Review: Christmas Music (Trevor Gordon Hall - Let Your Heart Be Light)

Christmas music sucks. It's the same songs, year after year, played incessantly for more than a month straight of EVERY SINGLE YEAR. It doesn't matter that there are new artists singing them; they're doing nothing new. For this reason, I limit myself to only listening to Christmas music at church and on Christmas and Christmas eve. That's it.

And it's not me being anti-Christmas or anything. I hate the commercialization of it and the music; that's it.

Needless to say, my expansive music collection has chosen to skip over the Christmas-themed music. I have 3 Christmas albums: the RelientK one from when I was in middle school, my friend Matt's band, and Trevor Gordon Hall's, Let Your Heart Be Light, The Christmas Album. I haven't listened to the Relient K one in eons and, honestly, I haven't unwrapped Matt's yet. If I try to preempt the Christmas music strike, bad things happen.

But somewhat out of obligation, I decided to take a risk this year. A HUGE risk. About a week ago, I got out Trevor's album and threw it in my car. I replaced the live August Burns Red album (that I was at the show for!) to listen to Christmas music?! And I'm there asking myself, Why?!


It's Trevor Gordon Hall. He's a musical genius, innovator, and a friend. My logic was that if anyone could do Christmas music right, it'd be a guy with vision like Trevor's. But the whole time I'm nervous. I REALLY don't like Christmas music. I'm thinking to myself, will my respect for Trevor disintegrate after hearing this? Am I going to impulsively drive into oncoming traffic to stop this? What will happen if I actually do like it?! How should I feel?


Yes, I did wonder ALL of those things. But in a moment of trust, I hit play and began my venture to work. It's less than 20 minutes, so I figured, worst case, it'd be a crappy morning drive.


I didn't expect, however, to pop the disc out and take it in to work with me. But sometimes you're broadsided like that. I had high hopes and reasonable expectations, but this album I would listen to year-round.

Here's the breakdown:

It starts out with Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas; commercialized and generic, but fresh. It's got a nice intro tacked onto it and some good harmonic work throughout.

Next is I Saw Three Ships. This is played in a very Trace Bundy-like style; some nice finger work to start off, followed by a very bouncy rhythm that has you bopping back and forth to the music.

O Holy Night follows with a more traditional sound, but done very elegantly. It's got a Don Ross feel to it. Nice and peaceful with few surprises, but just a generally good sounding piece.

The First Noel starts out with The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire). It's a good, familiar way to lead into the meat of the song. What got me about this one, time and time again, was how organic it sounded; there is so much string noise in all of the right places. So many people try to remove any extraneous noises when these are the ones that make the guitar sing.

White Christmas - from the start you've got this big, resonating harmonic. The song is big and open. A lot of times guys will try to cram as many notes as possible into these songs, but this is the perfect balance.

Frosty the Snowman - pretty typical, but spiced up with some sleigh bells and harmonica part way through the song.

Auld Lang Syne - he brings in a Rhodes and a glockenspiel for this song. I love the sound of glock and guitar. Matt Stevens turned me onto that. There's just something about that mellow bell-like resonance... It's a great arrangement.

Silver Bells - it starts out with what sounds like a ukulele and then gets some nice slide work overlaid on top. It's adds a nice mix to the album. If I had to guess, there's also some looping going on here, as Trevor does some pretty crazy stuff live and would probably be able to do the whole thing live...

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel - fretless bass intro. YES! It's super smooth and is coupled with a slow gear kinda volume swell effect on the guitar. There is actually a lot more focus on the bass than the guitar on this one - which on a 15 track album makes for a good break.

Christmas Time Is Here - this brings you back to the guitar-centricity of the album. It's got some nice quiet acoustic parts and then jazzy, lightly distorted leads with a hint of delay, over top.

Count Your Blessings (Instead of Sheep) - is that an e-bow? The spacey, sustain of an e-bow really adds to an album that is, overall, a little slower. Good call by Trevor.

Angels We Have Heard On High - it's nothing exciting, but definitely helps to bring the album together more. It's one of those things I guess you expect to hear, and, like many other tracks on this album, can take you back to the stripped-down simplicity of the original hymns.

Edelweiss - throughout the album, there a few places where Trevor uses an e-bow really subtly. It's one of those things that differentiates between good and great. Here's another instance of that.

Christmas Medley - Usually the contents of a song like this would be enough Christmas music for me for the year. Instead, I've listened to this album maybe 10 times so far. It really is that good.

And there's a bonus track. You'll have to check that one out for yourself...


