Shades of Gilmour

Pretty quiet news day today, but I spent some time on a guitar re-wiring project. Anybody who's a guitar player can tell you that the tonal possibilites with a Strat are just about endless. Three pickups, a 5-way switch, and three control knobs? Come on. What Leo Fender came up with is just the start.
One of the weaknesses in the original design (IMO) is that the brightest of the three pickups has no tone control. I never use the tone on the neck pickup, so every one of my Strats has been re-wired so that the first tone controls the middle pickup, and the second one is hooked up to the bridge pickup.
What I did on this guitar goes farther, though. Another weakness of the Strat design is you can't turn all three pickups on at the same time. There are some "super switches" that will allow all kind of crazy combinations, but you can also do it utilizing the stock components. I got this idea from the April, 1995 issue of the now defunct magazine Guitar Shop. It turns the first tone control into a master tone, and uses the second as a blend for the bridge pickup, with just a couple of switched wires. Brilliant!
I recently bought a DiMarzio FS-1 pickup - as used by David Gilmour in his main Black Strat up through the recording of The Wall, and decided this would be the perfect time to try out the blend wiring.
I installed the new pickup with the stock wiring, then followed the diagram above, and bolted it all back together. The result? Sonic bliss, and a lot of tonal possibilities not possible with the stock setup.
Try it if you get the chance. I think you'll like it.
P.S. Sorry for the poor image quality. I scanned it from the original article over ten years ago.

Awful Albums by Awesome Artists

Even the greats stumble once in a while. Here's a list at a site called funnycrave.com. See if you agree with their choices, and if you can think of any more, let me know.

http://funnycrave.com/12-ungodly-awful-albums-by-otherwise-awesome-artists/1290/

This one hurt, as I've been a Van Halen fan for years. Even I have to admit, though, I bought III mostly so I wouldn't have a hole in my collection.

8. Van Halen – Van Halen III

After Sammy Hagar quit or got fired or whatever the hell happened to that frizzy headed douche, Van Halen was left searching for a new lead singer. Inconceivably, they settled on former Extreme frontman Gary Cherone.

It gets worse from there. Ouch.

Chinese Guitar Counterfeiters

As a guitar player, this story is near and dear to my heart. The eBay and Craigslist markets have been over-run for the last several years by fake guitars, mostly made in China. For the most part, they seem to have been targeting Gibson and Epiphone and models that appeal to younger players, such as Zakk Wylde Les Pauls.

I saw stores full of these when I was in Beijng in 2006. Gibsons and Fenders, though the Fender copies seemed to be poorer copies. I remember picking up an obviously fake "Les Paul Elite" and when I flipped it over, it very clearly read "MADE IN USA" on the back.
"These are made here, in China, aren't they?", I asked the clerk. "Oh, yes", he replied. "Made in China." The one I was holding was selling for the equivalent of about $300 US, which is less than 10% of the price of an actual Gibson.
It used to be that the fakes were pretty easy to spot, with shady finishes, and incorrect details that were obvious to someone familiar with the real thing, but lately, it seems like the copies have been harder to spot.

I don't necessarily have a problem with copies of guitars, as long as they aren't being sold as the real thing and are clearly marked as such. Players who can afford real Gibsons will buy them, and these cheapies give kids a chance to play a guitar that looks like the real thing, but costs a lot less, and while these guitars are certainly not up to Gibson (or even Epiphone) standards, they beat the hell out of the Hondo II and Teisco stuff that beginners were stuck with when I started playing.

What really bugs me is people selling them as real, genuine US guitars to kids who don't know any better. No legit retailer would touch these guitars, but I see a couple a month on Craigslist, and they pop up on eBay all the time.

Clearly, any real effort to stop the counterfeiting would have to come from the Chinese.
I was delighted to find this on the Music, Inc. Magazine site, in the June 19th issue. MI is a magazine aimed at music retailers, who obviously have a lot at stake in this.

Guitar Counterfeiters Sentenced

Following more than a year of coordination and investigation by Chinese legal authorities, the efforts of the Electric Guitar Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (EGACC) have resulted in a criminal sentence for a major distributor of counterfeit guitars.

