Funny To Me

If you follow the work of Maynard James Keenan at all you might be interested in his latest release under the name Puscifer.

The first video is here on youtube.

It's . . . well, the funniest thing to me will be the reaction from both Tool and A Perfect Circle fans who aren't familiar with anything else MJK has done.

But if you've ever listened to Children of the Anachronistic Dynasty, then you'll be a little more prepared, at least for the single. Weird, drum-heavy, ambient . . . music, with vocals that are more about experimentation or ornamentation than anything else - if that sounds like something you want to try, give it a shot. While Maynard never gets quite as crazy with his voice as Mike Patton, both of them like to play with intonations, effects, breath patterns, hisses, pretty much anything they can do with their sound.

I used to listen to CAD while trying to fall asleep, and while I found the album to be shit when fully awake, in that reverie of near-sleep it was great for triggering lucid, strange dreams.

Maybe Puscifer will be the same.

You Can't Kill the Revolution Tie-In

I attended the Virgin Festival in Baltimore.

As Ben Harper played and sang the same old songs about revolution I thought about how easily movements are co-opted, how ideology is a game of constant hypocrisy we call compromise.

Harper needs a carrier wave for his thoughts of against-raging and spliff-smoking and his label needs to target the demographic of dread-locked college kids, old hippies, young hippies, and People Who Give a Shit (Who Will Never Change Anything). So they engage in this sickening relationship, a commercial venture that binges on the culture of excess and purges it with war whoops and anti-government bravado.

But he plays the dobro like he wants to crack open a fault line, eking out roaring waves of feedback that clang and clatter. This is what the Devil's fiddle-playing sounds like, and it's heavenly.

I saw Ben Harper almost ten years ago and he hasn't altered his shtick a whit. How could he? Being a revolutionary means always saying the same thing.

I Don't Get This Strategy

In a move designed to make me hate everything tangentially related to music, GuitarTabs.com has received a cease & desist letter from a law firm representing the National Music Publishers Association and The Music Publishers Association of America. I've been following the online tablature battle for at least fourteen years. It's disheartening to think there hasn't been some kind of compromise.

Tablature was just about the most important thing in the development of my guitar skills. Especially as a jobless teenager without an allowance. How was I supposed to buy 25 dollar tab books? I still remember when olga.net first went down, years and years ago. I was devastated. And they're still going through that bullshit.

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I've been trying very hard to stay on the side of the artists, to hate the corporations, and to support things like Creative Commons. But it can be a real chore.

Copyright issues are starting to make me hate the artists themselves. Recently an Italian student made an animated Calvin & Hobbes short for his final project. It was clearly a labor of love. It was also issued a DMCA takedown by Bill Watterson. I understand that it's the creator's prerogative, and that Watterson doesn't want Calvin in any other form, and that he fucking hates those stupid stickers of Calvin urinating on things . . . but I'm still within rights to think it was a dick move. Really. Fuck him for that. Boo-fucking-hoo, a student practiced his animation skills on your precious strip.

In some parallel universe someone has re-animated Shakespeare and he is suing the shit out of a lot of publishers and film studios. Suing them into bankruptcy.

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"In fact, U.S. copyright law specifically provides that the right to make and distribute arrangements, adaptations, abridgements, or transcriptions of copyrighted musical works, including lyrics, belongs exclusively to the copyright owner of that work."

"In so enforcing the rights of the creators and publishers of music, it is our intent to ensure that composers and songwriters will continue to have incentive to create new music for generations to come."

This does not make me sympathetic to your cause. I understand that you have a revenue stream that is drying up. Since music is easily transcribed onto computer and printed out, your service is not as in-demand as it used to be. Please consider this an opportunity to alter your business model.

Think about this: the people who create tablature on their own and the people who then look for and use that tablature are the same people who buy tablature. Do you think you should maybe engage your community before alienating it?

Bombtrack

For a long time I've been wondering how Tom Morello (of Rage Against the Machine) manages to do all those absolutely insane things with his guitar. So I did a little research.

Take a look at Tom's setup. It's pretty simple. He only uses a half-stack (since most venues provide extra amplification, a full stack really isn't necessary). A few common pedals. Mainly the Crybaby Wah, a Whammy pedal, Reverb Delay, and EQ.

The trick, then, to a lot of his sonic experimentation is a little thing called a kill switch.

Instead of one volume knob, his guitar has two, one for each pickup. He turns the volume all the way down on the top and all the way up on the second knob. There's a toggle that controls which pickup is active. When he flicks the toggle it's as if you were cutting the sound on and off in rapid succession, the same way a DJ might use crossfaders.

Here's a YouTube video for anyone wondering what this sounds like (sorry I can't embed the video - for some reason YouTube won't let me link my blog).

He uses this effect in more ways than you might imagine. You can feed the sound back into the amp or rub your hands across the strings or just slide barre chords up and down the neck.

Now, you might be thinking that a kill switch would be a pretty cool thing to have on a guitar, and you'd be right. They must be pretty common, huh?

Wrong. Turns out the only one I can find is the Gibson Les Paul BFG. This is a nice low-priced Les Paul - only $1,000.

The other option is to wire up your own. I'm considering it, but wary because an improperly grounded circuit can fry your electronics - or you.*

After that, all you need to do in order to play like Tom Morello is practice eight hours a day.

Simple.


*My first electric guitar, a Fender Squier, has always been a little iffy internally. That's what I was playing when my band played a classmate's high school graduation party. It had rained earlier that morning and we were outside. The extension cords were tangled and possibly a little torn. During one of our songs ('Eggman' by the Beastie Boys, I think) my hand began to tingle. Every time I plucked a string with my finger or palm-muted a riff I'd feel a burning.

Finished the song. Felt the strings. Got shocked. Felt the strings. Got shocked. So I learn at about the same pace as a lab rat. We replaced the extension cords and I swapped out guitars, completed the set. Hardcore.

And dumb. But you can't just stop a Beastie Boys song in the middle.

General Sound Tech Questions

This is mainly for Thomas, but anyone else with sound equipment experience can feel free to chime in.

Be warned, though, it's long-winded.

I've finally got a little extra room to set up my small batch of recording equipment (which will hopefully grow). My problem is that I can't find any good primers out there and I haven't been happy with the stuff I've been able to record. It might be my signal chain - and is no doubt largely due to my general ignorance.

Here's a quick rundown of what I'm dealing with:
-Fostex MR-8 digital multitracker
-LTO S-6 6-channel mixer
-Boss DR-5 Dr. Rhythm
-Boss ME-50 Multiple Effects pedalboard
-Crybaby Wah
-Behringer Condenser microphone (the mixer supplies phantom power)
-Fender M-80 Amplifier

Not much, I know. For the signal chain, I usually feed the drum machine and any mics into the mixer, then that into the multitracker. For a guitar I go through the pedalboard into the amp then straight into the multitracker.

The big problem is that I can't ever get a good guitar sound. I think it's the amp, but using the amp simulation in the multitracker generally sucks. Feeding it all through the mixer generally sucks, too. I want to get a full, heavy distorted sound, and the levels are never right - I either cut it out completely or it redlines.

I'm thinking I need a compressor, yes? Are there any good primers online that detail general recording stuff like this? Are there general rules for what level to put things at, how to get volume, the real nitty-gritty?

I'm not looking for anything professional, just being able to tinker with effects without getting overpowered by the drum machine or having to weaken the overall sound. I usually have to cut so much of the gain and level that the distortion loses most of its shape. And I can't even think about using the wah - the high-end completely redlines, unless I just completely cut it out with a filter. Not good.

Any thoughts, anyone?