Steve Ball

Bite Size Projects

Afternoon work: updated Music from this Music Diary summary page with latest daily work of the past few weeks.

Work for this next week: a) back to daily piano sketches, b) complete Piano Sketches CD.

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Milestone this weekend: completed mixing Electric Gauchos 1997 CD project. Accomplished this by breaking up a huge task into bite-size chunks spread out over the past ten days. Four major steps left: mastering/sequence timing, CD artwork, pkg production, and review with EG members. One approach: web-only 'release' via CDBaby, iTunes, MSN music, and Weed. Also, looking into buzz around Podcasting. This approach could save up-front physical production costs, but also limits the tangible manifestation that comes with producing a plastic and paper artifact that can be delivered from one hand to another.

There is a fundamental joy that pours from the process of practicing, writing, rehearsing, recording, and releasing music; an absolute magic happens in the space between facing the blank page and observing what unfolds.

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Sunday morning is, by far, my most favorite time of the week. Morning practices and reading on and offline. Some contrasting excerpts from this morning:

Google guru shares words of wisdom

Shriram's main point: There is no magic formula to success. Rather, it comes from continual small 'block and tackle'' moves. Oh, and it helps to have a little book called 'Ram's Book of Mistakes' to guide the way.

Shriram -- who worked at early Internet companies like Netscape, Amazon.com and Junglee -- became a prominent angel investor by writing an early check to Google's founders in 1998, and then advising them one day a week while they were still in a Menlo Park garage. He held about 2 percent of Google's shares, and made $22.6 million at Google's IPO offering. He held an additional paper value of $969 million in stock as of Friday's closing.

Shriram spoke in Santa Clara with Sridar Iyengar, president of the Silicon Valley chapter of the Indus Entrepreneurs.

Here's what he said:

• Success is pretty much a crapshoot; there are too many unknown facts in a company's early life to make all the right decisions. But good, quick judgment calls on several fronts help multiply the chances of beating the odds.

• Not even the wise man can see it coming: `I had no premonition of the things to come,' Shriram said, about meeting the founders in 1998 for the first time at the office of Stanford University professor Jeff Ullman, when he tested their search engine. For two months, he didn't think any more about it, until they called him.

• It's the people, stupid. Shriram helped co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the Menlo Park garage by consulting his `Ram's Book of Mistakes,' which he said he started eight or nine years ago to help remind him of all the bad decisions he'd made. Bad hiring decisions are the most fatal.

• It's all in the grooming. Shriram set out to make sure Page & Brin hired only the very best, or `A' people. He cited the well-known Silicon Valley tenet: Hire only A people, and they'll hire other A people. If you hire the B person, they'll hire C or D people. Someone asked a good question: How did Shriram decide who are so-called A people? Grooming is a part of it. `I try to find out who their mothers are,' he said. If they are raised well, they're more likely to make good citizens, employees and entrepreneurs.

• Shriram counseled the audience: `Be bold and dynamic,'' noting that there are huge opportunities afforded by the new Internet economy -- in China and India, especially.

• Enterprise software is one sector that is slowing. When asked about comments by Oracle's Larry Ellison that the tech sector is consolidating, Shriram said Ellison was correct, but only concerning software: `I'd say it's Larry's personal problem.' He noted that Yahoo, Google and eBay had created 24,000 jobs, and that Internet companies had created $200 billion in stock market value in the last seven years. `Not a bad achievement.'

• Launching a company is easy. The great thing about the Internet is, you can launch and test an idea easily and cheaply. If it doesn't work, you can go back to the drawing board. `If you build your field of dreams, and no one comes, you can shut it down,' he said.

• The trick is small engineering teams. `Bite-size engineering projects,' as Shriram calls them, where you can ``know and measure each person's output on a project.'' That allows you to remain innovative and to launch and scrap projects quickly.

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Photos from last night:

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Come on in...

Hostess

Host

Scary food

Scary guest

Scarier guests

Scary guest stunts

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Mendoza, pt. 9

Afternoon Work: Mendoza, pt. 9 (4.4M mp3).

Nine days later, nine sections of a process that began exactly seven years ago, Parts I-IX, are now completed. End to end, there is 49'13" of remarkably coherent music, all improvised, from the first note to the last. Anyone who is both brave and with broadband might braid these nine segments together and get a pre-view of what the CD version will hold.

