It’s A Musician’s Life (2)

It’s glamor, glamour, Glamour when you’re a musician.

Your first taste of reality comes when you first have to set up your equipment for a gig. The janitor makes you wait while he goes for a smoke, before reluctantly showing you where the electrical outlets are,for you to plug in your equipment ,and your request for some light on the dark stage area so you can see what you’re doing while settingup equipment is met with a cold hard PissOff stare.

So there’s this nice exclusive Club we’re playing at,  we’re really doing well, packing in the crowd every weekend, everyone loves us, we’re the best band they’ve had  in ages.

I’m having my meal at a table there before the show, nice quiet table (can’t have us musicians riff-raff sitting to close to themexclusive people, yes?) a plate of noodles and a glass of water (which I have to buy, cos they can’t waste their precious food on the musicians who’re going to be spending the rest of the long night making sure they have a good time) and suddenly this plate of scraps from some other table is placed on my nice quiet table.

And another plate of partly-eaten chicken with snot-stained tissues. And used glasses.

“Hi”, “Nice evening”,says the friendly waiter in the nicely-starched white uniform. “You guys playing tonight, eh? Excellent band, I like your music too”….and he walks off, clears more tables froma far and proceeds to  place all this trash on my table.

When you’re a musician, you don’t exist as a human being. You’re just this thing that does songs and stuff as and when requested. (request=order, you have no right of refusal).

Did I finish that meal?

It’s A Musician’s Life (1)

Hate having to start a post with a numbered title, but this seems like one of those with more parts that will needed to be added at some point anyway….

I guess some/many/most would think of being a musician and performing as a cool thing to do, all that Rock and Roll and bars and girls and debauchery and glamour and stuff.

I dunno. Mostly, for me, I just hope for a trouble-free and hassle-free gig.  You meet a lot of assholes when you’re a musician, even factoring in the fact that most of the population in any given place is assholes, you still meet more than the fair percentage.  So you got to develop this “wall” around you, and just not let the assholes get to you or the music  is gone that day.

There was this place in Penang some years, ago, a spanking brand new hotel facing the sea, and I was in a band auditioning for a contract at their pub. We set up the equipment, are doing a sound check, when the pub Manager asks for me to leave the stage ‘cos he doesn’t want any Indian fellows in any band at his pub, in fact he’d rather not have Indian customers too.  We had 2 guitarists in the band,  and I have a day job (the others were 100% dependant on the band for a living), so the band decided to continue with the audition without me, and so I was out of the band for a couple of months while they played in this Indian-less racist asshole’s pub.

But assholes are not just race-specific. Sometimes they take on a whole great dimension…….There was this other hotel in Penang, and their resident Filipino band’s keyboardist came down with chicken-pox, so they asked me to play with them (they didn’t have a guitarist either, they were just a keyboards-drums-bass-singer) so there I am onstage, and this cuntstomer comes up and asks if I am Filipino, I laugh and say of course no, I am just standing in for a sick Filipino, and he starts abusing me and tells me to get off the stage cos he’s there to see a Filipino band, not some idiotic Malaysian…….and again another happy tale, I have to leave the stage and they play with just the drummer and bassist and an incredulous singer.

And the good folks in the bar endure a few hours of flaky music, not one single person willing to tell off that asshole.

Can’t let these things get to me, though. Smashing someone’s face in would be a really tempting thing, but I guess after the thousandth incident you just sigh and resign yourself to the fact that assholes is everywhere.

*sigh*

Much Work, Slow Progress 2

So now that I have collected a bunch of effects to bring out the full glory of analmost-entirely analog guitar sound, all I needed to do was to connect everything together.

Guitar ,cable into an effect, connect to next effect, connect to next effect,etc,and connect last effect to my Marshall TSL100 all-valve amp,for glorious sound. Yes!

