a poet named Chris Hoffman. I played some songs solo, then Chris read some poetry, then we mixed the two together. It was really cool and the audience really enjoyed it. Thank you so much to Joe for putting on the concert, to Chris for working so hard at the poetry and the rehearsals we put in prior to the show, to Kirby for the great poster for the venue, and to everyone who showed up for this concert. What a greeeeaaaaat time!

We're coming into Thanksgiving week now and I really have so much to be thankful for right now. It's interesting how the more thankful and appreciative I am of what I have, the more I seem to receive. I need to remember this.

I'm off to Fort Collins today for a photo session for the upcoming Christmas album. Being photographed is always a bit weird. I just need to remember to not be self conscious. I look like I look and that's just the way it is.

Jeff

It's been a pretty intense couple of weeks for me. My dad died a few weeks ago. I went to be with him when he died. He didn't know I was there until I started to play guitar for him. Then he recognized me and knew I was there. It was a pretty amazing experience. He said my name a lot and the music relieved some of the pain he was in. After this initial time with him, after he went to sleep, he lived on for a while, but he didn't say anything else that I can remember. While I was staying there at his home, I kept going in to play guitar for him when I would hear him in pain. It always soothed him and helped him to go back to sleep. About a day later, he died. It was a very nice and very powerful goodbye for me to be able to play for him as he died and to ease some of his pain.

One of his last wishes was that I play guitar at his funeral. This was pretty difficult to do, but I was able to pull it off. I just had to save my own grieving for later and be more in "professional mode." It felt good to be able to do it. It's what he wanted.

It's very strange to have a parent die, and I'm sure it's something that will sink in over time. I feel very fortunate that I was able to have this great goodbye that so few get to have when a loved one dies. Once again, I'm amazed at the power of music.

Absolutely wonderful concert at Columbine Unity last night. That was a blast! Thanks everybody. I'm still buzzed from it.

Thank you to everyone at Unity in the Rockies for having me play there this morning. What a great time! Thank you so much. That was well worth the drive to Colorado Springs for. Thanks again everyone.

As always, it was great to play at Unity of Boulder a few Sundays ago. Thank you to everyone there for continuing to have me back. Great as always!

O.K. Two gigs, back to back, in different towns last night. A bit hectic, but it's better than being bored I guess.

Actually, it was great. I played for a society of Rolfing massage therapists at their party at the Boulderado in Boulder. That was fun, and I had the great help of Steve Clisset in loading equipment. That was terrific. Thank you Steve.

Then, as soon as that one was done, I zoomed off to Lafayette to play at Mojo Coffeehouse. That was a blast. Thank you to everyone who came out to that and who listened to the music and laughed at my pointless ramblings and stories. Lots of fun. Sleeping felt good when I got home.

Jeff

Hi all.

What a weekend. I played a concert for the Poudre River Library District in Fort Collins at the new Council Tree library. It was absolutely amazing. What a great audience. Very, very fun. Thank you so much to everyone who was there. That was soooo much fun! And thanks so to Norman and everyone at the library for continuing to book me there. Man, that was a fune evening.

Saturday night, I played for a wedding reception in Denver. Also, a lot of fun. I did a lot of improvising and found a number of new avenues in some of my compositions.

Sunday morning, I played at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder. That was really cool as well. Thanks to everyone who talked to me afterwards. Hopefully I'll be there regularly.

Anyway, thank you so much everybody. It was a great, absolutely terrific weekend.

Jeff

I haven't written here in months. Wow. Sorry.

Well, "Light in the Darkness " is doing really well. Magnatune is going to release it soon, which will be cool. They are a huge help to me. Not all music labels are bad!

I've been reading this book called "The Power of Now." It's really great and is having a really positive influence on me. People have been recommending this book to me for a long time, and I finally got around to giving it a chance. I'm kind of burned out on "New Age" self-help books, so it took me quite a while to open this one up.

It's really great. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's basically about tuning in and connecting with the moment you are in and not trying to live your life in the future or the past. Basically, be happy with what you have right now and experience this moment right now. That's what life is, a series of "nows'. I know this isn't a new idea, but it's presented in a way that it really makes sense. What a simple idea that can make such a huge difference in the way life feels. It's like life is happening but you're really not participating if you're focused on the future or the past all the time.

I think it's really easy to be somewhat unhappy with the state of your life and be in a constant state of striving to achieve some magical goal or set of goals that is going to bring happiness and contentment. One of the points of this book, is that while there is nothing wrong with being really achievement and goal oriented, you have to be happy and content right now or you will probably never will be no matter what you achieve.

