We met with some friends to (finally) catch Tommy Emmanuel in person at the Patriot Place Showcase Live venue last night. Tommy was in superb form. It was quite an experience to be sitting only about 40′ from the world’s greatest living guitarist.

Some highlights were And So It Goes, which brought tears to my eyes; Somewhere Over the Rainbow, ditto; the low end in Initiation (the one point where the P.A. volume was appropriate) literally shook me in my seat; and the Rick’n'Tommy duet to close the main show was great fun with some classics like Wake Up Little Suzy and Love Me Tender. Tommy did an extended encore, which included his awesome Beatles medley, and he even received a $1 tip from one of the waitresses! Yeah, that (read: she) was a little weird.
 

Only three minor disappointments: the house system was cranked up WAY too loud (I was sitting right next to the sound guy, so there really was no excuse – except that he must be partly deaf), Those Who Wait was MIA, and Guitar Boogie was played on an ancient 1934 Kalamazoo into a flat condenser dynamic-looking mic (fun, but the tune literally loses ALL its punch that way).

Everything else was an absolute delight – including Rick Price who has a great voice and an excellent stage presence. We all liked his music and his performance a lot.

BIG THANKS to Brian for spotting the tickets for this when the tour was added!

Links to additional pics below. Here’s hoping he was able to get that shirt back to Wal-Mart before heading on to Norfolk-Norfolk-Norfolk.

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10

We went to see Star Trek last week (twice). I was impressed and completely enjoyed it (hence the second viewing) and expect lots of other folks did too – it’s grossed almost $200M in only 8 days – but I’ll save a real review for another time.

Although I’m not awestruck by Giacchino’s new Star Trek theme – maybe it’ll grow on me – I was fascinated to hear how he worked Alexander Courage’s original into his new one for the end credits.

Here’s Courage discussing the concept, composition and production of the original T.V. theme, with a little surprise near the end.

 
The underlying “train” feel, with an overlaid, lyrical melody that Courage describes here is exactly the sort of thing I was shooting for in the little T.V. theme I did with SONAR and the JV-1080 years ago.

It’s been bugging me for a while – partly because I miss what little I remember of Austin and partly because this site has a regular readership of, like, 12, so I recognize pretty much all of the regulars’ IP addresses – but I think I finally figured this one mystery out.

The person hitting the site from Zymurgy has got to be… PHIL!

Am I right?

If so, are you still ‘tooning?

Some pics from the old days… CLICK TO ENLARGE

• A promo band shot (by… Jay Silverman, I think… back when he first started?)

Ron, Bob, Tony, Brian M., Brian A., Jay

• Another promo from that same shoot. Yes, Virginia, we were a show band. (duh)

clockwise from bottom: Ron, my old bass(!), Jay, Tony, Bob M., Brian A.
Brian M. in the middle

• Mugging on the job

Brian A., Bob (above), Brian M., Ron (squatting), John, Jay, Tony (above), Dave

• Giant City Brunch ’06

John, Brian M., Tony, Bob B., Bob M.

• Ron + Years = …?

While working on a new site today I had Michael Kamen‘s score from Band of Brothers playing in the background. Track 17 (Why We Fight- Discovery of the Camp) is the portion of the score that accompanies what is, to me, easily the most compelling and devastating scene in the entire series. If you’ve seen it then you know what I’m referring to. If you haven’t, then you should simply rent it, as any attempt I might make to describe it would pale to insignificance by comparison – especially if you watch that episode in context with the rest of the series. Anyway, the music triggered a distraction I had to follow up on.

A phrase in that track at about 10:22 reminded me of something I received via email from Michael long ago, which became all the more dear to me after his passing in 2003. I thought I’d lost it, but thankfully I had not. It was sitting alone on a 3-1/2” floppy disk (among several hundred I keep in boxes under the desk here).

About thirteen years ago – back around the time that the Mosaic Netscape browser became Netscape Navigator; long before every company on the planet had a ‘.com’ internet address – one of the very first web “sites” I created was something called The Kamen Conundrum. In fact, the entire 4-or-5-page ‘site’ was just a sub-section of my personal site at Connix back then. I’ve had no luck finding it via the Wayback Machine, although I imagine I have the pages and audio files archived away somewhere on one of my old IOmega ZIP disks, which are not readily accessible at the moment, as I’ve retired the system that contained the drive for those.

