Tag: live performance inspiration

  • The Unexpected Ways Eddie Van Halen Changed My Musician’s Path

    The Unexpected Ways Eddie Van Halen Changed My Musician’s Path

    I was in the middle of working on another post when the news of Eddie Van Halen passing away jumped out at me as a notification on my computer screen. WTF?!?

    As a guitar player, that kinda hits pretty hard. Mainly because he was one of the most influential guitarists in the history of guitar. It was common knowledge that he did have throat cancer, but last I had heard he had it beaten back. Apparently that really wasn’t the case, or maybe I misinterpreted the prior news when it was first announced he had gotten it and was dealing with it.

    Whatever the case may be, the world of music has been smashed in the face yet again in 2020. I texted a friend immediately on seeing the news asking: can 2020 get any more fuckin worse? People are making “bingo” cards of all the crazy shit that could happen in 2020 – I’m guessing no-one had Eddie Van Halen dying on their playfield. I certainly didn’t.

    In the grand scheme of the world, most people may never understand.

    What makes it kinda crazy to me is that there was a point early on in my career where I had a parallel to Eddie. While attending music school a buddy of mine, Justin Sayne, wanted one of the pickups out of my first guitar, a Fender Squire Strat. We spent an afternoon in my apartment pulling the strings off, the pick guard off and then he took his drill out with a massive drill bit. See he wanted a fender single coil and was willing to give me a humbucker in exchange. We had to drill out the body of the guitar in order to fit the humbucker into the space where the single coil was previously ensconced.

    It was true guitar hackery in its basest form. No measuring tools, no router, just pure human eyeballing of how deep and wide to drill into the wood each time as we removed wood. It looked absolutely awful when we got done. Then we had to hack the pickguard. Again, no router, no means of measuring other than placing the pickup on the pickguard and outlining where the intent was to melt it out with a soldering iron. Yeah, you read that right.

    There we were in a studio apartment with a hot soldering iron trying to be delicate with staying on the line to punch out multiple holes to remove the excess plastic to fit the pickup in. It smelled awful and stunk up the place. Once we got done with melting it out, we had to sand it smooth so it didn’t look excessively stupid.

    We got it all wried up and reassembled. That was my trial by fire to modify a guitar. Much like Eddie’s infamous frankentstein guitar. He built that from scrap parts and assembled it to be something that he wanted that wasn’t really on the market. Of course when we did this there were plenty of guitars on the market that were Fenders with two single coils and a humbucker. As a starving music student, you don’t have the option of picking up new guitars all the time. So it was born out of a trade of necessity.

    Over the years I made additional modifications to the very same guitar.

    After music school I opted to give it a custom paint job. This was an undertaking not unlike Eddie’s as well. He was notorious for stripping guitars and spray painting them with various colors. Mostly using tape and making bold shapes. My adventure was a tad different. Having a father that is known as one of the most influential graphic illustrators in art history, I had a bit more of a guided approach. Once I pulled the guitar apart, it took me days to remove the cherry red paint job that Fender had originally given the guitar. Days. Days of hard sanding. It felt like forever getting all the layers of that shit off. Once I got done with removing the paint I ended up thinking I wanted a single humbucker pickup instead of the 3 pickup guitar it was.

    Next step was filling in the unneeded pickup holes. That took a few days as well. It took a lot of wood filler and time to dry. Despite taking my time, I still managed to screw it up. The wood filler shrank more after the paint was put on and if one looks closely at the body, the outline of the old pickup holes can be seen.

    My dad tried to research what type of paint he should use for the images that were going on the guitar. We didn’t really have a direct line to any guitar manufacturers at that time, remember I was still learning how to play. Even though I knew this is what I wanted to do with my life, I was a total unknown from a small town. Eventually someone told him to use auto body paint for its durability. He bought some different colors that were needed for the paint job and started to make his stencils for the scene depicted on the guitar. Once he started painting with his airbrush, he got a bit agitated. What the problem was is, auto body paint is super thick, not very viscous. He clogged his super expensive airbrush meant for much more delicate work. It took time to clean it out and then figure out how to thin out the paint and stop it from clogging the apparatus.

    He got the image done and we took it somewhere to put a clear coat on it. I’m guessing it was auto body clear coat. Not the kind of clear coat that guitars would normally get. Something in the clear coat process muffed up the image of the snake in a spot or two. My dad had to paint over it a bit more to fix it, then we sent it out for more clear coat. Again, something that you wouldn’t see from a distance but up close you can see a bit of the layers in the paint job, which kinda gives it a bit of 3D effect up close.

    I call it my Desert Guitar. You can see why.

    That wasn’t the end of the modifications. While Eddie eventually had multiple guitar makers fanning all over him to be his next guitar maker, I had my friend Justin. Eddie’s Frankenstein guitar got laser measured to be able to match the feel of his well worn neck. Modern tech allowed Ernie Ball to computer cut new guitars to feel like his monster. For me, I haven’t reached that point. However, at one point in an airport while hanging with the boys from The Boogie Knights, the guitar player John was playing on my Desert Guitar. He loved the feel then took one look at the headstock and said: That looks so 80’s metal.

