Way Music

99 Percent Blues live at (de)Occupy Honolulu

Rich — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:56:23 +0000

Here we are holding down the Sunday jam at Thomas Square for (de)Occupy Honolulu: Michael, Laulani, Dave and Laulani, who is trying to video while singing backups and playing ukulele, and myself on slide and singing. Michael plays upside down and backwards, Jimi Hendrix style, and David has an endless stream of classic folk songs and his own originals. Michael and Laulani took turns laying down the Hawaiian songs beautifully, some of their own, some classics. We are there at Thomas Square, corner of Beretania and Ward, just like in the song, every Sunday, along with Food not Bombs, at 3 PM until dark. I won’t be able to make it this coming week, so I hope five more will take my place! I’ll be back the following week though, after taking a break to Molokai.

Thomas Square Blues

Rich — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 01:19:22 +0000

Extension of “99 percent blues,” acoustic with slide guitar and my sweet new Gibson acoustic on rhythm. The new verses reflect the 8 raids on the Thomas Square ~~Occupy~~ Honolulu encampment. Still there though! Come down Sunday afternoon for Food Not Bombs and a jam with Laulani Teale and myself. Bring yer instruments if ya gottem and some munchies.

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99 percent blues

Rich — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 06:04:32 +0000

OK, so what’s a blues song without some words? I finished my tribute to Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House” by cutting some vocals dedicated to the Occupy movement, and the ninety-nine percent struggling to wake up from the nightmare the one percent is inflicting on us every day with corruption, oppression, and greed. Oh, and if you want a blues song without some words, here is the instrumental version.

The directions to the camp are in the song. Beretania and Ward is the location of the Occupy Honolulu camp at Thomas Square. Thomas Square was the site where on July 26, 1843, Admiral Richard Darton Thomas returned the Kingdom of Hawai?i to the Hawaiians after the first illegal takeover, by the British. King Kamehameha III said “Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ??ina i ka Pono” (meaning “the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness”) in his speech at the ceremony marking his restoration. The sentence has become the state motto of Hawaii, incorporated into its seal. The second illegal overthrow was of course the one under which Hawai?i eventually became part of the United States. That is why we cross out “occupy” in our name, to show solidarity with the already occupied kingdom, otherwise known as the most heavily militarized state in the Union.

Come down and show some love for ~~Occupy~~ Honolulu if you are in town!

(de)Occupy Honolulu

Here are the lyrics:

99 Percent Blues

Creative Commons Commons Share and Share Alike type 3 license

(based on Jimi Hendrix’s Red House and a couple hundred other blues songs)

There’s a red house over yonder
Bank’ll get me one of those

There’s a red house over yonder

Bank they got me one of those

But I couldn’t get no bailout money

And the bank, well it foreclosed

I was standing on the corner

of Beretania and Ward

Holding signs there on the corner

of Beretania and Ward

I got the 99 blues

And that’s all I can afford

That’s ok I still got my guitar if they don’t take that away.

Police say get off the corner

You can’t occupy this space

Police say get off the corner

You can’t occupy this space

But i f they haul me off calling for justice

Five more will take my place

Extra Verses

I got three jobs

I can barely pay my rent

I got three jobs

I can barely pay my rent

I got those 99 blues

It ain’t like the one percent.

Corporations banks and lobbies

Bought the laws beyond a doubt

Corporations banks and lobbies

Bought the laws beyond a doubt

But when we raise our voice in protest

Its a crime to point it out

maison rouge a la façon du jimi

Rich — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 08:05:09 +0000

pale shadow of the right rev. jimi’s “red house”
~~version 2, better than yesterday’s~~

Version 3, da best one. There is also a vocal version, 99 Percent Blues, dedicated to ~~Occupy~~ Honolulu. This is the instrumental side.

there's a red house over yonder, that's where my baby stays

There’s a red house over yonder,
That’s where my baby stays.
There’s a red house over yonder,
That’s where my baby stays.
I ain’t been home to see my baby
In 99 and one half days.

Rogue Guitar, Adios Sierra Madre

Rich — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 05:03:51 +0000

Here is the last installment of my slide guitar recording from Sierra Madre. I think it is the best sounding one yet.

Rogue Slide Guitar, Installment 2

Rich — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 03:31:39 +0000

Here is the second installment of the Rogue guitar, this one called telephone blues, cuz of the ending. And the pic is me serenading my nephew, Kieran (in the car seat) with Monisha driving.