The Kamen Conundrum was a friendly jab at Michael’s apparent penchant for a particular musical phrase (do-re-me-re in solfege), which I dubbed “Doodle-Dee-Doo”. At the time I owned a number of Michael’s scores on CD, and one day I happened to notice that this phrase appeared somewhere on pretty much every one I had: The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Don Juan DeMarco, Lethal Weapon II, and several others I can’t recall at the moment. At the time, this ‘discovery’ seemed worthy of Internet publication (uhm… remember, this was back when The Spot was popular…), so I crafted a few pages with audio clips of the passages and put them up on my site.

After the site had been up for quite some months, I received a blank email with a single WAV file attachment. The From address was not recognizable to me and I actually almost just deleted it. Thankfully, I did not. As it began to play, at first I thought it was my cousin, who is named Michael, who’d been trotting the globe and who I understood to be in London at the time. His voice and speech patterns had a striking resemblance to MK’s. It wasn’t until I restarted it after getting halfway through, completely confused, that I heard “…this is Michael Kamen, in London…”. I think I stopped breathing for a moment just then. Here’s what he said:

…this is Michael Kamen in London, having finally accessed your… interesting message to the world. Uhm… you’re not entirely wrong. You’ve got one doodle-dee-doo. Uhm… there’s something you’re really missing, man, and you really have to go back over everything – I’m really sorry to tell you this. Ah, I’ll give you a hint in my own inimitable singing voice. It is possible to describe it as “doodle-dee-doo”, but you need an extra “doo-doo”. And it’s [singing] “doodle-dee-doo-doo-doo”, not just simply [singing] “doodle-dee-doo… vuh-vuh-vuh-voom”. And as, uh, John McClane would say, “Doodle-dee-doo, mutherfucker”.

Although I actually did go back over everything, I never did figure out what the reference was that Michael was trying to describe. We subsequently exchanged several emails on the subject, and I did get him to admit that “my” version appeared in many of the scores – he adding that it was simply a very ‘satisfying’ phrase. But both he and, later, Chris Brooks his (often) producer stated that there was indeed a musical phrase / homage running through almost all of Michael’s work, and that it was something different from the one I’d “discovered”.

To this day, it remains – to me – a happy mystery and welcome memory of a guy who left us far, far too early.

Wish I had more to write about, musically, but I’ve just spent the last month – plus – working 12-to-14-hour days, 7-days-per-week, helping to build a sales and marketing infrastructure where I work.

The company’s well over five years old at this point, so it’s sane to ask why this might have been necessary. The answer is that we were originally a technology company that was created and bred to be sold for its intellectual property. That didn’t happen. So we recently got yet another new CEO (the 4th or 5th, depending on how one counts), were re-classified back to “startup” status, and are now going to be selling a product based on the IP we’ve developed over the last 5 years. This transition took place over the last 6 months and entailed enormous effort on the part of almost everyone in the company. Yes, almost.

Anyway, selling a product in volume requires something more than the half-assed CRM system we were using to track the (relatively few) customers we had. That had to be rebuilt and integrated with a new, internet-based public face. Thankfully, we have a guy on-site who thoroughly understands the CRM side of this equation. He was able to do some amazing stuff in that area during the time we had. My focus was elsewhere, and included:

• an entire commercial-grade, PHP-driven web site – reclaimed from a SaaS/CMS company (eMagine) who was charging us by the hour for making changes to things as simple as a web form field;
• a separate staging site;
• two different customer support forums – one of which has a complex access control scheme that will eventually be integrated with customer data from our CRM system;
• policies and procedures for migrating customers over from the ‘old’ system to the new, as well as for site content maintenance (using Dreamweaver and CVS);
• a PHP-based, content-driven document delivery system that requires no changes to the actual listing pages when documents in the listing itself are added, deleted or changed;
• a multi-tiered, access-controlled education center for customers who’ve purchased different levels of support, also based on the above document delivery system;
• dynamic product download pages that automatically update themselves with file sizes, MD5 checksum values, etc;
• auto-regenerating sitemap, automated page redirection (from our old, dead links), interactive Google maps, ‘smart’ menu highlighting, floating navigation menus and lots of other stuff that’s pretty much just a blur, now.

