Acoustic Board? You bet!

As I alluded to recently, I've been thinking about my acoustic rig. Since I play acoustic in public way more often than electric, I thought it was silly to have a pedal board for something that never leaves the house anyway, and so this board was born!


The signal chain is: Breedlove acoustic -> Fishman Aura pedal (concert model) -> Boss GE-7 -> Tiny Virgin Mary (with humility controls) -> Voodoo Labs Tremolo ->Boss DD-7 (with tap tempo) -> Countryman Type 85 DI. I've used it out twice already, and it's fulfilling everything I need so far, but there are already upgrades to be made.

I'm convinced that the Fishman pedal is made up of equal parts transistors and magic. It sounds fantastic. I had a real problem adding something so blatantly digital and "fake" into a guitar's signal chain, but I decided that, when it comes right down to it, even the best piezo pickup sounds just awful. You get a lot of pick-attack, and almost none of the warmth and depth that make an acoustic guitar sound amazing. When in a full-band setting, that's not an issue because all of the other instruments cover up a lot of the frequencies that an acoustic rhythm guitar normally occupies: drums holding down the rhythm, bass taking the low, piano taking the mid-high, electric guitar taking everything else. In fact, the only sound that ends up coming through in a proper mix is...the pick attack. Which is, I think, the only real reason why this sort of technology hasn't been greatly researched and why the market is rather small. But for a solo artist, GOLD! If you get the chance, demo one. Definitely magical.

The other questionable thing in the chain, and the thing that will likely not be on the board for much longer, is the EQ. Don't get me wrong, I love EQ. But I also think that EQ is used mainly to correct any sonic problems. And I also also think that proper microphone placement and selection in recording can eliminate the need for any EQ. Like, say, the kind of microphone choice and placement being employed in the magic Fishman pedal. My gut tells me that, once I find the right image (there are 16 to choose from on the Aura pedal), I won't need any EQ at all. As of right now, it's being used as a footswitchable boost.

...which will come to an end once I get this. I am a firm believer that a little compression does wonders to an acoustic guitar, making finger-picking a bit more even and keeping even intense strumming manageable for the sound system. From all of the demos I've seen and heard online, this one seems to be subtle, clear and, above all else, really transparent. I'd love to find one around to demo myself, but I doubt that that's going to happen since it's such a new pedal. And, as an added bonus, boost switch! Clean, mid and treble. It's like a friggin' Swiss army knife.

Which the DD-7 is. It's hold mode is just enough for my looping needs, and it's got all the delay an acoustic guitar could want. And that goes into my DI, and to a board. When I have the OB.1, the EQ may still have a place on my board, if I chose to use it in creative ways (like laying down a sweet bass-line when building a song through the DD-7's hold mode), but that remains to be seen. And the tremolo is there for when I think a tremolo would sound cool. I still need to get in some quality time in front of a PA or an acoustic amp and figure out which setting on the Fishman is the best, but it's been working out so far.

Do you play acoustic way more than electric? Make an acoustic board! It's going to be an invaluable tool for coffee-house gigs, and it's made me way more versatile in a band setting.

The meaning of life:

It is always a mistake to decide what you are going to do (job/relationships/whatever) before first deciding who you are going to be.

- Andy Stanley

Happy (almost) New Year!

I hope all two people reading have had a very merry Christmas (or whatever, but at this point I think that everyone who knows that this blog exists is some form of Christian guitarist) and is getting stoked for the New Year. I know for me, it's definitely time for 2009 to shove off and make some room for the the long-expected twenty-ten.

Did I mention that one thing I'm particularly excited about is that we can finally start referring to the year as twenty-_____? It's so futuristic!

How am I celebrating? Passion Conference in Hot-lanta. And I am ever so stoked. As much as I love the greats of Christian rock, I've never heard anyone (aside from Matt Maher, who is awesome) live. And boy, is this one going to be stacked. Along with perrinials Charlie Hall, Matt Redman, Chris Tomlin and David Crowder*Band are going to be Fee, Kristin Stanfill and HILLSONG-FREAKING-UNITED! Which is a fact that I just learned, literally, three days ago. My face will be sufficiently rocked.

It's going to be a great way to kick off what may go down as being my most important year so far, as I'm going to be playing almost weekly with a guy who's been a great mentor to me, musically and spiritually, Adam Bitter. I've also been thinking more and more that the 9-5 just isn't for me, that music's where I'm called, rich or poor, and that I need to embrace it, get the fear, and just live God's calling for me. At the very least, a job in the music industry would be way more interesting than a job in the IT industry.

So I'm not big on resolutions, but sometimes you need to give yourself permission to dream. I'm a musician, first and foremost, and I'm going to start acting like it. Permission granted.