So tonight and tomorrow you need to listen to this. It is literally the only album on my approved Christmas music list.

spotify: Trevor Gordon Hall – Let Your Heart Be Light - The Christmas Album


not on the album, but SO GOOD live -

Soundtrack Review: The Art of Flight

I say “movie soundtrack” and what do you think? I know I’m immediately thinking big orchestral scores similar to The Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings. To a lesser degree, I think of movies like Juno and Scott Pilgram vs. the World. Film is one of those places where you can get a hipster to listen to an orchestra or you can get someone with slightly more class to listen to Sonic Youth. It’s a beautiful dichotomy.

But what is it that makes these soundtracks so great? If you were to throw the Juno soundtrack in with The Pirates of the Caribbean it wouldn’t bode well for either. Music is set there to compliment the film. It helps you to experience the film on a deeper level. In my examples, we’ve got POTC and LOTR as these big epics with battles and adventure …and music that makes you feel like you’re in the midst of those exact things. With Scott Pilgram, the music helps you to feel like you’re in the midst of a video game. And with Juno, you feel like a lost indie kid in a big confusing world.

The music is there to remove you from your seat and place you in the movie. Consequently, when you hear the same music without the movie, it is emotive of those same feelings. When I hear the POTC soundtrack, for instance, I immediately am thinking of scenes from the movie.

But this is a rare case. Unless it’s the theme song, for most movies, hearing something from it won’t evoke anything reminiscent of the movie. And even a more rare case is that there is a documentary with such a mind-blowing soundtrack.

Enter, The Art of Flight. It’s a snowboarding documentary. When I think of snowboarding documentaries, after thinking of how awesome the footage is, I am reminded of how terrible the music is. It’s so often over-produced rap, angsty punk, or something else that’s way too much of a sensory overload when combined with watching guys drop off 70 foot cliffs. The music rarely makes you feel like you are there.

And really, snowboarding is a lot more tangible than most movies, so it should be easier to emulate the feeling through music. If music can make you feel like you’re sailing across the ocean in a pirate ship, shouldn’t it also be able to make you feel like you’re doing something a little less fanciful.

So often this is botched up, but not with The Art of Flight. Everything is perfect. There is literally nothing I would change about the movie, except to maybe make it longer. Since I first saw it about a month ago, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about snowboarding or stop listening to the soundtrack.

The soundtrack to this thing redefines what you think of as a soundtrack. It has variety, dynamic, and puts you right in the middle of the movie. Sure, I’m not out there hucking backflips over 100 foot gaps on a glacial melt, but I do snowboard and am pretty well familiar with the sport. And somehow, this soundtrack is snowboarding. It’s complimentary to the images to place you right in the middle of the action.

This is finally a soundtrack that recognizes that snowboarding is more than just about big tricks. When I’m listening to this, I’m doing what I do on a mountain. I like steep and fast and, occasionally, a good cruiser.

Right off the bat, you’ve got some house beats (that's what they're calling this stuff, right?), compliments of Deadmau5, that give the vivid feeling of flying down a chute, airing over small features, but in such a fluid manner and with such intensity. The bass is driving, but at a palatable pace that focuses on the control of every little muscle movement involved with keeping up with gravity. It’s not about going big, but about style. It’s the beauty of a well planned line and the thrill of the moments when your board leaves the ground.

After that, there’s this song by The Naked and Famous, “No Way.” It’s basically like cruising on some packed power and then dropping some fresh tracks. You’ve got the opening words of “When the daylight comes, do you feel it?” It’s in a soft voice and makes you think of cruising blues on packed power after getting first chair, bright and early in the morning. When I’m listening to it, I’m hearing the crunch of cutting through the snow through nice, relaxed carves down an empty slope. Every verse is like this – like cruising leisurely and enjoying life. Then you’ve got these big choruses that take you from the lift lines and packed powder to the back side of the mountain, laying fresh tracks through huge pow turns. It’s like floating.

Next in line is Apparat’s, “Ash/Black Veil.” It’s set by a delay driven, beat that seems to be comprised of some guitar, violin, percussion, and random sound effects. It’s light and open. Listening to this one, I’m envisioning a tree run. Not an east coast run, but out west, where you’ve got big, open aspen glades and powder. The song takes you along this trail, where you’ve got nothing but trees ahead of you and nothing but trees behind you.

Basically, the album continues at this pace – exploring the many facets of snowboarding, snow, and winter. You’ve got tracks for big jumps, tracks for steep lines, tracks for danger, and tracks for relief. This is what I want to ride to this winter. This is a soundtrack beyond the scope of a movie. It’s one that spans to reach the snowboarding (skiing, snowmobiling, etc.) subset of the population to the point of being the soundtrack to our lives for the next 4 months.

