Way Down (draft 1)

"According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center, when reached for comment on this week, 93 percent of Americans responded “Okay, enough’s enough here, you have seriously got to be kidding me with this week,” with 84 percent saying “Is it Sunday yet? What? How in the hell are we only at Thursday? What the hell is going on?” - The Onion

Yeah, pretty much that.

I put this riff together on my first day of Christmas vacation back in December. I've been toying with it, flipping it around, trying to fit a song together around it ever since. So what's it about? If I could tell you that, then I'd have it finished by now.

It is uncharacteristically cheerful given the day on which it was born was, in addition to my first day of vacation, also the day of the Sandy Hook massacre. "Massacre" ... it occurs to me today, at the end of a week where we have been knee deep in death and misery and helpless anger, that maybe these times we're livin' in aren't really so unusual. I mean ... this crap has happened often enough for us to have a word for it ... in like every. single. language. Nonetheless ... we survive. On the whole, we somehow win more often than we lose, and collectively we carry on.

So ... I don't know ... this peaceful, cheery tune grew out of my subconscious in the midst of nonstop coverage of the most heartbreaking carnage imaginable, like a vine growing out of a garden of ashes.

I don't know what it means yet ... or maybe ever. But if I ever get a grip on some good lyrics for it, it's gonna be tiziiiiiiight.

Dave Grohl Tells it Like it Is

Get yourself some coffee and spend the next 45 minutes watching this. then go write some music. you'll be in the mood. trust me on this.

Gettin' Down With the Hitchhikers

Yours truly, doing my best Fogerty

That's a photo from my gig last night with The Thumbless Hitchhikers. I was singing lead on Born on The Bayou, which is why it looks like I'm screaming my guts out, LOL. I was :-) Thanks to Glenn Baeske for taking the best photo of me playing music ever!

White Man Group

"In order to break the rules, you have to know the rules" - Dr. Jonathan Wacker

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away Dr. Wacker was my percussion instructor and music theory professor. The year was 1993, the place was Armstrong State College (they've since gotten an upgrade to "Armstrong Atlantic State University").

The thing about being 17, straight out of high school and wanting to go to college for music, is that it's a frustrating experience. Especially in that era, because there wasn't an internet and Savannah, GA was a backwater. I knew there was exciting new music out there in the world, and I wanted to be in it. I wanted to be playing it, I wanted to be writing it, and I had literally no idea there were actual colleges for that stuff that I could get into. So I was at a glorified community college, stuck in the "music education" curriculum,  and being that I didn't want to be a vocalist (at that time) or an elementary school music teacher, it didn't take me long to wash out.

I was in it for the art, man ... and my 17 year old eyes just couldn't see it happening there.

Dr. Wacker was a quotable dude. I don't know if he originated that turn of phrase or not, but in my mind I'll always remember him dropping that one on me in freshman music theory. I was all like "where's the cool shit? ... and why do I have to learn about writing 4 note chorales?"

Well here I am like 20 years later, and the irony, she is thick. Read on, and you'll find out why.

So the track you are listening to, is built entirely around a thing I encountered by accident, called boomwhackers. These are typically used as instructional aids for ... you guessed it ... elementary music education. It was late Thursday night, The Thumbless Hitchhikers had just finished packing up after an epic jam session and the hang was in full effect.

Bryan (our drummer) leaves for a minute and comes back to the shed with an armload of these colored tubes and hands everyone two of them. What happened next was actually pretty damn magical: a spontaneous poly-rhythmic eruption of jam, the likes of which were stylistically from another planet compared to what we usually play. The Hitchhikers are a blues jam band for chrissakes, but here we are sounding for all the world, like a tiny Blue Man Group, and with zero practice!

It just happened out of nowhere, the funk descended upon the shed, and as quickly as it started ... it was all over maybe a half hour later, but I was stoked. I encountered something that set my mind on fire: native creativity. 

I haven't felt that in a very long time, and what I mean by that is that I didn't have to think about it at all. There were no wrong notes to play, and if you could feel the rhythm, you didn't have to think about that too hard either. It created a sort of direct, unfiltered connection to the soul.

