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.

Motivation

What no one wants to say, but you needs to hear, and you need to be reminded of periodically –

You’re not good enough. Your music sucks.

Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not. It doesn’t matter. The point is that that should be a trigger. You need to be pushed so hard that you either collapse and give up, or you push back so hard that you prove everyone wrong. See, when you think the world is against you, that’s all you have; to give up or to push through with every ounce of your being. And without pushing that hard, you’ll always fall short.

Giving 110% is a thing of the past. If you want to do that, you become a doctor or a lawyer, not a musician. As a doctor or lawyer, even getting through school, you have the world telling you that statistically you won’t make it through to the next level. My engineering class started with about 60 students. We ended with 23. 23 could give what it took.

But with music, so often a free ride is expected. Musicians are notorious for expecting success out of waking up at noon, wasting more time, and jamming for an hour or two a day. They’re the ones who have a handful of their friends and their parents telling them that their music is great and that they’ve got what it takes. Wake up.

Sure, there’s a lot of natural gifting that needs to be there and a lot of being at the right place at the right time. It is about who you know, but you also have to have the drive and perseverance to constantly demand more of yourself. You need 110% towards music or you need to be doing something else.

There will always be flukes; the stars that appear overnight. Blame it on the Disney Channel and Youtube, but don’t look at them for a success plan. If you do, you might as well be playing the lottery; you’re set up to fail. Make your keep by earning it.

You have to try your hardest and fail. You have to succeed and consider it failure because you didn’t do enough. You have to push yourself like you’re at the bottom even if you aren’t. Or give up.

Reading Poetry and Street Music Festival

It’s good to be ambitious. Ambition is one of the first steps in success. You can rarely have any type of sustainable success without the ambition to do what it takes to get there.

However, having too little ambition is just as dangerous as having not enough. Having too much ambition leads to failure – at least by the standards that you have set forth. I do this all of the time, knowing that I will fall short of my goals, but also understanding that setting the bar higher will have a better yield than if the bar were to be too low.

And this is fine …as long as this is out of the public eye. Prior to releasing my album, Deconstructing the Temporal Lobe, I was rather naïve to what all was involved in the CD releasing process. As a result, I was wrong with nearly every estimate that I gave people for a CD release date. I wanted recording to pressing to be in little more than a month. Well, it was something like 4-5 months, and even that was pushing some limits.

Being wrong like that, in addition to being embarrassing, can also ruin your public image and your credibility. Since that, I have, on occasion, made such a blunder as to project a time frame for my second album. It builds hype, but when those times come and pass, hype dies and so does your credibility. But I think I’m getting better. I’ve been a lot more conscious as to what I say in regards to anything uncertain. Ask me today when the second album will be out and I’ll flat out tell you that I need to make time to get into the studio and need to pull together funds as well. There isn’t a projected date because I haven’t scheduled my studio time yet. It’s pretty simple. I haven’t even planned the album out yet. These things are mildly important…

So what got me thinking of this was the 1^st annual Reading Poetry and Street Music Festival. The day-long event in downtown Reading was an effort to build community and to celebrate art, in conjunction with the global initiative, 100,000 poets for change. The festival was a great initiative and great to be a part of. In terms of exposure, it was rather weak, about the same exposure that I would get at an open mic. But that’s not what it was about. It was about building the city and celebrating poetry and music. And that’s what it did.

However, this post is about being over-ambitious. Though the festival was a great effort by many, it was incredibly over-ambitious. We’re talking 75 artists on 3 stages, street vendors, and part of a main street closed. For the first year of a volunteer-only funded project, that’s absolutely insane. That sounds more like the goal of an event that has been going on for 5-10 years.

Their main problem was going too big. All of their bases were covered, but on a small scale, not to the scale that the event was built to. It caused a compromise in things like publicity and technical planning. Publicity was rough, but thankfully everything worked out technically and it was a nice day, not rainy like the original forecast.

In being so ambitious, they also didn’t get to adequately qualify the artists. With something bigger like this, where everyone needs to do their part, I think it is even more important that some sort of contractual agreement be made between the event and the artist. I made a point to collect contact info in case of any issues, but other artists just straight up didn’t show. That speaks poorly for everyone. The only times I have been running late for a gig, I have made contact with someone at the venue so that I could get in and set up right away. I’ve never missed a gig.

These types of issues (no-shows, late acts, acts that went over their time limit) resulted in everything being about an hour behind schedule by the time I got there (from my other gig that morning). Which is to be expected …but could have been avoided.

As far as performer quality, most everything was decent from what I could see or hear. I enjoyed the 2 acts before me. Actually, the act right before me was a small band that had joined up with a drum circle for some on-the-spot collaboration. That’s what this was about. It was neat.

But when I first got to my stage I was nearly scared off by the act that was up. Some cross-dressing guy in a tight black dress and heels …with a whip …who was whipping people in the audience, singing about child abuse and the like. Yes, there is a fine line between art and perversion, but regardless of where you want to draw that line, a “family-friendly,” community event should not involve something like that.

Sometimes coming up short of your expectations is where you need to be. It helps you to learn. Sure, the attendance could have been better, acts could have been better organized, and the event could have been better publicized. I don't think anyone ever expected things to go down seamlessly. Really, you shouldn't. I’m excited for where this will go in the future. It’s part of a big effort to revive a city that needs some help. I hate cities, but if I'm going to live this close to one, I'd like to see it through that the city move in this direction. Reading won’t roll over in one day, but these are great endeavors and big steps forward. It’s great to see something so boldly ambitious.