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

I was thrilled when I learned late last year that the original Bela Fleck & the Flecktones were going to be touring. I had never seen this wonderful band at all over the years, so before I could talk myself out of it I bought a pair of tickets for their scheduled local show, which was to be the day after my birthday in March at the Warfield in San Francisco.

As it turned out, there was a venue change, and so instead of Market Street, my wife and I were on Van Ness at the Regency Ballroom.

The band was terrific. All of them have a mastery of their instruments that is astonishing, and while showing off is definitely part of the game, it’s secondary to the music itself, which is by turns beautiful, soulful, dazzling, intricate, delightful, humorous – sometimes all at once. They also clearly are having a ball playing together.

The latest Flecktones album, recorded last year with this lineup, is Rocket Science.

In January I wrote about the return of live jazz to Turtle Bay Seafood & Grill in Foster City. I’m sad to report that it is gone again, this time because the restaurant has gone out of business. C’est la vie. Sigh…

In January I wrote about the return of live jazz to Turtle Bay Seafood & Grill in Foster City. I’m sad to report that it is gone again, this time because the restaurant has gone out of business. C’est la vie. Sigh…

I had a wonderful evening at Yoshi’s in San Francisco enjoying one of my long-time favorite performers, Leo Kottke. Leo is a wonderful acoustic finger-style guitarist, composer, singer, and raconteur. On his uptempo pieces there’s an interesting and very personal thing about his sense of rhythm and dynamics – there’s a motion that borders on minor discontinuity that gives it an almost lurching quality, or something like a drunk person valiantly trying to prove they are not drunk as they walk. I’m not doing it justice, it almost sounds like I’m describing flawed technique, but it’s not at all, it is wonderful to behold and sounds like nobody else does.

Between his songs he weaves commentary, telling stories and relating anecdotes that are often hilarious and exhibit a keen mind, and whenever I have seen him I always end up laughing out loud multiple times during the show. His words have the quality of being completely off the cuff, which they very well may be. This evening he talked quite a bit about his childhood fascination with the Dick Tracy comic strip; plotting with friends to “roll” the school janitor; the quirky songwriter Bob “Frizz” Fuller; and other disconnected and unrelated topics. You can get a bit of the flavor of his monologues in his occasional writings on the Notes page of his website and in some of the liner notes of his many recordings over the years.

For the longest time I’ve thought of my musical identity as consisting of a bit of  “composer,” but in all honesty I have done so little writing that I’m beginning to consider that I’ve been bullshitting myself.

I think it was around my second or third year of college that I first tried to write some music. This was while I was in the band Natch Beebee. I still have a few faded sheets of music paper from this time with a couple of melodies and chord progressions. One tune I remember writing on the tiny deck outside my college apartment in New Paltz, NY, around dusk one day in the early autumn, and feeling really thrilled about how good the tune felt to me and how readily it had been brought forth. Some months later, I remember writing one song with lyrics for the band and showing it to a couple of the guys. They were less than enthusiastic and we never did do it. I also remember being proud of a little two-bar-long segue that I came up with to tie two parts of a medley of Frank Zappa tunes together. I also started a song or two that were potentially going to be used in a theater piece that someone I met was working on, but that never went further than a couple of discussions.

Over the years after moving to California, I might have jotted down one or two ideas, but I don’t remember much happening, until I started to get interested in the technology that started to become available in the eighties – specifically, “portastudios” (inexpensive multi-track cassette recorders) and sequencers, which gave you the capability to record musical information and play it back from a synthesizer or drum machine via MIDI. I met a kindred spirit in Kurt Kaupanger, and the two of us started to play around with the idea of doing a collaborative recording together. After a few years of working on this in short bursts of time, we came out with our self-produced cassette, on which I had contributed three original instrumental compositions (one of them, “Autumn Sunset,” the tune I had written on that autumn day years earlier in New Paltz). It wasn’t much, but I felt that there was something there, and in the years that followed I kept an active interest in trying to write and record, fiddling about whenever possible with my Yamaha cassette multitracker and my Alesis drum machine. After around 2000, my capabilities took a big step up when I started using Cakewalk Pro Audio recording software, which soon after morphed into SONAR, and ACID software, which allowed you to create music with loops, short, repeatable digital audio snippets.

