Tag: saxophone

Random Thoughts

I am wrapping up my lunch break on this random Wednesday in March and I thought I’d jot down a couple of thoughts for posterity. Ready? Okay, let’s roll….

  • Want to know something that sucks? I brought two ounces of Planters Salted Peanuts with me for lunch today (14 grams of protein). I took a small handful (my gastric bypassed body can’t handle more than a small handful at a time without getting sick) and popped it into my maw. I chewed it up a little (again, part of the post-gastric bypass world means chewing the holy hell out of everything, which sounds silly and obvious [like, didn’t you chew the holy hell out of everything before surgery? I thought I did, but apparently not] but until you fail to chew something down enough you can’t really understand) and suddenly and without warning I had to sneeze. Know what’s gross? Sneezing with a mouthful of partially chewed up peanuts… that’s what’s gross. Worse? 20 seconds after you sneeze, when you think you’ve recovered and cleaned up the mess… you sneeze again. Ugh.
  • Elon Musk posted to his nazi social media site that he didn’t understand why people are out to get him. He said he sells things that are good and that he’s never hurt anyone. Never hurt anyone? Are you fucking kidding me, you fucking moron? This nazi fucker’s end can’t come soon enough. Deport his moronic ass to mars and be done with it.
  • We have a contractor coming tomorrow. We have two contractors coming Friday. March 2025 will go down in family history as the month of the contractors. We just can’t get away from them. Please please please let this be the end of it for a while.
  • We are one week and one day away from the start of the Boston Red Sox 2025 season. No matter what happens, they can’t be any more painful to watch than the Bruins were this year. Even if they come in dead last again it still won’t suck as badly as the B’s. I’m thinking about signing up for an online subscription to NESN (the New England Sports Network. The TV network that carries both the Red Sox and the Bruins). I think my days of being a radio-only Red Sox fan might be coming to an end. I haven’t decided one way or the other yet, but I think it’s going to happen… we’ll see.
  • I don’t want to buy a tenor saxophone. I don’t want to buy a tenor saxophone. Did I mention I don’t want to buy a tenor saxophone? Who am I kidding. I want to buy a tenor saxophone. Only if it’s a good one though. Aw, hell.

Okay. I have to get back to work now. This is all I have time for right now. I’ll probably write up some more brain droppings later. It’s one of those days, if you know what I mean.

Photo a Day

This morning I snuck in a few pics to cover today’s photo a day challenge picture. I had just finished adding the final tracks to a song and I picked up the camera while listening to the playback. Here is today’s entry, 180/365:

180/365

I almost went with this one instead…

DSC_3752

These would have been okay too…

DSC_3754
DSC_3753

Five Songs Down

Five songs down… 15 to go? Well, at least five but as many as 15. Who knows.

This is short and sweet and also a sloppy mess.

I doubt I will post every song I finish for this year’s RPM Challenge. We’re just early enough in the mixing bonanza that I’m still feeling it, if you know what I mean. My ears have not been reduced to mush yet.

I Need to Practice

Listen to the section of this song where the saxophone and the guitar are trading four bar solos. The first four bars of sax sound okay. The second four bars of sax… I don’t know about anyone else, but I can literally hear my body decide it has had enough sax playing for a while and needs a rest. It’s something in the amount of breath support behind each note. The tone just gets thinner out of the blue. Again, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find that hysterically funny.

Here’s song number four for this year’s RPM Challenge.

Two Songs Down

I know I said I was going to sleep, but I just had to take some time to finish another mix. Two RPM Challenge songs down and anywhere between eight and 18 still to go.

There’s no electric guitar on this song. None at all. There’s acoustic guitar and saxophone, but no electric guitar. I originally saw this as sort of a throw away. Just a little blow off thing to pad my numbers. Somehow though I am finding I kinda dig it. Weird.

Music Day Continues Continued

WOW! Five years is a LONG TIME.

The saxophone came out of its case and amazingly, miraculously, I can still play it.

Can I play it well? Oh my sweet christmas I CANNOT. I SUCK! I put sax parts onto three songs including the instrumental where the sax plays the melody. It sounds awful, my playing is awful, and the whole thing is just awful and I don’t care because oh my goodness was that fun.

I lasted about 10 minutes before my body started to reject the whole experience. I mentioned calluses in the last post. When you don’t play guitar often you lose your calluses and it hurts. It is a similar thing with wind instruments except it is about muscle strength. There are muscles in your mouth and around your jaw that you don’t use very often that are used A TON when you play a woodwind instrument. I made it about 10 minutes before those muscles decided they were done. I would then play for 20 seconds or so and follow up with a 2-3 minute rest. After about half an hour of that I had to stop. For now at least. I am going to break for lunch and maybe watch a TV show and then see how I feel. It’s entirely possible the 2025 saxophone experiment might be over. We’ll see.

