It’s the early days of summer now, about a week after the 4th of July, coming up on the All-Star break in major league baseball. I’ve been pretty busy since the year began. I’ve been working on spinning up a trio with bassist and vocalist Adrian McMahon. We’ve found a drummer who seems to be working out, we’ve been working out repertoire, and we’re starting to sound pretty good. For the first time I am doing a significant amount of vocalizing, which is something I have been successfully avoiding for most of my life, ever since someone told me many, many years ago that I shouldn’t try to sing – that I should just stick with the guitar playing. That really stuck in my gut and every time I’ve tried to push past it over the years, I always fell short and backed off from it. So it feels gratifying to have it start coming together, finally. I am singing pretty simple backing parts on a number of songs, and singing lead on one so far, a couple more pretty soon.

I have also been trying to put together a workable jazz trio. It’s been hard to get off the ground but I have a bass player and a drummer interested. My notion is to play together and record it, and from that come up with a demo that I can use to shop it around and find some gigs. Ideally I’d prefer a classic organ trio format, where the organist can play bass, chords and melodies and solo as well. Guitar/bass/drums is cool but it leaves me having to work a lot harder.

Meanwhile, SNUG has not had much action this year, alas. There was a private party in June, and another benefit show coming up in August, but so far that’s it.

On the recording front, I continue to have several things hovering in varying degrees of completion, including a couple of Weather Report tunes. One is “Cucumber Slumber,” on which my son David plays drums. We recorded the basic tracks a year ago when he was home from school for the summer and we still had his uncle Ted’s drum set in the house. I’ve overdubbed bass and a few guitar parts, and it’s close to being ready if I could only find the time to finish it. The other two are “Mysterious Traveler” (which I’ve been threatening for years to work up as half of a medley combined with the Meters’ “Cissy Strut”), and “Black Market,” which I’ve wanted to learn for many years and finally have.

All this, along with working on solo playing and trying to find some cycles to also write some material of my own, leaves me with an overly-full plate, considering I’m trying to keep all these balls rolling while also working about 45-50 hours a week at my new (as of April 1st) day job.

There was a fun jam that Stan Erhart had going in a bar in San Mateo, just a little over a mile away from home, on Sunday nights, but after several months, the bar pulled the plug on it in late June. I attend the Wednesday night jam at the Club Fox only once in a great while, and so far have still not made it back this year to the Sunday early-evening jam at the Pioneer in Woodside and some of the other jams that I have been to only once or twice (especially the Thursday Grand Dell jam in Cupertino, which has turned out to be a pretty big deal). Jamming is sometimes a lot of fun and sometimes not, but it is time-consuming, too, and the other stuff I outlined above is more important to me.

It’s the early days of summer now, about a week after the 4th of July, coming up on the All-Star break in major league baseball. I’ve been pretty busy since the year began. I’ve been working on spinning up a trio with bassist and vocalist Adrian McMahon. We’ve found a drummer who seems to be working out, we’ve been working out repertoire, and we’re starting to sound pretty good. For the first time I am doing a significant amount of vocalizing, which is something I have been successfully avoiding for most of my life, ever since someone told me many, many years ago that I shouldn’t try to sing – that I should just stick with the guitar playing. That really stuck in my gut and every time I’ve tried to push past it over the years, I always fell short and backed off from it. So it feels gratifying to have it start coming together, finally. I am singing pretty simple backing parts on a number of songs, and singing lead on one so far, a couple more pretty soon.

I have also been trying to put together a workable jazz trio. It’s been hard to get off the ground but I have a bass player and a drummer interested. My notion is to play together and record it, and from that come up with a demo that I can use to shop it around and find some gigs. Ideally I’d prefer a classic organ trio format, where the organist can play bass, chords and melodies and solo as well. Guitar/bass/drums is cool but it leaves me having to work a lot harder.

Meanwhile, SNUG has not had much action this year, alas. There was a private party in June, and another benefit show coming up in August, but so far that’s it.

On the recording front, I continue to have several things hovering in varying degrees of completion, including a couple of Weather Report tunes. One is “Cucumber Slumber,” on which my son David plays drums. We recorded the basic tracks a year ago when he was home from school for the summer and we still had his uncle Ted’s drum set in the house. I’ve overdubbed bass and a few guitar parts, and it’s close to being ready if I could only find the time to finish it. The other two are “Mysterious Traveler” (which I’ve been threatening for years to work up as half of a medley combined with the Meters’ “Cissy Strut”), and “Black Market,” which I’ve wanted to learn for many years and finally have.

All this, along with working on solo playing and trying to find some cycles to also write some material of my own, leaves me with an overly-full plate, considering I’m trying to keep all these balls rolling while also working about 45-50 hours a week at my new (as of April 1st) day job.