Rich, Kieran, and Monisha

Rogue Guitar, installment 1

Rich — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 01:37:16 +0000

Here is the project for the next few weeks: slide guitar fest installment 1.

I will be learning how to record resonator guitar, play it, and pick up the ins and outs of my new digital field recorder, a Marantz PMD 671 with the basic preamp mod by Oade Bros. More on that another time.

Rogue Resonator

I just got a new guitar, a Rogue cheapo resonator model, made in Korea. The neat thing about resonator guitars is that most of the tone is in the tin pan that sits under the strings, so I (actually Ty at Guitar Works) replaced the one that came with it with a spun aluminum jobbie from Beard Guitars and put in an ebony/maple bridge and it sounds awesome.

The recording is through two matched Oktava mics set in an X about level with the twelfth fret from about three feet away to get a little of the room. I am going to try some different positions, maybe putting one mic on the resonator and the second a ways back to pick up the room ambiance next.

Update: I had the good fortune of playing a 1936 Dobro today and have come to appreciate that a vintage Dobro has certain advantages over the Rogue! Sweet guitar, so thanks to the folks at Pasadena Guitars for letting me try it, along with some nice acoustics and some sweet amps, especially the Matchless Independence 35. A steal at $3395, but I left it there, can you believe it?

http://www.pasadenaguitars.net/

Torroar

Rich — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 07:28:44 +0000

I took a one second clip of an audio recording of the tornado roar in Joplin, MO and stretched, remixed, and layered it back together, kind of the opposite synthesis method to granulization. This is using some of what I learned while making the tweets soundscape and while remixing the July 29 Todos Somos Arizona civil disobedience action against Wackenhut in LA. I hope no one thinks this is belittling the tragedy, it is just that the sounds inside the tornado are somewhat awesome in the older sense of the word.

Here is the clip that provided all the fuel for the remix. Nothing added soundwise to the remix other than what is in this one second.

And here is the remix, done in Ubuntu using Tapestrea and Audacity:

Amongst the guitar players: conservative fetishization and its discontents ;^)

Rich — Tue, 31 May 2011 00:24:28 +0000

Recently, Peter Kirn over at the excellent blog Create Digital Music wrote an article about Antares, the makers of the much misused and reviled Autotune, and their experimental onboard guitar processor that brings it to the guitar, an instrument that already has it (they are called frets). It set off an interesting discussion that mostly bears out a couple of things I have thought about guitarists (of which I am one) for a long time. First, we are usually really conservative when it comes to technology. Second, we usually simultaneously have a hardware fetish: When we do want tech, we want a physical thing even when there are software solutions that do the exact same thing, often better, often for free.

Got to have that box to stomp on, gotta feel it. As an avowed tube snob for the first thirty years of my playing, I have a keen understanding of this. Guitars have vibrating strings sunk into resonant wood. Tubes compress and distort in some wonderful non-linear way that creates a feedback loop, from guitarist to strings to wood to pickups to amp to speakers and back to the player. Its a little mystical and still gives me the warm fuzzies (as opposed to the solid state cold fuzzies). This is no BS and there is a connection.

But tube snobbery has fallen on hard times lately IMHO. Yes, I still think single coils through a tube amp sounds great, but digital modeling has gotten way better over the past ten years, and much of the responsiveness and harmonic structure of tube compression and distortion is available on my laptop. For example, this is all laptop guitars and it sounds as good as tubes to me, both the spanky, new string sound of the rhythm and the just-on-the-edge-of-distorted lead. Plus the Hammond B3 sound is through the guitar and the laptop too. Try bringing a real one of those through TSA, which I did with this whole setup. And try to get this out of a tube amp. Same guitar, same day, same laptop, same song. Its to the point that I never play my lovely vintage tube amp any more, which is a bit of a shame. It has no master volume and I live in a condo, so that is how its going to be. While I give up a few things, like responsive feedback (of the Jimi variety this time) and early deafness, my tonal pallete is vastly expanded along other axes, so to speak. A look around waymusic or listening in on the waydio will give you an idea of what I mean.

My amp, the ampeg vt40

I still have a longstanding plan to lug the old tube monster (see image) and the SG out to a practice room with some new strings and earplugs, but somehow have not had time to get around to it. I also had to test drive the newest piece of future vintage gear, the all tube, no nonsense Vox Night Train. It rocks, but I probably won’t drop the five bills for it cuz I can get close enough with my laptop. But I think the guy in the video is pretty much what we tube snobs look like to the rest of the world…just not aging gracefully, no?