I think Bryan could tell my gears were turning, because he insisted that I borrow his boomwhackers and take them back to my studio. "My kids never play with them anyhow", he said. So in the morning, on my last remaining day of vacation, I sent the kids off to school, got a cup of coffee and headed up to my attic studio. This track literally started with plugging in some microphones hitting record and just seeing what sort of sounds came out. There's not a single part on this that I played more than once (though as you can tell there are plenty of track overdubs).

It really all comes back to the elegant simplicity of the boomwhackers. There are only 6 of them (a pentatonic scale plus an octave), and they are as intuitive as a hammer: you hit them on something and they make a noise.

Put a different way: reducing your options clears the way to creativity. 

This is an oft-touted cliche in the world of music production, but until now I never really had the understanding. These days, those of us who are into this sort of thing like to sit down in front of our computers, fire up our DAW of choice and start fiddling.

If someone had released a "boomwhackers" software synth, I'd have downloaded it, and then spent the morning dorking around with the parameters ... choosing the material, the resonance dampening, the scale, the octave, the shape, etc. As it was, there were 6 choices, and therefore I had a 1 in 6 chance of every decision being a keeper. Which is why I finished this entire track before lunch yesterday.

Props to Dr. Wacker for planting the seed of this knowledge in my brain 20 years ago. Cool insight, dude.

The Magic of Vinyl

As the cover implies: a literal explosion of funk

Ladies and gentlemen I have discovered a new hobby and that is crate digging.

Yes indeed! I got a new turntable for Christmas with the vague intent to learn enough about scratch technique to make some of my own original scratches (versus finding new ways to fake it on the computer or creative ways to re-use the same 12 decent scratch samples I've got already).

Having owned a real DJ turntable for a grand total of four days, I haven't done much, but I've discovered it's possible to get some cool sounds without really knowing what you're doing. As an instrument, it's very promising.

What I have unexpectedly discovered, is that the experience of hunting down forgotten vinyl gems and listening to them in their entirety on a good system in a chill room, perhaps with an adult beverage or two is epic. 

Is vinyl really better than CDs or downloads? I think it depends on what you mean by "better", honestly. 

Without getting too nerdily pedantic about it, all sounds are pressure waves in air. Digital audio works by sampling the wave every so often and reconstructing it as shown here.

this is pretty much how digital audio works

physical noise (record not moving)

CD's sample at 44.1 thousand times per second, which is pretty damn fast. Vinyl on the other hand is limited only by the physical limitations of the lathe which cut the disk, which is to say continuous, and by comparison virtually limitless.

I set my turntable up through my computer's audio interface, which I've got running at 96 thousand samples per second (more than twice CD resolution) and I can definitely hear a difference. In terms of resolution, vinyl wins hands down. That being said, vinyl has a ton of surface noise, scratches, pops, hisses, etc ... so in terms of clarity, it looses to CD or downloads.

Listening to vinyl is like watching ultra-high-def TV through glasses with some pits and scratches in them, but in the end that aspect is almost irrelevant.

What I mean by "irrelevant" is that vinyl records are fun in a way that CDs and downloads simply can never be. There is a physicality to getting off your derriere, braving the dustmites, mildew and recovering crackheads at a local thrift store and emerging as Indiana Jones from the jungle with hitherto unknown funky treasures to grace the shelves of your musical lair.

Not only do you get the music, but you get large format artwork, and liner notes, and on average it costs less than a dollar for a whole album! Downloading from iTunes or Amazon is a positively sterile experience. It's the difference between going to a night club and going to a dentist's office.

If like me, you are too young to actually remember the era from which this stuff originated, and at the same time, are too old to give a damn about the crapola on the radio these days, then I'm telling you: You need to check this out. You're in the sweet spot for some musical archaeology.

here is some vintage funk I acquired yesterday via the most excellent Vertical House Records down at the Flying Monkey in Huntsville. Best $5 I've spent in years!

The podcast is an uncompressed 24-bit wav file recorded at 96 KHz, but downsampled to 44.1 (otherwise it'd be huge). This is an mp3 (as close to what vinyl sounds like as I can squeeze through the intarwebz) Get out there and hear the real thing for yourself!

Bar-Kays: Attitudes