Prolly the best artist demo I’ve heard at Frankfurt (partly because it has no goddamned soloing).
This is real. They were playing out in the plaza at Musikmesse. I tried to shoot my own footage, but it was just too crowded. (Though I did score a thrilling video of the back of Craig Anderton’s head.)
Gibson Guitars sponsored Compressorhead’s performance. There’s more on the band website.
Yet another sad anniversary: Believe it or not, it’s 20 years to the day since Tommy Lamb perished in a brawl at Indiana’s Plainfield Correctional Facility.
Unlike so many rock-and-roll deaths, Tommy’s demise never seemed to inspire a renewed interest in his music. Nor has he attracted one of those morbid death cults that affix themselves to departed musicians like nasty black barnacles. Ironic, given the epic morbidity of Tommy’s tragic tale.
Would it have been any different if Tommy hadn’t been such an understated player? If Rockfinger had managed to finish that second album? Or if the band hadn’t been led by twin brothers who abhorred each other? None can say — though it seems tragically fitting that Tommy’s bad luck streak should extend into the afterlife.
Sadly, I couldn’t locate the 1977 issue of Guitar Now! pictured here, though the magazine re-interviewed the embittered guitarist in 1991 for their 77 Greatest Solos of the ’70s issue. (“Feel It” clocked in at #68.)
Here’s Dan Dickerson’s classic Q&A:
Tommy Lamb’s Bicentennial Blast
I also found this excellent overview of Tommy’s truncated career:
Rockfinger: Loathe Thy Brother
If you don’t know Tommy’s upbeat fretmanship and downbeat biography, I suggest starting there.
But perhaps the best way to remember Tommy is through his music.
This is perfectly awesome:
Luna Lee is playing a gayageum, a Korean zither related to the Japanese koto, Vietnamesese dàn tranh, and the Chinese guzheng. She’e got other fun blues and rock covers posted on her YouTube page. Lee’s version of “Voodoo Chile” is the internet hit, but I dig her “Bold as Love” because the canned backing tracks are less intrusive, plus it’s my fave Hendrix song. 🙂
Like many guitarists exposed to Asian zither players, I find myself envying the movable bridges they have on each string. By positioning the bridge relatively close to the center of the string (and not, as on guitars, near one end), they can pluck notes or generate vibrato on either side of the bridge.
Lee and Thurston from Sonic Youth achieve related effect by placing drumsticks and screwdrivers between the neck and strings of their guitars near the 12th fret. (It’s not like those guys are Asian music scholars or anything, but another similarity is their use of tunings with closer-than-standard intervals between the strings.)
But no one took the notion further than the late Hans Reichel, whose beautiful, handmade instruments used center-positioned bridges to elicit eerie sonorities and startling portamento and glissando effects. This video is a nice showcase for Reichel’s radical re-imagining of the guitar. (Reichel also demonstrates his dachsophone — literally, “hedgehog-o-phone” — which, depending on your perspective, is one of the most expressive, amusing, or just plain irritating musical contraptions ever conceived.)
Anyone ever explored similar ground? (FWIW, I took a semester of koto back in the Triassic Era college. I sucked.)
A highlight of this year’s NAMM show was hanging out with Derek Song, a 23-year-old digital guitarist whose band, Pinn Panelle, has racked up an astonishing 12.5 million YouTube views with their realtime cover versions of electronic music hits, especially their version of Skrillex’s “Scary Monster and Nice Sprites”
Song, a Berklee College of Music grad, is DIY personified. He’s developed his own innovate guitar controllers and written custom software to milk them to the max. Those hit videos were shot on a shoestring. A Kickstarter campaign financed the Pinn Panelle’s last tour, where they brought live-band energy to DJ-driven EDM concerts and festivals. And the group has created two full albums without help from a label, including the just-released Ghosts and Liars. (However, days before the album’s release, the group’s bassist and keyboardist left the band. Now Derek and drummer Justin Conway are plotting their next moves, though Derek says Pinn Panelle will continue.)
Derek, a blisteringly smart guy with a friendly, unpretentious attitude, was kind enough to let me drag him into a relatively quiet corner of the NAMM show, shove a recorder in his face, and bark questions at him.
But first, that video again:
You’re a music-school dude.
I grew up in Glenview, Illinois, but moved Boston to go to Berklee because I knew I wanted to pursue music and new ideas. When I got there, I figured out that I would waste the least amount of money by pursuing electronic music production rather than performance. I’m not docking performance — some kids get so good at it! But I’ve always been more of a self-learner. I’m a terrible student, especially when I’m given exercises. I just want to play the ideas I have in my mind, and as long as I have the facility to do that, I don’t care about additional technique. But the Electronic Production and Design program at Berkeley had so many cool avenues for exploration, and I knew that technology was the future.
Did you always tinker with tech?
Well, one thing that influenced me as a composer and technologist was the fact that my dad used to fix TVs. Later on, when I started developing my own controllers, I’d work on them with him, and that’s really inspired me musically. When I first started playing in bands, my dad and I invested in a Boss GT-6 multi-effect pedal. I never used stompboxes because I could never afford them! But I read the Boss manual till I knew that thing like the back of my hand, and I still use that GT-6. Basically, I hacked it. I discovered some functions under the surface that open up a lot of opportunities for controlling specific effect parameters.