The thing that most of us guitarists have not figured out yet, and which gear companies don’t want us to know, is that anything that can be modelled as a DSP circuit in a piece of hardware can be modelled just as well or better, and cheaper too, in software on a standard issue laptop. Its the nature of DSP. My favorite example is the thousand plus dollar digital echoplex vs the free vst plugin Mobius, which is in effect, 8 echoplexes with no limit on the loop lengths. Remember, going digital means we are already out of the analog realm of the tube snob, even if the thing is in a box. But there must be something about the FEEL of that box, right? I think that is nonsense and habit rather than ears.

There is a wonderful piece of research that my friend Jon Sterne told me about, where a Stanford Prof played back different kinds of music to incoming students in different digital formats. What he found was that they liked the sound of 128K mp3 files, complete with hiss, more than the sound of uncompressed audio which was technically much better. Why? Habit. That is what they are used to hearing so that is what they like.

I think this is much of what my cousins the vinyl snobs hear in their LP collections, which have to be massively EQd and adjusted in a giant gnarly kludge to compensate for intrinsic sonic weaknesses of scratching sound into slabs of petroleum byproduct before it ever gets to the main stage of the amplifier, and sounds different on the inside of the platter than on the outside to boot. But cuz will insist that he (and its always a guy. sigh.) hears a warmth in the vinyl that is missing from digital audio, no matter how good the format. They are hearing something, but it is not intrinsic to the music, it is an artifact of the vinyl, and they like it.

So what is Antares doing? They have put a mini-computer into the underside of a guitar — forty thousand bucks of hardware according to the video — whoo wee, wish I had that! — that brings us guitarists all that autotune goodness that has done such wonders for pop music and the news .

So this is where the discussion gets interesting on the CDM blog. One group of tech embracers drool (and we do that sometimes) over the possibility of getting their hands on one of those $40k guitars while the other says, phooey, you lose the feel. Well guitarists, listen up: I’ll give you most of one of those 40k jobbers for free. Autotune is software. So is GSnap, a free VST plugin. There is your 95%. There are about five other ways of doing it too. And the last five percent is doable with some DIY noodling, along with lots of other stuff that that guitar can’t touch because the processor is artificially limited to doing that one thing.

Ah, but the feel, the bends, the touch — without the $40k guitar, it is all for naught alas. One of the features many guitarists lusted after (and we do that sometimes) was instant retuning. It has been possible since the beginning to transpose midi, so I have experimented a lot with doing the instant retune trick on my midi guitar. Here is the rub though: The gizmo retunes the signal, but not the resonance of the wood, the frequency of the strings, or the quiet sound of the acoustics of an electric guitar — all those stay in the actual tuning, leading for me to a tremendous cognitive dissonance. Here it is about the feel, and you would have to play really loud to offset that dissonance in the aural dimension, and still be left with the haptic dissonance. I am sure, in fact, that the guitar mix for the demo video is run straight to the mixing board so that we cannot hear the actual acoustic sound of the guitar bleed into it. That is why the guitar comes through much clearer than the the voices.

Autotune guitar is a boondoggle, a gizmo. Anything it can do with its processor, your laptop can do, probably better and for free, with its processor. Let the guitar do what it is made for, which is get an interesting signal out to the mangling stuff that follows. A hex pickup along with your regular pups is actually a useful piece of hardware for this. Use the computer you already own to do the rest. The hardware makes you do what it does. Not that I am against hardware…I’m a guitarist, so there is always some new thing that I sure would like.

Software, when it is nice, can be made to do what you do (most of the time). That is why I opted for the no-synths-built-in synth box when I did get a midi guitar setup. I’d rather use my ideas than what somebody pre-decides for me, which is what the pricier guitar synth boxes are doing. In fact, the guitar synth box itself could be done away with if there was a six-in soundcard interface that could feed the hex signal to the computer. All that pitch recognition and midification could be done on the laptop too if there was the right I/O. I’m sure Radio shack has the adapter somewhere….

Gig! plz come! May 19th…more later

Rich — Mon, 09 May 2011 09:31:00 +0000

Gig! May 18 at MIA at Fresh Cafe, 7 pm. Here is the flyer…