Zack Bochicchio

Ever since I was a little kid I have always had this unexplainable affinity toward music. Because of this, I constantly am trying to fill my life with music. A world with music is a world that I understand. Because of that, the theme of my podcast is the musical sounds that I here throughout a given day in my life. The first sound is the song “Interlude 2” by Alt-j. This is a quiet sweet instrumental that appears on their first LP called An Awesome Wave. This song is my alarm. Thus, the first sound I hear every morning is a musical one. The next sound you here is me doing interval training. You can hear me mumble, “minor third, octave, perfect fifth, minor seventh.” I use a specific website that will play me two notes and from there, I have to identify what the second note is relative to the first. After the notes play I usually repeat them to myself and then say what it is outloud and then click on the correct answer.Interval training has proven to be extremely helpful with music theory and with figuring out complicated songs just by ear. In the third sound, we hear John Mayer talking. This clip is taken from a short documentary called “This Will All Make Perfect Sense Someday.” This documentary was filmed during the making of Mayer’s first major studio album “Room for Squares.” Though I do not listen to this particular video everyday, I find it extremely important to listen to interviews and similar media from my favorite artists talking about their musical beginnings. Success in the musical world is my biggest and strongest passion and dream. In my mind, listening to what these people have to say is almost like taking advice from someone who i actually trust to tell me the right thing. But because I am not one of these famous people, instead of just listening to one person’s stories and views, i try to cast a wider net. This is why my next sound is a snippet from an interview with one of my other favorite guitarists, John Butler. John Butler has a much more avant-garde way of playing which is why he is one of my greatest inspirations with my acoustic guitar. John Butler made the acoustic guitar make sense to me. After Butler talking, the next sound is me tuning my guitar. When I tune my guitar the most frequent question is “why do u change the sound so much?” as you can hear from how much some of the stings change. This is because on a guitar unlike most other instruments, there is a freedom to have the strings be any pitch you want them to be! Most guitars are tuned to EADGBe or standard tuning. But because of this freedom, you can change the strings and pitches and juxtaposition of notes to create completely new sounds! This sound is me tuning from standard tuning down to open C. Open C is defined usually as CGCGCE but sometimes the high E can be dropped to a D. In this case it remains an E for me. The tuning is supposed to represent the part in my day where I start to play music which is why the tuning bleeds into this next sound. The next sound is me just doing a little jam in G major. I am playing in 6:8 time which is one of my favorite time signatures to play in. For this backing track, I am using a loop pedal to get the effect of multiple guitars when really this is just me and just one guitar. The next sound is a little bit funny to me. This is something i always do when i fiddle around on the guitar and I put it down on my lap and just kind of start slamming away and get some cool sounds. I never considered this a “song” but whenever i play this for people they are always amazed and love to hear me play it. So by virtue of that, this has become one of my most popular original songs when i play live. I felt like if I were to try to make the recording perfect, it would take away from the daily life aspect of this podcast. Mistakes are prevalent. The next piece is a song by John Mayer called “BIgger Than My Body.” This song means the world to me because it is about having that feeling of knowing exactly what you want to do and how you are going to get there but knowing it’s not going to happen overnight. These things take time and it’s a song about having patience, but thin patience at that. This song is a reminder to me that it’s okay that I’m not making a record yet or that I’m not currently touring and playing shows for thousands of people and that I need to take small steps and if I keep stepping, those steps will add up. The last and more important sound is a snippet from the song “Covered in Rain” off of “Any Given Thursday.” This song constitutes as possibly being my favorite song of all time. It is definitely the most important song to me and is the reason I have such a drive for success. The first time I heard this song changed my life forever. I remember the first time i heard it. Before the song I was just a kid. A normal teenager who just loved music. But something happened to me during that song and by the end of it, my dreams and ambitions became clear. That song made me realize that all i want to do in this world is that. Just play music for as many people as I can.  in “The Grain of the Voice” by Roland Barthes he talks about a particular grain that singers have that does not just talk about their timbre or volume, but the ability to hear the teeth, lips, throat and tongue while they sing. Barthes goes on to say that that “grain” can be heard as well in instrumentalists. In my mind, Covered in Rain is a perfect example of that grain being expressed through instruments. These are all sounds that themselves occur throughout a normal day for me, or represent elements that are present musically in all of my days.

Work Cited

Barthes, Roland. The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Print.

Newman, Joe, perf. Interlude 2. Alt-J. 2012. MP3.

Mayer, John. Bigger Than My Body. John Mayer. 2003. MP3.
Mayer, John. Covered in Rain. John Mayer. 2003. MP3.