Family, Festivals & Hummingbird Wars

Just in from coffee on my front porch...here in the boonies we get a lot of wildlife, and one of the coolest things happening this week is the huge amount of hummingbirds we get coming to our nectary feeders! For those of you who might not know, hummingbirds migrate all by their little selves (they're too feisty to hang in flocks, but imagine if they did! Bzzz), and from here in Michigan they go pretty much non-stop to Lousianna, where they take a break to refuel on the local flowers. Then they fly again non-stop ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE GULF OF MEXICO. That's like 500 miles across open water! Crazy. So they've gotta feed up here, and they often double their weight, and wind up looking like little feathered tennis balls before they go. As you might imagine, our feeders are very popular, and the Hummingbird Nectary Wars Of 2008 are in full swing. These tiny guys are very territorial and really have some amazing dogfights over the feeders. We've added new feeders and are gonna get more, probably today. It's very cool to watch them as closely as we do, they're beautiful and fascinating.

Friday we had our first gig with The Infinitones, out at the Crossroads Festival in Ypsilanti. As is the fate of all new bands, we opened for two other bands, the White Ravens and Muruga's Free Funk band. And also as with all opening acts, we followed the standard etiquette: Headliner sets up first (and does the first sound check), then next act sets up in front of them, and so on. That way the equipment can be hauled off in layers and the time between acts is lessened. Thing was, Muruga's band had 9 people in it!! With lots of equipment for each player...and a separate drum platform for the tabla player...and then the White Ravens had their keyboards up...so we were pretty cramped up there! Very little foot room. I didn't really have enough space to turn around to cue Dan the drummer much, although I didn't really need to...he's always on top of that. We played pretty well all in all, and had fun too. The Ravens sounded great and Muruga and his band are all stellar players, so I think a splendid time was had by all, really. I used my Cort Matt Murphy Signature guitar, the Fender Deluxe Reissue and the Vox Tonelab LE, and I was pretty happy with the tones. That Tonelab solves a lot of problems for me since it's so easy to program, so small (on a stage like that, very handy!) and sounds so warm and good. I still love my old analog pedals, but for now this is working really well.

Bad news on my family health front. My aunt seems to have had a re-emergence of her lymphoma. Of course my Mom is very upset indeed, as am I. I've been trying help as much as I can with my Dad's condition (he has Parkingson's Disease and is pretty shaky sometimes), but it seems everybody in their age group is having some real challenges. My aunt didn't make it out to the family reunion this year, and I'm thinking of trying to talk my Mom into going out to Montana to visit her, while I wrangle my Pa. That should be hilarious. As I've said before, this growing old is not for sissies! I know this is probably affecting my mental health too, but at this point I don't have time for that so I'll just soldier on and put out what fires I can. Later if things get better I can schedule a nice mental breakdown, and a comfortable rest in a nice white room with the men in the nice white coats. Ahh...

At some point in this next week I'm resolved to march into my studio and start recording again. I told Steve from the Buzzrats that I'd be working on bass for his new album, and it's time to go and see what I can do. Looks like about 16 songs! Ah, that Steve, ever the prolific songwriter. Once I get started it'll be fun...maybe I'll sneak some Electric Sitar on a few tracks as well. Hehheheh...

Coyotes, Cranes & My Secret Identity

I find more and more that as I go on as a musician that almost everybody has to have a few hustles to survive, in this incredibly difficult time for the arts and entertainment world...a Secret Identity if you will. I've had many periods where I made my living just playing, but usually that's when you're on the road for 200+ dates a year, which kind of makes having a home life out of the question! So most of us have side gigs or day jobs. I remember playing a show with the keyboardist from Molly Hatchet, who was working a furniture delivery business between tours...and I understand that Colin Moulding was driving a lorry even during the glory days of XTC! So glamour be dammed, I have to pay some bills. Over the years I've done such jobs as House Painting, Psychedelic Drug Reviewer (really), Flower Delivery, Library Clerical, Nude Art Model, Record Store Guy and Prep Cook. I do teach and I do recording, engineering and production for people, but the studio is still just getting off the ground (except on Friday nights, when it is sometimes at an altitude of 40,000 feet). So Cynthia and I own a cleaning business, where we and our associates hop into people's McMansions and office buildings and chase the fearsome dust bunnies around. There are many worse fates!!