But considering how much I could do now with the new toys, I did remarkably little. I had a brief spurt of creativity, creating a few short pieces of music, and taking a class in music for visual media for which I shot and scored a short video about my kids. What I was beginning to realize was that, with my day job and my young family, I simply could not do all the musical stuff that I wanted to do and get anywhere with it. I began to understand that if, for example, I focused on trying to improve my guitar playing, the little time I had would be spent on studying and practicing – which is exactly what I did starting around 2001 or so, for the next few years taking classes at the JazzSchool in Berkeley – and there would be no time for writing, nor for playing in a band. I did take one class at the JazzSchool on composing, which I found very helpful, and which brought forth a couple of new pieces, but then my focus shifted back to performing, which filled my time and left little time to work on writing.

So here it is, the winter of 2012, and on my website I claim that “I’m a jazz/blues/rock guitarist, and much-too-infrequent composer,” and it’s beginning to rankle me that I need to qualify the composer part like that. So, what to do?

Well, for one thing, I am going out and playing in local jams much less frequently now compared to the last two or three years, and I have few gigs and little to no rehearsals. So there’s a little more time than might be available otherwise.

I’ve got a wonderfully rich environment in my computer with which I can perform wonders if I can just get some balls rolling and in play. Maybe now is the time. Maybe the planets and the stars will align, and new music will pour forth.

The last couple of times I’ve played my archtop Cort guitar at one of these Turtle Bay jazz gigs, I’ve been really displeased with the sound I got plugged into my Reverend Hellhound amp. So this time I figured I would try the Lunchbox amp, which I’ve written about earlier. I was pleased to find that it sounded great and had just the right combination of warmth and clarity.

I’ve used this a few times now at some rehearsals for SNUG and while sitting in at Saloon in San Francisco with the Dave Workman Band and it’s amazing how much sound this little demon puts out there. Finally, a truly portable amp that’s suitable for more than just practice. Love this thing!

For years now guitar wizard Wayne Krantz has been one of my all-time favorite players. In my quest to try to hear everything he ever played on, I just came upon a used copy of a CD he did in 1989 while a member of the band Urban Earth featuring Harvie Swartz, titled Full Moon Dancer. If you read the review of it on the All Music website that I link to here, you’ll see that they find it’s a bit tepid, and I concur. Yet the players are all really good, and Krantz as usually really shines. Even at this point in his career when he was first making a splash, his playing had a special something that made him stand out amidst the pack of fusiony guitar slingers. The one track he wrote for this date, “Five Years,” is easily the best one on the album.

So I’ll take this chance to just quietly rave about Wayne Krantz.

I first came upon his name in the credits of former Weather Report bassist Victor Bailey‘s debut solo album, Bottom’s Up, from 1989. I had listened to the opening track, “Kid Logic,” and there was a guitar solo that made my ears perk up. Back then I couldn’t yet go to the Internet and Google the name, but I filed it away in my brain and kept my antennae up for more from him.

Soon enough I found him on some releases from Leni Stern in the early nineties. Then, if I remember correctly, I read a brief review of his own CD,1995’s 2 Drink Minimum, in some magazine, and was inspired to pick it up. To say my socks were knocked off is putting it mildly. A live trio recording from a performance at New York’s 55 Bar, it is just chock-full of Wayne’s amazing harmonic sense, incredible time, and dazzling single-line improvising. In the few things I’d heard earlier, he was an excellent player in the vein of a Mike Stern or maybe a Scott Henderson, but by the time of this live recording, he was totally in a world of his own. His playing is perhaps the most distinctive of all guitar players I’ve ever heard. His ideas are as fresh and cliche-free as possible.

Of course I had to go right out and get his earlier two CDs on Enja, Signals and Long To Be Loose.

In the late 90’s and into the 21st century Krantz released on his own label a couple of albums that were edited-down fragments from hours and hours of live recordings made at the 55 Bar in Greenwich Village, NY: Greenwich Mean in 1999, Your Basic Live in 2003, and Your Basic Live ’06 in (duh) 2006. He also played on several other people’s projects, notably Chris Potter’s Underground, Tal Wilkenfeld’s Transformation, and several releases by David Binney.

In 2009 he finally released his first studio recording since the mid-nineties, Krantz Carlock Lefebvre, on the Abstract Logix label. It was one of my favorite records of the year.

A recent news item from the label says he will have a new CD titled Howie 61 to be released in April 2012. I can’t wait! Here’s a promotional video I just discovered this minute.

Some WK links:

• Wayne’s website
• Wikipedia article
• Bio on All About Jazz