Check it:

And, of course, the rest of the soundtrack:

Segment	Artist	Song
Intro 1	Defrag	Element 1
Intro 2	M83	Outro
So Far Gone 1	Hendrickson/Dick/Harry	Before the Storm
So Far Gone 2	Deadmau5	Ghosts n’ Stuff (Nero Remix)
Down Days	Oswin Macintosh	Passion Victim
Wizard	The Naked and Famous	No Way
No Bueno	Apparat	Ash/Black Veil
Darwin 1	Klaus Badelt	Nowhere to Run
Darwin 2	Blockhead	Sunday Seance (Loka Remix)
Home 1	The Album Leaf	Another Day
Home 2	The Naked and Famous	Young Blood
Home 3	Mel Wesson	Motional Rescue Pulse
Avalanche 1	Mel Wesson	Stark Light
Avalanche 2	Sigur Ros	Track 6
Aspen	M83	Intro
Revelstoked	Hum	Iron Clad Lou
More stoked	The Black Angels	Young Men Dead
Even more stoked	M83	My Tears Are Becoming A Sea
Credits 1	Okkervil River	Westfall
Credits 2	We Are Augustines	Chapel Song

Studio Session 12/9-12/11

So I was just in the studio this past weekend and thought it’d be good to share some insight for those of you who may want to someday record some music and also for those who just want to know what it’s like. I’ll summarize my time this past weekend and throw in some tips as well.

Over three days (Friday-Sunday), I was at MR. STUDIO (Jeremy Bentley) in Lancaster for about 21 hours. In that time, I laid down guitar for 7 songs, totaling close to half an hour of material. These ranged in complexity from one or two track songs to some that had 6 or so. I’ll need to go in for one more day/weekend to finish up the project, but it is coming along well.

Overview:

Friday:

I tend to try to get the hard stuff out of the way first. It makes sense to me.  So a song that uses two stages of looping, distortion, delay, and some crazy polyrhythmic stuff made sense. Between setup and this song, I ended up going over by an hour.

Saturday:

I started with some easier stuff on Saturday. Starting off with something straight forward made sense after Friday night’s work. After one easy one, I did one that had a bit more percussion involved, so it was a little more difficult to lay down and get dynamically correct.

Then I started on another complex one. Looping, reversed loops, distortion, delay, and surprises were all involved… And by surprises, I mean, you’ll have to wait and the wait will suck. In any event, this one took the cake for hardest. Some 6 hours later, both Jeremy and I were frustrated and didn’t have a complete recording.

Sunday:

Sunday started with an easier song that ended up with some extra goodies. I’m excited for this one. It didn’t take too long until I decided to start playing around with it. Then ideas just started popping up.

After that, I did an old one that really didn’t take much time at all. It was easy and straightforward. Then, one with some looping and some percussion that wasn’t too hard either. This one brought out some new ideas that drastically change how awesome the song will be, so playing around there took some time.

Finally, the song from Saturday was revisited. It took us up until the very end of the session, totaling somewhere between 7-8 hours on that one song… Frustrating, but a great final product.

Tips:

Guitars:

Get them professionally set up. This was the first time that my Taylor was set up (big thanks to Penn Avenue Music in Reading). I keep it in a pretty well controlled environment, so it wasn’t out too bad, but with the neck true, it plays noticeably smoother.

Restring your guitar. This will be done with the setup, unless you’re going to skip that step. Don’t experiment with a new type of string – use a gauge and brand that you are comfortable and familiar with. And break them in! No one wants a tinny sounding recording, so make sure you’ve got 20 hours or so on them.

Also, go into the studio with options. I never go in with just one guitar. This weekend, I only used one guitar, but I had another, as well as a bass, just in case I felt inspired. You don’t want to think up some great idea and not have the means to execute it. Sure, it sucks lugging tons of gear into the studio, but it sucks more when you want something that’s not there.

Electronics:

With acoustic, you generally just mic the guitar. You don’t use an amp, and, even with electrics, you want to avoid effects. The idea is that it is easier to add stuff later than it is to take it away. Ever try to take out reverb after it’s been recorded? Ha!

What you’re looking for with the electronics is that everything is working properly. This may mean a new set of tubes in your amp (or preamp, as was my case), isolating and eliminating any noise from your pedals, changing the battery in your guitar (for active p’ups), or servicing your vintage echoplex (mine needs to be cleaned). This will ensure that you’re not messing around trying to fix stuff during your studio time. When you do it there, it costs you money.

Practice:

You’re going to be playing your instrument for extended periods of time. And you’re going to be trying to get everything right the first time. So figure out what you want to play and then you’ve got two focal points: accuracy and endurance.

Accuracy is hitting every note correctly. In your practice time, focus not only on the right notes, but also on tone. At least with guitar, there are a number of different sounds you can get from the same note. You want the best one. So practice that way.

The endurance required may vary. For a solo instrumentalist such as myself, 20 hours in a studio means upwards of 20 hours playing guitar – in two or three days. If you’re in a band or also sing, you’ll have some relief. If not, you’ve gotta be prepared.

