Category: lizardfish

Snow Practice

So remember a couple of months ago when my band, El Pez Lagarto (the Lizardfish), played at my high school reunion?  Well the organizers of that little shindig, while putting the plans together, created a Facebook group and added every member of our class they could find to it.

Also, remember a couple of days ago when I posted a flyer that Kevin the drummer made to advertise our 2/1/20 show onto this page?  Kevin often makes flyers like that for our shows, but in this case the manager of the venue actually asked for one.

Well those two worlds just collided.  Mike just posted the flyer into the high school reunion Facebook group.  To quote the guy from Quantum Leap: Oh boy.

We’re practicing tonight.  We’re also supposed to get a mini-blizzard tonight.  I’m thinking I’ll take the less-expensive guitar with me.  What do you guys think?*

 

*Don’t answer.  I don’t actually care what anyone thinks.  It’s just a figure of speech.

 

On a totally unrelated note, did you know that Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage is on Netflix?  I didn’t know before, but I do know… because I just watched it.  It’s still my all time favorite rock music documentary.  It’s even better than the best rock mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap.  You could even say that the movie is so epic that by the time it ends it is being influenced by itself at the beginning.

Nervous

Okay, I’m a little nervous. We have a gig on February 1st.  Given that we took the holidays off that means we have had one practice over the last month and we will only have two more before the 1st.  Now it looks like there might be a conflict this Sunday.  We are hoping to move the rehearsal to Saturday but there is a snow storm in the forecast.  Monday is a holiday and I have it off, I think I’m the only one, so I don’t have my long commute to worry about.  We should be able to have our usual 6:00 start time if the weather doesn’t cooperate on Saturday.  I don’t think we’re going to miss one of our two remaining weekends but like I said, I’m nervous.  We won’t be adding any new songs, but we are hoping to polish off the handful that we added in 2019 without ever playing to an audience.  I have some wood shed time ahead of me, for sure.

On the plus side, our singer told us he bought a new digital mixing board today.  One that we can control with an iPad app.  Does that mean we will turn into one of those bands and all of us will have iPads on stage with us?  Maybe.  Larry and I had a completely unrelated discussion the other day about in-ear monitors.  I would say this is the time to start experimenting with them, but sweet christmas they can get expensive.  No thanks.  If I happen to find a reasonably priced set that fits into my gigantic head (literally, not figuratively) that can also take the place of my ear plugs then maybe, but I don’t see that happening.  Greg uses an in-ear and said it cost him $600.  From what I have seen, that is cheap.  Nope.

Allow me to give some credit here.  In the last few months Greg has really come through for us in the P.A. system department.  I have a mountain of gear that I can bring to the band table, but a good P.A. system is not included.  Greg has stepped up and helped out in a big way.  Now we just have to book gigs so we can use all of the new stuff.

Change of subject, I mentioned the other day that my Uncle was having surgery.  It was actually a triple bypass.  We found out today that he is now off of the ventilator, which is good, but he still has a long way to go before he recovers.  On top of that my mother was having a bad night last night and there was talk of taking her to the ER.  Fortunately she improved and the hospital was not necessary.  It’s been a tough couple of weeks for her and her siblings.  Her older sister spent some time in the hospital a week or so ago, and her younger sister might have to go back on chemotherapy after being in remission for years.  Pardon me, oh universe, but do you have to be a dick to all of them at once?

As I typed that last sentence, the sun broke through the clouds.  Is that a sign?  Is the universe messing with my head?  Dick.

So Neil Peart mentioned me in one of his books.  Not really.  In Ghost Rider he tells a story of a stop on the Test for Echo Tour in 1997 where his daughter, Selena, joined him and his riding buddy, Brutus, on a between gig motorcycle adventure.  She met up with him at a show at Great Woods in Mansfield, MA.  Yup, you guessed it.  I was there.  June 23, 1997 to be exact.  Neil Peart, Selena Taylor, Brutus McTrash (that’s his name on facebook, if I remember correctly), and I were all in the same room at the same time.  Granted there were something like 12,000 other people with us, including Mike and Maria.  I don’t think Maria was there with us, we didn’t start the band with her until after that, but I know she was there.  In the story they left Mansfield and drove North into Maine and then the next day hopped onto their motorcycles and explored the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  Pretty much the same thing my wife and I do a couple of times a year.  The difference being our vehicle has four wheels and theirs had two.  Given that Neil’s publishing career was made up of all travel books, I would say that he had good taste in road trips, which means Jen and I have good taste in road trips too.  Yeah, we rule.