The other day we were headed off to one such gig, a summer lakefront cottage rental that we brush up every week. I like to take the back roads out there just because it's such a pretty drive, and we were in no particular hurry. I was turning onto a side road when something ran up from the bushes and stood watching me in the middle of the road. It was a huge coyote! I know that the ones you see out West are little guys, but these Michigan coyotes are really big, as big or bigger than a German Shepherd. I stopped the car and we watched each other for a while, and then he ran off into a field of soybeans on the other side of the road. Cyn and I could see his head appearing and disappearing as he jumped up and down through the beans (I guess he couldn't see where he was going) till he was gone. A nice nature moment!

We finished the cottage and started driving back to town toward our next cleaning gig, and were on a dirt road next to a wheatfield, where we had our next cool animal sighting. Four Sandhill Cranes were in the field, gleaning the leftover wheat and walking about in their weird prehistoric way. I see these guys (I don't know if they're always the same ones) occasionally out by our house, we're out in a major wetlands area (OK, I'll admit it, we live in a swamp). Again, we stopped and sat and watched them for quite a bit...I never really get tired of checking things like this out...

It occurs to me that my Secret Identity allows these kind of moments probably better than most jobs would...we're traveling in rural areas a lot, and we don't have a terribly fixed timetable most of the time, and we both really revel in this stuff. I certainly never had experiences like this when I worked at the record store! The animals there were of a quite different sort. I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had touring in Europe, Canada and the States for anything, and I'll be doing it again I know, but right now things are pretty good. My new CD's getting really good reviews, I'm having fun working on the next one in the studio, my new band is shaping up well and I'm playing out on sub gigs here and there when I want to. Plus, I work a day job with the coolest Redhead ever, and I get to see Coyotes and Cranes!

Yet another Magic Guitar

I would be totally remiss if I didn't mention another amazing guitar I have...this one is a restoration of a kind of historically notable model, the Ovation Deacon Limited. I got this one for $60 from a co-worker when I worked at a record store, but it was in pieces. I figured I could put it together and at least use it for photo ops, since it looked like an interesting instrument. But getting it playable took a long time, and several very competent luthiers worked on it to no avail. Finally my friend Mickey Richard got ahold of it and wrestled it into submission...by pretty much rebuilding the thing! When I got it there was a hole chiseled into it (to badly accommodate a bad tremolo bar) that you could see daylight through. He filled that with matching mahogany and put a veneer over that, which is so finely done that you have to look very closely indeed to see the difference in woods. Plus he re-fretted it, put in a new bridge, and new pickups, cut a new pickguard and refinished the thing with violin varnish. It looks (and plays) amazingly well...you can see what a nice job he did on it!















...and how does it sound, you may ask? It's a kickass little guitar! Tonally it sounds somewhere between a Gibson SG and a Fender Telecaster, very open and live. Its very thin mahogany neck is somewhat sensitive to changes in humidity so I don't take it out to outdoor gigs, but I'm gonna start taking it out to club dates now and then, since it's a lot of fun to play, sounds so good and also looks crazy cool!

The Magic Guitar

I have had the chance to play and own a bunch of good guitars and basses...for several decades I just had one acoustic guitar (a little Gibson) and a Fender Jazz Bass, and that was it. But in the last few years I've gotten the bug, and have created a little collection of nice instruments that I use in the studio and out at gigs. Some come and then go, and others are keepers, but I learn something from each one, even if what I learn is that I don't play that particular instrument.

I had that experience recently with a little jazz guitar I bought on ebay. It was a Jay Turser copy of a Gibson 175, and I was excited to get it. I've been getting into the primal stages of chord melody guitar (in another 20 years I might start getting good) and I thought this was the ticket. But for some reason, this just wasn't the guitar that was working for me. Didn't sound right, didn't feel right, although it was a very beautiful and well-made guitar. Dang, I thought, back to Ebay for you I guess.

But as luck would have it, my friend Danny Pratt had been looking around for a nice hollowbody, and when he called me up to play a gig I mentioned the Turser. He offered me a trade for a Tex-Mex Stratocaster, and since it had a whammy bar, and I needed a guitar with one for a studio track I was doing, I said OK. I had never thought I'd want a Strat, I'd always thought of them as kind of sterile in my hands, although I've seen people pull amazing music from them (Hendrix, Clapton and Michael Katon, amongst many others). But he played the Turser at the gig, and he sounded so good on it and seemed so happy, I figured it was cool, if I had to I'd just sell the Strat later.