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I take it as a given that the same people who may very well appreciate my recent previous pretty piano presentations from past weeks may find these long, growling, ambiguous-third-riddled all-electric-guitar-and-drum explosive electric explorations challenging, unlistenable, or 'boring.' For me, hearing this unfolding intelligent dialog between four guitars + drummer, all speaking in -- and more importantly, listening to -- the same language, and seeking the same end, is both vital and energizing.

I experience the process of this this work much like painting -- I'm barely aware of the effect these colors and shapes and meanings and messages may have on an observer (who is, by definition, in a future time and place from the one in which it's being rendered) -- but this interaction is not what drives or motivates or 'validates' the work.

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Evening POR (plan of record): halloween party -- currently thinking of going dressed as "SteveBall (1997)" including the classic bright yellow shirt, black leather vest, that very same pony tail that looks as if a flying squirrel had crash landed into the back of my head in the Mendoza, pt. I songtile below.

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Mendoza, pt. 8

Evening Work: Mendoza, pt. 8 (7.35M mp3).

These nine improvised Themes and Variations continue to evolve and unfold before my eyes and ears. In the home stretch now.

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One approach I've been using as a guide in mixing:

Mendoza = Music for 18 Musicians x The Intercontinentals x Metal Machine Music

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Mendoza, pt. 7

Evening Work: Mendoza, pt. 7 (14.7M mp3).

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Earlier evening: swimming and dinner.

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Mendoza, pt. 6

Evening Work: Mendoza, pt. 6 (7.9M mp3).

Part six is a reintegration into the world: people enter the scene. Within this, the musicians deliver a driving persistent theme undisturbed by waves of distraction, indifference, and ambiguity. The major third will not stay down: it keeps poking up from beneath the noisy business busy-ness buried beneath the mundane ambient chatter of the outside world.

Electric Gauchos songtile photo by Ingrid Pape-Sheldon.

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Mendoza, pt. 5

Evening Work: Mendoza, pt. 5 (4.3M mp3).

Getting even moodier as we approach and pass through the middle. This is really the great divide of the whole shebang, beginning with a burst of enthusiasm that eventually peters out into a musical metaphor of doubt, searching, and a dissonant loss of connection with where this melody began, and where it is eventually going.

To be resolved in part six, tomorrow evening.

Electric Gauchos songtile photos for Mendoza pt.1-pt.5 by Ricardo Gonzalez.

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Mendoza, pt. 4

Evening Work: Mendoza, pt. 4 (15.9M mp3).

Now, really getting into the deep heart of this improvisation. Much of my work over the past year with the Seattle Guitar Circle was inspired and informed by these improvisations. Very little was said for these Electric Gauchos sessions; we showed up, plugged-in, and played. This nine part sequence that is unfolding one day at a time in this "Music Diary" unfolded in real time, live in the studio, almost exactly as I'm presenting it here -- all I'm doing in 'production' is mixing (making each individual instrument sound good relative to the other instruments) and discovering the natural transition points.

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Still thinking about film "What the *Bleep* Do We Know" throughout the day.

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Mendoza, pt. 3

Afternoon Work: Mendoza, pt. 3 (9.4M mp3). This 'major/minor' theme also appears in part six of this nine part improvisation. Three down, six to go.

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Mendoza, pt. 2

Afternoon Work: Mendoza, pt. 2 (5.6M mp3). If you look closely at this picture in the songtile below, you can see a truck in the distance heading straight for the group. Life on the road in Argentina can be dangerous.

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Saw film, "What the %$#@! Do We Know?" with friends. An excellent message blurred and obscured by insulting animations and inarticulatly polarizing messengers. Nonetheless, I do recommend this film.

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Mendoza, pt. 1

Evening Work: Mendoza, pt. 1 (3.9M mp3). Tonight, beginning to mine the hour+ studio improvisations by Electric Gauchos, recorded in Buenos Aires, almost exactly seven years ago, in October of 1997 featuring Christian de Santis, Fernando Kabusacki, Martin Schwutke, and myself on electric guitars, and Fernando Samalea on drums.

These 1997 recordings will make up EG CD II, and the recordings from Seattle, June 2004 will make up CD III of the EGBS (Electric Gauchos Box Set.)

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