This past Saturday my son David and I convened in the family room again and proceeded to re-record the two numbers from the previous week, which had been somewhat spoiled by my careless bass part bleeding into the microphones. Over the week between I bought a very inexpensive headphone distribution box, so I hooked that to a stereo output from the mixer. I played bass direct into the board and so all that was in the ‘phones was the bass part. I also added a third mic, so I had one on the bass drum, one on the left side of the kit and a little bit away, and one on the right side of the kit up close to the snare. This time I got very usable tracks from the session. On Sunday I overdubbed a “real” bass part for each song, and on one song added a rhythm guitar part and a quick stab at a second part with some lines. They are starting to sound really nice. I’m looking forward to finishing them up, hopefully before too much time passes.

Early last year I mentioned in a post here the demise of a somewhat regular gig. I was never privy to what actually happened, but my understanding was there was a restaurant manager who had instigated the gig, and there was some sort of shakeup at the place which resulted in his departure. Since the live music nights were his doing, they ceased with his exit.

Now it seems that the management has changed (perhaps new owners?), and the departed manager has returned and has restarted the gigs. It sounds like it will be much the same as before: every Wednesday from 7-9 and every Friday from 7-10.

A pool of musicians rotates filling the seats. I had been averaging about one or two nights per month, so I expect that will continue, though it seems that perhaps the original pool of players has become a little bit depleted, so maybe I will play more often. I will be playing the first one this coming Friday, January 6th. Should be fun!

Well, it’s 2012, and after a week and a half of being off, I am back at the day job…

I wish I could say I got a lot done musically in my off time, but that would be a lie. I did achieve my primary goal, which was to set up a few microphones and record my son David playing drums on at least a couple of numbers. David’s been playing since last summer and is starting to get pretty good. I played a rough bass part along with him and the plan was to overdub a fuller bass part and some guitars after the fact. The bass bled more than I’d hoped into the drum mics, so I might not be able to do much with these tracks. Next time I’ll play through the mixer and we can use headphones to hear the bass part and thus keep it out of the microphones – either that, or I’ll just record the real bass part at the same time.

We still have another two weekends with David at home during winter break, so hopefully we’ll get in another session and get some really usable tracks.

Facing the prospect of actually, finally getting rid of my vast LP collection, I have been going through and identifying ones that I would still like to listen to again and digitizing them. To this end I bought a USB turntable to minimize the effort involved in getting them onto the computer.

Then, after doing several LPs using Sound Forge – recording each side, then opening the resulting files, running a click and pop filter on them, cutting them up into songs and saving them individually, I looked around a little on the internet and discovered a wonderful tool that cost a mere $29: VinylStudio from AlpineSoft in the UK. It makes the whole chore so-o-o-o much easier. Input the album name and it automatically names saves side 1 and 2 for you with appropriate names. Then you can download cover art and track information (titles and lengths) from your choice of online database (from Amazon, Diskogs, or several others) and it will automatically insert track markers at the appropriate places. You can easily adjust the markers if they are a little off, then clean up pops and clicks, and finally save the album in any of the usual compressed formats like MP3, or FLAC if you prefer lossless compression. It does this by creating a directory based on the artist and album title, then saves each song with the track name and the beginning and end as defined by the track markers, and with the cover art (if found) stored in the file. Just import into iTunes or whatever player you use.

Just might be the best $29 I’ve ever spent…

Facing the prospect of actually, finally getting rid of my vast LP collection, I have been going through and identifying ones that I would still like to listen to again and digitizing them. To this end I bought a USB turntable to minimize the effort involved in getting them onto the computer.

Then, after doing several LPs using Sound Forge – recording each side, then opening the resulting files, running a click and pop filter on them, cutting them up into songs and saving them individually, I looked around a little on the internet and discovered a wonderful tool that cost a mere $29: VinylStudio from AlpineSoft in the UK. It makes the whole chore so-o-o-o much easier. Input the album name and it automatically names saves side 1 and 2 for you with appropriate names. Then you can download cover art and track information (titles and lengths) from your choice of online database (from Amazon, Diskogs, or several others) and it will automatically insert track markers at the appropriate places. You can easily adjust the markers if they are a little off, then clean up pops and clicks, and finally save the album in any of the usual compressed formats like MP3, or FLAC if you prefer lossless compression. It does this by creating a directory based on the artist and album title, then saves each song with the track name and the beginning and end as defined by the track markers, and with the cover art (if found) stored in the file. Just import into iTunes or whatever player you use.

Just might be the best $29 I’ve ever spent…

For the first time tonight I tried playing in a trio with electric bass and drums. Yikes, is it hard!

The classic jazz trio is piano/bass drums. A piano player has ten fingers with the same basic function – to hit notes – and the nature of the instrument means they can play rich harmonic accompaniment while also playing lines. But even the most amazing adept guitar players are limited by the nature of the instrument to six notes and the separate and different function of the hands (five fingers of one hand fretting notes and the five fingers on the other hand striking them to make them sound).(Of course I’m referring to standard 6-string guitars played in more-or-less standard ways.) So a guitarist in a trio has to kind of pretend a bit to suggest musically what a piano player can do pretty readily. The best ones are adept at breaking parts down in such as way as to give the impression that there is harmony going on all the time while in fact they are alternating between playing lines and playing chords. It’s a kind of aural sleight of hand.

I am not even in the Little Leagues when it comes to his sort of playing and I was pretty chastened by the experience, but it wasn’t a total failure, and I think it will be fun challenge to continue to try to play like this. Conclusion: I must be more than a little insane.