But then I sat down with it, and time evaporated completely, and when I came to myself I was still playing and it was 3 hours later! Always the sign of a very special axe. Just forget whatever I said before about Strats, this one has made me re-examine my paradigm! It plays like a dream and just sounds beautiful, I'm playing it through an old Epiphone amp and I'm just amazed with the tone. I just used it on a new tune last night in the studio, thinking I was just goofing around, but somehow having that guitar in my hands created something magic. That's a keeper track! I found myself playing melodic phrases I hadn't known I could and might never even have thought of before, there's just something about it. A Magic Guitar!! Amazing.

Loop Composition

For those crafty individuals who have been following my adventures, you know that I've embraced the Acid Pro 6 program for working with loop-based musical compositions. I started using it because I never could seem to get my drummer friends to make it out to my rather isolated country home, or if they did make it we never seemed to have enough time to do too much. Drum machines seem dreadful to me, and I don't think enough like a good drummer to create a great part that way anyway...and actually I think there are very few people who can pull that off. But with drum loops, you have 2 to 16 bar sections of recordings of actual drummers, and you can mix and match them if you have a good set of collections (thanks, Beta Monkey and Drums On Demand!). It does take time, and (for me at least to get what I want) a LOT of tracks...on average probably 30 to 40 for a drum part, including cymbal hits and such. But I can usually get a part that will be very difficult to tell from a real drummer (at least if that's what I'm trying to do). Hey, it fools many of my professional drummer friends! Is it a replacement for a good percussionist, playing live with a smokin' rhythm section? Hell, no! But try to get those guys out to the farm at 3:30 in the morning...hmm, Cynthia might have something to say about that too...

Now, however, I've been delving into this medium more and more, putting horn parts on tracks for clients as well as percussion...and I've been experimenting with doing compositions that are nearly all loops. At first those experiments all sounded like very bad hip-hop, but as I've gotten more used to working with Acid I've found that I can get a really good-sounding (to me at least) pop song or classical bagatelle happening. Again, it takes a lot of time, lots of slicing and dicing of the material (it helps to have a huge library of loop CDs as well), time moving, reversing, transposing and mangling the stuff into a usable form. But it can be done, and I'm thinking that several of these will be out on my next album!

For a while I was kind of embarrassed about admitting to using this kind of technology...I really am more of a player than an engineer at heart...but I've decided that creativity can transcend those concerns. There are lots of amazing writers using loops, and the collage aspect of making something out of little bits of nothing is very appealing. Plus, I'm will wind up playing on anything I do...I can't help that. It's just part of the fun...and if it's not fun then I'm not doin' it. It's certainly not for the giant dollars! Hm, I must find some of those giant dollars sometime.

The new blog home

So I'm finding that I have to move my headquarters to new digs! While I'll include copies of this log on my other sites, I think that this spot right here will be central for now. We'll just see how it all works, and if I can tie my other sites to this tether! The layout should look nice anyhow.

I'm sitting here with an insistent cat on my lap (Isis the Abbyssinan, a serious love junkie), just minutes before I leave for a foray into the Big City and a quick visit with friends Death Kitten and the Six Foot Poles, who are playing a gig in Liberty Plaza. I'm hoping I'll have a little time after to get back into the studio and work for a while...between trying to maintain this old farmhouse and help out my aging parents, I'm not getting nearly enough time to work on the new CD! There are lots of strange ideas boiling around in my backbrain, and they're gonna blow if I can't get them out onto some virtual vinyl. Of course, they may blow anyway, but I still have to record them. The voices tell me to!

This is also the first day in a couple of weeks without the constant pain I've had in my back...not to whine too much, but after a while it does grate on you. Perhaps the chiropractor's tender ministrations have finally done their good work. I sure hope so! Between me hurting and having to deal with my Dad's problems with his fractured hip, I've been in an ongoing invalid mode...it just feel so good to take a breath without that "stabbed in the back" sensation. There, whine over!

Now I'm off to check with the guy up the road who has the Rhode Island Reds to see if there's any fresh eggs available (living in the country has its perks!), and thence off to Liberty Plaza. I'm gonna try to see my friends from Treatment Bound this evening, too, if the studio doesn't suck me into its evil hypnotic embrace...