This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to YouTube, The Simpsons, or (The) Pink Floyd.
One Simpsons clip to describe every single Pink Floyd record. Some are a touch too obvious (Animals) but some (looking at you, Atom Heart Mother and A Saucerful of Secrets) are so spot on it’s literally terrifying. Also, you will all finally understand what the hell was going on in The Final Cut.
Marc Maron’s WTF podcast had Bob Spitz on today. Maybe it was yesterday, but I listened today.
Spitz is best known for writing a gigantic biography of The Beatles. I bought it and devoured it the instant I leaned of its existence. I’m pretty sure someone got it for me for Christmas or something. It was a great read and I recommend it to anyone who has any interest in The Beatles.
He was on the podcast promoting a new music biography that comes out next week. It’s on Led Zeppelin. That brought me back. The first rock band biography I ever read was Hammer of the Gods by Stephen Davis . I bought it on my high school band trip to Connecticut in 1986. It was an industry eye opener for this particular high school freshman, let me tell you.
Pretty sure I’ll be reading this one, for old times sake, and I don’t think I’ll be waiting for Christmas.
I think it was yesterday that I posted something about messing with the attenuator settings on my Vox MV50 Clean, the amp I’m using for this month’s demos.
It has three settings; 50 watts, 5 watts, and 0.5 watts. I usually use 0.5 but today I turned the volume knob way down and tried five watts.
I want to say it sounded better, but I only played for a short time and I kept things mostly clean and quiet.
I’ll try it again with some dirt and some serious signal boost into the front of the amp and see how the little Nutube (which totally is not a gimmick) responds.
I’ll let you all know how it goes.
I snuck a little music in between the end of the work day and the start of the cooking of the dinner. Sneaky bastard.
November Music is now up to two songs in progress.
Usually when we go up to Vermont we leave as early as humanly possible so that we can spend as much time there as we can and still get home at a non-ridiculous hour. Today is a little different. I have to time my arrival to match up with his class schedule. That means I have another hour or so before I have to leave.
I was thinking about playing some guitar before I go, but Jen is working and a few minutes from now she’ll be in a meeting. Better for me to keep quiet. It got me thinking about gear though. The amplifier I am going to use for November is a Vox MV50 Clean. There are a ton of MV50 models, but the Clean is the only one that comes with an attenuator. The others have a master volume. Blah.
It’s supposed to be a 50 watt amp and the attenuator has three settings; Off, 1/10th power, and 1/100th power. So it can be 50 watts, five watts, or 0.5 watts. At 50 watts it is loud. Great googlymoogly it is loud. At 0.5 watts it’s not. It’s a nice, useable at home volume. Well… still maybe a smidge loud, but not bad. I keep it at 0.5 all the time.
But should I? I was complaining the other day about it caving in when I bomb it with signal out of one of my overdrive pedals. Maybe I should set it to 1/10th power and just keep the volume control really low. Hell, maybe I should turn the attenuator off and see if I can use the volume control to keep things manageable. It’s doubtful, but maybe worth a try?
Huh… we’ll see.
Change of subject: Last night I don’t know what I was thinking. Two nights ago I had a memory lapse and got into bed without putting my CPAP mask on. Dumb ass. I realized the mistake before my head was on the pillow and all was right with the world again. Last night I missed two things. I forgot to top off the CPAP machine’s humidifier tank. Oops. It didn’t run out, but it’s close to empty.
I also forgot to charge my friggin’ watch. I finished my 30 minutes of exercise and just forgot to put it on the charger. Next thing I know I’m dozing off and my battery is at 30 something percent. Crap. Well, if it dies it dies. What’s a red head to do? I went to sleep. When I woke up today it was at 12%. It’s good to know that I can go 24 hours without a charge. The downside of course is that it’s been on the charger for about 90 minutes and it’s only back up to 52%. It’s probably not going to be fully charged by the time I have to leave. That’s okay. It’ll be charged enough.
I still need to top off the gas tank (it’s about 190 miles each way. In my hybrid Kia, if I start with a full tank I can get there and back and still have about a quarter of a tank left. I friggin’ love science) and pick up some caffeinated beverages for the ride. After that the only question is music or podcasts? If it’s music I might go with the new live record from The Pineapple Thief. I first stumbled across them a couple of years ago and it’s all good stuff, just nothing that sets the world on fire for me. Their new live record (they couldn’t tour last year so they did one show in an empty room and webcast it everywhere. The new record is that show) does it. It sets the red head’s head right on fire. Great album. I was seeing all this potential and waiting for a record that lived up to it. The last one was close. This new one nails it. Having said that though… I’ll still probably go with podcasts. That’s just kinda where I’m at this morning.
