gonna come down and blow it all away”
From my 1988 one man band, rubberfish, comes john-lennon-wannabe-with-a-cheap-casio-and-a-rhyming-dictionary cheery apocalypse, perfect for today, with tornadoes, floods, landslides, fires, and elections. Remember, the big wind’s gonna come down and blow it all away, anyway. recorded on 4-track cassette. remind me to tell you the story of Rubberfish some day.
Hello friends! Things are heating up at Way Music.
Tonight I want to introduce a new podcast, “Rico’s Place,” where I sit in with guitarist and storyteller extraordinaire Rico Woltz, who holds space in Waikiki most evenings by the ABC store on the corner of Kuhio and Kuamoʻo.
In Episode 1, “The Last Thing You’d Ever Think,” we play some original music together, and Rico tells the story of one of the neighborhood’s street people, a Hollywood actor.
Rico is an amazing guitarist, and a keen social commentator with a sharp eye and a ready ear that has allowed him to learn about people in the neighborhood, housed, unhoused, and tourist alike, who come back to chat and listen to the music again and again.
Tonight’s episode is a little less than ten minutes long, just the right length for listening to during a task, and if you like the music, the whole set for that night can be found on soundcloud .
The Danelectro 59X12 is a unique electric 12-string guitar known for its exceptional build quality and distinctive sound. Unlike traditional 12-string guitars, the Danelectro 59X12 features reversed string order, with the octave up string being struck first. This arrangement adds a bright attack and extra chime to the sound, giving it a unique character and resemblance to Nashville tuning.
One of the standout features of the 59X12 is its pickup configuration. It is equipped with a bridge double lipstick humbucker with a split coil push-pull switch, along with a dog ear single coil at the neck. This setup offers a wide range of tone combinations, allowing players to achieve different flavors of chime and jangle. Additionally, the unsplit humbucker and the single coil pickups are capable of handling distortion exceptionally well, making the 59X12 a versatile instrument for various musical styles.
When playing the Danelectro 59X12, you may find yourself using the tone control more prominently, especially when utilizing the coil split feature, as it can produce a overly trebly sound. It is worth noting that the tight arrangement of the saddles on the guitar can make setup a bit challenging.
In terms of amplification, my favorite chime setting involves using the bridge and neck pickups together, with the coil split engaged. This configuration delivers articulate yet throaty chime or jangle, depending on the amp and settings. Amp choices that complement the 59X12’s sound include treble channel Voxy amps with a touch of tremolo and reverb for chime or a Fender Twin style with the gain set at 7. A more modern sound would be a crystal clean amp like a JC120 with a touch of chorus. The JC 120 always sounds a little clinical to me, so I opt for a very clean tube amp like a Soldano on low gain. Adding the chorus to the signal can result in a tone Andy Summers might approve, or fit with a clean section of a metal song.
Whether played through traditional amplifiers or amp simulations, the Danelectro 59X12 offers a unique sonic palette with its incredible chime, jangle, and distortion capabilities. I obviously don’t own all the above amps, so I create most of the amps sounds using sims. If you’d like to hear and see different setups for the 59X12, I recommend checking out the “All That Jangles does not Chime” video on my Digital Guitarist Youtube Channel (link).
When I was sixteen, I used to think about 2020, saying to myself that I would be sixty then and that’d be strange, but it turned out way weirder than I could have imagined.
16/61 is a set of conversations between my sixteen-year-old self and the more or less present-tense version. The sixteen-year-old gets veto power on all the music, so I designed it to impress. That is, it has some loud stuff!
I have these five songs ready, a nice little EP’s worth with more on the way.
Not so much an archive, 16/61 arrives at an understanding between the two, an alienated runaway teen and an unexpected grownup. I’ve loosely drawn on sounds and music that I made and played as a teen to record now. Sometimes I had music but no words; sometimes vice-versa; sometimes scraps of each. Other times, it was just a sound—tone, really—that I had in my head that made me feel alive; Or maybe a story that was just true enough to run with.