I’m still doing the photo a day thing over on Flickr.  This morning before work I took the three minutes I should have spent shaving and took a couple of pictures.  This one is the outtake.  You’re welcome.

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Band Practice Recap

I woke up this morning feeling like crap so I called in sick.  I slept away almost the entire day and I’m just clearing the cobwebs now, so I figured I’d give a quick recap of last night’s band practice.

We’re a soul band now, dontchaknow?  We had a request from our singer for an Al Green song.  It was a last minute thing and the bass player didn’t have time to learn it all, but we muddled through it.  I hope it happens, I really do.

For me personally, it was a mixed bag.  First and foremost, I took my little Vox MV50 amp and my new 1×12 speaker cabinet to test drive them and make sure that they are loud enough to use in place of my Deluxe Reverb if need be.  Oh were they ever loud enough.  With the attenuator off, I nearly blew down the walls.  It was awesome.  I also brought my little ABY switch and for the first time in human history, I played through two amps at a practice.  The drummer asked why and I answered, because it’s awesome.  And awesome it was.  The Deluxe Reverb was behind me, and the MV50 was off to my left.  I was surrounded by speakers and they were pushing the air hard enough that my pant legs were being blown around.  Awesome.  Just awesome.  Unfortunately no one else could hear anything so after the first few songs I took down the Vox and went back to my Deluxe Reverb on it’s own.

From the moment I switched to one amp until the end of practice, I was struggling.  It took about 30 minutes of goofing around with two amps to completely spoil me to the point where I couldn’t make the one amp alone sound good.  I was monkeying with pedal settings and amp settings the whole rest of the night.  It was really frustrating.  I also may have decided that my Russian Fuzz pedal clones are not workable in the band setting.  I just can’t get enough output to fit into the mix.  It’s not a mid scoop thing, I need more output to compensate for that, it’s just a sheer volume thing.  Even when no one else was playing, I couldn’t get the output level to match what was coming out of the D&M drive.  I think next rehearsal will see the return of the Triangle Big Muff clone.  The mid scoop is much more dramatic on that pedal, and therefore takes even more volume to compensate, but at least the output level is there.

Hopefully I will now be able to add a couple of song files, just for fun.  This first one (assuming it embeds) is the one song that all four of us were playing on that had both amps.  The second song is just there because I used my cheap ass little Mooer flanger pedal for the first time and despite being a disgustingly cheap Chinese knock off of an EHX Electric Mistress, I think it sounds great.  The last song is just there because I like soloing over the chord changes.  It’s one of those songs that I really don’t like to listen to, but I really enjoy playing.  Weird.

 

 

Post Gig Recap

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We survived another show last night. Barely. We have been lucky over the last year in that we haven’t had any technical difficulties at any of our shows. That lucky streak came to an end last night.

The last time we played at Racks in Plaistow was a couple of months ago. That night we noticed that one of the house PA speakers sounded like it was going to give up the fight. At some point after that it died. That wasn’t really an issue for us last night, but more on the PA later.

I was paranoid as hell last night. We set up all of our gear and then waited. During that wait time I was going nuts. What if we go for sound check and something is wrong. I need to go double check everything. Mike the bass player was feeling the same thing. It was odd. About 10 minutes before sound check we both went up on stage and checked everything out. His gear was fine. Mine? No.

I plugged in my guitar, turned everything on, and nothing. I tried changing the input on the amp. Nope. I plugged directly into the amp. That worked. Okay, so it’s somewhere on the signal chain. Ah ha! One of my overdrive pedals’ power cable was unplugged. Fixed. Just as we were ready for sound check, I was up and running. But why does everything sound so wrong? Oh crap, I was still plugged into the wrong channel on the amp. Fixed.

So we’re bombing through the first set. Everything is going fine. Then someone in the crowd says that Greg the singer’s microphone was cutting out intermittently. Okay. Mess with the speak, the board, the PA amp, the cables. Nothing helps. We even strung together a couple of mic cables to stretch across the stage to use in place of the cables the house had. It worked for one song and then we lost the PA completely. We actually blew a fuse on the power amp. What the hell do we do now? Mike the bass player and his gigantic bass amp rig to the rescue. We ran a 1/4″ cable from the headphone out on the mixing board into a second channel on his bass amp and we sang through that.

It sounded like… what… shit. That’s what it sounded like. That is how it always sounds when you run a vocal mic through a bass amp. It’s supposed to sound awful, that’s why no one does it. The important thing here is that it worked and the show went on. We were halfway through the first set and we were looking at the possibility of going home 2-3 hours early, but Mike’s big yellow bass amp (Big Bird) that weighs 20,000 pounds came through for us and we were able to play the rest of the show.