It sounds very simple, but putting this attitude into practice is not easy. It makes such a difference though. Not being able to accept or enjoy what "is" is really an unbalanced way to live. This idea really hits home for me because I am always fighting with the "is" in one way or another. It's pretty amazing to accept and be happy with what is.

O.K. in other news.

I came upon a family of foxes playing last week while I was driving home at dusk. I pulled over and watched them for a while. It was really amazing. They weren't aware of me for quite a while. I really like foxes and they are kind of my "Totem Animal" for me. I see them a lot, but I've never been able to observe a whole family out playing like this. It was amazing. Eventually, the mama fox saw me and sat up really straight and still and stared at me. This was a signal the fox puppies (kits?) understood and they moved back into the brush to hide. What a cool experience this was. It kind of gave me a little burst of faith. It was kind of magical.

Hi all. The new album, "A Light in the Darkness", is finally available for purchase. You can buy cd's at CDBaby, Amazon, and probably a few other places that I can't keep track of. You can download songs at either of those places or itunes.

You can listen to all the tracks free here at my website.

Thank you to the Fort Collins Public Library and everyone who attended the Harmony in the Round concert last Friday. That was great. What a great audience and a few of you even laughed at my jokes! Thanks again everyone. It was a blast and it was great to meet so many of you after the show.

Thank you to everyone at Columbine Unity Church for being so great this Sunday. That was a great time. It was great to meet everyone there too. Thank you so much. Let's do that again soon.

Wow. I want to thank the Longmont Public Library and all the people who attended last night's concert. Really amazing. That was the most fun I've ever had performing in my life. Absolutely incredible. What a great audience! It was just the best. Thank you so much!

I had a really interesting experience/revelation last night while performing. I kind of crossed a boundary in performing that was really awesome.

This is a little difficult to describe accurately, but basically, last night, while performing, I didn't think at all about not making mistakes or about technique or notes or anything guitar related. All I concentrated on was listening. Really listening, as if I was just sitting in the audience listening. And as strange as it seems, my fingers just went to the right places without me having to concentrate on even playing. It was the strangest thing, and it was really amazing.

I have a theory on this and how it relates to performing in general. Many a musician has been really upset by the realization of how powerful stage fright is. And it's very strange how sometimes when you're on stage or performing a song that you know very well, it's suddenly filled with mistakes for some reason.

Here's what I think it is. I think that when you really know a song, you don't really consciously think about it while you play it at home. It's just there and you just kind of let it play. But then, when you're in a situation where you're performing on stage or in front of other people, you really start concentrating on the song to make sure you play it correctly. I think that basically, the part of the brain that normally plays this memorized song, maybe it's the unconscious, isn't being used any longer. To make sure I play it correct, I am now trying to purely use my conscious, decision making brain, to play the song. Since this part of the brain isn't the part that usually plays the song, mistakes creep in where there were no mistakes before.

Last night, as I was playing, I kind of just let go and started to listen more than play. I was amazed at how expressive and relatively error free the songs were. Then, while playing, I would think "This is crazy. If I keep doing this, I'm really going to mess up." and I would then try to re-assign the playing to my conscious, decision making brain. And immediately mistakes would start showing up and the song would start to lose its expressive quality. Amazing.

It takes a lot of courage to let go like this because it's so hard to believe that it works. Also, it probably goes without saying that you have to really, really know a song before this works. Basically, it's trusting that it's already stored in the brain, no other decisions have to be made, I just have open that file, so to speak, and let it play. And the more I listen to it as an audience member, the more I can make it actually expressive and musical. But, the decisions on the notes and the arrangment are already stored. If I start trying to second guess this unconsciously stored information with my conscious brain, mistakes start appearing.

This is not a new idea. I have read about this before but I guess didn't believe it. I read a book years ago on jazz improvisation in which the author said that the secret to really improvising well was to know all the rules of music theory so well that in performance you don't think consciously, but instead let go and let the rules work through you.

It's such a scary idea because I think most of us like the idea of control. I know I do! But I think I'm learning here that for the music to really work in a live situation, I have to trust that I already know the material and just let it play from that part of the brain that doesn't need to think a lot or make decisions. I supppose that this is the unconscious or maybe muscle memory.

It makes sense really. I know these songs. They're already stored in my brain. If I played them at home, I wouldn't make any glaring errors because I know the song. Duh. But in a performance situation, where there is some fear or self doubt, I somehow convince myself that I really don't know the song, because I start trying to access the information to play the song from an area of the brain where that information isn't stored.