These interior sounds transform when they meet the air. Making them real is a live process, like guitar feedback that grows the tones into things wondrous or terrible (or both!). When they enter a space, the sounds in my head can be shaped and pointed in a direction, ridden like waves, or grown like gardens, but never actually controlled. The experience is more like traveling together than being the boss of it, and I love the trip.
Music remains a place of refuge, a place for working things through, thinking and feeling outside the language box, for the sheer fun of playing to discover what I’ll hear this time.
For this gift – perhaps to you, but foremost just to me—I owe a troubled kid who chose to dream and to dare.
I just found the link to Richard’s award-winning short film of his “amplified poetry.” That’s me playing my digital guitar setup underneath the vocals and over the drone of Richard’s Moog. If you are curious what a digital guitarist is, take a look at my YouTube channel of the same name. I am pretty sure I also did the mastering for this track.
From Richard’s Vimeo:
Screened live at the 41st Hawaiʻi International Film Festival (November 4 – 28, 2021); an Official Selection and Award Winner for the Best Shorts Competition in 2021 (La Jolla, CA); an Official Selection Semi-Finalist for the 2021 Munich Music Video Awards (Germany), and screened in person during the International Poetry Film Festival in Venice, CA on April 30, 2022, Richard Hamasaki’s film and amplified poem features concrete poet & artist Thad Higa & digital guitarist Rich Rath. “I AM A PLASTIC” was originally published in Read Water: An Anthology (San Diego: Locked Horn Press, 2020).
RIchard Hamasaki
A short film I made a few years ago for a piece of music that I recorded entirely on my iPad. See if you can guess what the source of the video is before the song ends! I used Sergey Grishakov’s wonderful free mastering app, Matchering, to create a master that crosses the sound of Miles Davis’s “So What” for the upper registers and Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” for the lower registers.
I’m the only one playing. Recorded live in one take, never to be repeated. I thought I accidentally deleted but didn’t. I almost lost it.
The image is roast cauliflower I made.
Hardly of this world, how can he be gone then?
Have a couple of hours of Scratch to mourn our loss. Playlist follows.
Do we truly live upon this earth?
Nezahualcoyotl (1402-1472)
Not for ever on this earth, only a short time here.
All things, even jade will crack,
all things, even gold, will break,
even the quetzal’s plumage fades;
not for ever on this earth, only a short time here.
* Where: https://youtu.be/zmL6pAlWmLQ
* When: I hope you can stop by next Thursday night around midnight (Or Friday Morning if you are on the East Coast!)
7th installment (take 2) of “Sleepwalk with the Digital Guitarist.” When I explained to my 9-year-old nephew that my show last Thursday was called “don’t wake the baby,” and that I messed up and there was no sound turned on for the whole hour I played, he remarked, “maybe you did that ‘don’t wake the baby’ thing a little too much.” It was a great set, sorry about the glitch, so I will try the same thing again this coming Thursday. I am just going for a mellow vibe and we’ll see what happens. Part of it will be on the new 12 string, but I will probably switch it up a bit too. I won’t wake the baby though, promise. But this time with the sound on. 🙂
Just before Midnight, THursday May 28, til about 1 AM Honolulu time. That’s 6 AM opn the East Coast and 3 AM on the west for you early risers and late nighters!to one, Thus
“Sleepwalk with the Digital Guitarist #6” I’ll explore all things Mersey/Athens/Brit Invasion/Hoboken exploring the jangle and the chime by introducing the newest member of the family, my Danelectro 59×12 twelve string run through different amps and such. What is the difference between “Needles & Pins” throaty Vox chime (or hard days night, or …) and the fendery jangle or early REM (or anything from 80s Athens or Hoboken)? What difference does the guitar make? How about different amp Sims? (although I’ll do the amp shootout some other time!)
If you want an idea of what the sleepwalks are like, here is Sleepwalk #3:
