This was not a “song”, at least insofar as I did not rehearse for it other than to check my equipment that morning. (This will very apparent to you after listening to any portion this.) But it was noizefest, so there ya go.
Sign by Ray Bong, who through the miracle of the internet knew about my other life as an Apple developer and a certain pissy email that I got from the CEO-emeritus Steve Jobs. I don’t really think that makes me his “enemy”, but it was good stagecraft, and was probably the most interesting part of the set.
So here’s the recording of what turned out to be my first completely solo set ever, clocking in around 12 minutes, and titled thanks to Ray Bong. You can hear him shout out at the very end!
Thanks to Phil of Slobodan for letting me use his amp (that’s his feet in the picture above). Setup was 6 string electric through overdrive, looper (Boomerang), then echo (Memory Man) into the amp. Most of the noise is the Memory Man delay loopback.
Of course guitars can’t really do themselves in, but it looked like my late 80′s Rickenbacker 330 12-string had done just that when i opened the case on Friday to find this:
After getting over the initial shock, i realized that it was the “R” tailpiece that had broken, presumably during a hurricane evacuation or just being in storage in hot weather. But this guitar had been halfway around the world with me since around 1991, and I had never had this happen before.
Rickenbacker will replace the “R” provided that I send them the old one and buy the replacement as well. It’s a pretty old guitar, so I suppose that’s reasonable, but the replacement part is $100 which is not cheap.
No real answers as to why it happened either, but looking on the Rickenbacker boards it seems that there was some problem with the models of this era and hopefully fixed now. The extra tension on the 12-strings (versus a 6-string) is obviously a factor, as it doesn’t happen on 6-strings. And when the person at Ric customer service asked me about what kind of strings I had on it — I had Pyramids — he seemed to believe that these strings had a higher tension rating which may have contributed to the crack.
I’ve had this guitar for nearly 20 years and only ever had one issue with it — when a piece of later-discovered cat fur was blocking the jack preventing me from playing “Fearless” at a Halloween show where we performed as 1972 Pink Floyd — and excepting some screws that went rusty, have not had any reason to question the quality of their manufacturing process. It’s been a great guitar, and hopefully will be again soon, but I am really going to have to consider using different strings, or storing it differently, or something. Hopefully the replacement tailpiece will be of stronger stuff!
in case you’re wondering why there haven’t been any updates recently, i’ve been busy with a variety of different things: rehearsing for a chef menteur live show, finalizing mixes and getting CDs together for the alternative music expo, updating the BPR site with new functionality and new music, overdubs and mixing on the new chef menteur album (still in progress), and now also preparing for an archipelago show. archipelago is opening for sir richard bishop (sun city girls) at the zeitgeist on june 6th. his solo album polytheistic fragments is recently one of my favorite acoustic guitar albums of all time, even though my favorite track on the disc, “saraswati” is a piano track.
i hope to get back into the groove soon, though; for example, i sampled just about every note on my mom’s old harmony banjo and i’ve got a nifty little thing going with that and the monome that i need to make a proper song out of.
here’s a video of me having fun with the monome. i am using a Max patch called boiinngg to trigger the drums in Ableton Live, using the Impulse plugin.