There was a fun jam that Stan Erhart had going in a bar in San Mateo, just a little over a mile away from home, on Sunday nights, but after several months, the bar pulled the plug on it in late June. I attend the Wednesday night jam at the Club Fox only once in a great while, and so far have still not made it back this year to the Sunday early-evening jam at the Pioneer in Woodside and some of the other jams that I have been to only once or twice (especially the Thursday Grand Dell jam in Cupertino, which has turned out to be a pretty big deal). Jamming is sometimes a lot of fun and sometimes not, but it is time-consuming, too, and the other stuff I outlined above is more important to me.

There’s an interesting new venue up in San Rafael that opened earlier this year. It’s a somewhat upscale supper club with live music. On Wednesdays they have a “Pro Blues Jam.” My friend, bassist extraordinaire Michael Oliver Warren, is in the house band, and told me I should check it out sometime. Being so far way, and on school night, I hadn’t yet taken the opportunity to do so. But then the first week of July arrived. Wednesday night was the 3rd, so the next day was a holiday. So I took the opportunity to throw a guitar in the car, pick up my fellow jam-hound Jeff Kamil, and drive north across the Golden Gate to see what was happening there at the Fenix Supper Club.

It was a bit of a strange experience. The music room is the dining room and it was completely full of people with reservations eating dinner. We had to wait in the bar, where at least we could see the band via the same camera feeds that were streaming the video over the ‘net. (Yes, it turns out they stream the shows at the Fenix and archive them after the performance. Here’s the video with me in it, singing and playing on Bill Wither’s song “Use Me.” My appearance starts about 10:20 after the beginning of the video.) We each had a burger, a good one, if rather pricey, had a beer, and watched. Later we managed to be able to sit at the far back of the dining room, and that was an improvement.

The house band started about 8:15 (the Fenix website says 7:30). They have a “theme” each week. This one was “Stevie Ray Vaughan Night,” which I presumed meant the host band’s set this night would be culled from material associated with Stevie Ray Vaughan, as indeed it was.

The host band played about an hour, then opened the second set with an instrumental by the guitarist. Then they called up me and a drummer. (You can see the drummer in that video shortly before we started to play, expressing some consternation that we weren’t about to do a SRV song. I guess he thought the jammers were restricted to calling SRV tunes, which was reasonable based on the information provided.)

After that song, I left, the drummer remained, and Jeff got called up. He got one song too. Later there was a young woman that sang three jazz standards, followed by older gentleman that sang three soul songs. We left around then, it was something like 11:30. Not sure how much longer it went on.

Yipes, once again time bunched up under me and then popped forward to now, and suddenly it’s nearly six months since I wrote anything here… A lot has gone by.

Concerts: I saw Gretchen Parlato at Stanford on August 1st, shortly after the Lionel Loueke show described in my last post… I saw the Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Mountain Winery (I’ll post links soon to a couple of videos I took and put up on YouTube)… I saw Wayne Krantz again, finally, at Yoshi’s in San Francisco on October 7th… am I forgetting another show or two?

My own playing: SNUG played a gig on July 28th and another on December 1st… I also played a solo gig at a private event using the Godin nylon-string and it went very nicely… I did some recording again with my son David on drums over the summer, the Weather Report tune “Cucumber Slumber,” I’m still working on overdubbing all my parts (electric bass and guitars)… I’ll post it on SoundCloud as soon as it’s ready… and, since late in the year, I’ve started what hopefully will turn out to be a fun new project. Also late in the year, Stan Erhart started a new jam session on Sunday nights right in my home town at McGovern’s Bar. Hopefully it will last because it’s so convenient, and I often get to play with some really good rhythm section players…

More anon as soon as I get a chance. I’m hoping 2013 will provide more chances for me to get out and play…

On Sunday, June 24th, I went to see the Lionel Loueke Trio at the Stanford Jazz Festival.

Have you ever had the experience of missing out on an admirable musician for a while, not because you had not heard them or were unaware of them, but because for some reason you weren’t really hearing them?

That’s what happened to me with Lionel Loueke. I’ve known about him for a while. I read about him. I have the Herbie Hancock CDs that he appears on. He also plays on this CD from drummer George Mel that I have. A year or so ago I heard his Blue Note release Karibu, which I listened to once. I saw a couple of YouTube videos.

But, somehow I didn’t quite get him at first.

Then earlier this year, when I went on my Gretchen Parlato binge, I discovered that  Loueke played, sang and wrote some material on her first CD, and played and sang on her second one too. Hearing him this time I thought, “hmmm, this guy’s really pretty good. Maybe I should give him another chance.” When I saw he was going to be at Stanford I figured, “Victoria likes that African stuff, she’ll probably enjoy it,” so I bought a pair of tickets.