Wow. Actually, yesterday was a pretty incredible day in all sorts of ways. Have you ever had a day where it seems like you've stumbled into some other kind of dimension where everything just makes sense? I can't describe it accurately, I suppose. It's great, but pretty darn scary at the same time. I'm used to things not making sense and having to fight against everything! Don't take that away from me! What will I have if I don't have to fight everything!!???

Anyway, what a great day. Thanks again to everyone at the concert. It was awesome.

In other news, the two new albums, (yes now it's two) sigh, are still under construction. I'm being pretty ridiculously perfectionistic with the recordings so it's taking a little longer. Plus Chadzilla, the producer and engineer of the sessions, also happens to be one of the most in demand musicians and producers in Colorado, so I have to get sessions booked whenever it works for his schedule and mine. But, it's worth it. He's an absolute genius and it's worth the wait to work with him. I'll be happy I took the extra time once the albums are done.

O.K. Signing off.

Jeff

I'm still mixing the current album. It's going to be a mix of 6 string, steel string acoustic fingerstyle, 12 string, nylon string, and some spacey type songs that use a lot of cool echo sounds.

It really takes a lot of patience to do an album well. I've been working on this one for months, I just wish it were done at this point. But, if I just rush it, I'll have to live with something that isn't as good as it could be. You've probably heard me whining about this before. Luckily, the producers and engineers that I work with understand what a perfectionist I am and are patient with me. I know it can't be perfect, but it has to be as close to that as possible.

I might still have to re-record a few pieces for this album. Most of the songs sound good, but the nylon string pieces, which are some of the strongest songs on the album, don't quite sound right. As much as I hate to consider this, I probably will have to re-record those songs. Getting a good recorded sound from a nylon string can be very difficult because it's such a quiet instrument.

I learn so much about music and guitar technique when I record an album. The studio puts such a microscope on your sound. Live, you can get away with all sorts of strange sounds, but in the studio, you hear it back while not playing, and it sounds so different. I suppose it's like hearing your voice speaking on your outgoing answerig machine message. "That's not what I sound like!".

It becomes clear to me when recording how little things like fingernail length and age of strings can make such a huge difference. A perfect track can be ruined if one fingernail sounds different from the others or one string sounds less bright than the others.

Of course, at some point, you have to say "O.K. This album is as good as it's going to be" and then just let it go. It's difficult to do this, but if you don't you start to become "Brian Wilson", (the composer from the Beach Boys who drove himself crazy, literally, partially by obsessing in the recording studio over an album).

Something kind of interesting happened this week in "licensing" news. A magazine called "Farm Journal" contacted me about using one of my songs for a promotion they're doing. As some of you know, I grew up on a farm, and my family always had a subscription to "Farm Journal". That's pretty neat I think.

O.K. I guess I just wanted to write something. Oh yeah, also, I have no idea what to call the upcoming album. I guess I have a few ideas, but nothing spectacular has presented itself yet. I still have to do photography for it as well. And then, there will probably be another round of videos filmed to promote the album.

I don't mean to sound un-enthusiastic about it. It's awesome to record an album, it's great. But, I guess I'm just ready to be done with this one. I started the project too unfocused and I'm kind of paying in fatigue now. The next one, I'm going to have a much clearer plan for what I want to do. The recording studio is not the place to try to figure out what you want to do with an album. That should be set before you start recording. Listen to all my free advice I'm spouting out here! I should take some of it myself!

Anyway, the album will be my best yet I think. I hope. I can't wait for people to be able to hear it. I think that by October it will (hopefully) be done.

Jeff

Thank you to Larry Buckel. Larry tabbed out a very professional arrangement of my song "Prairie Sky" and sent it to me. That is so great and it looks so much better than the pencil and paper ones that I make myself. Thanks Larry!

I got a really nice e-mail and package from the Univeristy of Guelph in Canada last month. Their library used my song "The Return of Summer" in a promotional video promoting their services. It's really neat. It's linked here on their page. http://www.lib.uoguelph.ca/ Look for the video link. It's also here on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtuJcaVS0Fk
Thank you very much for this.

Wow, what a weekend.

I played at Cafe Caliente in Denver, Friday night, Unity of Boulder, Sunday morning, and Belmar Shopping Center on Sunday afternoon.

All three gigs were great. It was really wonderful meeting all of you this weekend. Thank you so much for taking the time to let me know you enjoyed the music and/or to buy a CD.