New Gear: Studio Projects B1

Having already found an interesting little mic that colors acoustic guitar in a really flattering way (MXL 991), I was searching for a nice, even microphone for vocals so that I could use ProTools to scratch out some demos and eventually get myself out into the world, just like the hundreds of other artists on the internets. Admittedly, this is a bit like using a flamethrower to clear the snow off of your driveway, but I wanted scalability, and dagnabit, I got it! After some good advice, I started looking really seriously at the Studio Projects B1.

In my mind, the first thing I needed to decide was whether I wanted a good dynamic microphone, which could easily come with me on gigs or fill other live-sound needs (and would subsequently maintain some kind of constant between recordings and live sound), or a good condenser or ribbon (or tube, or any other variant) mic that was more fragile but better suited to controlled, studio use. To this day, I'm not sure that the choice I made is the same one I would make again, because for someone who is going to be playing out a lot more, that consistency would be really nice. But either way, I settled upon the B1, which is a Large Diaphram Condenser.

The differences in technology between condensers and dynamics is a topic in and of itself, but in an extremely simplified explanation, dynamic microphones are less sensitive, can take higher sound levels without distorting (where distortion, unlike in a tube amp, is a bad thing) and can also generally handle a lot more physical abuse; getting dropped, stepped on, not explode under Phantom power, etc. A condenser mic is more sensitive, which leads to more accurate sound (but can also lead to more background noise in a noisy environment) and is what Phantom power was designed for. Hence, while a good studio will have every kind of microphone you could imagine, you tend to see really nice condensers in a studio setting, whereas you would almost never use one live, or at least, not in a vocal application. But as with anything else in music, rules were made to be broken! (which can sometimes lead to broken microphones!)

As with everything I've bought while still being in making-some-money-but-primarily-paying-down-student-loans mode, I got a pretty good deal on this one, though even at the standard street price of about $100, this mic (supposedly) holds it's own against other similar microphones priced 10 times higher. I can't really comment on that myself, having only this and two other microphones in my microphone closet, but I will say that I got way more than I thought in terms of accessories. I think that this must be one of the newest versions. Some features include two different pads (-10 and -20 dB), two high-pass filters (75 hz and 150 hz), a shock-mount, a sweet wooden box to house the microphone, and a windscreen for when I'm recording, umm, bird-calls in the wild. I think virtually all of these were absent in v1, so I definitely profited from waiting a bit.

As for the sound? I need to play with it a lot more, but it seems pretty even, frequency wise. I did do a bit of recording on a tune I wrote a while ago called "Fair Warning", which I put up on my very own MySpace. Yay! The acoustic is done with the MXL 991 (12th fret, 45 degrees towards the soundhole), the vocals with the B1. And I don't have a pop filter, so I was being a bit...cautious, vocally. But I threw it into ProTools, jammed the obligatory reverb and eq on there (and a bit of compression on the vocals), and there you have it. And ignore the lyrics. They're quasi-temporary. Unless you love them. Then they're super-permanent!

My overall rating? Definitely worth the price, if you need something that can jam on vocals and acoustic (though I haven't tried it yet, but a lot of people have claimed to like it). And honestly, for $100, you'd be hard-pressed to find something better.

Drink Spotlight: The Sidecar

You know, bartending really isn't all that difficult. You see books with hundreds or thousands of drinks (most of which are utter dreck), and you think, man, I could never be a bartender, how could I ever memorize all those drinks? The short answer is that, if you know 10 specific drinks, then you can cover literally 99.9% of the drinks that your common frat boy or sorority girl will order. But for a more interesting answer, once you understand drink families, you've got it made.

What are drink families? Put simply, when you do research the hundreds of different drinks out there, you'll find that they start to look similar to one another. That's no accident; people's tastes may have changed a bit in the past 100+ years, but a good drink is, above all, balanced. Not too sweet, not too sour, not too strong, not too weak. So when you're looking to make a drink that walks that fine line so well, you'll find that some ratios just work. The Sidecar is one such example.

Never heard of a Sidecar? For shame! The story goes that there was a particularly fat captain in WWI who frequented the Ritz Hotel bar in Paris, and did so more often than not in the sidecar of a motorcycle. Whether this actually occurred, or where specifically the drink was created, is up for debate, as is most cocktail history. Somehow stories told in bars aren't always 100% accurate...

But even if you've never heard of a sidecar, you've no doubt enjoyed it's most famous cousin, the Margarita. How close of cousins?

This family, which I've heard called the "daisy" family before, goes like this:

2 parts spirit
1 part sweet liqueur
1 part citrus juice

Which combines very, very well to properly balance the sweet, the sour, and the spirit. As such, the Sidecar is quite simply:

The Sidecar:

• 2 oz. brandy (or Cognac)
• 1 oz. triple sec
• 1 oz. lemon juice
• 1-2 dashes simple syrup

Shake and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon twist.