No! Dammit it isn’t that easy   Cuss and swear, cuss and cuss some more. Really. The whole thing sounds like a horrible mess. Something’s wrong. All sorts of unwanted sounds and hum and feedback, and loss of clarity of guitar signal. WTF!

A number of technical issues now have to be addressed, and I’m forced to have to research all sorts of science mumbo-jumbo to get a grasp of the situation.

Each effect in a chain, even when not being used, still has an effect on the chain, it’s inherent circuitry/electromagnetics affecting the chain and so the guitar tone.

So? So I need to ensure I can bypass an effect when it’s not being used, and a really True Bypass often requires another bypass-switching control, which is the subject of a long story, but let’s just say I’m probably going to have to build my own True Bypass  Loop box.

To build the True  Bypass Loop box, I need some special switches, called 3PDT switches, which are NOT available in Malaysia. Tough, but I managed to source them online from Singapore.

But guitar signal tone will probably still be sucked by the series of effects and switches, and all that cabling before the signal finally reaches the amp …. due to the nature of guitar pickups’ signals, issues related to Impedance of the cabling/chain come into play.

WTF is Impedance? Ha! and double-Ha! Impedance is the sum of all things impeding the flow of an electrical signal, it seems, and this means factors like Resistance, Capacitance and Inductance need to be analysed and understood.

So WTF is Inductance? Ha! Capacitance? Ha!

It then seems that I probably need to make a bypass-buffer gizmo, which in effect would take my fragile guitar signal and enable it to cross the tone-sucking roadway of effects and cables and reach the amp mostly unscathed.

How to make the bypass-buffer? How to make the True-bypass loops?

That’s what the whole bloody month has been spent finding out!

Much Work, Slow Progress.

Story of my life, I guess. *sigh* Nothing comes easy for me. Or perhaps I always choose the difficult paths?

This post sort of begins to explain my many weeks of not updating this blog.  I’ve been busy!

So whaasup this time? It all seemed innocuous enough when I first started thinking about it,a simple plan: I wanted to do away with the “modern” digital guitar-effects I’m using now and go back to old-fashioned analog effects.

Digital audio is basically audio that has been reduced to numbers, (1 and 0 !) and then these numbers are modified by all sorts of clever calculations and computer-like processing, and then reconverted into sound which you and I hear….when you bring it down to it’s simplest,  basically digital sound is the art of manipulating what you and I think we’re hearing.  Really. All sorts of stuff that the scientists “know” you and I cannot differentiate becomes irrelevant,  sor of lik I can typ thi sentnce lik thi n u can stil think u kno wha i mean.

So? Fuk digital. Fuk Fuk Fuk. If I want to say it in a sentence I’ll say it in a goddamn sentence without sounding like some 14 year old retard texting his retard friend. And if I want to spend 40 years learning how to strum a simple G chord I want you to hear the whole bloody G chord and not some scientist nerd’s idea of what constitutes the essential audio aspects of a G chord.

So? Just go back to the old-fashioned equipment, and play the old fashioned music the way it used to be played. Simple.

But not quite. Nothing’s ever simple. Not in my life anyway. If you’re a guitarist, or someone with a morbid sense of curiosity, you might want to read on. Might. The rest of you can just kindly go back to whatever it was you were doing. Something digital, most likely.

Guitarists use gadgets called “effects” to produce enhanced and interesting sounds. Some are simple-ish effects like reverb units, some are outrageously freaky effects that belong to sci-fi soundtracks.

I’m an old-fashioned guy. I just use some Overdrive and Distortion effects, along with some Chorus, Reverb/Delay and of course the mandatory Wah pedal. A Tuner gets into the stuff as well, thought a tuner is just an aid to tuning the guitar and does not do anything to the actual sound.

My almost-wholly-analog setup: (The delay unit is still digital). OK, guitarists, you can get jealous and drool and call me a sonofabitch now, I’ve set you up for this nicely! But there’s a whole BIG and extremely complicated story unfolding, which I’ll address in subsequent posts if time permits….