    I had a moment. A moment of like, fuck I don’t represent that and I don’t want my guitar to scream that either. I got on the phone with Justin as he was making guitars for a living (still does). The neck I had was a “Jackson” style Warmoth replacement neck for Fenders. I said, can we do something about the headstock to make it look less 80’s metal. Justin asked me to send the neck to him. Once home I whipped that neck off the guitar and shipped it out to Justin. He asked if I had any ideas and I said: just make it look not metal. I didn’t have a plan and modifying something like a headstock isn’t really the easiest thing. Justin did what he could and sent it back to me.

    At first I was like WTF happened?!? Justin lopped off the pointy end and put some strange grooves in the front of it, which meant a need to put the machine head for the high E string somewhere else. I didn’t want to buy a new neck because much like Eddie’s main axe, I had this neck broken in to feel great when playing. So I had to learn to enjoy the new look. I also had to get used to the fact that the machine head for the high E operates backwards from how most bottom of the headstock machine heads work because it was originally on the top. I still use it this way now.

    I’m not sure if Eddie ever loaned his guitars to friends. He probably did. Wolfie, Alex, Valerie, Ted, any of you know? Due to my living arrangements, meaning that I lived with Jeff Scott Soto, I had multiple musicians in my orbit and lot of them were awesome guitar players. Because I was the resident guitar player and had quite a few guitars in the condo, my axes would give picked up and played by more players than I. Lots of guitar players aren’t very good with this, but it never bothered me.

    The Desert Guitar was always the one people tended to gravitate towards. I can think of a couple of reasons for this. One, the paint job. Two, the headstock. Three, the simplicity of it, it had a single humbucker and one volume knob. Four, it sounded really damn good. Whatever it was, guitarists that played always wanted to borrow it for recordings. I was happy to oblige if I wasn’t using it. Thus my Desert Guitar has been on even more recordings than I used it for.

    The weird thing is, nothing about the guitar screams well built, accurate measure, etc. What I mean is, it should sound awful and feel like shit. The exact opposite is true. It feels great and sounds great. We all know Eddie’s guitars sounded great and people that buy the worn in versions from his template say they feel great too. Which goes to show, you don’t always need a perfect instrument to be a great player or to sound amazing.

    Now that I’ve spewed all that out while listening to Van Halen for the past couple of hours. I’m going to leave you with this…

    We’ll always have the legacy that Ed left, but its highly unlikely there will ever be a guitarist as mind-blowing as Ed was. He took the instrument places most people will never go. For that we should all be grateful. There are those of us who will really miss you Eddie Van Halen. Thank you for doing what you did and how you did it.

  • Breaking the Silence: How Tech Trouble and Skiing Reset My Music Focus

    Breaking the Silence: How Tech Trouble and Skiing Reset My Music Focus

    There’s been an undue amount of silence on my website and social media. For those not interested tl;dr – this is a rundown of my past two months of real silence.

    Silence on a Journey

    Its been a tad quiet on my website since late November. That wasn’t by design. It was by life. The music industry generally shuts down in December and at the end of 2017, I ended up holing up myself with family and pretty much working on a project being planned for later this year in 2018.

    I did my annual pilgrimage to NAMM in Anaheim. Letting out a little information about the upcoming plans, which isn’t something I’m want to do. Mostly because without a contract in place – its really all air being blown about. Its better to keep the silence when things aren’t in stone. Despite that, I and a couple of future bandmates got to partake in seeing Andy Grammer rock the outdoor stage at the convention center.

    His songs are enjoyable, but after seeing him live I now understand his real talent. Putting on an awesome show!

    Certainly gave me a bunch of ideas of breaking my live silence, when plans for later this year come thru.

    Solace in Skiing

    Winter got turned on its head. Eastern states got pummeled while the west was left nearly bone dry. Due to a bunch of unscheduled trips away from the studio, I turned to skiing to realign my soul. There’s a spirit in the high altitude that isn’t matched anywhere else. There’s a freedom to life when you succumb to gravity and let it pull you down mountains as fast as you can stand to go – and I can stand to go pretty damn fast. Most skiers can’t keep up. Thinking about that, it would be pretty awesome to spend a day skiing with Lindsey Vonn. She and I could just run the mountain in silence, but I’d probably gush in admiration.

    Digital Mountains

    In March I came to a realization that my old hosting service wasn’t going to be updating their backend software. After a couple of years of asking for updates, and being told, we’re eventually going to. This led to reaching out to my friend Derek Sivers. He suggested that I ought to strike out on my own and go self hosted. He claimed I could do it in a week. Therein began a real fork in the road for 6+ weeks. The true moment where I pretty much went into digital silence with minor moments of social media posts here and there.

    Technology isn’t a stranger in my life, but I’d never considered learning to run my own server stationed on the web. Yes, I have a server at home that allows me to house digital copies of all my media and gives me an encrypted way to control my studio machine from afar. That’s far cry from the open ocean of the internet.