As you can see, it's not exactly as described. I've opted to add in a small amount of simple syrup to bring the sweetness a bit more forward for modern tastes. It is still a perfectly delicious cocktail without, but the bit of extra sweetness really carries the flavors. And Brandy in the winter time is just right. Definitely top 5.

If you're wondering just how close of a cousin the Margarita is (at least, as the cocktail was originally invented), you simply swap the lemon juice for lime juice, and the brandy for tequila. Then use the salt rim, the lime wedge, all that. The point being, you know the Margarita will be balanced because the fundamental ratio remains the same, ensuring that your drink will be just right! And if the drink families intrigues you, look for the next few Drink Spotlights, which will each feature an iconic drink from each family.

Glen Hansard

That's right. Glen stepped away from the mic, unplugged his guitar, and just went with it.

So I was at a Swell Season concert last night. And, by at, I mean I was standing in the front row, piano side, the entire night. These videos were shot by a friend I was with who was standing right next to me, so that should give you some idea. For those of you who don't know the Swell Season, rent Once. If the above video (of my favorite song) didn't already, that movie, or at least the soundtrack, will change the way you think about passion in music.

I almost never bought the ticket. But then, I was at the show for three and a half hours, so I guess it was worth it... These guys are incredible, and if they ever come to your town, go.

A few more clips (unfortunately not the whole songs....):

Now officially a cool blog!

Seems I've been called out....

Well, maybe not so much, but Karl just posted some nonsense about this here blog here, claiming something about writing good gear reviews. So I guess to not make him a liar, perhaps I should, you know, write a gear review.

And I will! On the advice of some guys I trust, I got a Studio Projects B1 condenser mic for some vocal work, and it's pretty sweet. But patience, it will be up in a few days.

First, a little honesty. While I may purport to be an incredible electric guitarist with "tone for days", the fact is that I've never actually played electric guitar before. In public. All that has changed! A friend of mine is in charge of music for a small parish in a poorer area of St. Louis, and he called me up asking if I wanted to play with him for something called XLT, a sweet Adoration-fest put on by the Archdiocese. And by "called me up", I of course mean "Facebook-ed me", because, come on. It's the 21st century. And I'm scared of phones.

So I took my Blues Jr., my G&L (this was a worship event, after all...) and my sweet pedal board and made the trek. How was it?

In a word, humbling.

I hacked my way through intros to From the Inside Out and Your Grace is Enough and Let God Arise (which was actually a lot of fun...I love distortion!) all while putting on my best "Oh, what? You were looking for the electric guitarist? That would be THIS GUY" face, and I played with delays and volume swells like it was going out of style. And I considered turning on my tremolo pedal until I realized that a tap tempo is almost more important for tremolo than it is for delay...But the point is, I realized that I need to practice, but also that electric guitar freaking rocks!

I also realized that I really, really want to get tons of gear to make me better, but I'm resisting that urge. But I do want a second delay. I would love to get a Timeline because, well, it's the best delay there is, but to be completely honest, I need something smaller and with presets. So I'm also seriously considering the new M9 by Line 6. Why? Because I really like the simple functionality of Line 6's Dl4, and by all accounts, the M9 is basically a DL4 plus about a hundred other pedals, but the same size. And I'm not crazy about any of the 'drives that I've ever heard from Line 6, but at the same time, I'm basically considering the M9 as a super DL4, so it's going to just be another pedal on my pedal board (handling a lot of delay and modulation), rather than a whole pedal board in and of itself. And modeling makes me really nervous. It still does. But I think if the guys like Jack Parker (David Crowder*Band) and Daniel Carson (Chris Tomlin) use or have used the DL4, I really can't complain about their tone. Don't even get me started on Lincoln Brewster.

Thoughts?

Is it plugged in?

As an IT specialist, I find myself asking that question. You really would be surprised how easy of a solution that is, and how often it is the correct solution. And how stupid it makes the people who have come to us with the question feel. Cue foreshadowing....

I had a minor freak-out moment last night. On the advice of a friend, I gave my Blues Jr. a once-over with the screwdriver to assure that all of the screws were nice and tight, and also to learn a bit about how it's put together. When I put it back together, nothing. Glowing tubes, no sound whatsoever. No noise, no guitar, nothing.

I thought I'd jostled a tube to death or inadvertently exposed the circuit board to air and thus killed it, and took 15 minutes seating and re-seating the tubes, checking the connections, before I noticed this:


Note: there are two 1/4-inch jacks on the back of a Blues Jr. One for the speaker, one for the boost switch that I don't have. They are not marked, and both are difficult to see or access. The boost switch input will not drive a speaker. That is all.

For anyone with a Blues Jr., the jack closest to the tubes is the speaker jack, and the other one is for the Fat Boost switch.

Who says?

This is about a week late, but it's taken a little bit of reflection time.