The first time I recorded with Jeremy, my fingers were raw after day one and I was in excruciating pain at the end of the weekend. I actually had to take time off of playing to let my hands recover. This time? My hands felt great at the end of every day and Sunday night, when I got home, I got out my guitar and started playing some more. The key was that leading up to the weekend, I put in quite a few 4-5 hour practice sessions, some on back to back days. Earlier I mentioned putting 20 hours on a new set of strings. I did that in a week. Including the time recording, I played for nearly 40 hours in a 7 day period. That’s a full week’s work.

Rest:

Don’t go in tired. Recording is mentally draining. Even if you are physically prepared, your mind needs to be in the game or you’ll get nothing done.

For vocalists, I hear you’re supposed to rest your voice. I don’t know, I’m not a vocalist.

Documentation:

This is a big engineering thing that has carried over to my music. I’ll never be one to write out my songs, but make sure you include any relevant details, so that you know them when you’re recording. This includes song names, tunings, effects used, effect settings, etc. I went a step beyond and made a chart that listed these things. Ultimately, it helped me to visually see which songs made sense in progression, giving me my album order. Sending this to Jeremy gave him a good idea of what was coming where as well. Be sure to keep track of anything that changes in the studio as well.

Be Open Minded:

Sure, I mentioned above that you want to have things figured out beforehand. The point there is that you shouldn’t be writing the songs on studio time. That doesn’t mean that they can’t change. Be open to changing things last minute. You may accidentally hit an extra note somewhere, but if it sounds better that way, then change it. When you’re sitting in a studio listening to the same section of a song a million times in a row, you’re bound to come up with some new ideas.

Let the Engineer Do His Thing:

These people record for a living. They probably know more about recording than you do. Accept that. Once I was in position with the mics, I was told not to move. Sure, I moved in between playing, but while playing I was in the exact same position EVERY TIME. Don’t screw that up.

Finally, here’s the gear setup that I used:

• ·      Guitar: Taylor 410ce (c. 2007)
• ·      Pickups: K&K Onboard Trinity
• ·      Effects: (in order) Presonus TubePRE (w/JJ 12ax7), Ernie Ball Volume Jr., Ibanez TS7, Line 6 DL4, Danelectro Tape Reel Echo Simulator, BBE Sonic Stomp, Fishman AFX Reverb, Boss RC20XL
• ·      Amp: Roland AC-60
• ·      Mics: (2) SM57 – 1 off of soundhole, 1 for amp. GT55 – off of 12^th fret.

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5.10

What do you want to be good at? What do you want to succeed in? And more importantly, how are you getting there?

If you want to be famous, go play in traffic. You’ll make the news. Better yet, film yourself doing it. Youtube will eat it up …for a few days.

But if you want to do something great or to be a better person, it won’t happen tomorrow. Or next week. It takes time and push to get anywhere. If you’re lucky enough to be handed something “successful,” you still aren’t “successful” until you’ve tackled adversity and dealt with bad times.

Tuesday, at the climbing gym, my girlfriend climbed a 5.10 on her first try. A few months ago she was too afraid of heights to climb the whole way up the wall. To put it in perspective, there are 8 different “colored” routes at the gym, white through black. She started at white. This was a green, with only blue and black above it.

To get to that point took a lot of hard work. To start, she was afraid of heights. For most fears, the best way to deal with them is to face them. Climb a 35 foot wall enough, and suddenly 35 feet isn’t so high. Maybe you’re still afraid of heights, but you’re not afraid of 35 feet.

Beyond that, a 5.10 is pretty nuts. It takes a lot of skill development and strength; skills and strength that you only get through constantly being challenged. On easy climbs you have huge jugs to hold on to. It’s essentially like climbing a ladder; one hand after the other and one foot after the other. As you move up, the holds get smaller. Suddenly, you’ve got small pockets, pinches, and crimps. Your holds go from being 6 inches off the wall to being half an inch or smaller. And instead of a logical hand-over-hand progression, you’ve got places where you match a foot on a hold your hand is on and other places where you’re laying back with your shoulder into the wall. You have to not only learn these techniques, but you also have to learn when to use them and how to use them effectively.

And if you can’t constantly be looking ahead, you’re going to get stuck. I push pretty hard with climbing. Generally, I slow down when I feel like I’m risking injury and become reckless. If you’re not pushing towards that, then you’re not being challenged enough. You don’t want to push past that point, but you want to go right up to it and stare it in the face.

It’s a progression. We all start out playing individual notes or chords in whatever we do. It’s a slow process, note by note. Then you start to learn skills and technique. You practice endlessly until it hurts. Then you practice more and it hurts more, but it’s a good hurt because you understand it. Finally, you work on developing those skills and being innovative. That last step is a life-long work. It involves few of those days where your fingers are raw because you’ve already built up the calluses. But you can’t ever be comfortable with where you’re at. To be great, you don’t stop at 5.10, because there is 5.11.