Read the whole article here:

http://www.musicincmag.com/News/2009/090617/090617_legal.html

Alice in Chains is back!

AiC were one of may favourite bands back in the early nineties. They were labelled "grunge" because they wore flannel and had long hair, but I always thought that was an unfair label. They went through a rough spot when grunge fell out of favour, and especially when frontman Layne Staley died.
I have to admit, I was skeptical a few years ago to hear they were touring with a new frontman - Layne's vocals seemed to be so integral to the sound - but I gotta say, the new guy, William DuVall, and the new single, "Check My Brain" from the upcoming Back Gives Way To Blue sound excellent. I'm looking forward to it when it hits the stores on September 29th.

Listen to it here:

http://www.aliceinchains.com/

Oh, Come on, Ritchie - Lighten Up

I love Ritchie Blackmore's playing. His style has always seemed to me to be a perfect mix of classical and rock, and often more appropriate for the song than some other "Neo Classical" guitar players.
I've also heard he can be a... challenging person to deal with. He quit Deep Purple - twice - because he couldn't get along with other band members, and Eddie Van Halen has recounted the tale several times of trying to introduce himself to Ritchie after VH's first album came out and being ignored.
Apparently, he doesn't always get along so well with family, either. Here's a bit of an interview with Joe Lynn Turner (one time Rainbow vocalist) in Classic Rock Magazine, about Over the Rainbow, a band he's currently fronting which plays Rainbow material, and which features Ritchie's son, Jurgen Richard Blackmore, on guitars:

"...Ritchie suddenly became very antagonistic. Things got so bad that he insisted Jurgen – his own son – couldn’t use the name ‘Blackmore’. Jurgen’s full name is Jurgen Richard Blackmore – it says so on his birth cerificate."

See the full article here:

http://www.classicrockmagazine.com/news/ritchie-tried-to-ban-son-jurgen-from-using-the-blackmore-name/

A Touchstone of Indie Music Slated for Demolition

For fans of 80's and 90's indie rock, the Uptown Bar in Minneapolis was a special place. It was a place where bands were formed, where local musicians hung out, and where, at one point, you could go and be served food by the mother of Bob and Tommy Stinson of the Replacements.

Now, it has come to my attention that not only is the current owner selling, apparently the new owners think the space would be better used for... retail? I don't think anything has made me this sad since WOXY (BAM! 97x, the future of rock and roll!) left the terrestrial airwaves in 2004, after their owners, Doug and Linda Ballogh, decided they'd had enough. And more recently, they announced the studios for their now web-only station, woxy.com were relocating to Austin, TX.

Anyway, here's a link to a story on the Uptown:

http://blogs.citypages.com/gimmenoise/2009/08/uptown_bar_one.php

More on Record Labels

Here's an excellent article on NPR's site that backs up what I was saying in my last post pretty nicely:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111172341&ps=cprs

Without wanting to get into too much trouble with NPR, I thought this summed it up:

The Posies left Geffen in the late 1990s — not over money, but a lack of promotion. They went back to PopLlama, the small independent label where they'd first recorded an album called Failure, and released one called Success. It was made very cheaply, and Auer estimates it sold about 25,000 copies.

"I actually saw a check for that record that went in my pocket," Auer says. "I never saw a check from the sales of any of the records I've made on the major labels."

Do we Need Record Labels any more?

No, and we haven't for a while.

We are at the dawn of a great age for musicians. An age in which musicians aren't going to be hindered any more by the constraints of how much it costs to record and distribute their music.
Or by the demands of record labels.

What record labels brought to the table was the infrastructure that was needed to record the music, press it, ship it, distribute it, and get it played on the radio. And it was a lopsided and unfair system. Google search for "deal memo", or click here, and you'll find Steve Albini's excellent write up on this terrible system.

Now that recording isn't (or doesn't need to be) as expensive a process, "pressing and distributing it' involves sending a few copies to CD Baby or Tune Core so you can get it on Amazon and iTunes, or just letting people download it from your website, and to the extent that airplay is even necessary, you can do that yourself as well, streaming on places like MySpace, the record companies really don't have a viable business model.