Last weekend was our Fall retreat, called "Unstoppable" and based upon the life of St. Paul. I was, of course, music minister, and it was really awesome to be able to get back to that. It's been since the last MACCS retreat (I think) sometime last November that I've been a full-blown music minister on a retreat, though there's not much that would compare with THAT weekend. I played a lot less frequently this weekend, because we were trying to hit a bit more on silence and reflection, though I did learn "Party in the USA" and break that one out for the teens. Yeah, I know. My only saving grace is that I didn't completely memorize it. At least not the words. I couldn't help the chords.

We talked a lot about loneliness in terms of a God-shaped hole (which I'm sure you've heard of before, but it seemed to be news to all of the teens. Note to self...) and it was really very therapeutic. I think loneliness is something that everyone's felt and that everyone can relate to. We also talked about the dark night of the soul, which may be something a bit less well-known, but basically it's feeling separated from God and not being able to get back to Him. Mother Teresa is (now) well known for having had a stretch that lasted for the majority of her ministry which is absolutely incredible to think about, but virtually every Saint has struggled with it for varying amounts of time. It really hit home for me last night when I went to Mass at the church I grew up in and saw a teen there who was on the retreat, and he described himself as currently going through it, which really broke my heart. Then I started to think about it, and it's been a while since I've been able to really feel close to God, but I've been using it as an excuse to not give everything I have to try and get back there. I don't want to go around comparing myself to the Saints, but it seems to be pretty much universal that everyone feels lonely for God sometimes.

I think that for the people who serve the church, it gets really, really hard to take a break and take some time for ourselves. I've brushed this off for so long, sacrificing a real personal connection in order to "better" minister to everyone else, but it's really been taking a toll lately. I'm not sure I could ever know how it's affecting the teens or the core team that I work with, but I'm sure it's not a positive change.

Maybe some music will come out of it?

Side note, I'm trying to keep this thing from getting really whiny or bitchy, because come on, you didn't come here to read me whine and bitch. I need to track down a few different mics, and then I'll figure out a way to get some demos up here, and maybe some original stuff. It just seems like it's been a long week and a half, and also, Call of Duty 6 came out last week, so on Saturday I had a rocking LAN party that lasted until 2am. So yes, I have been "busy".

Also, John Mayer's new stuff is out. I haven't heard much, and I absolutely hated "Who Says" when I first heard it like a month ago, but something about the chorus has grown on me, to the point where the progression and melody is expressing something to me that I can't put into words. The best musicians write music that speaks to everyone in a way that's just so personal that you can't even stand it, and I think that the more I hear, the more his stuff does that for me. I've certainly taken a lot of crap from my friends for liking John Mayer, but I think he's a completely different person now than the guy who wrote "Your Body is a Wonderland". At the very least, he's a very different artist. I still don't think I'd be able to stand him as a person, but he's got a gift.

New Gear: Fender Blues Jr.

Sorry for the blatant lack of posts. I've just been having way too much fun with my most recent bank-account drain to do much writing!

I will continue to both praise and lament Craigslist. My most recent purchase? A $300 Fender Blues Jr. I've been looking to get a Blues Jr. for a long time, mostly because it is:

a) a small, very portable combo amp,
b) has just one channel, and a simple Fender reverb tank, and
c) I small, wattage wise, and takes pedals well, and has tubes, and is generally awesome.

If you've read my gear page, you'll note that my previous main amp was an Epiphone Valve Jr. which, honestly, sounds fantastic. It's got really good, musical cleans and is only 5 watts, which means that it breaks up very well in low-volume settings, a must for a church amp. The biggest beefs I've had with it is that it is a head/cab, making it slightly less portable, and that it doesn't have a reverb on-board, making me have to waste space on a Verbzilla to make that happen. Not that I dislike the Verbzilla. I mean, it's a little too digital-sounding to me, but it does a decent enough reverb. But with this Blues Jr., I can both save some space on my board, and also save a little time in only having to carry one box instead of two.

It's based upon the same tubes as the Valve Jr., but I've been playing around with it enough to have found some differences in the character. The Blues Jr. feels a bit more open-sounding, and more clean, whereas it's not difficult at all to push the Valve Jr. into distortion. I can also tell the difference between the two speakers. I've been playing on the Valve Jr. for like 2 years now, and it's pleasantly broken-in, whereas the owner of my Blues Jr. told me that he hadn't put any real hours on his amp, and you can definitely tell. The amp feels a bit stiffer, but something tells me that once the speaker breaks in a bit (or once I replace the speaker), it will be a lot smoother. I still need to see if I can use the cab of my Valve Jr. as a break-out speaker for my Blues Jr. to try it out on a broken-in speaker, or just to try it out with a better speaker.

Some would call it harsh, but I prefer "crisp". I think once it breaks in a bit, this little amp is really going to be something.