I’m excited about the first three months of 2012:

• In January I’m going to see Robben Ford at Yoshi’s in Oakland
• In February I’m going to see Leo Kottke at Yoshi’s in San Francisco
• In March I’m going to finally see Bela Fleck and the Flecktones at the Warfield

The latest edition of the Golden Gate Blues Society newsletter (Issue #11, October 2011) has a review I wrote about the Ruth Davies’ Blues Night concert I saw this past summer.

There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!  – Percy Bysshe Shelley

Here it is a week before Thanksgiving already. Let me take a few minutes to see if I can sort out what’s happened in my musical life since my last post… jeesh, this gets harder and harder every day I age…

September and October saw a little bit of SNUG activity. First up was a private event at the Hong Kong Flower Lounge in Millbrae. A stripped-down lineup – SiBon, Ross, and I – crammed into a ludicrously cramped space and played a very short set and got fed some incredible food. Next up was a very fun  outdoor brunchtime gig at the Main Street Coffee Roasting Company in Redwood City. We went over well and hope to be back there again when the weather returns to the appropriate temperature. Finally, we played on a Saturday night at a funky bar in San Mateo, Moon’s Family Sports Pub (I think the word “family” in the title means the pub is owned/operated by Moon’s family, not that it’s a family sports pub to take your kids to for a meal and a few brewskis). This time we had a fill-in rhythm section, Alvin Joseph on bass and an old musical colleague of SiBon’s, Rick Bailey on drums. We went over well and I suspect might be back there again soon.

In October I sat in for several songs with Stan Erhart’s band at the American Legion Hall in Princeton-by-the-Sea, right next door to the OPL, long-time site of Stan’s Sunday night jam which I used to frequent when it was still happening. Then in mid-November I played a set with my friend’s band Blue Tuesday at McGovern’s Bar in San Mateo, an evening that was made noteworthy by the presence of the awesome Berkeley-based guitarist Garth Webber sitting in a later set. It would have been great to have had a chance to play with Garth again (we jammed once or twice a while back at Stan Erhart’s OPL jam), but it was wonderful just to be able to watch and listen to him.

I’ve continued to attend the Club Fox jam on Wednesday nights in Redwood City, but much less frequently. I used to go probably 4 out of 5 times, now I head down there probably once a month or so. My original plan was to switch it up and go to some of the other local jams in between, especially a couple of jazz jams, but I haven’t seemed to have been able to do that quite yet.

Concert-wise, I saw a couple of great shows. In October, at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco, there was a King Crimson-centric performance titled Two of a Perfect Trio – Adrian Belew‘s Power Trio and Tony Levin‘s Stick Men. Belew and Levin, along with Stick Men drummer Pat Mastelloto, were (are?) members of King Crimson, and the whimsical name for the tour is wordplay on the title of a Belew song and Crimson album, Three of a Perfect Pair. Each trio performed a set of mostly their own originals. Then Belew, Levin, and Mastelloto came out and performed a couple of King Crimson songs. Finally the remaining members of the two trios (touch guitarist Markus Reuter from Stick Men, and bassist Julie Slick and drummer Tobias Ralph from Belew’s Power Trio) came out and joined the trio of Crimalums for a pulverizing set of Crimson material.

Then, on Halloween night, at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, I saw Jeff Beck. It was my ninth time seeing him (a review of the previous show in 2009 and a list of all the other times I’ve seen him is detailed in this blog post). This time his band still had Jason Rebello on keyboards, but the bass and drum chairs were filled by Rhonda Smith and Narada Michael Walden. The set list had a fair amount of overlap from the 2009 show, with the addition of several tunes from Beck’s latest studio recording Emotion and Commotion and a couple of new covers added since then.

Not much I can say about Jeff Beck that hasn’t been said, so I’ll leave it at this – when he comes back next year (with a new studio album, apparently, and a tour with his new trio with Rhonda Smith and drummer Veronica Bellino), I’ll be getting tickets if he’s anywhere within a couple of hundred miles…

How To Become Clairvoyant is the fifth solo release by Robbie Robertson, coming 13 years since his last release (and I thought Jeff Beck waited a long time between recordings). I remember being really knocked out by Robertson’s first solo album in 1987, so when I first heard about this one, my antennae twiggled. Then I learned that it is a collaboration with Eric Clapton, which further tweaked my interest.

I’ve been quite pleased with it. The songs are all very good, though none of them jump out at you as an instant classic like “Cripple Creek” or “The Weight” from his years in The Band.

Robertson’s vocals are… what should I say? – limited? – but they work. He sometimes treads close to pretentiousness, but usually he manages to be emotionally expressive, and he has an excellent sense of phrasing and rhythm.

Sonically the recording is brilliant. It’s sort of a combination of raw, lo-fi electric guitars, nylon-string acoustics, and Hammond B-3, mixed up with more modern electronic sounds here and there. Everything sounds organic and loose, but there are all sorts of interesting layers and interlocking bits of sound, in a way that reminds me of the late Lowell George’s production work with his band Little Feat. I haven’t been as impressed with the production of a recording in a long time like I have been with this.

Clapton is all over the record, but in an understated way for the most part, except for where he and Robertson trade off lead vocals on the song “Fear of Falling.” He co-wrote some of the material, plays guitar and sings backup on many of the tunes. It’s wonderful to hear Clapton involved with something as creative as this.

Steve Winwood also appears on organ. Bass and drums are mostly provided by Pino Palladino and Ian Thomas, There are also appearances by Robert Randolph, Tom Morello, Trent Reznor, Angela McClusky, Jim Keltner, and others.

There’s a nice little writeup about the disk at NPR’s Music’s First Listen site.