I just weighed in for the week. Down 4.4 pounds for a total of 40.4!

40 down, 160ish to go!

Let’s celebrate by looking at a very flooded Mighty Spicket River!

There. A picture I took this morning, sourced from my Flickr account.

Long Live the Flickr.

I just learned some serious news.  Serious in terms of my photography goofiness and social media oversharing.

Flickr has been sold.  SmugMug bought Flickr today.  I don’t know much about SmugMug, other than it is a photography sharing service.  The only references to it that I have ever seen online are sites designed to sell prints.  I don’t know if that’s all they do, but what I’ve seen looks okay.

Should I be scared?  They say no.  There is a FAQ site that gives me the answers I wanted to hear, but how long until that changes?

Fingers crossed that they revitalize Flickr and turn it into the awesome site it once was, and also fingers crossed that they don’t screw things up the way yahoo did.

Yeah, I’m scared.  Optimistic, but also scared.

Join my cat in celebrating the fact that my Gibson ES-335 is home again. I just picked it up at guitar center. All is well.

After seven full days of not hearing anything from guitar center, I called the repair desk today to get an update on my poor Gibson ES-335.

I brought it in to get the pots and the switches checked. Best case scenario would be that it’s just old and dirty and needs to be cleaned. Well, best case is the truth. Sigh of relief.

I also asked them to take a look at the neck to see what they thought. Gibson necks are glued into place. Back when I was in a band with Maria and Mike my Les Paul fell when my strap broke and the neck snapped away from the body. It was horrible. I took it to Tewksbury Music Center because they were an authorized Gibson Repair Shop and they stressed out mightily but ended up fixing it good as new. My poor ES-335 looks like the neck is slowly but surely pulling away from the body. It hasn’t gotten any worse over the last few years, but I wanted an expert opinion on how bad it is.

The answer? It’s bad. It’s too much for Guitar Center to deal with. They actually suggested I ship it back to Gibson to have them fix it. I’m not going to do that any time soon. Like I said, it’s not getting worse (that I can see), so I am just going to live with it for now.

Now all they have to do is actually do the work I asked them to do so that I can pick it up and have it ready for the April 28th gig.

April 19, 2018 at 9:00am Eastern Daylight Savings Time.

I was up before work today and was planning on going out into the back yard and filling up the bird feeders. Then I looked out the window and saw that it was snowing and decided to stay inside and cry instead.

It’s getting late.  You haven’t taken your photo-a-day photo yet.  The cat is nowhere to be found.

So you take a picture of the two random fuzz pedals sitting on the dining room table.

It rained a little today. Our yard is drowning. We are building an ark.

Another three hour rehearsal last night.  We only have one more before the next gig.  We dropped a couple of the new songs.  Dropped is the wrong word.  We really punted them to the next, next gig.  They just won’t be ready in time for this one.  The new songs that are still on the set list all got a thorough working over last night and are starting to come together.

As a group, the theme of last night was something like, “oh crap, we haven’t played that one in ages.”  There were a few instances when a song title was called out and we looked at each other thinking, how does that one go?  That’s the down side of having a large repertoire.  It’s also the downside of taking long breaks from rehearsals in between gigs.  That’s why you have rehearsal though, to shake off the dust.

For me personally, my rig is a mess.  I am getting to the point where I can foresee not having a single fuzz pedal on my gig board.  I just can’t get the Big Muff style pedals to cut through the mix.  When I’m in fuzz mode I lose the low end battle to the bass, and the high end battle to the cymbals, and there is no mid range to speak of.  I need volume to get through and I can’t get enough through the pedals alone.

I’m thinking of shuffling the pedal order around so that the dirt goes D&M boost, D&M over drive, Big Muff clone, then either the Keeley Super Phat Mod that I got a couple of weeks ago, or maybe the Tube Screamer mini that is on the home board, and then the Spark Mini.  80% of the time I’d be using the D&M drive for rhythm and the D&M and the Spark for leads.  If I want fuzz I would go D&M boost, Big Muff cone, and then the extra over drive to act as a volume boost/mid range push for rhythm, and add the Spark for an additional volume boost for leads.  That might work.  If it doesn’t work at next week’s practice, I might go fuzz-free at the gig.

I finally took the Fuzz Face off the board last night and replaced it with the new Super Phat Mod, which is a modified clone of a Boss Blues Driver.  I am 100% prejudice against all Boss pedals and this is as close as I will ever come to using one.  I just threw it on in place of the Fuzz Face, so it was first in the signal chain.  I prefer dirt pedals at the end, but Fuzz Faces are super finicky and pretty much need to be first (unless you buffer the signal correctly, which I am not equipped to do and would probably screw up anyway).  There were a couple of times that I shut off everything except the Blues Driver and it sounded great.  I might be rethinking my setup even more than I already mentioned.

I had sort of resigned myself that I would be playing a new guitar yesterday, but that didn’t happen.  I played my Les Paul.  My trusty #1.  My ES-335 is still in the shop and I have no idea if I’ll have it back for the gig.  That means my Stratocaster needs to be my backup.  I’ve never played it in front of an audience before.  I brought it to a gig, but never took it off the stand.  Maybe April 28th is the day that changes.  Maybe the Strat will make an appearance in the third set.  I should probably start practicing with it more.