This time last year, I was working frantically to finish my recording of “It’s Christmas (Let It Touch You)” so that I could release it by download at the start of the 2008 Christmas season. I can hardly believe that a year has passed. That’s the way I mark time. Some people use the calendar, or birthdays. I always figure out my chronological orientation by the recordings I’ve released. Therefore, it must be Thanksgiving week, because it’s been a year since “It’s Christmas (Let It Touch You)” was completed and released.

Wow. I’ve certainly posted a lot of blog entries since then too. That’s some Archive. I guess no one could call me a blogging dilettante. Though I’m hard pressed to identify the wide virtue of this pursuit.

Having no release to stress about this Thanksgiving, I’ve turned my churning brain to matters technical. I’ve broken out the soldering iron and endeavored yet again to simplify my live rig.

As you know, I’ve been playing with the Band of Brothers for over a year. I’ve gone from bass to guitar to piano and guitar. Now I bring all this stuff with me to gigs. I use two amplifiers (one keyboard, one guitar) and when I finish setting everything up, I feel sequestered in my own little electric nest, surrounded by wires and devices with little glowing lamps on them. I have a microphone, a keyboard controller, a synth module and a bunch of stomp boxes (effect pedals) to mutate my guitar sound.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, other than my amplifiers, all of these pieces of gear run essentially on battery power. Each one of the stomp boxes could run on a 9 volt. The controller could run happily off a computer’s USB port. So it’s safe to say that my hair never stands on end from all of the EMF swirling around my head. (That would actually be kinda cool over the short term.) However, what I have is much more annoying: a collection of wall warts and extension cords that enables me to power all of these toys using AC outlets. These little adaptors are the worst. They take up way too much space in a power strip, blocking more than one outlet most of the time. They are heavy and connected to a flimsy little wire that delivers battery current to your device.

To clean up the mess, I’ve picked up a regulated power supply that can deliver enough current to run everything. One wall wart that delivers a regulated 9 volts at an amp and a half. I also bought a spool of wire and a bunch of the connectors. I proceeded to build a power supply that would run all my pedals and my keyboard controller too. I added up the current ratings and confirmed the polarity configurations of everything. A few curse words and burns later, my live rig is faster to set up and very much neater. No more mess behind my amps and no more cables to detangle before and after the show. I even used spiral tubing to to build a snake from my keyboard to the synth module and the amp. It’s very slick if I do say so myself and since they aren’t sprawling all over the stage, I don’t have to worry as much about somebody walking on my cables and breaking them inside the insulation.

If you’re a guitar player, you’re wondering why I don’t have a pedal board with all of the pedals attached with Velcro. To put it plainly, they’re too clunky, they take up too much space on the floor and the Velcro adhesive always fails me eventually, leaving a tacky ectoplasmic residue on the bottom of my pedals that makes me sad.

Tone Restoration

My next project? Tone restoration. It isn’t that my tone has gone bad or anything, but I’m just ridiculous enough to hear the minute differences that occur when you string a bunch of devices between your guitar and your amp.

Each one of these effect pedals has an input and an output. You plug your guitar into one, and then patch its output to the input of the next box and so on and so on until you run out of boxes. Then you patch the output of the last box into your amplifier input. Each device has a footswitch. When you activate an effect using the footswitch, you add its electronic mutation to your signal. When an effect is off, it theoretically passes your guitar signal unaffected. (Since I’m talking about effects pedals here, I wanted to say “uneffected,” but spell check doesn’t like that. Wouldn’t “uneffected” be more correct? Oh well…) Unaffected.

Theoretically. OK, now this plunges headlong into the geek zone.

Guitar signals are pretty weak right off the instrument. Therefore, every device you place between your guitar and your amp slightly degrades your tone and adds noise. They all have little op-amp circuits in them that whether they are active or not blow up and shrink your signal like a balloon you never tie in a knot. To minimize this, you can use your amplifier’s effects loop.

Certain guitar effects sound better before the preamp and certain other ones sound better after it. Things like distortion and wah sound better before your amp. Plug your guitar into them and then connect them to the amplifier input. The amp can actually help them to sound better. However, if you use a time-based effect like delay or chorus, you might want to put them after your amp’s preamp, using the effects loop. That way, you get your tone straight and let your amp do its amplitude and coloration work first. Then you can send a good strong signal out to be modulated using the amp’s Effect Send. Come out of your time-based effect and back into your amp’s Effect Return, which goes into your power amp section and gets blasted out your speaker. Can you put a chorus or delay after your distortion and then plug the whole chain into your amp’s input? Sure, but I can hear the difference and the effects loop plan is the better option.

So now I have to build some more cables so I can get certain effects into the amplifier input and other ones back and forth through the effects loop. All of this while keeping the pedals in close proximity to each other, so I can turn them off and on without stepping all over the place, and not adding to my cable clutter onstage.

As you can see, I’m dealing with a lot of stuff right now. :~)

Every once in a while this happens to me. I find myself listening to music that if you’d have asked me about yesterday I’d have discounted. Recently I was chatting with a friend who commented that I had very eclectic musical tastes. My response at that time was that I actually don’t. In fact, my tastes have recently been leaning very “unfairly” toward soul music, especially Philly soul and all of its descendents. Lately, it’s the O’Jays, an unhealthy obsession with the O’Jays. Until this morning.