It's not like I invented this idea, either. Artists like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead have been doing their thing for several years now. What's new is that the wave is starting to pick up speed as smaller artists get on the bandwagon.

This is all probably pretty scary stuff if your job is tied to a record label or an ancillary industry, but as a recording engineer and a musician myself, I find it all pretty exciting, and I know I'll be watching to see what happens next.

God I Hate Snow

Just had to say that, after shoveling 6" of the crap off my driveway and sidewalk just now.
I grew up with plenty of it in northern Illinois; but here in southwest Ohio, we don't get much. One good snow per year is about all. Hopefully, this is it.
I was home from work today, so the one bright spot is I didn't have to drive in it - well not much, anyway.

In other news, I had two job interviews today. Another thing I really hate is looking for a job. If I cfind one I like okay, I tend to stay until they kick me out. Which is what happened at my last job. I went on vacation to China, and when I came back, I found out that my office had been closed while I was gone! On 9/11, of all days. So typical for that company.

So, I put out the old resume, and found work; but it's a contract position, and while the job was pretty cool at the beginning (read: they let me do whatever I wanted as long as the job got done). Then in December, I got re-orged, and the job has become progressively less cool (read: they're starting to tell me what to do).
All I really want, if I have to work, is to find a job I don't hate where they won't close my office.

Is that so much

This has to be a record

First post in a freaking year and a half. I actually am not a "writer". I like e-mail okay, but I've never had a diary, or anything like that. I actually couldn't find this page again initially. I didn't even really want to post to my own blog; I just wanted to log in so I could post a comment on my brother's.
Oh well. It'll probably be another year before I post again - if I can remember where it is.

Mower Drama

Okay, so I haven't posted anything in over two months. I guess there is stuff I could write about, and probably will, but for now, here's what I was up to last night:

[WARNING: the following mower drama is rated Y-14. Some scenes of mower abuse may be too intense for younger or more sensitive viewers. Parental caution is advised.]

Last week, while I was mowing happily along, the 10-year old MTD suddenly started running really crappy unless I pulled the choke out, and then it died on me altogether, and wouldn't restart, which meant I had to do the rest with the ancient, 20", non-self-propelled push mower. Not cool.

I resisted the strong urge to set it aflame and push it into the busy street, and instead, rolled it around back till I could mess with it, which was last night.

It would run for about two seconds, and stop. Pulling out the choke didn't help. I knew it had to be a fuel delivery problem, because pulling the choke out had bought me a little time, and it would start, but only run a few seconds.

I replaced the spark plug anyway, just because, though when I pulled the old one, it was still in great shape.
Next, I replaced the fuel filter, because I could see it had some dirt in it, though I had verified that fuel was still running through the line (and all over everything) when I had it disconnected.
So, I had verified that fuel was getting _to_ the carb.

A shot of starting fluid yielded a start, and if I kept spraying, the mower kept running. So now, I knew the problem lay somehwere between the fuel getting into the carb, and getting srayed out into the throat. Probably a stuck needle or gummed up jet.

Sure, a carb rebuild would have solved the problem; but if I had to invest that kind of time and effort into a 10-year old mower, it was going to be time for me and Mr. MTD to part ways. I already had eyes on my next concubine: one of those sweet, sexy, zero-turn mowers.

I tried one last thing: I dumped about half a container of STP fuel system cleaner straight into the carb throat, and hit the starter. It blew smoke out the exhaust, and STP out the throat. I dumped a little more in, put the rest into the tank, and let it sit for half an hour.

I came back, fired it up... and it died in two seconds. I shot some more starter fluid into the carb, hit the key again. It sputtered to life, then started to die. I cranked the throttle back and forth to confuse it, and voila; it was running on its own. I let it run for a few minutes to run some of the stuff inthe tank through, and the stuff in the carb out.
Then I hopped on, dropped the blade, and made a few passes around the back yard, just to make sure it was going to keep running, and not quit like a little b7tch as soon as I dropped the blade, or tried to move forward.