It’s really great to see Kelly progress how she has. And it’s encouraging to know that my moderately aggressive teaching style gets results. But she’s far from done. We’re both taking December off, but come January, we’ll be picking back up, moving back up to the 5.10s and looking ahead.

Review: Guitar Masters (McKee, DuFour, Bennett) @ World Cafe Live

I started down the path of percussive fingerstyle and experimental acoustic guitar about 4 ½
years ago. It’s hard to believe that it hasn’t been longer. Right before that time I had seen my
first Trace Bundy youtube clip. A friend forced me to watch it and I was hooked.

Shortly thereafter, the world of percussive fingerstyle would explode via Andy McKee and his
candyrat records youtube videos. No one had seen anything like it before and they went viral.
Like 41 million views viral. Doing my homework on McKee, I discovered the candyrat record
label. THE label for guys of this sort.

The candyrat roster is just about as jaw-dropping as you can get in a single genre. McKee,
Antoine DuFour, Guitar Republic, Craig D’Andrea, and the newly added Trevor Gordon Hall
just to name a few. You can’t beat them. And you really don’t ever want to. It’s unattainable
with so much talent spread so diversely, and on this playing field, that’s not what it’s about. You
want to join them. And once you’re in, that’s what happens.

So you end up with these A-list lineups every time. And it seems like they’re always either far
away or at times when I’ve got my own gigs.

But not this time. Last Tuesday I finally got to see some of my earliest fingerstyle influences,
Antoine DuFour and Andy McKee. They joined up with Stephen Bennett, all on the same stage
at the same time. It was the Guitar Masters Tour.

Antoine DuFour:
The night opened up with Antoine. He’s my favorite of the three. He’s got a really smooth,
rhythmic Canadian fingerstyle sound that’s coupled with technique. Solid technique. Every note
is meticulously placed around every percussive motion. The way the melody and percussion are
coupled is seamless.

He started the night off with Spiritual Groove; one of my favorites. Once upon a time I had
watched the youtube video for it, but it’s so much more intense live. And so complex. He played
a handful of tunes off of that album, Development, and some newer material as well. It was a very well-
rounded selection, showcasing many different tunings (DAEFCE is one I’d like to play around
with a bit) and even a harp guitar, aptly referred to as a bazooka. Sure, he’s a bit awkward on
stage, but his playing and writing ability is superb.

Stephen Bennett:
This was the first time I had ever heard Bennett. I had heard the name in passing, but, like so
many other suggestions and name droppings, it was never followed through with. So I had
no clue what to expect. My best guess would have been someone very similar to McKee and
DuFour. And that guess would have been wrong.

Bennett actually had very little in common with the other two. He played a more traditional
fingerstyle, sans percussion. This guy knew his guitar inside an out. Not having fancy effects
or a flashy playing style, he relied on chords and melodies. I’m an engineer, so I’ll always have
somewhat of a bias towards whatever is more innovative, but this guy had what it took to hold
my attention. Which wasn’t just in the guitar playing.

Bennett toted 4 or 5 guitars, including a baritone, a harp guitar, and his antique National
resonator. All throughout the performance, he was telling stories and cracking jokes. Though he
didn’t have the tricks of the young guys, he had the skill and stage persona of a seasoned veteran.

Of his pieces, my favorite was a new lick he played, entitled, “Chocolate Mo.” The song was
on the National resonator with slide. Named after a nickname his granddaughter (?) had given
to Andy McKee, the song was constructed around the sound of the name, “Chocolate Mo.”
Genius, really. And it was new. Being the second crowd to hear a song that just so happens to be
awesome? Not a bad evening.

Andy McKee
He’s a legend; perhaps one of the first to really “blow up” via youtube. He’s doing nothing that
hasn’t been done before, but he’s doing it really well and really accessibly. On one hand, this
has turned him into a crowd pleaser, obligated to play a variety of hits. On the other hand, he has
developed more as a guitarist, gotten to collaborate with others of his caliber, and has been able
to settle in to his place on the stage. He’s comfortable and relaxed and makes it look way too
easy.

His performance consisted of almost all tunes that I was familiar with. There was some material
off of his newest album, but it was a lot more “hits” such as Drifting and Rylynn. When people
started calling out requests, Andy started to engage the audience a little more. He answered
questions from a drunk old man and even, after being told to “play them all,” made up an
impromptu medley of a bunch of his songs. It’s always good to see someone great at an art who
also has people skills. I think that is a lot of why Andy is where he’s at.