Well, you can probably guess the rest. As you would imagine from someone that knocked the socks of Herbie Hancock* and Wayne Shorter, the guy is awesome. Poised, gracious, totally comfortable, gifted with an incredible harmonic sense ala Jim Hall or Wayne Krantz, and with those deep West African rhythms and interlocking lines infused in him from birth (he grew up in Benin), a dash of Brazilian flavor ala Baden Powell, and an advanced and modern jazz improv sensibility that is veers deftly into and out of the abstract, he’s got something different than anyone else, and it is… just wow.

He has been mostly playing nylon-string electrics, but that Sunday night he had a beautiful Paul Reed Smith solidbody. He plays finger-style, sometimes very staccato, and in one solo piece he actually put a strip of paper between the string near the bridge and created a remarkable emulation of a kalimba. He uses effects, pretty subtle for the most part, some delay and some phasery stuff on some of the staccato to give it a little bit more of a snap.

He also sings, quite beautifully, and virtually the entire time he used a floor vocal processor, one of those TC Helicon boxes, I think, to generate harmonies. In addition to singing, he used his voice as a mouth percussion instrument, delivering clicks, hisses, exhalations and pops, as well as sometimes scatting along with his guitar improv.

On top of that he writes great stuff…

Sadly, they moved the show to the smaller theater next door to the Dinkelspiel because they couldn’t sell enough tickets to fill the ~750-seat space. There were maybe 120 people present… amazing that a guy of his creds can come to a supposed major metropolitan area known (rightly or wrongly) as a savvy cultural center and not sell 750 tickets. Alas, you are all too aware if that kind of thing… sad, sad, sad… (Last year even Milton Nacscimento didn’t sell out that space for two nights.)

From Loueke’s bio on Wikipedia:

Loueke got his first professional job by accident, when a club manager heard him playing a guitar he had grabbed off the bandstand during a break and offered him work. He played African pop music, but discovered jazz when a friend returned from Paris with a copy of an album by jazz guitarist George Benson. This inspired Loueke to study jazz in Paris. He then won a scholarship to study at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 2001, Loueke auditioned for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at the University of Southern California. He was selected in a worldwide search by a panel of judges including jazz musicians Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard and Wayne Shorter. He attended the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz until 2003.

* Herbie Hancock said, when recalling the moment he first heard Loueke’s audition tape, “I flipped. I’d never heard any guitar player play anything close to what I was hearing from him. There was no territory that was forbidden, and he was fearless!”

The newest thing I’ve added to my quiver is really two things: first, a Roland GR-55 Guitar Synthesizer, and second, a compatible guitar to “drive” it with, the Godin Multiac ACS-SA Slim Nylon-string guitar. I’ve wanted to have a way of recording MIDI data from a guitar for many years, and now I finally do.

I’ll talk about the guitar first. I’m really enjoying it. It’s very comfortable and playable, with a

comfortable neck. It differs from a standard classical nylon-string guitar in having a narrower neck and longer scale, so it’s an easier adjustment for an old hack electric player like me. Its standard amplified sound is terrific. I now can add the sound of a nylon-string guitar to my recordings.

But of course the synth capabilities take it to a whole other universe. As a controller, I’m pretty impressed. I’ve read for years that guitar-to-MIDI systems are just too glitchy to be truly usable, but I find that the Roland has little trouble tracking what I play on the Godin. My technique is fairly clean, so I think I shouldn’t have too much trouble adapting my playing when driving the synth.

The guitar plugs into the GR-55 using a special 13-pin cable, which carries the individual signals from each string as well as the standard audio signal from the pickup. The individual string signals undergo pitch-to-MIDI conversion and the MIDI data triggers the sounds on the synth, and can also be routed to external synths or a computer’s MIDI interface for recording. There are two separate sound sources that can be triggered at the same time, so you can layer any of the sounds available and adjust their blend.

In addition, the GR-55 incorporates some of the modeling technology from Roland’s VG-99. So in addition to the two synth tones you can trigger at the same time, you can also layer one of the modeled COSM tones (which include electric guitar sounds like a Fender Stratocaster, Telecaster, Gibson Les Paul Standard, etc., electric bass guitar sounds like a Fender Precision bass, Jazz bass, Rickenbacker bass, etc., and finally acoustic sounds like steel-string guitar, nylon-string guitar, Coral electric sitar, conventional five-string banjo, and Dobro-type resonator guitar).

Finally, the synth tones can be routed through a battery of digital multieffects, and the COSM modeled tones can be routed through guitar amp models and guitar effects.

There’s an expression pedal on the right side of the unit that can be set to control effect parameters, and a phrase looper so that you record up to 20 seconds of sound and have it repeat to provide a bed of sound to play over.