As for me personally, it went pretty well. I didn’t have any pain in my left hand to speak of. There was a little early on, but I got through it. By the end of the night my hands were protesting and the end of the show was much needed. I think we really went two songs too long for me, but I made it through. Once I got through my own little tech issues everything went fine. My OCD pedal is really noisy, especially when it follows the Tube Screamer. It’s really noticeable when we are practicing in an otherwise quiet room. Last night the noise floor was high enough that I could only hear it when I was listening for it, and I don’t think anyone else could hear it at all.

As for the crappy tone I’ve been getting at practice… I wanted to open things up at home and mess with EQ, but I didn’t. At the show I thought I would tweak on the fly but I didn’t have to. I thought the three overdrive chain worked really well. I thought I sounded pretty good. Not great, but good. I’m starting to think that maybe the issue is just the walls in Mike the Bass Player’s basement. Maybe it’s just the room effecting the tone. I don’t know. I do know that I was pretty happy with everything last night.

There were no other issues. No dropped picks or anything like that. I had the mic stand pick holder with four spares on it. That did not end up being needed, which is exactly the point. It’s there if you need it, but hopefully you don’t need it. I also had a glass slide. Why? Because the mic stand pick holder had a slide holder too, and if it’s there I should use it. I had no plans to play slide at all, but I did use it on the very last song of the night as a goofy attempt at being gimmicky. I don’t think anyone noticed.

One more item of note, the crowd was huge! Well, by our standards it was huge. Probably the biggest crowd yet! It was great! It was also pretty funny that almost everyone left after the second set. So big crowd for the first set, who thankfully sat patiently while we tried to fix the PA, then a bigger crowd for the second set, and then a tiny yet extremely enthusiastic crowd for the third set.

To sum up, it came within a whisker of being a total disaster but it ended up being a really fun night. Thanks, everyone!

Gig Day To Do List

Hello and welcome to June 3, 2017.  It is gig day.  The band is playing in Plaistow again and I need to write a to-do list for myself.

  • Decide which guitar will be the #2 for the night.  It’s always been the ES-335, but tonight I am about 56% set on it being the Fender Strat.  With the exception of Tempest Fero’s first couple of appearances back in 1988, when my guitar was a very cheap Hondo strat copy, I have never played a non-Gibson guitar in front of people.  There were a couple of times when I played my friend Larry’s Epiphone, but that is still a Gibson product.  Will tonight be my first time with a Fender?  Will I take it but not use it?  I have no idea yet.
  • Restring two guitars.
  • Velcro the Tube Screamer Mini pedal to the board.  Right now it’s just sitting there, not tied down at all.  That could be a problem come show time.
  • Set everything up at home for a warm up/practice/find a way to tame the mid range nonsense in my tone session.  Possibly use my new A/B/Y switch to let me play with my Fender Deluxe Reverb and my Fender Bassbreaker amps at the same time.  I don’t expect to do that at the show, I just want to do it because it’s awesome.
  • Pack everything up, including the box of picks, the mic stand pick holding device, and the glass slide.  I don’t have any reason to play slide tonight, but the pick holding device is also a slide holding device, so I am taking it with me.
  • Take a shower.  Very important.
  • Go to Mike the Bass Player’s house and pick up the stuff I didn’t take with me after last weekend’s practice.
  • Go to the bar.
  • Unload the car and set everything up.  Will there be a Fender guitar?  I still haven’t decided.
  • Soundcheck… maybe.
  • Play the show, all three sets.
  • Pack up the gear and load it back into the car.
  • Get paid (assuming we are still getting paid).
  • Go home.
  • Unload the car.
  • Go to bed and hope to sleep for 12 hour straight, but realistically only sleep for maybe four hours.
  • Wake up tomorrow and call it a successful gig.

No problem!

Musical Stuff

Band practice was a bust last night.  Mike’s bass was slightly damaged during his cellar flood a couple of weeks ago.  It’s in the shop.  We are hopeful it will survive, but maybe a little part of us is also hopeful that it won’t survive and he’ll be forced to buy that Rickenbacker 4001 he’s been dreaming of since high school.  I brought my cheapo-ebay special Squire P-Bass so he could use it if needed, but my bass is actually in worse shape than his.  Playing in tune was out of the question, so we sat around for two hours throwing out ideas for new songs to cover.

I was listening to a podcast on the drive home tonight.  It’s put out by the fine folks at CD Baby and it’s called DIY Musician Podcast.  The topic this week is, Is your age an obstacle to music success.  I guess, and the podcast agreed, that the answer to that question depends on how you define success.  Is success being able to make music full time?  Is success being able to tour the world?  Is success being able to bang groupies while doing blow off a passed out hooker’s behind like an 80’s hair metal band?  Not for me.