Success.

Plus, I have killed every mosquito for blocks.

The End

Two Posts in Less than a Month!

Well, lookie that. I lied. Here I am posting, mere days after my last post.
I'm mostly just posting to vent my frustration at my job...
When I signed on, I was told that "every few weeks or so", we had to work on Friday night at around 10PM, for about an hour, to update software on our site.
Now, I wasn't thrilled by that, being someone who values my free time highly; but it was the first serious "bite" I'd had in a few months, and the job seemed otherwise pretty cool. And my boss is cool; which goes a long way, sometimes.

Well, you guessed it: "every few weeks" is usually at least every other week, and sometimes is as often as twice a week. Oh, and it's not usually at 10 for about an hour - it's occasionally as late as 2 AM (hell, one time it was 8:30 AM Saturday!), and has yet to take less than two hours. And that's if everything is working right.
I was here last Thrusday for 12 hours, and I just found out I have to work this Saturday morning at 2 freaking AM.
This is just insane. I have to get out of here.
If they'd fix their process, I'd gladly stay. But they won't. Someone somewhere up high enough seems to believe this is the right way to run things, and I can't change that.
My résumé is out. We'll see what happens.

In happier news, I played with my "new" band, Cataplexy (me, drummer Jeff from Synergism, and "super-bassist" Joe) last Saturday for the first time in months, and we wrote pretty good chunks of three songs. Pretty productive. There are still some scheduling issues with that band, but I think it's going to be worth it if we can get it off the ground.

Okay, that's it for now.

I'm not dead...

Man. Do I suck as a blog writer, or what? This is why I never stuck with being a writer, although it's always been one of those things I keep imagining I'd be good at (despite the grammar in that sentence).

Well, let's see. Since I last wrote, we had a nice Christmas, I got a job at Zix Corp - http://www.zixcorp.com/ working on their Pocketscript product, and as a result, I've had exactly zero spare time.
I also forgot what the password was to this blog, and it took me a while to figure that out, and then my computer went down. I'm typing this from a brand new Sony Vaio, which I am really digging.
So, I'll try to post a _little_ more regularly, but I'm not promising anything.

Things have been pretty dead in the studio, too. Nobody too exciting, though I did record a band called 4 Foot Fall that is pretty good. Other than that, mostly my normal rap customers, all squeezed in on the weekends now, since I'm working during the week.
Ugh...

Well, that's it for now.

Wanna take bets on how long till the next entry?

Finally - a Rock Band

Well, had a pretty peaceful Thanksgiving weekend. Ate too much, laxed around and did nothing mostly, but I finished it off with a session today - a 4 piece "modern rock" band. Their name is Silhouette, and they're a bunch of young kids, but they're really good. Their sound to me is reminiscent of Uncle Tupelo or Wilco, with some Soul Asylum thrown in. Good stuff.
I hope to be able to say I knew them before they were famous.

Little Funny Things

Okay, not much happening at the studio this week. I've got bookings later in the week. Meanwhile, here's a couple of funny things I saw:

Looking at a job listing, and next to "salary/wage", it said, and I'm not kidding, "Comiserate with experience [sic]". Seriously. I couldn't make that up.

Today, driving around running errands, I saw one of those little SUV's that had been lowered, had fancy wheels installed, those wacky looking wipers, and in the windshield, it had visor that said "FIESTY [sic]". Kind of takes away some of the intended impact, don't you think?

More later in the week.

