Archive for the “Music” Category

The band I’m in, The Lillian Pearl, had it’s first official show on Saturday. We played at “Woodfest,” which is basically a big party in our drummer’s neighbor’s backyard. They’ve been doing it for a few years now, and they asked us to play for them. I guess about 40 people showed up, so it was an okay turnout for a band no one has heard of. We probably would have had more people show up, but there were a lot of social conflicts going on.

It went okay, I guess. We know these songs pretty well, and we didn’t make any huge mistakes that I could hear. Everyone that we talked to said that the sound was great. The cops showed up after 4-5 songs and asked us to turn down, though.

The next big technical thing to work on will be monitor mixes. We’re using in-ear monitors, and none of us were very happy with our mixes. I couldn’t hear the drums at all, so I pulled out one of my earbuds. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked.

Here’s a pic of the amp backline:

From L to R: my Fryette Sig:X, Maury’s Mesa Triple Rectifier, and Doug’s Ampeg SVT-CL. We faced the amps offstage so that they didn’t bleed into the FOH mix too much. I think it worked pretty well.

Here are some other pics from the show that Jenny took.

We played for a little over an hour. We played mostly covers, but we threw in one original. It was kind of a last minute addition, so we’ll definitely need to finesse it a little bit. I think we’re going to focus more on songwriting for a while. We don’t want to be a cover band, so we need to get busy writing stuff.

It was fun, and hopefully it won’t be too long before the next one.

I don’t typically listen to Christian music. Rob Bell says that Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective. What does “Christian music” mean anyway? Is it enough for the songwriters to be Christ-followers? Do the songs have to be about Jesus? Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

In general, I find most Christian music to be pretty annoying. It’s overly simplistic, saccharine, and it just rings false to me. In spite of my aversion to “Christian music,” I really like Robbie Seay Band. Robbie seems to be a pretty authentic songwriter and he’s not really interested in writing über-catchy praise and worship anthems.

Anyway, Robbie Seay Band released a new single today. It’s called Miracle, and it’s pretty good.

I wrote out a lyric/chord chart if you’re interested. I’m sure that it has a lot of mistakes in it, but it should be pretty close. Check it out, proofread it, and let me know if you see any mistakes.

Here it is.

A couple of weeks ago, I was recruited by a couple of buddies to join them in a new band project. I have been playing with these guys at church for quite a while, but we have all been wanting to play something other than praise and worship music. At least, I know that I have. There’s nothing wrong with P&W music, but the songs are all very similar in structure and it gets pretty repetitive.

We’re going to start out by learning a bunch of covers, and we’re looking to do a pretty eclectic mix. We were all learning our instruments in the ’90s, so we’re planning on doing some Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Stone Temple Pilots. We have pretty diverse musical interests, so it should be pretty interesting what we come up with. I’m into bands like Radiohead, Wilco, Sigur Ros, Animal Collective – a lot of modern indie/experimental stuff. Maury’s (guitar/vocals) interests are pretty diverse – from acoustic folk to metal. Greg (Bass/vocals) is into bands like Rush and Dream Theater, so he’ll probably want to do a bunch of 20 minute multi-movement songs that change meter every few seconds =). Ben (drums) – I’m not really sure what he’s into, but I think he mentioned King’s X. Anyway, we’re all rock guys, so it’s not that diverse, but it should be cool.

I think my current setup should work for me. I’ll probably mic my Stulce, run it squeaky clean and use pedals for drive. I may need to add another distortion if I need some heavy crunch. It seems like there’s no real reason to use massive amps anymore. I would love to use a cranked JTM45 or a Bassman, but they are so loud.

Anyway, we’re just doing this to have fun. We’ll probably write some tunes, but we have no delusions of grandeur, like we’re going to “make it big” or something. It’s just a way for us to hang out and make some music that we love.

Once again, it’s testing season here at school. Since I don’t have a homeroom, I am not responsible for actually administering a test. As a result I am sitting outside in the “trailer park” (the temporary building annex) waiting for testing teachers to need something. Fortunately, 1) we have wi-fi here and 2) it’s not totally freezing today. Last year it was really cold, rainy, and miserable. Anyway, I just thought that I would post a few updates.