Happy travels, folks!
It’s November. In terms of weather and seasons that blows chunks. In terms of music… get ready to be bored to tears, boys and girls!
One song underway. 7/8 time and it has a keyboard part. I must be completely insane. Keyboards? Blah!
On the blogging nerd front, I mentioned about seven days ago that we broke the record for page views in a month with a whole seven days still to go. Well, those seven days are up now and did we ever destroy that monthly record. Boy howdy, did we ever! September broke the record at the time. The September count was 3% higher than the previous record. The October count though… holy shit, the October count was 31% higher than the September count. THIRTY ONE PERCENT! I don’t really know what happened. Sure I posted more than any other month, and sure I was bombing the universe with baseball playoffs and Red Sox panic. Still… a 31% increase? How the fudge did that happen?
Okay, I still have seven minutes of exercise to finish. I think I’ll get to it now.
In the immortal words of Bender Bending Rodriguez, it’s fun on the bun.
This was a left over and forgotten thing from the record every month challenge thingie. The guitar solos used the little Nutube Vox MV50 Clean amp, if yer-a-wondering what I was talking about in that earlier post.
The song is kinda cheesy but it’s not too bad. It’s better than I thought it would be, which isn’t saying much.
I just recorded some guitar parts. I used the new Les Paul, as usual… I don’t think I’ve played any other guitars since May, and recorded some leads for a re-recording song using the Fender Bassbreaker 15 amp, and some more leads for a record every month song using the Vox MV50 Clean.
What does the Vox sound like to me? Well, with a very limited amount of experience with Vox style amplifiers, the MV50 sounds like it really wants to sound like my AC15 but only sort of comes close (the AC15 in turn probably sounds like it’s trying to sound like a Vox AC30, so maybe it’s more correct to say the MV50 is trying to sound like the AC30). It’s got that sparkly thing in the high end that Vox amps are known to have. It sounds good, but not quite great. I tried slamming the cute little nutube in the pre-amp stage with an avalanche of signal from the Ryra Klon Klone and it collapsed into a squashed out over compressed lump of mess. When I do the same thing to an actual tube amp it sounds more like… bliss. Yeah, that’s a good adjective… bliss. Is bliss actually an adjective or is it a noun that I am using as an adjective. It’s been so long since I’ve thought about grammar, you know?
I am all setup in my bedroom music nook for some November Musical fun. I brought the Vox MV50 Clean amp and the speaker cab I bought to match with it out of the living room and into the bedroom. They will go back when the kids come home for Christmas break because I usually keep that amp plugged into the piano so they can use it.
I still have the Fender Bassbreaker 15 here for use with the re-recording music. The cab is a Bassbreaker cabinet too and it looks almost identical to the Bassbreaker 15 itself so it almost looks like I have a Bassbreaker stack going. I don’t though. I have not brought out the A/B/Y switch to let me run the two amps together. Maybe at some point I will, but for now I just have one amp each for two separate projects.
The tentative title for the November album is something like Not a Gimmick, or Not a Gimmick at All, or something like that. Because of this:
Nutube… not a gimmick at all.
Car music this morning wasn’t the best, but it happened. I had three songs ready. One was a song left over from record every month in June. It had lyrics written. I figured I’d use it to warm up before getting into the re-recording stuff. I had two songs ready there.
The warm up song took longer than it should have. I decided to add a harmony when I should have left well enough alone. I couldn’t wrap my brain around what to do so I added a keyboard part to work it out. I got it, it just took more time than I would have liked.
As for the re-recordings. I only got to one. I was toast after all the yelling and didn’t want to push my luck. For the one song I did, I think the original from this summer was probably better. I’m not sure.
There was a mall security truck doing rounds that kept hovering around. He was distracting me and making things difficult. I know he’s just doing his job and all, but I felt like he was also kinda being a dick about it. He never came close but he was always around.
Anyway. I’m hoping to finish off the guitars on those two songs this morning. First I have to finish Dawn of the Dead. The youtube post I found is an extended version. It’s 2.5 hours long and I still have about 55 minutes to go. Shopping mall zombies make for good Halloween fun, eh?
Here’s a picture of the clock from the drive home:
Here’s a bonus picture of a stone wall, because fun.
Inside the Red Head's Head 