    I began learning how to install an entirely different operating system than what I was used to. This led to a rather steep learning curve. I pestered Derek about software and options of what to do, until he pretty much said – I’m going out of contact for a couple of weeks. Fortunately I had a brother from another mother in Jesse Stern who was taking a very similar journey.

    A crash course of learning the ins and outs of server life. It was eye opening.

    Security was the original breaking straw of why I wanted to find a new host. I was installing the latest and greatest of operating systems, web serving software, databases, email, ftp and vpn setups. My first attempt found me about a 4 days in and suddenly locked out of my own server. Oops. My second server went much better, but still took a good deal of time.

    Then came the need to extract all my data off of my old host. It spread into so many different areas. Once collected I found that it was roughly 1.6 terabytes. I couldn’t imagine I had that much data stored in places. It accrued in silence over a bunch of years.

    Mistakes

    A harsh reality smacked me in the face. A blog site that I used to run on a daily basis Single of the Day, took me hours to port over. Several thousand audio tracks. Plus an unruly database. It took me 3 days to delete hundreds of thousands of spam comments because WordPress couldn’t handle doing it itself. If you don’t think spam takes up much space – I learned that it was several gigs in my database. Once removed from that site’s database, it shrank from multiple gigs down to a few megs. Wow!

    Come later this year my silence from Single of the Day will be broken. In the meantime, I will spend random time here and there to convert old posts to the newer format. A format that showcases posts like before, but instead of using MP3s, I’ll be going for digital streaming posts namely on Spotify. It falls more in line with my original goal of getting artists I’ve posted about, paid when people listen.

    When email finally switched and went online with the new server, I was terribly naive. Within 24 hours my father’s email account killed my email setup. Yes, I’m hosting my dad’s website and email. He’s like most older people who aren’t terribly savvy with their email account. Tons of spam. It didn’t help that my ignorance also left my email server software open to outside users to crack and send spam.

    There wasn’t much silence from my mouth after that realization.

    Rebuild It Again

    I had to destroy another server and start from scratch. By this time I was getting pretty darn proficient with installing things. However, I decided to switch hosts to a new cloud host as I was disappointed with the previous cloud host and their lack of customer support. The fortunate thing was, all my websites and other valuable info had been pared down to roughly 15gigs, far cry from the original 1.6 terabytes. This also meant spending more time securing the backend.

    It took another week to get it close to running full speed. Email still eluded me.

    Then I took a trip to see about a girl. Talk about a waste of several days of time right there.

    Returning in silence from a disappointing trip

    I kept working on email. Making sure all my certificates for my domains were in order. I doubled down on securing the email server. To the point that once I got it working, it wasn’t fully working properly. I have about 180 email aliases. I do this in order to find out where what companies end up selling my info to spammers. Then I can delete that alias. It took several days to figure out a setting in the software that was missing literally two words from the code. Those two words cost me several days of time in getting email back to fully functional.

    Attacks

    Amazing. That’s the word I’d use for what happens to servers. They get brute force attacked. Which is why I ended up installing software to ban intruders. Fingers crossed it keeps things at bay.

    At this point, I’m breaking my silence because yesterday I finally got all of my digital life back up to speed. Up to speed on way more modern software. I revamped this website and offered up a request to the software creator for a desired change to the music pages. They liked the idea, hopefully they’ll implement it soon.

    This digital journey led to my websites serving pages faster than ever before. My email is running better than ever before, plus I’m getting less spam and I can see that despite spammer attempts to break in and send spam, so far its not happened. I’ve switched to a new email list software that I’d really love to have you on (hint hint – signup using the form at the bottom of this page!) It also means my phone and laptop are running faster, because I run a VPN for my data needs in public.

    Back to Music

    I’m back in the studio saddle. Still working on the plans for later this year, I’m really hoping to have some awesome news to share about that soon (I really thought it would be all set back in February). In the meantime I’m finishing up a slew of music for a new library. I’m finishing up several singles to add to the stockpile. And I’m ramping up on additional plans for later this year. Until then, please go listen to my latest single Rise Up!

    Rise Up - listen now!
  • Why I Rang in the New Year in Australia (And Scored a Film Gig Too)

    Why I Rang in the New Year in Australia (And Scored a Film Gig Too)

    goodbye 2014

    I’m excited to say goodbye 2014 hello 2015 earlier than I normally would. Why? Well…

    Because I’m actually already in 2015 as I type this right now. How is this possible you ask? Easy peasy is the answer. I’m in the land down under, known geographically as Australia. Yes! I’m in Sydney Australia enjoying some time off before the swing of 2015 gets going full.

    All I can say is: if you’re a fan of fireworks, you have to get to Sydney for their new years eve event.

    Pure.

    Simple.

    No if’s and’s or buts’s.

    Get to Sydney, you won’t be disappointed.

    New singles will be coming starting soon. Also, I’ve been hired on to score an indie feature film. Its off to an exciting start already.

    Hello 2015

    https://vine.co/v/OwjzaAwQMVj

    Here’s a little clip of the festivies that happened early today Jan 1st 2015.

    Hope you enjoy the end of your 2014 and enjoy your new year festivites and see you when you get here next year. Had to throw in a little time humor.

    Happy New Year!

    Stay tuned!