Grammy nominated children’s songster Zak Morgan performed last week at the Levitt Pavilion in Pasadena.

At an earlier performance I attended, he asked if we (the Poxy Boggards and Merry Wives) would sing back up for him on “Nicolo Picarello,” a song the Boggards recorded background vocals for about a year ago.

We were only able to muster about six or seven vocalists. When we got up there (about 1/2 way through the set) he asked us to stay and wing backing vocals for the rest of the set.

It was a very fun time. Zak is a great and generous performer. If our schedules work out again, we’ll be back out there backing up the kid again.

If you have little ones, I recommend you check out Zak’s web page and see when he’s playing near you.

It was especially exciting for me because I got to watch Johnny “Spazz” Hatton on upright bass. Spazz plays with the Brian Setzer orchestra. Having picked up the upright about a year ago, I’ve been itching to watch upright players. His playing style is unconventional and awesome to watch.

Pain Celtic Squall rehearsed last night. For those that don’t know, this is my “other band.” It’s a quartet comprising Heather (my wife), Phil (from the Boggards) and Claire (from the Wives).

Once faire was over, we started using our regular rehearsal time to record, and we’ve made a good deal of progress toward a finished CD. We’ve recorded just about everything we were well-rehearsed on, and it’d been so long since we rehearsed, we decided it was time to take a break from recording and start playing together again.

Pain. Great pain.

I’m playing upright bass in Squall, which is a physically taxing instrument to play — not as bad as playing piano in a marching band, mind you, but difficult nonetheless. I’ts a large instrument. Everything’s far away from everything else. And it takes a lot of force to generate a note.

When I first started playing it, it was pretty continuous pain. My plucking fingers were raw and constantly on the verge of blistering. My fingerboard hand was always cramping from from trying to push down the very heavy guage strings (not to mention the callouses, which weren’t even in the same place as my bouzouki callouses).

That was when I started, and I sort of feared a resurgance of this kind of pain when we started rehearsing last night. Yes, there was a little bit of the cramping and the friction pain, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

Arthritis. Arthritis in my elbows. Both of them. It was quite painful, actually.

Age has certainly brought advantages that I hadn’t forseen:

But I  don’t dig the aches and pains.

Got a new laptop for Father’s Day.

HP Pavilion dv6700. Dual core Turion 64. nvidia graphics. 16×9 screen. 3gb memory and a 250gb drive.

Came installed with Windows Vista Home Premium edition. Preinstalled with Service Pack 1.

I have almost no experience with pre-SP1 versions of Vista, so take this with a grain of salt. I like Vista. Caveats:

- it’s running on a computer designed for the OS, and it’s a pretty fast computer.

- I like the Windows OS, and have been using it since 3.1.

I’m using it with the goofy, graphics-intensive interface, and it looks nice and is fairly snappy. I’m sure the performance would improve greatly if I turned that off, but as of yet, I don’t see the need.

Although they’ve moved some stuff around, it was still very easy to find it all. Uninstalling all the OE software and the Norton security suite (something I do with every computer) was fairly simple, but time-consuming. It took almost 4 minutes to uninstall the Norton stuff, and I’m still not sure I got all of it.

I’ve installed Firefox 3.0 release candidate (my apoligies to Tiffny for maligning her noble employer’s name), Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org (which now runs VERY fast), Allegro 2002 (which STILL say it crashes when it closes, but works nonetheless), and PaintShop Pro.

All the software seems to be working fine. The real test will be when Digidesign approves ProTools LE for Vista, and I try audio editing on this machine. If that works, I’ll be elated. Not sure if the small Firewire port will work with my audio interface … if not, I’ll be slightly less elated.

U2’s manager, Paul McGuiness, has been fairly outspoken, and a little cracked, about music file sharing on the internet.

Ars Technica detailed his latest rant at Music Matters 2008.

In it, he proposes that ISPs share their revenue with the music industry. Why? Because the ISPs reap all their great service subscription revenues from people wanting to illegally share music files. That’s why people are on the internet, he says.

Guess ol’ Paul’s never heard of porn.

Tags: internet, music business

Currently, I have five songs started. Nothing completed. Nothing even close. I’ve got some good ideas, but haven’t yet hit upon that inspiration spark that sets off the flurry of songwriting.

Two are potential Boggards songs (maybe Rogues’ Reefe songs), two are Celtic Squall songs and one is either a Squall song or an MWOW song.

Have to see how things flesh out. I’m going to try some free-form, stream-of-consciousness writing and see if anything hits.

Only three weekends left.