Trio:
Now if you are very creepily stalking me, you might know that I went to see Joe Satriani’s G3
tour about 5 or 6 years ago. 3 world class guitarists (Satriani, Gilbert, Petrucci), each with a
solo set and then with a combined set at the end. It’s a show I’ll never forget and one that really
hasn’t had anything to be compared to up until this point.

And really, when you’re comparing rock guitarists to fingerstyle guitarists, you still don’t have
a comparison. The G3 jam is all about soloing and rocking out – not so much the case with the
Guitar Masters Tour.

So at the end of their solo sets, McKee invited DuFour and Bennett back up on stage for some
collaboration. They played 3 tunes together, a DuFour cover, a McKee cover, and tune that
Stephen Bennett wrote specifically for the three, entitled: “Tres Padres.” Apparently that means
3 fathers in Spanish.

Maybe a fingerstyle combo isn't as exciting as a G3 jam, but the caliber of the players was definitely on par. One negative I did notice was that parts of the trio seemed a little cluttered, with just too much going on. I guess that happens. Regardless, it was something that you really only ever get to see once or twice. These guys killed it with a great line up and provided a wonderful evening of music.

B-Sides Review: Pterodactyl

In speaking with Matt Wagner, the B-Sides executive at Messiah, after the Pterodactyl show Wednesday night, he shared his philosophy on B-Sides, stating that “There might only be a handful of tables filled for B-Sides sometimes and then a bunch of people not really paying close attention, but those that are there for the music will get something out of it and that’s what it’s about.” Sure, those weren’t the exact words, but close enough. The point being that you can’t please the masses. If that is your goal, then you’ll continually alienate the same kids.

So every once in a while, there’s a B-Sides that some people might not get. I thought Pterodactyl was going to be pretty empty, but there were a surprising number of people there. And I’m sure that at least some of them actually got it. The band may have been a bit absent minded at times, but the music was what I was there for.

And the music was good. It was dissident and mathy and probably resembled a bad acid trip at times. Their sounds ranged from playful to depressed to moderately scary. The music is somewhere between Grandchildren and A Place To Bury Strangers, but I’d place the performance closer to the noise rock genre. There was a lot of sound modulation via a Line 6 DL4 and various fuzz stomps as well that all added to a rather strong presence. The four-piece consisted of guitar, bass, synth, and drums. The synth player was the only one who didn’t sing, so with 3 voices you also got some harmonizing and occasionally some pop-esque vibes.

Mash all of that together, and, like I said, I don’t think too many people really appreciated what they were hearing. It didn’t help that the mix was rather synth-heavy as well. It was rather deafening, but knowing that that wasn’t the intention helped to be able to see past some of the shows flaws. So really, as a show, it was rather sub-par. As music, however, it was enough for me to buy an album. Take a listen for yourself:

Brian Brushwood, NSFWShow, and Amazon

You have to put yourself out there. Take some risks. That’s how you end up in the right place at the right time. If you wait for it without being proactive, you’ll have opportunity after opportunity pass you by.

So I’ve got a quick story. Well, at least it will be quick if you read it with the same enthusiasm that it is being written in. Otherwise, it will be long, but still well worth it.

It all started last Tuesday, when my friend Courtney invited Kelly and I to see a magic show, Brian Brushwood. Her friend, Jon, was the stage hand for Brian, so she wanted to see him, and the show was at Albright College, all of 2 minutes from my house. Despite it being climbing night and knowing nothing about Brushwood, we decided to go. It’d be something different, at the very least.

 So we went. Ironically, I ended up as one of the randomly selected volunteers from the audience. It’s always comical when someone who doesn’t go to the school gets something… It was fun and the show was enjoyable. Sure, some of it was transparent, but some things were genuinely baffling.

After the show, we hung out with Courtney and Jon and his family for a while. Good people. Fun people. People we had just met.

In our conversation, it came up that I was a musician. Describing my music isn’t always the easiest, so after the attempt, I left them with a few cards. Jon said he’d check it out further and let me know if there was any place for my music within any of Brian’s podcasts.

Now I’ve never done a podcast. I’ve tried to work out streaming details, but it’s hard to get a guitar through a skype type system. But Brian is a podcast fiend. He’s most well known for Scam School, one about scamming free drinks from your friends and things of the like. Then he also has a comedy one on TWiT, NSFWShow. Conveniently, NSFW had a summer music series that their fans wanted them to continue year-round. More conveniently, their regular Tuesday night show was bumped to Wednesday night at Jon’s house.

So on Wednesday I get a text from Jon, inviting me to play on the show that night. The potential for thousands of people to be turned on to my music is kinda hard to pass up, so Kelly and I headed an hour and a half to Jon’s house for dinner and a podcast (keep in mind that this family we had only met the night before).