Thankfully, others were responsible for writing the volumes of actual page content of the site. And the web design firm did a very nice job, for their part. They did most of the interactive Javascript and cross-browser compatibility stuff, and were exceptionally responsive given the timeframe we had (weeks, not months). Even so, they originally wanted to maintain each page of the site as an individual file – with all the duplication of HTML and Javascript that would have entailed (er… “want to move that ad banner to the right 3 pixels? sorry – you gotta edit 60 files – arrrrgh!!”).

It used to be the case that many (most?) developers I ran into were also musicians or at least musically inclined. Something about being comfortable with things In The Abstract, I think. Most places I’ve worked in the past, if you tossed a whiteboard eraser into a cubicle farm, it’d bounce off of three bass players and a drummer before it hit the ground. Is that not the case any more? Or have they just forgotten about things like D.S. al Coda or al Fine?

Duplication of effort has always bothered me. I have this visceral, negative neuro-associative reaction to making the same change to a system in more than one place. That carries over to having to verbally explain to people multiple times how a system works – especially after it’s been documented with step-by-step instructions that are way simpler even than the “getting started” documents we expect our customers to follow when they install and configure our product. But it seems like I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. Part of the job, I suppose.

Anyway, here we are starting over on a “new” venture with a five-year-old enterprise. Those of use who’ve been there from the beginning are effectively duplicating a lot of the effort we’ve already expended. Maybe it’s one of those “if at first you don’t succeed” things, I don’t know. Experience makes me skeptical. After 30 years of doing this, it’s been the all-too-rare occurrence that people (read: management) ever learn from past mistakes. As such, “try, try again” is starting to sound a lot less like tenacity and a lot more like the endless repetition that some folks use to define the term insanity.

First I want to post a thank-you to Charles Johnson at lgf, whose recent entry introduced me to Tommy Emmanuel, C.G.P. – an absolutely amazing guitarist and performer who is just a supreme joy to listen to and watch. I’ve since picked up his new album The Mystery, which is stunning, and ordered a couple of his instructional DVDs, as I really must know how he does some of the magical things he does.

As I’ve been ramping up on the music thing, and replenishing my tools, the last major item on the list is a 6-string acoustic. A quality 6-string acoustic. I’ve been looking at Taylors. Yes, they’re expensive. Yes, they are worth it. I played a few at Guitar Center a couple weeks ago, comparing them to the Martins, Gibsons and others on hand. No contest. I’ve also done a considerable amount of ‘forum research’, reading numerous posts by serious players on the Acoustic Guitar Forum and elsewhere. I’d pretty much had my sights set on their acoustic-electric 614CE, but really wanted something like that in spruce/rosewood. GC had a 914CE, which strays beyond my budget, and some other more expensive ones when I was there.

Hoping Sam Ash might have some to try – plus I needed to pick up a wide strap for the B-Bender – I stopped in there. Didn’t see what I was looking for. So I tried a few Takamines, which were kinda O-K but not what I’m looking for. As I was getting up to leave I spotted this Larrivee on the counter. Never heard of ‘em. I noticed a very impressive-looking premium sibling inside the display case and thought, heck, I’d give the counter model a try. It was a D-03. Even though I wasn’t interested in a Dread’, I loved this guitar immediately. It played effortlessly and had an exceptionally bright-plus-deep sound (the one I miss from my Lyle 12-string) – easily on par in sound and playability with the Taylors. What’s more, they’re considerably less expensive. I started investigating these and have found that I can get their LV-09E from Trinity Guitars or Notable Guitars for about $1000 less than the best price I can find on a comparable Taylor. At this point it looks like the toughest part of the decision will be whether to go with Trinity or Notable.

