Matt Stevens - Notes From The Wilderness

Monday, 15 March 2010

From the reply you left about practising 8 hours a day but not becoming the best shredder in the world - Do you think 30 minutes of practising with an agenda and goals is better than 8 hours of playing without any clear goals?

Umm I did get scary fast when I about 16-17 but i soon found out it was pointless and not very musical. I think focused practice is better and now i have a little routine where I play a warm up then scales in all positions, then some Bach, then some improvisation. So to answer your question yes focused practice is the best. I think if i had carried on doing the 8 hours day practice the way I was I would have been a good "shredder" but I discovered Johnny Marr, The Beatles, Portishead, Radiohead and realised that what I really loved was chords and Harmony and composition.

Ask me anything

Podcasters and blogger are great part 2

ts been a weird few months as I have been stuck either lying on the floor with a laptop on my chest or doing Physio. Very odd but i am slowly getting moving again.

Here is a podcast from NickTann from last week which features lots of swearing(not by me) and some of my music, other great music and me talking about the 1000 True Fans concept.

The mighty Progopolis Podcast played all of the Fierce and The Dead single and Dolls house one after the other - amazing!

Just wanted to use this blog to say thank you to the following blogger and podcasters for supporting my music in the last few weeks:

Podcasts

Indie Radio Chattanooga

Bloggers

Progressive Rock Reviews

What are you listening to?

Biblical Christianity

Magazines

And someone else made this nice youtube playlist.

Thank you - you are nice!

Matt

Sunday, 14 March 2010

Sunday Free Noodle 6

This week’s noodle is:

Matt Stevens(guitars/loops)/Alun Vaughan (Bass/Keys/Programming/Production) - Burning Bandstands(Alun Vaughan Remix)(original engineer K Feazey)

This a great remix of Burning Bandstands off Echo by bassist, and composer Alun Vaughan. Love the Bass playing - hes really melodic and interesting as a musician. If you ever get a chance to see him play solo bass it’s well worth it and he also plays in the fine progressive beat combo Panic Room plus he has pretty much the busiest gigging schedule of any musician i know.

Love the distort on the acoustic guitar and the amazing bass passage half way thru, excellent stuff.

Please let me know what you think of this and if you would like to do a remix give me a shout.

More noodles next week.

Please let me know what you think of this and if you would like to do a remix give me a shout. More noodles next week.

Subscribe to my podcast feed here and get the Sunday Free Noodle every week:

If you like this you get get the original version on my album Echo as a "pay what you want" download here

About The Sunday Free Noodle

The Sunday Free Noodle project is a free MP3 ever week - remixes, collaborations, live stuff, spoken word stuff and other odd things - for the next year. 52 MP3’s (thats alot). I think it will be a challenge to keep this going and I’m really looking forward to doing it - please subscribe to the podcast feed on itunes to get it free every week and tell me what you think(yes you can say if you think if its crap). I hope you enjoy it.

This project has only really come about because i have injured my back and have had a chance to go through my hard drives whilst lying on the floor with the laptop on my chest. Odd how things happen.

I really it want to be a collaborative process. Let me know - if you are a remixer, cellist, vocalist, percussionist, film maker,trumpet player or visual artist or anything else let me know(although I draw the line at juggling) . Perhaps i could send you some stuff(loops and noodles) to add something to?

Speak soon

Matt

Speak Soon
www.mattstevensguitar.com
mattstevensguitar@btinternet.com

Saturday, 13 March 2010

A Cover of Snow

An interesting day - my friend Rainer Strashill - who did the Snow Remix did a cool ustream concert today - he did an acoustic piano cover of my song Snow its about 31 minutes into the video if you would like to see it. It was a very cool experience to hear someone improvise around my themes and he did a blinding job. Thank you Rainer.

If you want to hear the original version of Snow Part 3 you can here

If you want to here the Fierce and the Dead Version of Snow Part 1 you can here

Speak soon

Matt