The “regular” sound of the Godin can also be blended with the two synth tones and a modeled tone, and you can adjust the volume of each independently from the Godin via a pair of slide switches. So, for example, in performance you could start playing some synth sounds, and comfortably segue into nylon-string guitar and back again.

I’ve really only begun to scratch the surface of the GR-55, and I look forward to lots of fun with it, and anticipating that it will up my interest level in both composing and recording.

Here’s a small sample of some of the sounds on the GR-55…

Last night I plugged my new Godin ACS SA Slim nylon-string guitar into my Roland Cube 30 amp and was a bit dismayed to find it sounding odd. At first I thought the guitar was buzzing as if all the strings had somehow gotten too close to the neck. OMG, did the heat wave warp the neck?

After a few minutes I realized it was the amp, though – it seemed to be distorting in a strange way. Over a short period it got worse, to the point where it started emitting a loud and obnoxious hum and I turned it off.

I thought, damn… I’ve had this amp for a little over 7 years, I guess maybe it could just up and die like that, but crap… wonder if it’s worth repairing?

So this morning I figure I’d try it again. This time, no sound at all. Hmmm… so I plug it directly into the mixer of my little recording rig, and nothing…

Suddenly, consternation turns to elucidation – I turn the guitar over and there on the back I look at — the battery door! Yup, it has an active pickup. I had totally forgotten about that. I have never owned a guitar like that before, so a dying battery was a brand-new experience for me.

So I swapped it out for a fresh battery and voila, everything sounds beautiful once again.

Sheeesh…

Just a few quick notes as summer approaches…

My drumming son David is home from college for the summer, and I’m hoping I can twist his arms into recording a few more tunes with me.  I’m in the process of updating and improving my recording capacity with a new audio/MIDI interface for the computer (an Echo Audio Layla 3G, replacing my hoary old and somewhat problematic M Audio Delta 66 and MIDISport 2×2) and a couple of additional microphones (a pair of Cascade M39 small diaphragm condensers and a Cascade V57 large diaphragm condenser), so I will actually be able to put more than three mics up around the drum kit this time.

I’ll be writing more soon about a couple of other pieces of gear that I recently got – a Roland GR-55 guitar synthesizer, and a Godin ACS-SA Slim nylon-string guitar to drive it with. (I  plan to include a demo audio recording.)

There are a couple of shows coming up that I got tickets for and I’m very excited about:

• On the first weekend of summer I’ll be seeing one of my all-time favorites, guitarist Pat Martino, at Yoshi’s San Francisco…
• … followed the very next day by the Lionel Louke Trio performing at Dinkelspiel Auditorium on the Stanford University campus as part of the annual Stanford Jazz Festival.
• On the first day of August I’m going to catch one of my new favorites, vocalist Gretchen Parlato, also at the Dinkelspiel at Stanford.
• On the second Saturday in September I’m going to see one of my favorite musical groups, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga. (This will be my first time seeing a show at this venue.)
• On the first Sunday in October I’m going to see Wayne Krantz at Yoshi’s in Oakland. (If I’m not mistaken Wayne hasn’t played a show in town since I saw him in 1999, also at Yoshi’s.)

I sold some old equipment recently, and turned the money right back into new equipment… the first item being the latest from Line 6’s line of guitar amp modeling devices, the POD HD. I have previously owned the POD 2.0 and the POD X3.
What is amp modeling, you ask? In the recording studio, guitar amps have traditionally been recorded by placing at least one mic in front of a speaker. At the end of the wire is an electronic signal that is sent into a mixing board, and eventually ends up on tape or hard disk. In a nutshell, what Line 6 did was to come up with methods for emulating this signal with digital processing. In effect, they took the recorded sound of guitars played through amps and analyzed the resulting signals, then in software found ways to take the signal off a guitar’s output and end up with something as close as possible to the real reference sound.

It’s not perfect, but it’s remarkably good, and gives you the functional equivalent of a warehouse-full of amplifiers that you can simply dial up rather than have to haul them out and mic them – not to mention the cost of owning and maintaining them all.

The POD simply makes it wonderfully simple to get good guitar sounds recorded. The HD series has the latest iteration of Line 6’s modeling technology and claims to be even more realistic than the earlier models.

How realistic? Well… I’d agree that the modeled amps don’t sound as rich and complex as the real amps would recorded through a perfectly-placed mic in an excellent studio by talented recording engineers. But they are pretty darn close, at least to my admittedly forgiving ear. The convenience and capability they offer to a home recording enthusiast make them pretty much a no-brainer.

I’m looking forward to setting up a few personal patches and doing some recording with the new black bean (all the previous models have been red).

Line 6 website
Wikipedia article on Line 6