This is my fifteenth consecutive season of Faire. Starting to suffer some burnout. But it’s not just the fifteen years — the Boggards have become (and have been so for a few years) a year-round endeavor, and that’s eating up an enormous amount of time.

I already told the band that I’m taking a hiatus starting immediately after Faire until sometime in October or so. I may take off even longer. The band’s a lot of work and takes up a lot of time, and it’s crowded out a lot of the things that got me to start it in the first place.

Like songwriting.

I’m lucky to get one or two songs written a year. That sucks. Back when I had my rock band after college, I was writing a song a week.  And I want to expand my songwriting horizons a little. I’d like to write some songs that don’t have to do with drinking or f*cking.

I’ve already got my plan of attack for my songwriting from Derek Sivers’ blog. I’ve got a stack of index cards and I’m writing myself a bunch of songwriting “assignments” to complete this summer and fall.

I’m also going to concentrate more on Celtic Squall. It’s very exciting being in a new band. Yeah, it’s some of the same old people, but it’s different: a different kind of music, different audience, different vibe, different sound.

It’s very different starting a band today, knowing what I now know. I’ll probably write more on this later. When Bill and I started the Boggards, we barely knew what we were doing. Today’s different, I think.

Stu’s First Law of Online Recording Forums:

“Avoid them.”

Not really. At least not entirely, anyway.

Here’s the problem: there is a lot of very accurate, yet useless information out there. It will distract you. It will divert your attention from the thing that matters with recording: competently capturing a competent performance.

We all know how quickly a discussion on the internet can lose any relevance. I remember years ago, back when there was only USENET, I was on rec.audio.pro. A discussion started about the mechanics of compressors. Each side was so deeply entrenched in its own definition of a compressor that a flame war began, completely with ASCII schematics of compressor circuits.

The whole thread probably started with some poor guy who was trying to use one and didn’t quite understand what he was doing. Perhaps he was hoping for some sort of preset he could start with. Maybe he was looking for some rules for when to use it.  Did he get any of that? No.

The thread got quite lengthy.  So much so that if the original poster had spent his time experimenting with the compressor, rather than reading the hundreds of posts in the thread, he would have had a much better understand of what a compressor is used for.

I can point to dozens, maybe hundreds, of examples like this.  Some people just like to argue, I guess, but they’re sure as hell not making any music while they’re arguing.  At some point, if you have a recording setup and you want to record music, you need to close your God-damned browser and make music.

And now, like any good blog posts, I have a couple of lists:

Four things that will improve your recording quality more than logging on to a recording forum:

1. Go find your most recently written song and give the lyrics a thorough editing. Few of us write perfect poetry with our first effort. So take some time to actually read your lyrics. Can you phrase things so the scansion’s better? Maybe you can work on that one problematic verse that’s not quite as good as the others.
2. Write a new song. Don’t have any current music to work on? Write some! The best way to improve your songwriting is to write more songs.
3. Record a demo. Maybe you’ve got a song or two that’s almost finished — or maybe it is finished. Lay some tracks! If the song’s not finished, maybe hearing it as a demo might inspire you to finish it. Maybe you’ll hear a part that can be improved. Don’t study recording — record!
4. Practice an instrument. ‘Holy Christ! That’s crazy talk! Actually work to become better at my craft?’ you say. That’s right. Run scales, arpeggios. Practice difficult position shifts. Work your technique. Hone your sound. Practice expression.

If you must frequent recording forums, may I suggest these:

1. The Womb. This is the mixerman.net forum. You know, the Mixerman Diaries? That’s right, those hysterical accounts of a recording engineer, working with the now-legendary “Bitchslap.” You’ll find some of the usual recording forum fare, but you’ll also find a lot of insight about the music business, from people who work in it.

Oh, I guess that’s it. Can’t really think of a better one.

I love conspiracy theories. The more outlandish, the better. My new favorite is the mysterious Majestic-12. Majestic-12, or MJ-12 to its friends, is supposedly a top secret organization created by Harry Truman to cover-up, manage, or otherwise handle the presence of extraterrestrials roaming about and around our planet.

The biggest smoking gun in this conspiracy is a supposed memo,  dated 24 September, 1947.

This memo may very well be a fake.  According to the Wikipedia article on Majestic-12, there are several things to indicate this letter is not genuine (probably the most telling is that the typewriter used to write it didn’t exist until 1962).

Here’s the thing: even if the above memo is real, it doesn’t mention a god-damn thing about space aliens!

But it’s still a fascinating story and part of me hopes it’s true. I just like the idea of a bunch of super-secret spooks running around battling space aliens.