In the tenacity department, the current score is: Patty – 1; Bureaucrats – 0. As of yesterday, the interminable controversy initiated by the ADS Coordinator at Patty’s school back in May (previously discussed here) has at least been temporarily resolved. It took getting a number of organizations involved and a lot of hours coming up with the documentation to make the school an offer they basically couldn’t refuse, but in the end they did a complete, 180-degree turnabout on their previous, “non-negotiable” positions. She WILL be allowed to continue her coursework there and she WILL be supported in pursuing this upcoming residency session remotely, which means she won’t have to deal with another Survivor experience (summer version). The executive director of the Vermont Human Rights Commission indicated that our long (but effective) proposal to the school included all the documentation needed to “state a prima facie complaint of disability based discrimination“. Apparently the school recognized this as well, as it took less than 24 hours for them to completely change their previously dissonant tune. A formal complaint to the State of Vermont is still an option, but to be honest, even after the incredible amount of emotional stress they put her through this past summer, neither of us is interested in pursuing legal avenues as long as Patty’s able to continue her academic progress unfettered by idiots who don’t know the law. As long as the stress doesn’t result in another MS exacerbation, we probably won’t take this further. Frankly, we’re both drained by the experience and don’t want to have to think about any of it ever again.

So – time to get back to doing some music!!

Almost exactly a month to the day from when I originally placed the order, this arrived via UPS – Fender’s American Nashville B-Bender Telecaster. This git is Sweet… and Heavy, on multiple levels.

I discovered, eventually, that the real reason for the shipping delay was that earlier this year Music123 was absorbed by the Borg of the retail music instrument industry – Guitar Center. Going all the way back to 1977 – I still recall the smug attitudes of the wannabe-guitar-hero salespeople in their Hollywood store when I was shopping for a new Bass – I’ve never liked Guitar Center. The fact that they’re in the process of gobbling up all competition makes me like them even less. Recently I went to their local brick-and-mortar outlet to play some Taylors and bought a guitar strap. The sales guy was nice enough, but it took him freaking 10 minutes and two different checkout computer stations to ring up that single $6 item. First he wanted a credit card. Then decided that wouldn’t work and asked if I had the exact cash. Luckily I did. Kind of the antithesis of those idiotic Visa commercials where we boobs with cash or a check bring the world to a grinding halt because we’re not falling into lockstep with the rest of the Cashless Society.

Anyway, in this particular case, apparently, part of the reorg process involved moving Music123′s inventory from one state to another. This of course is simple economics and logistics, and perfectly reasonable. What was upsetting was the fact that the customer service organization danced around this fact from the time I began inquiring about the delay. And of course they never mentioned anything about the merger with Guitar Center. I got no less than four different stories “explaining” the delay and shipment, which was very frustrating.

To boot, before I discovered that they’d snorted Music123, I had an online chat support session with one of Guitar Center’s reps while looking for an alternate source. I was told by him that Fender’s Nashville B-Bender had been discontinued (a lie, as it turned out, since there’s no reflection of this on Fender’s site, and it’s still in their 2007 price list), and that they didn’t carry them. At that point, though, this new information made it look like Music123 simply didn’t have the item in stock, was trying to get one, and simply wasn’t telling me. That surmise was supported by experience with Music123 the month before, when I’d ordered a supposedly in-stock American Series Telecaster (before I learned about the Nashville), only to be emailed a week or so later with a notice that the item really wasn’t in stock, and that they wouldn’t get any for weeks – so I canceled. In the long run, I’d have probably been better off ordering from some anonymous piker on EBay. Maybe next time. The way my luck works, zZounds will be carrying them next month.

All’s well that ends well, though, as the guitar is just awesome, and if it really is discontinued I’ll consider myself lucky to have picked up one of the last few. It plays like a dream and has an almost infinite range of sounds due to its added Strat-style center pickup and 5-position pickup switch. And I LOVE having only ONE volume and ONE tone knob – I’ll never understand why this didn’t remain the standard for all electric guitars (the Tele’ – at that time called the “Esquire” – was one of, if not the first). The classic ‘twangy’, Luther Perkins Esquire sound is there, but with the right amp setup, it also has balls to spare. This is all before we even talk about the bender mechanism, which gives it a whole other dimension. The thing was shipped, this time, in a not-very-pretty, but very functional molded case, which prevented a repeat of the shipping damage I experienced with the Vintage ’52 Telecaster, which Fender sends out in a stunning, but not-at-all-appropriate-for-shipping tweed ‘suitcase’ case (full disclosure: I may still buy this case for the Nash’, just ‘cuz they’re so damn cool… .

