This weekend I played back-to-back shows with Black Celebration. Our first show was in Portland at the fabulous Wonder Ballroom. My trip to the show was somewhat frantic due to unexpected horrible traffic on I-5 between Seattle and Portland. Granted, we probably should have left an hour earlier, but I’m not entirely certain that we’d have missed all the mayhem. And so having arrived exactly one hour later than I needed to, I didn’t get a soundcheck and had to go with only a quick line check before the show. Fortunately the house sound crew are consummate professionals and made everything work perfectly. By the time we took the stage they had dialed in my guitar and vocals, and the show went very smoothly. The Wonder Ballroom is beautiful and spacious, and they have one of the nicer backstage areas. The band’s “green room” (which was actually green!) was very comfortable and clean. Awesome snacks and good beer were provided in abundance. And they even helped us load our gear. That venue is really great and I look forward to returning in the near future. Our set for the Friday show included the usual hits and I really enjoyed the way things went. I found myself a little uncertain on some songs like “Master and Servant” because I’m playing a guitar line that doubles the main synth part. On songs without a distinctive guitar part I usually try to support the main theme with a simple melodic unison. After the gig I did some re-listening to the original recordings. Our set was well received and the audience clamored for an encore. Sadly we didn’t get to do one because the set times were so tight. Oh well… always leave them wanting more, right?
Our show Saturday was at the Showbox, near Pike Place Market in Seattle. The drive back to Seattle was uneventful and much faster. Parking in the Pike Place Market area is always challenging. I usually just give up and pay the steep fee to park in the small lot next door. There isn’t an official loading door for the club, so being right next the venue means once you’ve negotiated the uneven sidewalk / parking lot pavement, you’re in the front door and it’s a straight approach to the stage. As always, the house production crew was ready for action when we arrived and the night went smoothly. Our set was great, and I think this was the best show we’ve ever played. After reviewing the original DM recordings I made some changes to my guitar parts for this show, and it felt much better to me during the entire set. The vocalist from the Morrissey tribute commented that my tone was dead-on, which is nice coming from a fellow musician hearing us for the first time. When recreating studio recordings in a live setting, the devil is definitely in the details.
Overall, a great weekend of gigs. I’m looking forward to the next ones.
King Crimson is so incredibly great. This is one of their signature moments from (what I argue to be) their most amazing and creative period as a band. Adrian Belew, always the joyful rogue. Robert Fripp, mad scientist virtuoso. Bill Bruford, human clock. Tony Levin, multi-instrumental wizard. The three best albums from this lineup are Beat, Discipline, and Three of a Perfect Pair. There are also a number of live videos from this time, and all are worth seeing.
One of my ongoing music projects is Black Celebration – a tribute to Depeche Mode. I’ve spent some time the week getting ready for 2 upcoming shows. The first is Friday night in Portland at the Wonder Ballroom and the second will be on Saturday at The Showbox in Seattle (near Pike Place Market). The band is currently working on adding songs and there will be a few musical treats for loyal fans. At our last performance at Neumo’s we had a sold-out house, and we expect to see a large crowd for this one as well. Come on down and join us for a night of great 80s music.
The intrepid Tube Sox began this summer’s softball season with a 17-2 victory. After having our first two games rained out (and rescheduled for July), we finally managed to take the field. Most of the crew is back from previous years. I was impressed that everyone on the team got a good hit or two at the plate, and our fielding seems pretty good this year. As always we followed our game with a trip to Bad Albert’s for beer and food. Gotta replace those lost calories. We’ll continue our adventures this season and will look forward to the meeting up with familiar teams in our league. After ten years, you get to recognizing a lot of other teams. Good fun all around.
I returned to my desk today after lunch and found this post-it note. For the past few mornings I’ve been pulling the top part of my hair back and putting it into a short pony tail to keep it out of my face. Apparently one of my co-workers found this hairstyle to be derivative of their favorite Saturday morning cartoon. Good thing I didn’t wear that leopard print jumper today too.
For reference, here is a handy guide for field identification use:
Seriously. This morning was unnecessary. I got up early so I could load my gear into the car for tonight’s gig. Getting up earlier than my usual 5:50 AM alarm is already pretty gruesome, and having to load gear extra early is un-fun. But the torrential downpour was an exclamation point on a run-on-sentence-of-morning-lame-osity. Trying to wrestle my bass cabinet into the back seat isn’t fun under the best of circumstances. It takes a lot of wiggling and shoving and leveraging and takes several minutes. But I succeeded. So now I have a wet bass cabinet in the back seat. I’m sure it’ll look like a tropical rain forest inside the car when I leave for the gig this afternoon. According to mythology, the weather gods typically live on mountaintops and in cloud castles. This is to avoid feedback from mortals. If I could get my hands on the deity of precipitation, I’d give him a fearsome wedgie.
Last night the Preons held our weekly practice session and I found myself fumbling to execute my Warr Guitar parts. I think the core issue was that it had been about two weeks since I last did any actual playing on that instrument, and it was frustrating to see how quickly the muscle memory was lost. My facility on Warr Guitar (such as it was) resulted from a few months of consistent practice, and it didn’t take long to get rusty. We replayed some of the more problematic areas and it seemed to go better on the second repetition, but throughout the night I felt fairly clumsy on my parts and will need to spend time this evening working on them. Other than that, I’m rather satisfied with my experience with the instrument. It’s opening up my playing to include greater complexity in counterpoint, and I like the added range of notes on the treble side. It’s also interesting to develop some effect patches specifically for this instrument, just to leverage the percussive aspect of the note attack. We’ll be playing tomorrow night at the Mix in Georgetown, and I look forward to our set.
Last week I started reading This Is Your Brain On Musicby Daniel Levitin. It’s a fascinating examination of the neurological and psychological processes that are in play when listening to music. I’ve read the first half of the book while riding the bus and several people have commented that they also read the book and found it interesting. That seems like a good endorsement. Then again, most of the people on my bus also work downtown in the same area as me. So it could be something in the water.
This past weekend the 1 Uppers spent a lot of hours in the recording studio putting down tracks for a CD. We managed to get through four takes (each) of six songs on Saturday despite losing a few hours to ProTools gremlins. Our intrepid drummer and engineer Eric Eagle did a great job of getting all the electrons in line, and once we got underway we had a very productive session. One of the interesting setup exercises in the studio is capturing good tone from all the instruments, and since I’ve spent the past year really massaging my sound, this was something that meant a lot to me. The most common approach to putting a microphone on a guitar amp is to use a Shure SM57 slightly off-axis. For decades I carried a pair of SM57s for this purposes, but they were a casualty of my car being broken into a few years ago. Kris loaned me a Sennheiser e609 for my guitar amp which sounded really great. I’m thinking of ordering the e906, which is a slightly upgraded version of that microphone. It has a smooth openness to its sound that isn’t present in the SM57.
I’m pleased with the results of this weekend’s recording and I look forward to getting back into the studio to work on additional elements (solos, fills) and more songs. The 1 Uppers was originally started with the intent that we’d cover some country favorites just for fun. At some point the creativity started to flow and we began to write originals. I’d say we probably have a full CD of material to put down, and it’ll be a fun summer project to realize this project. Bits ahoy!