How, oh how, I wish I was a bass player. Allow me to elaborate.

I am a bass player. The bass parts on those wonderful Philly soul records are usually enough to keep me satiated as a musician and a listener. They are fat, round and beautiful. They are the nuts and bolts of some of the greatest arrangements I’ve ever heard on pop records. As a musician, listening to music is an active experience. Since I’m playing so much guitar and keyboards live (in the project I’m involved with) and doing so much singing in the studio (I’m at that stage with my current tracks), listening to the music I have in my personal rotation at the moment enables me to focus on chords and vocals.

But never forget that I was a bass player first. I lament that I am not the bass player more often. When I build my next band, I’ll be down there, for sure. Over the last two years, the fates have simply called me to play keyboards and guitar. I’m fortunate enough to be proficient on many instruments, but there’s always a little sting when I’m talking about playing music in a new project and I hear that a bass player is already involved. I always end up thinking, “How ‘bout this guy? He gets to play bass? Lucky bastard…”

I don’t mean to say that I don’t love the piano or the guitar. I’m happy to be trusted in those roles live and thrilled that I can fill them on my own records without any difficulty. It enables me to express exactly what I need to express, without compromise. Though I’m principally a bassist, in the Band of Brothers, I’m much harder to replace as a keyboardist and guitarist. Therefore, I do my best for Brian and the band.

I’m ruminating on this again because for some reason, I came upon the latest Billy Sheehan album this morning. Yesterday, I’d have said, “Umm.. Billy Sheehan? Really?” It reminded me of the phenomenon that occurred in my life a couple of years back when I started to re-devour Rush records. I found myself just basking in the bass-centric arrangements, the 16th note runs and the half-distorted tones. I would that I could more often retreat into the place where only bass matters.

When I first started playing music outside of the school band, it was the early 80s, which was a time of quasi-virtuosity in heavy rock music. Though I never gravitated toward metal, there was something admirable about rock musicians being concerned about chops and technique. It began in progressive rock of the 70s and took a heavier turn later. I didn’t worship these guys as gurus, but I had to respect the time they devoted to mastering their instruments. It seems completely alien now in mainstream circles.

In that upbringing, I guess I still retain some of the original musical geekiness that enables me to appreciate a bass player who at will can completely overplay and be as self-indulgent as possible. In my early days, I had absolutely no responsibility to the “big picture” in a musical ensemble. What the hell did I care about that? I could just lose myself in the role of the bass and be as jingoistic as I pleased. When so many of my friends wanted to be lead guitarists, I wanted to be a bass player and at the same time, do anything they could do. It was the Billy Sheehan and Geddy Lee types that put that thought in my head. Though I laughingly think of myself as some twisted musical Garibaldi reared in an environment of flash individualists, deep down, I’m still one of them.

I had the light this morning. There weren’t many cars around. Still, when I got halfway into in the street, a car moving at a pretty high rate of speed tried to make a left turn. Seemingly out of nowhere, a car appeared and was headed straight for me. A light rain was falling and the street was wet. The driver braked in a panic and the car skidded, coming to a stop about 3 feet from my legs.

I was ready to jump on the hood of that car to buy myself a few more feet and save my life or at least my legs. I’ve rehearsed that move in my mind frequently during these years I’ve spent walking so much in traffic. Yes, I think often of diving on the hoods of cars. I kept walking, because I was able to and still in the middle of the street. As I walked by the passenger side of the car, I peered in the window at the driver, a woman with a scarf over her head, simply frozen behind the wheel. Her hand fell to the gear shift, but she never even turned to look at me. By the time I had crossed the other street at that corner, she had pulled over and stopped, presumably to change her pants. I didn’t stop, since I figured the driver and I had very little to talk about, but my heart still raced. I said a little prayer of thanks, since I supposed that I could have easily been killed.  

I made the most of my adrenaline and ran a couple of blocks to get my train, which was already arriving. When I was safely aboard, I considered this incident a little further. I thought about my family and what it would’ve meant to them. How should I feel? Is there a message in this event that I should not miss? I could’ve been taken out by a car, which if you’ve ever had one moving toward you, you know becomes real in a very different way than just watching one rush by silently from up in a skyscraper somewhere. I actually felt the mass of the object in whose path I was standing. It’s so difficult to describe. It had a life about it. This was the first time I experienced that bizarre sensation after years as a child of studying the “faces” of cars that were formed by bumpers, headlights and license plates.

The biggest surprise of all, and perhaps it shouldn’t have been, was that my life didn’t pass before my eyes at that moment. I didn’t feel the fear that one would think I’d feel in that situation. Even as the car was heading for me, I knew that I would not die today. There was a peace behind the fight or flight response in my body. I have too much left to do. There was no way. Some force stopped the car short of actually hitting me. Was that what I felt?

On some days, when I’m under no real threat, I can feel so fragile. I remember writing about that feeling here before. When I wrote about it, I thought of it as a wisdom that came with my age. However, when it comes down to the reality of situations like these, I can just sense that I’m not going anywhere for a while. It can’t be my imagination. I won’t claim any measure of invincibility, but my conviction today was as powerful to me as the “life” in that car.