John Hendow

Last Friday’s gig at Neumo’s was fun, despite being a somewhat quiet night in the club. The audience that was present was plenty enthusiastic and had a great time. We decided to soundcheck with “Red Skies At Night” which went very well. Strangely, that song seemed a little random when we did it later in the set, but only the band noticed. The other band on the bill was Gruvbox, which is a local funk outfit. They laid down some great music and it was fun to chat with them before the set.

Overall I think we played a great show. I love the sound of the PA system in that room and the sound crew has a 100% pro attitude. Always fun to be in the middle of the Capital Hill weekend madness.

Last weekend I played 2 shows with my country band The 1 uppers. Friday night’s show was the Conor Byrne. The regulars who frequent the bar are big fans of music in general and they seem especially enthusiastic about country. We were last on a bill of three bands, which meant we were subject to the late starts and late finishes of each of the bands before us… by the time we took the stage it was well after midnight. We played many of the songs which we’re currently recording for our CD and threw in a couple of cover selections as well. I have been experimenting with using just the Telecaster, straight into my Hot Rod Deluxe with nothing else in the signal chain. This does sound good, but I found myself wishing I had a little more tonal variety available. I had a bit of trouble with the output jack of the tele; the cord kept falling out and I couldn’t seem to get it to lock into place. Some soldering will be in my near future. I didn’t get home until after 2:30 which is quite a bit later than usual. Fortunately I managed to sleep in until around 9:00 the next morning, which allowed me to be fairly productive on a home remodeling project.

On Sunday we played again, this time a mercifully early show at the Sunset in Ballard. This is a classic local bar that is legendary for its vibe. I decided to bring the strat instead of my tele, and also brought the Pod XTLive for some tone shaping. The addition of slight compression and delay makes a big difference in the feel of the guitar; it was worth the extra bit of gear for this gig. The other bands on the bill were very good, and it was fun to see friends who live in the area. During “Luxury Liner” we Kris spun a long solo that was a wild run of tricky licks. There’s no denying how good he is. This was one of his trademark jaw-droppers. Playing in a band with him and Jon Hyde is amazing. They’re great musicians who continually surprise us with great ideas. At the end of the night we celebrated another successful gig. The next show is a few weeks off because some members of the band will be traveling for work and other projects. We’ll get back to 1 Upping again soon.

In the past few years I’ve installed a fair amount of cable in our house. The current total is something like this:

• Cat 5E : Over 1100 feet and counting. This is both for the internal data network (gigabit throughout the house) and the voice lines. Early in this project I completely removed all pre-existing phone lines from the house and pulled all new cable. This has greatly improved stability and allowed us to switch to digital voice. There are a few additional data drops to install, but we’re getting pretty close to having the data lines completed. Then again, I keep discovering places in need of a network port…
• RG59 : Over 400 feet of new cable is now installed in the house. When Comcast digital cable was installed, the tech simply ran cable along the outside of the house, around the back, and through the wall behind our TV. I never liked having it on the outside and eventually removed it, pulling the line up into the attic and running inside the walls for a cleaner install. In the process of doing so I decided to pull additional feeds for the garage and upstairs.
• Speaker wire: Over 500 feet of CL2/3 rated 12-gauge speaker wire is already in place. I’ll be installing more as we continue to expand the whole-house audio system. We’re enjoying great audio throughout the upstairs, in the garage, and on the deck.

And of course there will be more…

Les Paul was a true gentleman and one of the world’s most interesting guitarists. I saw him perform a few times in NYC and it was a treat to listen to his stories and beautiful music. He invented the solidbody electric guitar (which bears his name) and also invented multitrack recording. His ingenuity as a musician and technologist is well known, and I’m sure that others will more eloquently eulogize him. I’ll say this: Les Paul made me dig deeper as a guitarist, and he remains one of my favorite players of the instrument. Godspeed, Lester. You opened a door for me.

I’m currently traveling on business and am staying in North Hollywood. As one might expect, it’s warm here and there is a lot going on. I arrived late last night and drove in from LAX. My hotel is in “Universal City”, which is on the big hill where Universal Studios is located. When I checked in last night I was pretty tired and was happy to get to bed at a decent hour. I was awakened at 1:30 AM by noise from the next room. Apparently there are a number of preteen boys staying in the hotel (a sports team?) and the room adjacent to mine was unchaperoned. They were talking / yelling, watching loud TV and jumping on/off the beds. At 2:00 I called the front desk to complain about the noise and was informed they had received a number of complaints already. Before long it got quiet and I managed to get to sleep. I was awakened again at 4:30 by exactly the same commotion, this time from the room on the other side. It eventually quieted down but the damage was done and I’d failed to get a decent night of sleep. This morning I asked the hotel to move me to another room, citing the noise issue. They assured me they would relocate me to a less rowdy area of the hotel.