So color me happy, but a little bit sore. The only drawback (well, there are two, but one is due to my own playing habits) is the guitar’s weight. I haven’t actually weighed it, but this puppy is easily the heaviest thing I’ve had hanging around my neck in a long time, maybe ever – including all the basses I’ve played. Not a surprise, really, since the body is almost 2” thick solid hardwood. Some of that hardwood is routed out where the bender mechanism is installed, but that doesn’t make it any lighter. In fact, possibly adding to the weight is the heavy chrome steel plate Fender uses to close up the back. The Parsons/White version uses plexiglass, which I’m sure is considerably lighter. Either way, this thing definitely needs a wide, padded strap, as it’s pretty heavy just for normal playing, plus the bender mechanism is actuated by pulling down on the guitar neck. The other minor nit is a characteristic of the Tele’ shape itself – the cutaway is a little small for my big hands, so if and when I get ripping into any extremely high-end solos, I’ll need to work on hand position up there to squeeze my hand between the ‘horn’ and the neck.

Anyway, let’s contrast this Music123-cum-Guitar Center experience with the superhuman response one gets from zZounds.

I wanted a practice amp. The BXR is just too heavy to lug up and down stairs and I don’t have room for it in my little music studio / computer office anyway. I started scoping a small guitar-only amp and eventually settled on the Roland Cube 60 after some research on the Telecaster Forum and few other places. I placed the order at 3:35pm this last Wednesday afternoon. The amp and some ancillary junk arrived at about 1:30pm – the next day! Less than 24 hours’ from form submission to delivery to my front door! It’s just a mystery to me how they do this. I’ve received pretty much the same response with other stuff I’ve ordered from them. Basically, the item arrives before you even get the tracking information for shipment. And I haven’t found better prices. Needless to say, I highly, highly recommend them and pray to all that is good and holy that Guitar Center never sets their sights on acquiring them.

The Cube, by the way, is mightily impressive – again, on several levels. First, it’s LOUD! I could easily use this thing for a small outdoor gig. THAT kind of loud. Inside gig – no question. You’d never guess this by looking at its size, which is roughly twice as big as the old 5-watt “Pignose” amp I had years ago (which ran on batteries). The design is apparently very efficient with the 60 watts it sports. But that’s not the half of it. Like the Nashville, this thing has personality to spare. Rather than go into all the details here, you can hear the various things this amp can do at zZounds’ listing (click the “Docs, Multimedia” tab). There are also two video demos at Same Day Music that are pretty entertaining – just scroll down and click on “Cube 60 Interactive Demo” under “Multimedia”. Very cool.

Some folks apparently dislike the idea (and sound) of amp emulators (aka “modelers”), where digital signal processing in the amp modifies the output to sound like, oh, maybe an old Fender Princeton, a Marshall Stack, etc. Me, I’m happy to have an amp that’ll do what this baby does, and it’s my firm belief that only a very few purists are going to be able to tell the difference between the sound of this amp’s emulated configurations and the real thing. Unless one is in a really intimate setting, the acoustics are never, ever that good. And given the difference in price and physical logistics, the Cube is a steal, IMHO. With its tuner, line and recording outputs, multiple footswitch controls, the almost infinite number of amp/effects combinations, the “JC Clean” mode, tiny footprint, light weight (not much heavier than the new Tele’, in its hardshell case) and obvious reserve of sheer volume, this piece of gear rocks, both literally and figuratively. I can’t wait to play out somewhere with it.

Speaking of playing out, Patty and I went to see Taylor Hicks at the Warner Theater in Torrington, CT on Aug. 10th. It was a great show! That boy can jam on the harmonica, let me tell you! The high point for me was their encore: Supertramp’s Take the Long Way Home – one of my very favorites. Haunting, the way they sidled into it and the way Hicks and his sax player pulled off their parts. I appreciate cover tunes when they basically emulate the original -OR- essentially create a whole new version of the tune. Bad-imitation covers bore me. This one was great. More on the rest of the show later, maybe – this is getting a bit long as it is.

Guess I should gripe blindly into the empty blogosphere more often. The Gibson was ready for pickup last night, so at least I have that back now. The other stuff… not so much.

