Tag: Music

Attenuation

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 All Right

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.

Halloween Tune

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.

Guitar Therapy

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?

Fun With Amplifiers

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.

Morning Music

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.

What’s Up for Sunday?

Jen has to get up early for work tomorrow so I should get up early too and do some car music. What do you think? Then when I get home I should put leads on anything I manage to finish during the car music. Sound good? We have something going on in the afternoon that’s going to pull me away from things for an hour or so. That’s cool with you, isn’t it?

After that… Halloween. Covid-19 Halloween. Covid-19 Halloween The Second Coming. Shit. Last year the city canceled it all. This year it’s going off as usual. We won’t be playing along. We’ll be hiding in the back of the house. I’ll probably be mixing something. I think you’ll be okay with it. I hope you will, at least.

So should I install Parallels on my MacBook Pro so that I can play Windows games? I had been playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic a little. I can’t play that on my Mac. If I get Parallels I should be able to play it. I wonder how much the software costs. Would you think less of me if I got it?

The Bruins are playing The Panthers tonight. They kicked our ass the other night but it was overshadowed by something to do with the sexual abuse scandal that came out of Chicago recently. I don’t know the details, I just know that a lot of people got the sack. I really need to learn the details of this story but I am still really furious over the fact that the catholic church overlooked the sexual abuse of children for decades and any time I come across a similar story I just want to fucking vomit all over the people responsible and I do not want to vomit today. You know what I mean, don’t you?

Now I am pissed off. I didn’t want to be pissed off.

To make matters worse, it’s pouring rain out. Shit. I am so sick of rain.

Bandcamp Volume 4

Volume four out of four (for now).

My bandcamp page now only contains songs I am embarrassed by, instead of both songs I was embarrassed by and songs I was outright ashamed of. We’re moving up in the world!

Quarantine Tunes Volumes one through four are all there. Volume five is underway but ages away from completion. It’s going to be all songs from this year’s 50/90. How exciting (meaning not exciting at all).