So, minor inconveniences aside, it was a pretty good first day of work in Burbank and I’m pleased that we’re getting so much done. Tonight I’m going up the Universal City Walk area for dinner and some random shopping. Welcome to Hollyweird!

Last Friday night the Dudley Manlove Quartet played at the High Dive in Fremont. This is one of the better local venues and has a terrific bar / kitchen staff, awesome sound engineer, and a generally great vibe. It’s surprising to me that more local bars aren’t like this; Seattle seems like a friendly and positive place, but so many bar employees seem to have a case of the grumps. At any rate, this was another outstanding evening of fun with the band and our friends. A few tasty refreshments were sent to the stage (many thanks!) and we had a great time rocking the hits.

I brought the telecaster as my backup guitar. Playing it during soundcheck was a treat and I considered using it during the second set. But I love the sound my of strat and just couldn’t force myself to switch. Guess that’s a good problem to have. I noticed during setup that the high-end noise is still present in the stage power at the High Dive. One of these days I am going to remember my VOHM and I’ll do some investigation. I can’t tell if I’m getting SCR noise or if it’s something in the line waveform. I usually dial down the gain and high end on my amp settings and it tends to make things work well enough.

We opened the night with “Forever In Blue Jeans”, which has a fun guitar intro. I worked the song up last week and was all set to play it in the key of A; in advance of the gig I sent an email to Steve to double check keys on a few songs and he told me DMQ does that song in Bb (!). So I reworked the intro without all cool open strings. We also added “Poison Arrow” which was pretty good. The guitar part on the studio recording is somewhat sparse with 2 chords played as harmonics but I occupied a little more space during the chorus, filling out the Em with a fuller chord texture. The balance of the set was material we’ve played together before. I have been using part of the solo during “Venus” to play musical quotes from other guitarists; I’ve played “Purple Haze”, “Sharp Dressed Man”, and others. For the High Dive gig I played “Walk Don’t Run” (which I transposed to the higher key). Mack was the first to recognize it. We seem to share the trait of being musical omnivores. Another amazing fun night with the Dudley Manlove Quartet. This is a great musical workout and I really appreciate the humor and joy of the other band members. I look forward to our next show at the Tractor Tavern on September 5.

As a project manager, I’m occasionally presented with the challenge of compressing work into a tight timeline. Sometimes this is the result of the customer (business) of wanting results sooner, and other times it’s because there is an external deadline that cannot be moved. In either case, the scheduled activities are reviewed to identify opportunities for parallel effort. In PM parlance, attempting to get more done sooner is often called “crashing” the schedule; a degree of caution is advised when considering this approach. Because most projects involved a fixed pool of resources, this can result in over-allocating individuals (overtime / long hours) and there are well-understood diminishing return curves for demanding extra effort.

Whenever possible I attempt to negotiate the schedule with the project sponsor, but I’m finding it fairly common to be called in for projects where a delivery date has already been communicated to the customer. This means working backwards by building the task schedule from the end milestone. Tasks are identified for possible overlap and the critical path is shortened as much as possible. Crashing the schedule is usually identified as a risk, although I’d be tempted to say it is a mitigation plan undertaken in response to an issue. Call it what you like… getting more done with less resources in less time… everybody loves that idea and many PMs find themselves being expected to make this happen on a regular basis. I suspect the nature of our industry is that we’ll need to introduce greater training for optimization into the PMI knowledge areas.

Black Celebration performed last Saturday evening at Neumo’s on Capital Hill in Seattle. We were part of a three-band bill that included Love Vigilantes (New Order tribute) and Erasuresque (Erasure tribute). It was a hot day in Seattle and the club was very hot all night. They did have some fans operating to move the air a bit, but it was still mighty toasty! One of the nice things about doing these kinds of multi-band bills is that we always find ways to share equipment to minimize down time between bands. This also keeps the stage logistics to a reasonable minimum. I brought my trusty black strat and decided to bring the Telecaster as my backup guitar. Ricky (guitarist for Love Vigilantes) parked 2 of his ES335s in my guitar rack, and along with our 2 amps and couple of pedalboards it looked like we had an on-stage pawnshop going. 

  Neumo’s has a lot of rules. Probably as many rules as Dungeons and Dragons. Except there isn’t a saving throw. The venue is a lot of fun to play and I do enjoy it. They are quite organized and actually very cool to work with. Since I’m a PM by trade, documentation is always a positive thing.

I took advantage of the big stage by going wireless. It gave me the mobility to trot over to Zach’s side of the stage and wander back to visit Shane in drum world. Neumo’s has a very good sound system and our mix always winds up exercising their subs to great effect. Even the stage monitors and side fills are top notch, so it’s easy to get a good representative mix onstage. I thought we played an excellent show. All three bands were in good form, with strong audience reception. It’s always fun to have people in the audience singing along with their favorite Depeche Mode songs, and we even fielded a few requests (which, fortunately, were in our set list!). Overall, a fine evening of music and comraderie. I believe we’ll be scheduling more shows for the Fall, so stay tuned.