Category: Generic

Tipper’s Gonna be Pissed

Damn, Tipper Gore is gonna be pissed off at me.

This is a song from Thursday night’s practice. I didn’t include it in the playlist I posted yesterday because I made a dumb mistake during my guitar solo and it soured the whole thing for me. Now that same mistake is going to bring down the might of the PMRC (is that what Tipper’s censorship group from the 80’s was called? I can’t remember).

I was feeling a little goofy all night. I was also feeling a little adventurous. The result, I did a lot of silly little gimmicky things that sound okay when you pull them off, but sound really dumb when you don’t. Most of them sounded okay. During this song I got it into my head that I was going to strum a dominant 7 chord way up high on the neck during my solo. Robin Trower does it all the time and it is super awesome when he does it. Unfortunately for me, having the same first three letters of my first name does not make me as skilled a soloist as Robin Trower. I started playing the little gimmick and then realized… what the hell am I doing? That chord doesn’t work in this key. What are you an idiot? As I stopped I shouted an obscenity. I won’t repeat it here, but it started with the letter “f”. Now I know you’re all crushed to learn that I sometimes say bad words, but you’ll just have to accept that I’m not this pillar of morality that you thought I was. I’m sorry about that (not really).

At some point later in the song it occurred to me that I very nearly yelled my bad word into my microphone. Hehe, thought me. I asked the other guys if they heard it and they said no. I just listened to this recording a few minutes ago and sure enough, I heard it. BOOM, right there where Tipper Gore can be all offended by it.

Enjoy my little eff-bomb! WOOHOO

Conflict

Being in a cover band is conflicting. On the one hand, I love playing guitar in a band. It’s a freakin’ blast. On the other hand, I generally don’t like most of the music the band plays. Still, it’s a ton of fun.

Here are a few songs from last night’s rehearsal. It was recorded with an iPhone and therefore sounds almost as good as cats choking on cow shit. There are examples of songs that I like to play that I don’t actually like. There are also songs I like to play that I do like. Can you guess which is which?

Band Hiatus

The band rehearsed tonight. The first weeknight practice since I joined.  It was weird having to deal with traffic to get there.  That has never happened.  We snuck this one in because one of the guys is going on a business trip for a few weeks.  It’s tough getting all of us together this summer.  Hopefully things will be easier in the fall.

I took my laptop and a couple of my new microphones with me, but traffic made me a tad late so I didn’t take the time to set them up to make a recording.  I settled for my iPhone instead.  I haven’t listened to it yet.  I’ll edit it tomorrow and share anything that sounds decent.  It’s going to sound like swill, but it’s always worth listening back.  I’ll get the whole room mic’d up soon, but not until next month at least.

Missing Them

Last night was the first night since the day their vacation started that my step kids would have been at our house but they weren’t because they are on the wrong end of the continent.

I know they are having a blast on their trip, but frankly last night sucked without them.  Jen and I are missing them so very much.

(Im)Patiently Waiting

Well, New Horizons had it’s closest encounter with Pluto.  It happened a couple of hours ago.  All of the probes systems were tied up with it’s observations, so there was no communication with Earth during the flyby.  That, plus the 4-5 hours it takes for messages to cross the 3 billion or so miles to Earth, means we won’t know for sure that everything worked until late this evening.  I read somewhere that we don’t expect to receive any data until 8-9 O’Clock tonight.  We know the spacecraft made it to Pluto.  We won’t know for a while yet if it successfully completed it’s objectives.  There is always a chance some thing could have gone wrong.  Fingers crossed that everything went fine.  For now, I will just wait impatiently for some news.