Unity of Boulder, as always, is such a magical place to play. The congregation there listens so intently to every note. That's such a thrill for me to be able to really express the songs in an environment where every little nuance is listened to. Thanks to everyone at Unity for continuing to have me play there. It's such a great experience to play music for your services. Thank you!

Cafe Caliente was a lot of fun on Friday night. Thank you to the late crowd there. I was just about to pack it in for the night when you all showed up. That was great! What a great audience.

And Belmar on Sunday afternoon was a lot of fun too. Thanks to everyone I met there. That was a blast.

I'm recording again this weekend. This album is starting to drive me crazy, but it's better to spend the time up front so that the album(s) are perfect (or as good as they can be) when I'm done. At this point, I think the one album I went in to record is going to end up as two albums. About 30 songs have been recorded so far and that's just way too much for one album. I guess I had a lot of songs stored up. Anyway, I hope to have it done soon!

Jeff

A while ago, I was interviewed for a really cool podcast show called "Lending a
Voice". Here's the link.
http://lendingavoice.com/2007/04/29/interview-with-jeff-wahl/ That interview is online now. It's kind of a funny interview. I listened to it today and laughed a lot at myself. The funny thing, I was being serious, but it's pretty funny how I keep kind of tripping over my own words, repeating myself and kind of can't figure out how to explain aspects of guitar playing.

This is a late thank you ... sorry. Thank you to New Horizons for Spiritual Living in Lafayette, CO for the great service you all had me perform at a few weeks ago. It's always a terrific experience to play for you all as part of your services. I'll see everbody there again in August of this year.

A big thank you goes out to Ben Chan in New South Wales, Australia for the great work on transcribing my songs. They look great, so much better than my pencil and paper tabs!

I'm still working on the next album. About a month ago I recorded about 20 songs at Monster Island studios in Denver. Listening back to the tunes, I've decided to scrap all but 5 or 6 of these tunes. If I listen objectively, a lot of the songs just didn't fit together. Some of them may survive for later projects. The ones I kept were so much better than the others though. So, I'm completing writing new material to try to match those other songs' levels. I should go into record again this month. I think it's going to be a very mellow 6 string steel album.

I had originally planned it to be a primarily 12 string album with almost all the songs being very fast and "show-offy". But listening back to the tracks, the mellow, 6 string songs that I had just kind of included as "filler" sounded so much better than the ones where I'm showing off how fast I can play.

So, back to the drawing board. It's easier to redo the album at this stage than to release something that I don't like. Once it's done, I have to live with it for a long time.

One of the most common questions I get is "How do you write music, where do you get inspiration from?" So, I guess I'll try to address that here.

It's kind of hard to describe but this is the general way it usually works for me. I usually just start playing and a melody or chord change kind of "presents itself" to me. This initial idea kind of gives me a visual image. It reminds me of some scene and I start to see that scene in my head. Basically, the visual image becomes like a little movie that plays in my head. Then writing the song is usually very easy because I just write a soundtrack to the visual scene that is playing in my head. It's like watching a movie with no sound and just playing and notating what I think the sound would be if there were a soundtrack. So, I guess the songs I write are all soundtracks to imaginary movies. That actually would be a good title for an album - "Soundtracks to Imaginary Movies". I have to remember that.

So, the inspiration is the easy part. The work of it comes in notating the songs. I notate everything I write. I generally use tab instead of standard notation. I was educated to believe that tab was bad and "breaking the rules", but I don't care. It's easier. Anyway, notation is the hard part, not for the notes, but for the rhythms. The rhythms are really the unique part of it and the hard part to notate. But, if I don't notate the songs, I can't remember how to play them or what tuning I wrote the song in, etc. I highly recommend notating your songs if you are a solo guitarist, especially if you play in different tunings.

Then again, maybe it's just the way my memory works. Maybe a lot of you can remember your songs without notation. I know that Leo Kottke never writes out his tunes, and I've heard that Michael Hedges never notated his pieces. My memory needs the written aspect for memory. That's just the way it works for me. I have a file cabinet at home with hundreds of notated songs. A very nice aspect of this is that if a tune isn't right for an album and I stop performing it, I can always find it again later and re-learn it.

O.K. I've rambled enough for now.

Back to life.

The house concert last Saturday was a lot of fun. Thank you to Steve Mullins and Kevin Garry for including me in this concert. It was a real honor to play on the same bill with these two amazing guitarists. The variety between our styles was really cool too. I think we're going to do shows together like this again.