The whole night was great. Despite some technical difficulties with the podcast, it was a lot of fun and something completely different. Plus, dinner was awesome! Things sounded decent on our end, but apparently it sounded pretty horrific when littered with Skype artifacts. But somehow that was ok.

Because these guys have dedicated fans. Take, for instance, their comedy album, Night Attack. It was being pushed that night and the fans responded well. Well enough to push them to #5 in overall mp3 sales on amazon. These were fans who were gifting the artists with their own album in order to push it to the top. Sure, it’s a cheat on the system, but the point is that these fans are life fans.

So when I was on, people more or less ignored that the sound quality was horrendous. Honestly, I don’t know if I would have, but these guys did. And then they went online and listened to actual recordings. And then they went to amazon and went nuts.

Right now I have no idea what “went nuts” entails, but here’s what I saw the next morning:

Sure, it’s only amazon, but there’s still gotta be some force behind moving up to #5. Even if it were 10-20 sales… The best part is that, at least in the “Easy Listening” genre, I haven’t left the top 100 since. I was up as high as 85 on Sunday, but found that I had dropped to 12 by Monday morning. That pretty well means that I am continuing to have sales even after the live podcast. Which, though there were 1000 people live, they average something like 30,000 downloads on the podcast.

Again, it’s all about being proactive at putting yourself out there. Every sale counts. Every illegal torrent counts. They’re all potential fans. I just took a risk and put myself in front of upwards of 30,000 people – more than I’ve played in front of throughout my cumulative career! Plus I got an awesome dinner! The only downside was that I was tired the next day. Tired. You can only play in front of the same crowd so many times before you end up tired anyway, so why not take some chances?

Also, if you haven't picked up my debut album, Deconstructing the Temporal Lobe, then help keep me in the charts at amazon HERE.

And you can watch the podcast too (warning - I haven't finished watching it yet, but it probably has a good bit of language)

Review: Matt Stevens - Relic

Sometimes your mind is blown to the point where you need to just stop and think about whatever subject matter is in question. And as your whole world slows down, you contemplate what you know and what you think you know. You then realize how finite your understanding is and how vast even the smallest of particles is.

Like Tuesday, when I found out that they just beat light. Like, the constant, c. Einstein’s relativity was based largely around c. Physics is based around c. And they beat it.

Mind blown.

And yes, their results need to be verified, but even the thought that something might be faster than light is mind-boggling. The implications…

 Then Tuesday night, I saw magician Brian Brushwood (blog on that later!). Sure, some stuff was transparent, but other parts were just crazy. Like when he had a nail come out of his eye?? You expect to see bizarre stuff, but that’s just nuts. Mind blown.

Then there was last week. I finally got a chance to listen to Matt Stevens’ new album, Relic. And I say finally not because it just came out. No, I’ve had it for a week or so. But these are albums, not singles, and deserve to be listened to as such. Anything less and you miss the point. Like a magician, you expect Stevens to blow your mind with something on his album. And so much like a magician, the only chance you have of understanding these events is with your undivided attention, away from any distractions.

So I took a menial task at work and cashed in on the otherwise mindless time, listening a few times through. Mind blown.

Matt Stevens is known for live looping, innovation, and being quirky and unexpected. Both his writing ability and his ability to deliver are inspirational and merit the following that has kept net chatter active and growing for the past few years. Whether it is organizing streaming festivals or releasing a solo album or releasing an album with one of his projects (The Fierce and the Dead, Yonks), Stevens has given fans reasons to tune in and stay active.

Relic is no exception. It delivers what we have come to expect from Stevens since his 2008 release, Echo. That is, something completely different.

See, at the advent of Stevens’ solo career, live looping was something few people had heard of. There were the one man bands paraded as side-shows and then a small underground following of live loopers who were too far experimental to be seen by the public eye. Were there others? Yes, but none quite like Stevens. With his debut album, Echo, Stevens pushed loop-centric experimental acoustic guitar work into an accessible realm. He did things that seemed on the surface to be normal and harmless. It was stuff that sounded friendly, but was done by one man, not a 6 piece band, and was counted in 11/8 or 13/8 or worse.

Following Echo, Stevens released Ghost. We all expected what we knew from Echo, but what we got was Echo mixed with a band. Still distinctly Stevens, but with additional percussion and a bass line or two. This blindsided fans, but they liked it. And as the albums success grew, so did Stevens’ career.

All the while, Stevens has released live album after live album in a Dave Matthews type fashion. Despite only having 3 full studio albums, including Relic, I believe I have about 7 solo albums from the last 3 or 4 years. Then there are the projects… This level of quality output has left fans seldom at a point when there wasn’t something new. Where your top 40 artists release singles every few months, Stevens seems to release entire albums. All quality.