In a few weeks I will be attending the TMEA (Texas Music Educator’s Association) conference in San Antonio. It’s a really big conference with a bunch of seminars and clinics to hear new ideas, new music, and network with other music teachers. There are also a lot of performances by honor bands from other schools and all-state groups (compliations of some of the best students from the entire state).

I haven’t been to the conference in a couple of years, so it will be good to go again. It serves as a reminder of why I’m doing this teaching thing. It’s easy to get depressed by the apparent lack of student growth, especially when many of your students are fairly apathetic about the whole thing in general. Music education can quickly become a daily grind, when it should be an exciting thing – a job where you get to teach young people how to make music. I sorely need a shot in the arm.

In other news, I’m getting back into the pedal building thing again. I built a bunch of pedals a while back, but I eventually sold or traded them off. I just wasn’t happy with the sounds that I was getting from them. I recently ordered enough parts to begin working on a few projects. I am going to build a Bluesbreaker (with the King of Tone mods), a Lovepedal COT50 clone, and a ’69 four knob fuzz. If nothing else, they should be fun to put together.

As if building guitar pedals wasn’t geeky enough already, I further established my geek credibility by getting an Xbox 360 for Christmas. I have been playing Fallout 3, which is a really fun game. It’s not quite as deep or open-ended as the first two Fallout games on PC, but it’s still totally awesome. If you don’t know, it’s based in a post-apocalyptic wasteland 200+ years after a nuclear war. Your character has spent his/her entire life in a fallout shelter called a vault, but is now out on a mission to find his/her father, etc. Anyway, the game is very immersive, and has really good graphics and sound. I’m not sure how the graphics compare to other 360 games, since this is my first game, but it looks pretty awesome to me. Anyway, my Xbox Live gamertag is phintze if you’re on and want to add me.

That’s it for now.

[Note: I wrote all of this on Tuesday morning, but I'm just now getting around to posting it.]

I’m sitting in a wedding chapel in Dallas as I write this. Jenny is shooting some bridal portraits for a client and I’m tagging along. We will both be shooting the wedding in May. I have never shot a wedding before. Actually, I have never been involved with a professional shoot. I have been doing photography type stuff for a pretty long time (I was on the yearbook staff in high school) so I know about apertures and F stops and all that.

Anyway, the point is that I’ll be sitting here for a while, so I figured I would work on a new post. This one is going to be about the acquisition of gear and how/if it relates to the actual music making process.

I spend a lot of time researching new gear purchases. It has come to my attention that I probably spend more time looking at pedals, amps, guitars, microphones, and speakers than I do playing guitar and making music. That is kind of a depressing fact. I think that the whole GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) thing doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with music. There are many guys who have much humbler rigs than I do who are quite prolific in their output.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to trade my Stulce for a Blues Junior or my Les Paul R7 for an Epiphone. However, I could make music that has the same emotional impact with either setup.

If this is true, then why do I/we spend so much time on the internet shopping for the next pedal/guitar/amp/whatever? For one thing, writing can be hard. It can be a grueling process. It’s much easier to just buy something and say “this pedal is it. It’s going to solve all of my problems.” It would be nice if that were the case. While that shiny new piece of gear is nice, great tone is not a substitute for great chops or a great new song. 

I need to start spending more time with the guitar in my lap and less time on my laptop. That’s almost a play on words – I didn’t mean for that to sound cutesy.

This is the pedalboard that I ended up using this weekend. It belongs to a student of mine named Jakeb – thanks a lot, man. It’s a nice board and it covers a lot of bases.

I had forgotten how good the Echo Park sounds. Our drummer commented about something sounding cool, and it was all the delay. I was just playing artificial harmonics using the tape echo setting with the modulation at 12:00 and it sounded so spacey and warm. It’s a really good delay, and I would probable still have it if it had multiple presets. When/if Line 6 finally updates the DL4 I will probably buy one, but it’s kind of useless to me without dotted eighth tap tempo.