For example?
UPDATE, 03.07.13: I should have mentioned a point that several readers noted in comments: The capo only alters the tuning of open strings. Which means that while you can play many harmonies normally available only in dropped tunings, any notes above the capo appear at their usual frets. For example, all barre chords are played exactly as in standard tuning.
After all the digital guitar stuff I’ve been writing about lately, I really wanted to spend an afternoon without plugging in any frickin’ USB cables. So I finally got around to experimenting with the SpiderCapo I picked up last year on a whim.
The SpiderCapo his six independently adjustable clamps, each of which can either stop the string or let it ring freely. That means you can dial in most dropped tunings without actually detuning any strings — instead, you transpose the entire voicing up. It’s a lot of fun to play, and seems like it could be a cool composing tool if you’re the sort of musician who gets inspired by unfamiliar tunings. Plus, it looks kind of wicked when you fret the unstopped strings behind the capo.
Here’s a little video I made, noodling around in a few tunings I particularly liked:
Anyone else tried one of these? Or any other “tricky” alternate-tuning capo? How about those gadgets that (unlike the SpiderCapo) can stop strings at differing frets?
Bill Bennett, longtime oboist with the San Francisco Symphony, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage onstage last weekend while performing Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto at Davies Symphony Hall here in San Francisco. He passed away yesterday, surrounded by his family.
Here’s a fine obituary written by our local classical music critic, a cool guy who also knew Bill well.
I met Bill 30 years ago. I was a classical musician recently turned rocker, teaching guitar in San Francisco and hoping for a break. I received a call one day from a young-sounding dude who’d seen one of my ads.
“Do you teach rock guitar?” he asked with a slight air of suspicion.
“Of course I teach rock,” I sniffed.
“I only want to study rock,” he said. “Not classical.” I assumed I was talking to some close-minded metal kid, and reassured him that I wouldn’t try to foist any classical stuff on him.
You know the punchline: My “close-minded” student turned out to be one of the most celebrated classical musicians of his generation.
UPDATE: My apologies if this page failed to load properly before. After a much screaming and crying some careful troubleshooting, it seems to be working correctly now.
I put together a little slideshow of some of the interesting things I saw last week at the 2013 NAMM show in Anaheim.
I covered some of the coolest new digital gear in this post. This time, the focus is analog guitars, amps, and effects. Plus: an ultra-rare sighting of a true California celebrity!
This first installment of my 2013 NAMM report focuses on products for the digital guitarist. In the coming days I’ll be doing posts on analog amps, guitar, stompboxes, and accessories. (But maybe not as quickly as I’d like, because I’ve also got to cover MacWorld in San Francisco this weekend.) This is cross-posted from Create Digital Music, one of the few music sites I visit every frickin’ day.
We guitarists tend to be a technologically conservative bunch, yet there was no shortage of forward-looking products at NAMM 2013.
Not that everyone was looking in the same direction. Guitar processors are getting smarter, but they’re doing so in different ways. Are we entering an era when every guitar, amp, and pedal in our effect chain will boast powerful processors and a dedicated editing environment? Or will we just simply centralize everything in some future i-device? (I suspect that latter, and tend to think that smart pedals and smart amps represent an evolutionary cul-de-sac. But that cul-de-sac might be a real nice place to hang out for a couple of years.)
One release I found particularly telling was Eventide’s H9, the latest addition to the company’s software-intensive stompbox line. The H9 has few new sounds, but can run all the DSP algorithms from Eventide’s other guitar stompboxes. The $499 box will ship late this quarter, preloaded with 9 of Eventide’s 43 current algorithms. Players hungry for more will be able to purchase them а la carte from an online store. (Eventide hasn’t yet finalized the add-on pricing.) The H9 also includes a handsome and full-featured iOS app for editing and managing patches via Bluetooth. There are no current plans to release an editor for OSX or Windows.
My Bowie fandom is second to none. Yet I’ve always felt a vague sense of disappointment that the Spiders from Mars didn’t really sound much like spiders from Mars.
On the other hand, the fourth movement from Béla Bartók‘s Fourth String Quartet really does sound like Martian spiders — assuming the critters in question had been force-fed a diet of chord clusters, mathematics, Hungarian folk music, and some of the most astonishing counterpoint this side of J.S. Bach.
And dig it: This white-hot blast of dissonant modernism was composed in 1928!
And how does this string quartet music sound on guitars? Awesome, IMHO — largely because the movement is played entirely pizzicato (plucked, not bowed). Very few modifications were needed to adopt it for four electric guitars.
Since New Year resolutions expire at midnight, January 7th, I’m racing to realize my goal of finally becoming fluent with music notation software before the sands run out.
I’d like to share some initial impressions about Notion. This isn’t a full-fledged product review — just a few thoughts about a half-dozen features I dig. (Most also apply to Notion’s sister app, Progression, which compiles all of Notion’s fretted-instrument tools, but omits the orchestral stuff. If you only plan to notate for guitar, the lower-priced Progression is probably all you need.)
1. Appropriate complexity. Two programs, Sibelius and Finale, dominate the music notation field. Both are powerful, deep programs. Most notation pros use them because they’re packed with features essential to “music engraving” (the archaic and pretentious term for the process of preparing music for publication).