Speaking of lunch, one thing about playing sax that I forgot all about is that it makes you wicked hungry. I think that’s a wind instrument thing in general because I remember everyone in my high school band complaining about how they were starving at the end of each rehearsal. Yeah, I needs me some lunch now.

Saxophone, babie! I can still play!

Saxophone?

Do do do, just whistling past the american graveyard again… still… do do do…

I’ve been listening to King Crimson’s Red album quite a bit over the last few days. Crimson, in their original incarnation, had a sax player. First it was Ian McDonald, then it was Mel Collins. When band leader Robert Fripp shook things up and hired a whole new band with a drastically new sound in 1972 the saxophones went away. For a while, at least. By 1974, when they were recording the Red album, they were down to three band members, Fripp (guitar/mellotron), John Wetton (bass/vocals), and Bill Bruford (drums/percussion). Fripp was the only soloist in the lineup… sort of… the other two guys could have cranked out leads with the best of them (because they pretty much were the best of them) but instead they brought in a bunch of session musicians to help fill in the gaps. Among those session musicians were two sax players; Ian McDonald (alto) and Mel Collins (soprano).

Collins plays on the album’s centerpiece, “Starless” and his playing is wonderful (as always). McDonald also plays on “Starless” as well as “One More Red Nightmare”. His playing is out of the fucking world amazing. He wails, especially on “Starless”.

Listening to this record quite a bit lately has me thinking… is the sax playing inspiring me a little? The RPM Challenge is less than two weeks away and it’s coming up on time for me to start recording some new music. Do I suddenly find myself wanting to play the saxophone again? I haven’t taken my alto sax out of its case since I finished the 2020 RPM Challenge. Five years. Is it time to break it out again? I think it might be. I know I can still play even if I am only about 1% of the sax player I was when I was a music major from 1989-1991 and sax was my primary instrument in school. Guitar was a hobby I played on the side, even though I spent nearly infinitely more time playing guitar than sax… which contributed to me leaving school before I graduated.

So I guess what I am trying to say is, if throughout the month of February you start hearing about me writing songs in the key of E flat or B flat instead of E and A, and you start hearing me complain about severe pain in my lips and jaw (due to not having practiced at all in the last five years), then we can probably go ahead and blame Mel Collins and the late Ian McDonald. Just saying.

I Need to Practice

I haven’t touched a guitar in 20 days. I need to carve out some time this weekend. I have been thinking about bringing my Vox AC15 amplifier to the next Lizardfish practice, whenever that is, and I need to see how loud I can get it before the tone breaks up. I know my other 15 watt amp, the Fender Bassbreaker 15, can’t get terribly loud before it distorts. I think the AC15 handles it better, but if I can’t get it loud enough to compete with a drummer while still staying clean, then I can’t use it at practice. Really, I just want to bring my Fender Deluxe Reverb home again.

Speaking of Lizardfish, Mike the Bass Player is in Cleveland today. He sent us a bunch of pictures from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. To quote Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Alex Lifeson, blah blah blah. Mike sent me a picture of the BB King display. It’s awesome. Thanks, Mike!

At our last discussion, Mike said he’d be away for a couple of weeks. After that we can try to set up a rehearsal date. I really want to play. I really want to play. I’m still scared shitless of getting sick, but I really want to play.

It’s going to be a couple of weeks before the kitchen updates are finished. Once that’s all done I am going to start looking for a guitar tech to hire to work on my stuff. I’ll go with the ES-335 first. Check the frets, check the neck joint, rewire the whole friggin’ thing. Four new pots, a new jack, maybe a new pickup switch, and all new wiring. Don’t touch the pickups, they are gold and need to live forever. Everything else that lives under the covers, replace.

I’m worried about the neck joint. It’s clearly pulling away from the body, but it’s been doing that at a glacial pace for at least 22 years. I’m worried, but I’m not that worried. I am really worried about the frets. I’ve never had a guitar refretted. If they need to be replaced, is it still going to feel the same way it did before? No, clearly, but will it be so different that I will fall out of love with one of my two favorite musical instruments on Earth*? I hope not. Especially given that the frets on my other favorite musical instrument, my Les Paul Custom, are in worse shape. We’ll find out.

Right. Lunch break over. Time to read that huge email a coworker just sent me. I’ve got some back story to get filled in on.

*Technically I should say it’s one of my three favorite musical instruments. My ’78 Les Paul, my ’79 ES-335, and the Selmer Mark VII tenor saxophone I played in high school. I haven’t seen that instrument since 1989. That sucker was in bad shape when it came to me, but it was glorious. Epically glorious. I loved that horn. It was brass magic.