If I get to define what success is for me, then I am an unbelievably successful musician.  I’m a couple of weeks shy of my 46th birthday and I played four gigs in the last year.  That’s more than most of my bands played during their entire lifetime back during my 20’s.  If I remember correctly, the next gig will tie Lizardfish for the most gigs ever played by any band I’ve been in.  Break Even played five.  I’m really stretching my memory here, but I think the band I played in in High School might have done eight or nine.  However, four were with the one main line up.  The four or five others were with variations on that lineup.  The band Mike and I had with Maria the drummer as well as a number of different singers was by far the best band for my taste as it was the only one that was all original, but it only played two gigs.  El Pez Lagarto has played four gigs since I joined, and has three more booked.  That’s amazing to me.  In my eyes that makes us supremely successful!  Now if we could just start doing the occasional original song.  That would be icing on the cake.

I am going to start mic’ing up the room during band practices again and trying to make decent sounding rehearsal tapes.  I haven’t mentioned it to the band yet, but I think I might want to try recording a show as well.  All the more reason to start slipping in original songs.  How about an EP of original music titled, Live at Racks: Bootleg.  I see a hit in our future.  Now I just need to get those songs written and rehearsed and my little idea for recording a show needs to be practical and the band has to go along with it.  No problem.  (yes, problems.  everywhere problems.)

Steve Hackett has a new album.  It’s on Spotify.  After me posting all of my crappy songs back in February, here is an example of what a real guitar player sounds like.

Enjoy.

Is That How It Goes?

I’m sitting at my desk.  My wife is sitting at her desk right next to me.  She started laughing a little and then put on some music.  The first song was one that my band plays. It was odd… I learned it by listening to a recording of the band with their previous guitar player.  I don’t think I had ever listened to the original recording.  It was weird… I don’t even come remotely close to what was on the record.

That song ends and another comes one.  Same thing.  A song my band covers.  This time what caught my ear was more tone based as I played the same part just much, much heavier.  Then the chorus kicked in and my backing vocal was off by a whole octave.

The third song she played… also one my band covers.  I asked her, did you make a Lizardfish playlist?  She just laughed.  I love her so much.  Again, what I play and what I hear on that record… not the same thing at all.

Damn it, Robert.  Do you play anything right?  Why haven’t you been kicked out yet?

Then someone on Facebook posted this image:

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First off, Chick Corea is a genius.  Okay, now that I’ve said that, I have no idea if this was really written by him.  It feels like things that a jazz legend would consider, especially the parts about knowing when to just shut the hell up.  I wish I could do that, but I just can’t wrap my brain around it.  Even when I’m supposed to be silent I am still throwing noise into the mess.  Bad, Robert.  Bad.  Anyway, the one that sticks out to me also validates all the screwing around I do within the confines of my little cover band.

9. Guide your choice of what to play by what you like – not what someone else will think.

I’ve never met Chick Corea.  Return to Forever’s Romantic Warrior album is godlike.  Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew is beyond what humanity should ever have been able to accomplish.  More than any of that though, #9 on that list is, in my mind, the most important lesson a musician can learn.  Be a human being.  Don’t be a jukebox.  Do what speaks to you.  Don’t worry about what others will think.  I told you the guy was a genius.

Procrastination as an Art Form

It’s been 23 days since the band’s last gig.  Today will be our first post-gig rehearsal.  We picked a few songs to work on.  Have I learned them?  Nope.  Not yet.  Even better, have I taken my guitar out of it’s case?  Nope.  Not yet.  Even betterer, have I touched any of the gear that I took to the 4/1 show since unloading it all into the garage that night?  Nope. Not yet.

I had a plan to re-arrange my pedal board to put the focus onto overdrive instead of fuzz. The green Muff pedal is coming off, a Tube Screamer is going on, the main source of dirt will be the OCD.  A good plan.  Have I done anything to implement it and test it out and see how I like it?  Nope.  Not yet.  Sigh of frustration.  I will leave the board at home today and just take my OCD clone and a tuner.  Then I have to make myself do the work I have been putting off for the last three weeks before next week’s practice.

You see, folks, there are people who are masters at procrastination.  They see themselves as skilled above all others.  Then they see me in (in)action and they realize that there is another gear.  Another level of procrastinationness.  I alone have reached that level.  I alone have elevated procrastination to an art form.  I am the king.  I am the lord and master of all put-offedness.  Kneel before my mad skills.