ItsOnlyBob

I'm pretty sure my ability to write music comes from my dad. I have no other musical blood ancestors to blame.   Dad couldn't read a note of music or play an instrument (he washed out on the trumpet in elementary school), but he had a good ear and he could carry a tune.  Best of all? He could whistle like nobody's business. His technique was astonishing, as nimble as a chimpanzee. And he could improvise for hours. He would putter around the house, spinning endlessly inventive, wildly acrobatic variations on the simplest of tunes. One of Dad's favorite songs from his own childhood was "Dunderbeck's Machine." It used a familiar folk melody to tell the story of an evil butcher whose sausage production flowed in suspicious concord with the disappearances of animals from the nearby pound:  Dunderbeck, oh, Dunderbeck! How could you be so mean? I'll bet that you are sorry You invented that machine. Now dogs and cats and long-tailed rats No lon...

Like anyone else who makes stuff up for a living, music arrangers occasionally suffer from creative constipation – sometimes to the point that we are so unsure of our ability to put a new spin on a tune and write it to our impossibly high standards that we back out of doing it. Then we hear the arrangement that’s used in its place, and we realize we could have farted out a better one after a dinner of corned beef, cabbage, egg salad and Old Milwaukee. So my advice to the creatively blocked – no matter what your art may be – is always: Go have that dinner. Then write. Write whatever is in your head at the moment, even just the melody and chord symbols. Bland is better than nothing, for now. It can be merely the least inspired thing you've ever written … or you can make it intentionally bad . Ask yourself what Mr. Trololo would do. Let it be shabby and cheesy and gauche. Or maybe just a little over-caffeinated . Write it as a jaunty march in 6/8 time, or as...

I love reading other peoples' inciteful commentary referencing the unproper usage of language expecially if it centers around some of the things which also tend to bother myself when I am reading things which are written or things spoken by voice in a poor fashion. There are many writers and speakers, who only tend to utilize the weakest sentances and words; irregardless of the fact that they are just watering down the affect that there words have on the people that are reading that which they have written or hearing that which they say. A long time and well reknown critic of carless writing and talking, this has and always will bother me. I often wonder if the English language will ever survive in tack. The thing is, is that oftentimes these are educated individuals, they are someone who definately should not have any excuse of incriminating the mother tongue like they do and, yet there intercourse is literally sprinkled with the following, to name a few; bad punctua...