Thanks to everyone who attended. It was a lot of fun. And those baby goats at the farm were really cute!

I'm recording again this weekend at the amazing Chadzilla's studio.

O.K. I had a new batch of videos filmed and those are on youtube now. Thanks everyone for your kind comments on the videos there. Thanks to Bob Weiss at A Positive Image Video Productions. He's great. If anyone needs to do some demo's or music videos, he's the guy to hire.

I started recording a new album at the studio of my friend Chad Johnson (a.k.a. Chadzilla in the music world). It's going really well. I recorded 20 or 21 songs in one session. That's how I like to work. I like the songs to be really ready before going in to record. I did compose one song there in the session but everything else had been in my fingers for quite a while. I will probably record 2 more songs for this album, pick the best ones and release it. It's going to be some what of a "show off" album, with a lot of very fast playing and some fun songs. I'll probably record another serious, emotional album later in the year similar to "Meditative Guitar".

Congratulations to Chad and Andrea on their wedding. That was great to attend! The best wedding I've ever been to.

I'm playing in a house concert this Saturday with some really great classical guitarists. This will be the first house concert I've played. Hopefully I can make those a regular part of my playing schedule.

A big thank you goes out to Ben for transcribing my song "Lullaby" and sending it to me. I'm a pretty lazy transcriber so the version I had online was handwritten and a number of people politely complained about how sloppy it was. Ben took my pencil version and converted it to a very professional looking transcription. It's really amazing. It's not online yet, sorry (lazy again). Thanks Ben, and good luck on your High School exams. Thank you for this great favor as well as honoring me by playing some of my music as part of your exams.

It snows one day and then is sunny the next here. It's unpredictable as usual. Whatever. That's one thing that's fun about living here.

O.K. I had a new batch of videos filmed and those are on youtube now. Thanks everyone for your kind comments on the videos there. Thanks to Bob Weiss at A Positive Image Video Productions. He's great. If anyone needs to do some demo's or music videos, he's the guy to hire.

I started recording a new album at the studio of my friend Chad Johnson (a.k.a. Chadzilla in the music world). It's going really well. I recorded 20 or 21 songs in one session. That's how I like to work. I like the songs to be really ready before going in to record. I did compose one song there in the session but everything else had been in my fingers for quite a while. I will probably record 2 more songs for this album, pick the best ones and release it. It's going to be some what of a "show off" album, with a lot of very fast playing and some fun songs. I'll probably record another serious, emotional album later in the year similar to "Meditative Guitar".

Congratulations to Chad and Andrea on their wedding. That was great to attend! The best wedding I've ever been to.

I'm playing in a house concert this Saturday with some really great classical guitarists. This will be the first house concert I've played. Hopefully I can make those a regular part of my playing schedule.

A big thank you goes out to Ben for transcribing my song "Lullaby" and sending it to me. I'm a pretty lazy transcriber so the version I had online was handwritten and a number of people politely complained about how sloppy it was. Ben took my pencil version and converted it to a very professional looking transcription. It's really amazing. It's not online yet, sorry (lazy again). Thanks Ben, and good luck on your High School exams. Thank you for this great favor as well as honoring me by playing some of my music as part of your exams.

It snows one day and then is sunny the next here. It's unpredictable as usual. Whatever. That's one thing that's fun about living here.

I had an asbolutely wonderful experience playing guitar for the Unity of Boulder Sunday services today. It was great. This church is one of my favorite places to play. The audience listens so intently to every note. I can really express the feeling in the compositions using a lot of dynamics because everyone there listens so well.

Thank you to Jack, Norma, Syntysche, and everyone else who helped me out this morning. It was really nice meeting all the people who came to talk to me after the services as well. I'm sorry I ran out of CD's, but there will be more available some time this week.

Thanks again Unity! That was a wonderful time!

Jeff

O.K. We all made it through the holiday season! Wow. What a wild time of year that is.

Don't take this wrong. I love Christmas songs, but I'm so glad that I don't have to play any more solo guitar Christmas songs for another year! When my last holiday gig was over on Christmas Eve, I felt such a wave of relief that I could put the Christmas songs away for a while. I love those songs, but it is always a bit much after playing them so many times by the end of the season.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who keeps e-mailing and commenting on youtube and buying the music. Really, really wonderful. Thank you!

It's really, really cold in Colorado this winter! Yikes!

As crazy as it seems, my you tube guitar videos have been viewed a total of 91,000 times now. This is amazing to me. Thank you to all the you tube viewers for your kind comments. Who needs MTV when we have you tube?