The past week or so has been a series of frustrations. Mostly waiting for other folks to get their acts together. I’m sure I’ve let people down myself in the past, although my ego has blocked the memory for the moment. But the stuff that’s been going on here is getting kind of stupid.

First up we have a bureaucrat at my wife’s school, who seems to think she’s suddenly been promoted to some sort of Administrator position (she’s the ADA coordinator). She’s taken it upon herself to threaten Patty with refusal to let her start her fall semester if she doesn’t comply with the workarounds they’ve concocted to cover for their lack of ADA compliance.

It’s a long, long story, but the bottom line is that she’s required to attend two weeks’ residency each semester, and the rest is done online. It’s a great program, but the residence facilities there are absolutely abysmal. Example: on the day I dropped her off last March for the first shot at this, the temperature there was a record-breaking 28 degrees below zero. And there was no heat in the “dorm” where they’d put her. I quote “dorm” because the building where students are housed is more like a summer camp billet than any kind of dormitory I’ve ever seen (including during 3 years in the Army). The list goes on: no lights on the grounds at night, cobblestone walkways at the mercy of the incessant northern New England frost heave cycle, doorways too narrow for a standard walker, let alone a wheelchair, drainage so poor that the roads turn to instant mud with each rain… and then freeze into an impassable badlands during the night. It’s a joke.

But the issue, really, is that Patty was able to cope with all that (and much, much more) and still be the first student to have her semester program approved (part of the residency activity – all done online, though, so it’s a mystery why it has to be done there). Naturally, we informed the school of the vast deficiencies in their ADA compliance, making suggestions where appropriate – from the viewpoint of one whom the ADA regs are supposedly designed to help. The newly hired coordinator has apparently decided to take that information personally, not sure why. But of course now, on top of dealing with the “fun” of MS AND completing the coursework for her summer semester, Patty has to deal with this idiot telling her she might be prevented from continuing her education because the school refused to comply with basic ADA regulations.

So that’s one… Next on the list are the guys who have my guitars.

My Lyle 12-string, which I purchased in 1973, has been through the mill, big time. In the 34+ years I’ve had it, it’s neck has gotten warped, there’s a hairline crack in the heel (from a motorcycle incident, no less), a few of the tuning machines are falling apart, there are string retention pegs missing from the bridge and it definitely needs a new saddle. But it’s the oldest thing I personally own and it has a sound that has been complimented by more than one studio engineer and at least two professional musicians. I’d like to get it fixed if at all possible, so I took it to a local music shop to see what their luthier had to say about it. Since I was making the trip, I also brought along the aforementioned Gibson The Paul II for a basic setup. Next Monday both these instruments will have been sitting at the shop for a month, with no indication whatsoever when -or if – they’ll be worked on. I’ve called numerous times to no avail. The option at this point looks like just picking them up and starting over somewhere else. Unfortunately, the paucity of luthiers in the area makes it a bit difficult to know where to go next, and I’m getting tired of researching the issue.

According to one of their salespeople, the Nashville B-Bender Telecaster I ordered from Music123 last Saturday was packed up and ready for shipment on Sunday… and it’s been sitting in the warehouse since. Several calls and emails to them as well. The most recent explanation is “The reason it has not gone out yet is the warehouse started shipping everything at the same time so there has been a slight delay although your order should go out soon.” I guess “at the same time” means they’re now trying to save money by having fewer pickups. Like once a month? Not sure what “soon” means. Maybe October. Hey! zZounds!! Why don’t YOU folks carry this item!!! *sigh*

Finally, I had the joy on Monday morning of learning that my boss had either quit or been fired. I still don’t know which. His boss (my new boss) won’t say, and he’s not responding to the emails I sent him asking what happened and, then, letting him know he’d be missed. What I do know is that the reasons he’s gone (there are multiple) are wholly due to the fact that his bosses won’t do their damn jobs. To boot, my new boss is now “out” for a couple days – with nary a mention of this to me – and apparently won’t be back until next Monday. I’m a big boy, and I can certainly manage my own time for the next couple days. That’s not the point though, is it. It is, however, a good example of the sort of thing that ultimately led to the issues that culminated in Monday morning.

Then there’s the 110th Congress…