Tablature and other stuff

When I finished recording The Solomon Project, I felt a real need to do something (anything) to keep myself busy. You wrap up a big project, and it leaves a vacuum in your life. Well, I decided to make a little website about the album to give people a bit more to read. That's the sort of thing I like - lots of information about the music I'm listening to.

Trouble is, I never took the time to properly promote that website. It gets about 12 hits a month. Not a very good use of my time, in retrospect. I mean, it's still there. Nothing is going to take away the work I put into it. But to date it hasn't exactly been terribly useful.

That's a shame, because there's one section that I put a lot of time into: Lyrics and Tablature.

Lyrics are easy. I had to type them out (in many cases, for the first time), but other than that the work was already done.

Guitar tablature is another story. See, when I write a song I don't create any sort of written record of what I'm playing. I record track after track, mix everything together, and kick the finished product out the door. Maybe with a bit more love and care than that, but you get the idea. But writing tablature is time-consuming. Basically, I sat down and played through every song on the album a dozen or more times, guitar in hand, and worked out exactly what I'd played on the track. Then, I transcribed it. One song ("Bleed Dry", an 8-minute instrumental) took the better part of an afternoon to tab out. It was, frankly, miserable.

I won't be doing tab for The Shivers, but I did put the lyrics to both albums up on Bandcamp where I have everything hosted for streaming/download.

Basically, I love writing tab. If you look, you'll find a dozen or more tabs online written by me. But it's a lot of work, and I don't know that I want to tab my own stuff again for a while. Maybe someday I'll change my mind.

But I won't be taking the stuff I've already done down. It'll be there for as long as I pay the hosting bills.