The wah sounds like every other stock Crybaby on the market. They sound pretty good as long as you don’t play with too much of the “toe down”/icepick treble stuff. I need to get Jakeb to do the trick where you slip the wah pot back a notch so that you don’t get quite so much of the trebly part of the sweep.

I was having a harder time bonding with the overdrives. Part of the issue is that I really like the way my amp sounds, and whenever I stepped on either pedal they added too much of their own character for my liking. This is why I like my PURE boost so much – it just gives me more of my amp. Anyway, I ended up using the Bad Monkey as my clean-ish boost and the SD-1 was my dirty boost. I was able to get a pretty nice lead tone when they were stacked. Our worship leader told me that my solo on “Your Grace is Enough” sounded like Lincoln Brewster, which I will take as a compliment. Just don’t tell me that I look like him. In between services, I turned up the gain a little on my Stulce so that I wouldn’t have to rely so much on the drive pedals. I still used them, just not as much.

The biggest challenge of the day (that I hadn’t really thought about) is that my in-ears are in my pedal board case. I had to use a floor wedge that was slaved off of our worship leader’s monitor mix. Obviously, he has a lot more vocals in his monitor than I am used to, so it was an adjustment to play when I couldn’t hear myself very well. We got it balanced somewhat, but I’m sure that he was probably getting more of me than he was comfortable with.

All in all, this was a cool experiment. It’s likely that no one noticed anything other than me, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. I’ll be glad to have my own pedals in front of me, but it’s nice to know that you can get useable tones out of $50 distortion pedals in a pinch.

I have really been neglecting this blog during the past week. So, if you anxiously refresh this page hoping for some new content – I apologize.

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My Tascam US-122 showed up today. I installed the drivers from the CD and my MacBook didn’t recognize the interface. I went online and realized that the old drivers don’t work with Leopard, so I downloaded the new driver and everything works now. I haven’t recorded anything yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to do that tomorrow. If I get a chance, I’m planning to record a demo of my amp. Check back for that.

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I have been experimenting with the clipping section of my Tube Screamer clone. Basically, you can mix and match different types of diodes to get different levels of overdrive. I’m currently using a combination of MOSFETs, 1N914 germanium diodes, and 1N4148 diodes. I’m not sure how it compares to the other settings that I’ve tried because I don’t really remember what the other modes sound like. I need to put several of these things on a switch so that I can go back and forth between different clipping types to decide which ones I like best.

For the record – I don’t really understand the technical aspects of what I’m doing, so don’t ask.

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I have been noticing some issues with my strat lately. Specifically, it’s too bright overall and the volume and tone knobs have some weird things going on with the taper. I opened it up last night and was kind of shocked. I’m not an artist with the soldering iron now, but I’m way better than I was when I wired this thing up the last time.

Another thing that I noticed was that I used 500k pots on everything. I’m not sure exactly why, but that’s one thing that’s making the pickups too bright. I also wired it so that the first tone knob is a master tone that controls all three pickups. It was a good thought, but the bridge pickup is too bright to use the same setting as the neck pickup. I think I’m going to rewire it so that the first tone knob controls the neck pickup and the second knob controls the bridge.

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We’re playing Rise by Robbie Seay Band this weekend at church, and it sounded pretty excellent at practice tonight. The lineup for this weekend is really good. We have a new guy playing drums for us and he’s pretty stinking good, even if he talks too much – just kidding, kind of =). Our bass player (and sometime drummer) is nailing the bass part, which is probably the most important part of the song. Maury and I are playing guitar, as usual. It’s a solid band.

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We went to the beach today. I can’t wear my contacts at the beach because of the sand, so I wore my glasses. I was wading with Jack (the water was up to my chest so I was holding him), and we were letting the waves hit us. There were some pretty decent waves and one of them caught me by surprise and knocked my glasses off. I guess I’ll be shopping for new glasses. Awesome.

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I guess that’s pretty much it. Oh yeah, I’m on Facebook now, so check out my profile and feel free to friend me.

I have been in a creative vacuum lately.

I don’t know what it is, but I haven’t actively created any music in a long time. I play all the time, but I haven’t really sat down and created (and finished) a song or piece of music in a really long time. I have written phrases, riffs, and pieces of songs, but I haven’t finished anything.

