Put it on and do something else and you are in your own movie with an amazing soundtrack. Is it a track? Or an EP? An ambient gem, for slightly dystopic yoga sessions, half an hour of beautiful cinematic soundscapes evoke…well you’ll just have to see. Good for dreaming, sleeping, meditating. Furniture music, you do not have to pay it much attention, but you can if you like and that rewards too. Listen to the whole epic free or buy if you will at Bandcamp: [October Requiem]. LMK your experience of it in the comments.
Quick review of both the magic and the warts of Positive Grid’s Bias-X. We chase a single sound a couple of different times using the new AI feature, along the way finding out where Bias X still has far to go. The sound we are chasing is a classic Vox Chime. For more on that, and how the Vox chime differs from the Fender jangle, see this livestream: https://youtu.be/5k74DFYpzJo?si=I_OEhMy8pTtYcdvY.
The Magic: AI really is fun to dial in sounds with as long as you are good at a little prompt engineering; It sounds great.
The Warts: CPU hog, need to be connected to the internet, so MS, Google, FB, and everyone all want to call home and glitch out your audio, unreported latency
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.
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 KuamoÊ»o.
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.Â
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 .Â
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).
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 HawaiÊ»i 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).
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.
Geek out: This is a run through of three of the four amp models on Neural DSP’s archetype Nolly Amp sim (the three leftmost models)combined with some live-tweaked drums and playing guitar synth at the same time as the Nolly with Matt Tytel’s amazing Vital VST. I almost lost it a few times, but managed to hang on by a thread.
Lee Perry, from the British National Portrait Gallery
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? 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.
