Yesterday the demolition tornado was in full effect at our house. We took down the entire wall dividing our living room from the office, including the removal of three built-in bookcases and a closet. Now the fireplace stands alone and naked. We’ll be rebuilding the wall this weekend with new bookcases. This is a big messy project, and a fun one.
Sure, this is probably the most unhealthy thing I’ve ever ingested, save perhaps that funky moonshine with the cobra in it. But seriously. Voodoo Donut in Portland has taken two of the awesomest things in the world (Maple Bar and Bacon) and combined them into something so utterly perfect in its culinary decadence that I’m aquiver with joy. Or maybe it’s just a sugar rush. Either way, this is quite a thing. I’m sure this will lead to a brutal sugar crash in about an hour, but it seems like a reasonable price to pay for the experience. Voodoo Donut, I salute thee.
Saturday’s round 2 games were great. I was delighted that both UW and Gonzaga made it to the second round. In their initial appearances both teams handily won their games and it looked like they were both poised to do well in the second round. Unfortunately, UW played a flat first half against Purdue and was never really in the game until well into the second half. By then the inertia was in Purdue’s favor. Although my alma mater only lost by 2 points, they were never really all that close to winning.
Gonzaga put up a great fight agains WKU, and the game came down to the final few seconds. Seeing the Zags pull of a last-minute victory basket was incredible. Everyone was really impresesed with the whole game. Honestly, I thought WKU was the best team of the weekend. They played with intensity and speed. The fact that Gonzaga pulled out the victory was a testament to their tenacity. Great game!
The concession disorganization continued Saturday, with lines continuing to block passage in the corridors, and wait times of up to an hour for food. I had expected they might make some kind of adjustment to improve logistics, but apparently not. I tried to pretend I’m not a PM and did my best to ignore the unaddressed inefficiency. Meh. It’s hard for me… I want to fix things and plan iterative improvement. Thankfully, there wasn’t a whiteboard handy or I might have started diagramming.
This was such a fun weekend of sports, great company (family and friends in abundance), crazy running around in Portland, yummy food and of course, excellent microbrews. So, with my first NCAA tournament games behind me, I’m really looking forward to going again next year. We’re putting in for 2010 tickets for rounds 1 and 2 in Spokane. Teri and I are planning to watch the next round of games on TV, even Friday night’s game – which occurs on our wedding annivarsary! Before this year I never spent much time watching college basketball… I think during the whole time I was a college student (which, admittedly, was a pretty long time) I might have attended 2 games in total. I guess I just never really thought about it when I was a student at the UW or WWU. I always had my snoot in a book or was practicing music. Go figure.
Yesterday I attended four basketball games… a personal record. As much as I enjoy the NCAA tournament, four games in one day is pretty much a caboose-killer. The four victors of round 1 (Purdue, WKU, UW, Gonzaga) looked pretty good. I especially found WKU impressive; they had an amazingly fast game and adapted well. They also had an awesome pep band and easily the best mascot of the entire weekend (although no one seems to know exactly what it is). The day was broken into 2 sessions, each with 2 games. Ten hours of great basketball.
The Rose Garden in Portland is a great venue. It has excellent sight lines and is the perfect size for basketball. The MAX rail line made it very easy and convenient to get to the games. The level of fan support is wonderful and I had a lot of fun being at the games. However, there were a few things about Thursday’s experience that were disappointing:
It seems to me a moderate degree of planning could have improved the experience for everyone. An investment in controlling the line flow, bringing in extra concession support, and planning for logistical resupply would have been great. And for the gold star, taking a look at the game start times and half-times would have given the organizers some idea of when to expect 20,000 attendees to simultaneously storm the counter. With the average food purchase around $10, I’d estimate that a 10% increase in efficiency would have justified the expense of having that planning meeting.
As for emptying / readmitting this size of crowd… seriously… those handheld scanners are PORTABLE and WIRELESS! Great Zeus… can’t you just have people move out into the concourse into a designated holding area, then station a few people at various points to scan and admit ticketholders? Those without tickets could be shunted to a patrolled queue that went directly to an exit door. Apparently I’m in the wrong business and should be a consultant to event venues 🙂
Saturday we’ll be attending the next round of games. I’m sure the games will be every bit as good.
The 1 Uppers had a great gig last night, easily our best yet. Sunday shows can be random. It’s hard to predict whether people will actually come to hear music on those night, and the intermittent snowfall this weekend probably didn’t help. This was one of those surprising gigs where (1) we had a sold out room (2) we had some great guest vocalists and (3) the entire band played their cabooses off. We ran through a 50 minute set of material, highlighting nine new originals which really sounded good. Friends and regulars provided positive feedback on the new songs.
The stage at the Rendezvous is small. I’d describe it as “intimate”. Given the size of the room we usually don’t put anything in the PA except the vocals, which means we’re mixing ourselves from the stage using our amp volumes. In my opinion this is ideal. It allows us to have the same experience on stage that we have during rehearsal. My amp has been de-ghosted, and is now acting normal again. Many thanks to Brian at Hyatt Studios for the quick turnaround on this crucial repair. The issue did turn out to be that pair of +/- 16v resistors in the primary voltage circuit, which explains all the random op-amp behavior. Brian also went throught the circuit and make a few minor improvements, adding jumpers to areas where the intermittent signal flow seems to occur in this model amp.
David and Jon are really sounding great together on harmony vocals. Their blend of voices is becoming part of the band’s trademark, along with Jon’s fearsome pedal steel and Kris’ stellar guitar work. Those guys blow the doors of the rest of the band every night. It definitely raises my game playing with them. I am looking forward to the next gig.
Our gig in Ballard was pretty interesting. The venue Live Girls Theater showcases dramatic works by women, and is consistently reviewed as a great art resource in the Seattle area. Our performance was part of the evening’s presentation. Although we had a regular set of songs ready to go, we started playing sort of a quiet ambient soundscape as the audience began to be seated. This went on for perhaps twenty minutes before we began the set in earnest. I thought it was a fun way to begin the night’s music and allowed the audience and the band to acclimate themselves to each other.
The set included the first public performance of “drug song”, which almost always is the last song of the night at practice. For this performance it continued tradition by being the last song of the set. It has a very open landscape of d minor (Brad and I have been hinting at d dorian, and we may go in this direction) with a lot of room for a big trumpet solo. This is a song where I’m very tempted to play a guitar solo; a few months back I happened to have my guitar with me at reahearsal, and toward the end of the song I swapped out my bass and took a ride on the strat. I may need to start bringing my guitar along for this.
The only song of the night where I played Warr Guitar was “the dalles”. I wanted to use it later in the set as well, but switching back and forth repeatedly is bothersome when our set time is short. So it spent most of the set happily sitting on its stand being admired by the audience seated right next to it. Josh introduced the instrument by saying “we didn’t think John had enough strings on his bass so we made him get this Warr Guitar…”. Nice.
This show also represented our second public performance of “brave new world”, which resulted in a minor train wreck toward the middle. Josh and Brad seemed uncertain of the form at one point, and I tried to power through it by driving the root of the chord structure. After the song Josh acknowledged our gaffe to the audience. The Preons are totally transparent to our listeners, which is important. Mistakes are part of the music.
All in all, a good one. Lots of fun was had and we enjoyed the play as well.
A big thank you to the great gods of rock, sitting comfortably in your easy chairs in the halls of Valhalla.
http://beatcrave.com/2009-03-03/spinal-tap-reuniting-for-unwigged-and-unplugged/
Yay!
Last night during 1 Uppers rehearsal my trusty Fender Hot Rod Deluxe amp started behaving strangely. It was randomly switching channels, the reverb was cutting in / out, and it was making profoundly unmusical sounds. I tried to switch out the cables, the guitar, and so on. Eventually I unhooked the footswitch and unplugged the guitar, and STILL it was doing all that crazy stuff. For the balance of rehearsal I was horribly distracted by how thin and crummy my amp sounded.
This morning I spent some time looking around on the usenet forums and deduced that either (1) my amp is haunted or (2) I’ve developed a cold solder joint at the +/-16V power resistors that control the op-amp switching. I’ve watched “Ghost Hunters” on the Sci Fi channel and since there weren’t any disembodied voices during the EVP session, I’m guessing it’s the resistors. Apparently this is a very common issue with this amp model and there are numerous postings to this effect. Fortunately it’s a pretty minor repair and I hope to have my amp back in time for Sunday’s gig with the 1 Uppers.
So, back to last night. As I was driving home from rehearsal I started making a mental list of my music gear, noting which items are need of repair. The list of fixes is bigger than I realized and it seems some gear maintenance is in order. Welcome to the world of a working musician! So here is my list, in order of severity:
Bring Out Your Dead
It’s Just A Flesh Wound
Looks like I’ll need to do some work on this gear sometime. With the ongoing projects at home I don’t know how I’ll find the time. Perhaps I’ll call up my musician buddies and host a solderfest in the garage…
For our gig at the Mix, I was the first musician to arrive. And the first to leave. There were three bands on the bill that night, with The Preons scheduled to go onstage at 9:00. We had agreed to be there for a 7:00 load in, and I was in the front door of the club with my gear at exactly 7:00, only to discover that I was alone. I chatted with the house sound engineer and described our setup and input list. Then I loaded my rig onto the stage, set up the Warr Guitar and bass, and got all tuned up. Then I drank a beer. And another. About thirty minutes later a few members of the next band drifted in. Then more members of my band, and people from the last band. We eventually were all ready and managed to start right on time.
When our set was over, I tore down as quickly as possible to get out of the way. One of the challenges with having two instruments is the extra cords, stands, and cases. I really need to find ways to make setup / teardown faster. Once I was off stage I had a few minutes to visit with my friends David, Debby, Bill, Kim,. Shane, Wally, Bill (yes, another Bill), Dorothy and Dave. Then I loaded up my gear and we headed out to our next engagement of the evening, which meant I was out the door with all my gear before the second band had made a peep. My apologies to the other bands for this seemingly rude behavior; we had made arrangements to meet elsewhere for the remainder of the evening.
Last Friday night was the on-stage debut for my Warr Guitar. At rehearsals I have been refactoring my bass parts for “Cobra Kai”, “The Technologists”, “The Dalles”, and a few others. By grouping those songs together at the top of the set, it allowed me to start out on Warr Guitar and then switch to bass for “Sunrise”, “Charlie Munden”, “48 Express” and “Listing”. Overall it’s pretty satisfying to have some facility on my new instrument and I’m becoming more comfortable with playing it with the band. Very few people actually know what the instrument is, so I wound up doing some explaining after our set. This is fine with me. When I played Chapman Stick I was a perpetual ambassador, demonstrating how it worked, how it was tuned, and why it’s such a great geeky fun. A few people seem to have some familiarity with the Chapman Stick courtesy of Tony Levin, but a Warr Guitar is more obscure. The occasional King Crimson fan knows this instrument, but that’s pretty much only high-profile gig you’re likely to encounter one (at least until The Preons seize their rightful place as global pop icons of the new millennium). The band played a great set. I thought our overall sound was very smooth and balanced, particularly impressive since none of the instrument amps were in the house PA. We did our own mix directly from the stage by simply balancing our relative volumes. We also kept the gaps between songs pretty short, which preserves the set momentum and helps keep the musicians “in the zone”. We’re also working on presenting the band in a more linear setup with Josh and Janie in the middle, while Brad and I act as bookends. I like putting the drummer closer to the front of the stage where people can appreciate the instrument more closely. Janie’s playing is a big part of the band’s kinetic energy and it’s unusual to hear a female drummer who plays with her level of intensity. It’s also nice to have the drummer recognized as part of the “front line” rather than being toward the back of the stage.
During our set, the club projected “Baraka” onto the wall behind us, which was an interesting touch. I’m sure people wondered whether we usually played our set while video of the Balinese Monkey Chant was being projected onto us.
I’m looking forward to next weekend’s gig. We’re playing in Ballard at the “Live Girls Theater”, and the stage is somewhat unusual. It will present another opportunity for us to experiment with our setup. It’s my understanding that there is a projection screen available and we might attempt to put it to use during our set. Since we’ve already used “Baraka” perhaps we need to branch out into another choice…