I Should Have Died, Epsiode 1, prelude

In keeping with my idea of posting interesting stories from my past, here's the first of several in the "I Should Have Died" series:

When I was sixteen, I had a 1966 VW Beetle. At the time, it was about 17 or 18 years old, which isn't ancient, but it was old. Also, over the years, lots of redundancy and safety features have been added to cars - the 1966 VW Beetle had almost none of those. When I got it, it had lap belts, front seat only.
Now, in this car, the engine is in the back, so all that's in front of you is a trunk; and the windshield is literally like, 6" in front of your face. And 2" away from your chect is a pointy, non-collapsing steering column. In short, this is not a car you want to be driving if you get into an accident.
Another major safety improvement modern cars have is that they basically have two (some even have four!) braking systems - one for the front, and one for the back. The idea is that if you get a leak in one end, your car will still stop at least a little, so that you can get safely off the road, or to a shop. And this is also another safety feature missing from the '66 Volkswagen. If there's a problem anywhere in the brakes on a '66 VW, the whole system goes out. All of this intersects to create the interesting story in my next installment....

Wacky Anecdotes

Slow week in the studio this week, so it occurred to me I could post some funny/interesting anecdotes from my past. Kind of give you a peek into the experiences athat combined to make me.
Here's the first one:

This story happened in the 8th grade, which, for me, is the '78 - '79 Timeframe.
In our neighborhood, the token thugs that everybody was frightened of were the Meltmars... Phillip, and his older brother, Chuck. If there was a cat killed, a
window broken, a bike stolen, you could be sure the Meltmars were
behind it. They were just bad news. For starters, their parents were
divorced, and they lived with their mom. Now, I know that today,
that's almost de rigueur; but in 1977, it was still pretty unusual. I
only knew two or three people whose parents were divorced back then.
Anyway, one wintery January morning, we were waiting at the bus stop,
going back to school after Christmas break. It was cold. So cold,
everything actually sounded crisp. Unless you've lived through a
Midwest winter, you probably can't comprehend exactly how cold it was,
so just imagine the coldest thing you can think of, and double it.
There was a big elm tree at the bus stop, and as we were all standing
around, a piece of the bark on the elm tree near me popped off, as if
it had exploded. I thought that was a little weird. A few seconds
later, another piece popped off, and then another.
The third time, I heard the small "crack" sound from about 200 yards
away, just a second before the bark popped off the tree. I looked
toward the sound, and saw Chuck Meltmar up in his window, but didn't
think a lot about it. Just then, the bus rolled up, and we all got on.
Later that day, when I got home from school, my Mom told me that Chuck
Meltmar had been arrested. His grandfather had apparently gotten him a
.22 caliber rifle for Christmas, and Chuck had apparently been taking
pot shots with it out his bedroom window.
Never was entirely sure if Chuck was shooting at the tree, or at me. I wasn't exactly his favorite person...

Today's Session

Another Rap Session. Same guy who came in last Saturday. I hate rap, but I gotta say that this guy does have a work ethic. Gets the job done, and his songs are a litte more hummable than most.

Whoa! A Metal Session...

... for a change. It was kind of a train wreck, though. The guy was the guitarist from a metal band who recorded here before. He's since dumped his band, and got bored trying to find another band, so he decided he'd record on his own.
Incidentally, his former band is the source of one of my funnier studio anecdotes.
After about the 6th take of a song, this guy turns to the other guitarist, and asks,

Guitarist 1: "What chord are you playing there??"
Guitarist 2: "F#"
G1: "It's not F#, it's F!!
G2: "I've been playing F# for three f7cking years!
G1: "Well, then, you've been playing it wrong for three f7cking years!!"

I couldn't make that stuff up if I had to.

So, anyway, this guy came to the studio today, and obviously didn't know the song as well as he did. The guitar tracks are a punch-o-rama.
Then came the bass parts. Dude bought a bass one hour before the session, and wanted to use it. Nevermind that he didn't know how the controls on the bass worked. Nevermind that it already had light strings on it, and then he proceeded to tune it down a whole step...

Ugh...

Rap, Rap, Rap

Well, yesterday, another rap session. At least, this guy was moer talented than usual, and his "beatz" had some melody to them. I can actually hum these.

Today was guitar lesson day #1 for the week. 10 year-old girl. I was skeptical at first, but I gotta say, this little girl is driven. She was supposed to learn to tune using her tuner, and learn three chords. Well, I think she learned about a dozen. She's doing really well, and she's definitely got the enthusiasm. If she keeps it up, she'll be the next Yngwie.