This cycle needs to end.

I was talking to Jenny about this today. We used to write songs together, but we haven’t written anything new in like 3 years or something like that. Part of the reason for that is that it’s really frustrating to sit there together and try to write something on the spot. An idea I had is for me to record something and loop it for a while and give it to her so that she can try to come up with something to sing on top of it.

To do that, I need a recording interface for my computer. Sure, I can use the amp sims in Garageband and get so-so sounds out of it, but I hate doing that. It just doesn’t sound anywhere near as nice as my amp does.

To remedy the situation, I picked up a cheap Tascam US-122 USB interface on eBay earlier this evening. Hopefully, I’ll have some results from this thing before too long.

Jenny & I (and a couple of friends) went to a church in Houston called Ecclesia last night. We’ve been there a lot, and we would probably make it our home church if we lived in (or a little closer to) Houston. I won’t lie, the music is a big part of the reason we like it so much. I know that music isn’t necessarily a part of the biblical model of church, but that’s a discussion for a different day.

Anyway, the main reason that we made the trip last night is that Robbie Seay was scheduled to be there. Robbie is the worship pastor at Ecclesia, but he’s usually touring so we never really know if he’s going to actually be there or not. Fortunately, he recently started including the Ecclesia dates on his schedule on his myspace page, which takes the uncertainty out of the whole thing. I kind of expected it to be an acoustic set with just Robbie, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the whole band.

Taylor Johnson (he has played on a lot of their recordings) was on electric guitar. He sounded really great last night. He’s not a flashy player – he’s more into adding space, depth, and texture. He had this really huge delay going and everything that he played just fit in the song. [I need to experiment with bigger delay sounds, but I'm always afraid that things will get too mushy.] As far as gear, he played what looked like an American Deluxe Tele into a /13 (Divided by 13) amp. He had the standard Line 6 green and blue boxes (delay and modulation), and some other stuff (Fulldrive 2, EB volume) that I didn’t really get a good look at.

They played a good mix of originals, modern worship songs, and even a hymn. It was a really good night of music.

Chris Seay is their main pastor, but last night Doug Pagitt was there. I don’t know much about him, but my friend Tommy was geeking out when he saw him. I may write another post about him later on, but maybe not…

Over the last few days, I have been working on a couple of projects. I’m rebuilding my wah using a PCB from General Guitar Gadgets, and I’m building a fuzz using a PCB that Maury designed for his fuzz aka “The Peach.”

I ran into several roadblocks in building the fuzz. I bought some carbon composition resistors, which are substantially bigger than metal film resistors. Maury designed his board to be tiny (since he puts them in small enclosures) and the resistors that I ordered wouldn’t quite fit. Fortunately, I had enough metal film resistors lying around to complete the job. I also managed to order an obsolete part from Mouser, so I had to make a trip to Radio Shack to get a trim pot. The one that they had didn’t quite fit on the board, so I had to rig it a little bit. I’ve put it all together (pretty much), but I’m still having some trouble with the sound. The fuzz sounds really choked or something. I’m sure that it has something to do with the bias, and it’s probably because that trim pot is messed up.

The wah went together a little better, but it’s still not finished. The inductor hasn’t gotten here yet, so once it comes in I should be able to solder it in place, adjust the pot and start quacking. I socketed several of the capacitors so I won’t have to desolder anything if I want to experiment.

Here are some pictures:

Here’s the fuzz. I’m not finished wiring this one up. I haven’t wired up the LED or DC jack yet (I haven’t even drilled the hole yet), but neither one of those is necessary to test the circuit. The wiring is still pretty unkempt, but I’ll shorten those wires before I consider it finished.

Here’s the wah. The wires are still pretty long, but I’m not sure how much cleaning up I’m willing to do. I’ve seen some really well-organized wiring jobs, and this is not one of those. I’ll probably use some wire ties and shorten a couple of wires, but that’s about it.

You can see where the inductor is going to go when it finally gets here. Hopefully I’ll just be able to solder it in and play without having to do any serious troubleshooting, but we’ll see…