So we have gone up to the point of Relic, where you would think that Stevens would have settled into some type of formula. After all, if it’s working for you, why change? But that’s not music. Stevens wanted something new and fresh, so once again, we were blindsided for the better.

First, I noted that there was a lot more of everyone else. Stevens is still the main act in his solo work, but there is more presence with drum samples and the like. It gives it a little more accessibility to those who are afraid of the solo guitarist, yet its complexity still keeps everyone coming back.

After that, I noticed that the album doesn’t have the same flow as Echo or Ghost. Songs are less reliant on one another. Not so much as MR. BUNGLE, but enough to make you step back. At first, this seems abrasive, but after a few times through, it see that it comes together to build something. It’s something he hasn’t done before; taken elements of chaos and placing them throughout the album. You don’t see it on his other albums because harmonic cohesion was a focal point of the earlier album themes.

Chaos is new. And fresh. And Frost? Frost is the track that Stevens figured would begin to alienate fans. It reminded me of the way that Dream Theater alienates fans whenever they have an album that is heavier or softer than the previous; which is every time. Or the way that Meat Puppets incorporated country in with acid rock to rile people up. Maybe not in that way, but it’s just so far removed from your view of “Matt Stevens.” It’s heavy. It’s aggressive. It’s in your face. It’s metal. Legitimately. It reminds you that Stevens’ original influences on songs like Burning Bandstands were bands like Metallica. It seems like all of the experimental acoustic guitarists out there have roots in metal. Regardless, I thought my itunes had skipped to a different artist. It was bizarre at first.

And then you see that that’s what the album was building towards. People who are into pretty sounding acoustic music often view heavy metal as this ugly chaotic beast. It freaks people out and alienates them. Relic is an album peppered with organized chaos, but you don’t want to see it until Frost. Then it makes sense. And could really turn people off. But Stevens’ fans aren’t fans of the pretty acoustic stuff; they’re fans of music. And this is a beautiful counterpoint to the preceding tracks on the album, fully showcasing music. Mind blown.

But it’s not over. END 30 is the last song on the album. It starts like so many of Stevens’ songs do; nice and peaceful; loopy. And ends as a noise track. The album takes this path through peaceful melodies, into full-throttle abrasive distortion and dissonance, and ends in a sea of noise; a sea of nothingness.

The Blue Marsh Canteen: Blue Marsh Idol

Irony is a great thing, most of the time.

A lot of times it comes at the end of a moderately bad situation, adding some comedic relief if you can see it that way. Usually, that’s my stance on things.

This particularly case of irony came from a post a few days ago. I’m at work, so I don’t have the exact words that I wrote, but it was something like: “you need to be told that you’re not good enough and that your music sucks.” The post was on motivation.

To give some more context of this story, understand my position – I know I am a decent guitarist. But I’ll seldom say any more than that. Sure, I’m better than a lot of people, but that’s not good enough. I’m proud of what I’ve written and what I do, but it’s a far cry from what I’d like to be able to do.

So where this all comes into play is at The Blue Marsh Canteen open mic. They’ve been running the “Blue Marsh Idol” for the past couple months and I had made it to the final round. Honestly, I wasn’t concerned. Sure, I can be a bit arrogant. There was one guy, Byron, who I had seen play there before who was a legitimately decent songwriter, so I figured it’d come down to the two of us or something like that.

Oh yeah, and the winner gets a new Jackson guitar. As many of you know, I have moved into the realm of collecting guitars. A new guitar as a prize would be a great addition to the lot. So you could say there was something riding on it. Given the nature of the event, I even went out of my way to come up with different arrangements for a couple of my songs, just to spice things up a bit.

Anyway, everyone played and really only one person stuck out to me, Byron. Actually, he was the only other person to play all originals. And they were good. The others were pretty cut and dry covers – not different arrangements or anything uniquely their own. That bugs me.

Then the results were tallied to make the top 3, where there would be a one song flash round. I didn’t make it (Byron ended up winning. Congratulations! You played a great set.).

There are different ways of looking at the phrase “not good enough.” In one sense, you could be not good enough technically or vocally. Maybe your songwriting is just not good enough. Then there is a seldom used not-good-enough, where you are not good enough to sway opinion.

See, at a place like the Blue Marsh Canteen, you have to sway people onto the side that says that music doesn’t have to have words. It’s common among society. Regardless of how much technicality or passion is behind a song, you still have to be good enough to sway peoples opinion in your favor. If someone is predisposed to like covers and sing-alongs, then you have to be good enough to pull their attention away from that.

Given my technical ability and progressive writing ability in comparison to some of the other contestants, I don’t think that those were the shortcomings of the set. I think it boils down to not being good enough to sway opinions on what I was playing. Regardless, at the end of the day I wasn’t good enough at something to be able to move to the final 3. That means I have work to do.