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From The Desk Of Kleenex Girl Wonder: Instruments

Kleenex Girl Wonder just released 13th LP The Comedy Album. Graham Smith, who’s been making pan-genre pop rock in bedrooms, studios, forests and everywhere in between under the KGW name with various people since 1994, joins MAGNET as guest editor this week. Climb inside his skull as he figures out what it’s all about, whatever “it” may be.

instruments

Smith: Kleenex Girl Wonder became a band in 1994. The first instrument I used was a ‘72 Fender Telecaster that had been sitting around in my house that originally belonged to my uncle. From there, I expanded somewhat logarithmically: a Yamaha arranger keyboard with drum pads came first, and a few basic pedals, all feeding into my Tascam four-track. Once I managed to get on board the internet, which was around 1995, I learned about rec.music.makers.marketplace, a newsgroup where instruments were bought and sold, and I went to town pretty quickly. There are probably relatively few electronic musical instruments produced in the ’80s and ’90s I didn’t own for at least a little while. My primary hustle was buying instruments below market rate, using them for a little while, and then selling them when I felt they had little more to offer me. I sold an Akai S-612 sampler to John McEntire of Tortoise fame; after tipping my hand by responding to his inquiry email with the question “Are you the John McEntire?!” he knew he could get away with taking all of my QuickDisks even though I explicitly told him to only take a few since I was keeping my second S-612. I couldn’t really hold it against him; he had driven all the way out to a fanatic child’s house in the suburbs, which is a gambit that carries with it all sorts of risks.

My proclivity for buying and selling boatloads of electronic instruments (in addition to more “normal” musical gear based on the kind of music I was most closely associated with, like guitars and basses and microphones) has never really abated. I still scan the various news sources religiously to see what new and interesting hardware and software is coming out—hardware is at a disadvantage in a lot of ways because it takes up space, but it also has resale potential, so I’m split pretty evenly in terms of what gets my motor running. All of this consumption is in the interest of allowing me to either: a) translate the ideas I have in my head into real music or b) inspire me to come up with new ideas without having to get all theoretical about it. I like to have a large palette with all of my various soundspewers set up for use a moment’s notice, even though I’m usually only focusing on one at a time. What can I say, it’s my process, and it’s also a lot of fun.

I mention all of this as a relatively roundabout attempt to point out that the number of affordable options available to home recordists in this day and age is probably 10 or 20 times what it was in the ’90s; perhaps there were lots of options back then, too, but it wasn’t at the forefront of peoples’ minds. A guitar, a garage and a four-track were enough. I’m glad that I learned to try to expand that a little bit, even if it means I am complicit in the deluge of self-produced Garageband (capitalized, single-word) “electronic,” “R&B-ish” music we all get to enjoy in 2016. The more options we have and the more things we try to do, the better. It’s never a good idea to limit yourself to your natural voice, even though it’s a great idea to define and embrace it.