People sometimes ask me how a musician works--how we write songs, how we come up with ideas, how we put it all together. I'm thinking I will start to answer this in a series of posts that describe in a random order what it is that I do.
So here I am at 2am on a school night watching old clips of The Muppet Show for inspiration. If that's not a cool job, then I don't know what is.
The Muppet Show had a lot of music and skits that will work perfectly for burleque shows, with a little twist here and there. Or even just to add some humour into any band's concert. Tonight I'm feeling particularly inspired by Zoot, the saxophone playing jazz cat from the Muppet Show Orchestra, who bemoans the quality of the music he is asked to perform. This skit has one of the best lines ever to have been spoken by a puppet...
The next Pink Flamingo Burlesque show is going to have an outer space theme so I've been doing research on science fiction movies, especially old ones. Aside from watching the most obvious film for this research, Barbarella, I also came across a website of Public Domain Movie Torrents. The site has plenty of old science fiction films including the Flash Gordon series.
I'm not a big science fiction fan, but with titles like Attack of the Giant Leeches, this site is hard to resist and it has proved to be a great source for research and inspiration for our upcoming space themed burlesque show.
The most popular torrent seeded is Oasis of the Zombies: "An expedition searching for treasure supposedly buried by the German army in the African desert during WW II comes up against an army of Nazi zombies guarding the fortune."
It's great to see technology like Bittorrent which is most frequently used for illegal file sharing being used to legally share media that might otherwise be forgotten.
"The guitar is small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice."
- Andrés Segovia
"Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart."
- Andrés Segovia
[That's how I've always played, although I've since learned that if you want volume, you've got to hold your guitar away from your chest otherwise you'll dampen the vibrations of the body of the guitar. I've really noticed that now that I have a true hand-carved archtop. That baby really vibrates!]
"When I began, the guitar was enclosed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, because there were no virtuoso guitarists.
- Andrés Segovia
"I've had three wives and three guitars. I still play the guitars."
- Andrés Segovia
People sometimes ask me how a musician works--how we write songs, how we come up with ideas, how we put it all together. I'm thinking I will start to answer this in a series of posts that describe in a random order what it is that I do.
The next Pink Flamingo Burlesque show is going to have an outer space theme so I've been doing research on science fiction movies, especially old ones. Aside from watching the most obvious film for this research, Barbarella, I also came across a website of 
"The guitar is small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice."