Means are simple, add up the "sample" or "population" of whatever values you're looking at and divide by the number of values. With this said, I've been looking at my musical "career" over the last few days. So is to say, I've been looking at my overall experience over the last few days; trying to arrive at a mean of my experiences. Prior to writing this, I'm going to say it hasn't been great, but who knows, I've been surprised before.
When I was in my junior year of high school I joined my first band, Bluebottle. We were a seven-piece group of kids, playing an immature version of punk/ska. Costumes, pelvic thrusts, and gigs at VFW and Knights of Columbus halls. In the process we were all relatively happy, or so I'm assuming. We were all able to take care of teen angst in less destructive ways than drinking or debauchery, downing various colas and dancing about. The strange thing about this band was our relative intelligence. In stark contrast to our capering within our private lives, we were all very independently intelligent people. So as to say, in our own respects we expressed specific intelligences. From math to writing, analytic to physics and music. Taking AP, advanced classes, writing papers on the structures of prose and writing some ourselves we all seemed to have a level playing field on each other. Most of us, I should say.
After over a year of shows and writing songs in a basement, we decided to purchase some time in a recording studio near Indiana. Something professional as the progressive step past using an eight-track or a tape recorder balancing on the drier at the top of the basement stairs. It was our first experience in doing so, studio recording, working with and attempting to mimic the personality of respectable adults doing respectable, adult music in a home studio. Things took a while. Inexperience shaking instrument movements, less concerned with getting things right than getting them done quickly on a Sunday night almost an hour from our homes.
For me there was a twang, a preexisting gut-punch feeling that I couldn't quite place after I played my parts a few times. As a member of the horn section, our general job was to augment the band around us, create melody or harmony where it was needed. Creating bars of melody with my trumpet between half-time drums, oddly intricate bass lines, and simple guitars; I stood in the corner of the control room, sweating, with headphones falling off my head and the sound too low to hear. Completing things as the novice I was, I ran into the other room as our lead trumpet player stepped in, conversing with the tech and man-at-the-big-board. He was the most familiar of us all in that booth, asking about gain issues and overall quality.
Before the final product arrived one of our members told me that all my parts had been, basically, cut from the recording. Turned down to inaudible background, white noise on an album full of noise. When I confronted the rest of the band, they said nothing. Searching for patterns or signs in the wood grain of the lunch room table that might help them break the news. I asked why they didn't just talk to me in the studio, pounding my fist on the table, the tables around me rubbernecking for high school drama. They didn't have an answer, looking at each other. And it was over.
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