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Just because it’s really cool ;-) Enjoy!

Enjoy!

Out in the hot tub with the girls, we hear a sound not unlike a dragon approaching from somewhere in the woods behind the house.  It comes closer and closer. All of the sudden we see this looming from behind the trees. Right up and directly over us.  The people on board were friendly, shouting and waving to us.

Last night my oldest daughter, Mia, did what I think took a lot of courage. She got up in front of  about 100 people (parents, kids, grandparents) and sang the song Hey There Delilah. If you know the song, you know there’s lots of words that go by pretty fast and the melody itself requires a fairly wide vocal range. While slightly more timid than usual, she sang with her usual grace and sweetness. She is my favorite singer.

Mia is no stranger to the stage. This summer, she’ll be attending another season of her theater camp and will be performing in her tenth play. Last night was a less formal setting (part of a 70s themed  end-of-the-year celebration at her after school program), but she still brought her game. I’m very, very proud of her. It was such a delight to have parents tell me after the fact how wonderfully she sang and how brave she was to do it.

Just because this is amazing …

This past week I played my first concert on trombone in nearly twenty years.

Over the holidays my daughter Mia was asked to participate in a performance of the Toy Symphony by the MetroWest Symphony Orchestra (as part of her affiliation with the Enter Stage Left theatre school). I took her to several rehearsals and then saw the performance, her playing triangle and whistle at center stage, laser focused on the conductor. It was wonderful to see her involved in that, but for me it also took me back to my days of playing trombone with orchestras and jazz bands and pit groups for plays.

I spoke with the conductor, Peter Cokkinias (professor of conducting at Berklee) and mentioned my interest in joining the group, told him I’d gotten a new trombone for Christmas and was eager to start “shedding my chops.” A few weeks later, he called several times looking for me to come in and play for him.

I got through six rehearsals before last week’s performance. It really was a thrill being on stage, dressed in black, the hall filling up, my daughters and wife in the front row.

My view from the stage, taken with the iPhone

It’s funny (and I remember this phenomena now), the night before the concert we did a dress rehearsal. Everything was off; the tempos were shakey, people were missing queues, the hall was muffled because rather than baffles behind us there were curtains. It was really bad. But then, the day of the performance, everyone lit up, brought their game, and we played beautifully.

Professor Cokkinias teaching Mia the finer points …

Technorati Tags: metrowest symphony orchestra, music

I mentioned in a previous post my need for a computing platform to support a home recording studio. After some investigation, I decided to purchase from eBay a custom PC (rather than buy an expensive brand name or build one myself). Well, the machine arrived last week and I could not be happier.

The idea here is rather than buying a single, standalone recording appliance (for example, a TASCAM 16-track hard disk recorder), I would go the way of the studios and use a software-based solution on some decent computer hardware.

I use Sonar Producer 4, which is one the very best software packages available for both consumer and professional musicians. It supports full audio and MIDI recording scenarios (64 audio and unlimited MIDI tracks), has built in software synthesizers (some of which emulate the vintage synths like Korgs and Moogs), tons of effects (things like echo and delay and compression … eliminating the need for racks of outboard equipment and wiring), and provides very detailed views for recording parameters as well as a mix mode that looks like a real studio mixing board. It even can be used for mixing and editing music and video. Here is a mashup of some of the screens:

Here are the specs of my rig (much of this equipment, outside the PC, I already owned):

• Intel Pentium 3.2GHz Custom Workstation (2G RAM, 160GB Hard-drive, CD/DVD RW)
• Creative Audigy 4 Soundcard supporting 24-bit sound and soundfonts
• Samsung 17-inch Flat-panel Monitor
• Altec-Lansing Speakers with Subwoofer (need to replace these)
• Rhodes MK-80 Electric Piano/MIDI Controller/Tone Generator (88 weighted keys … really sweet)
• Roland M-120 12-channel Line Mixer (supports MIDI, 1/4-inch, and XLR inputs, effects sends/returns)
• M-Audio Fast Track Pro 4×4 USB Audio/MIDI Interface (preamps and phantom power)
• Alesis SR-16 24-Bit Stereo Drum Machine
• Sonar Producer 4 Studio Software

My daughter Mia and I got the rig hooked up this past week and within twenty minutes had recorded our first multi-tracked song together. I’m practically giddy with excitement to dig in and start playing and recording again.

As a side note, I should mention that the whole eBay experience was very efficient and pleasant. The vendor, eCollegePC, kept in constant contact with status updates, shipped the machine on time, and once received, I found the machine exactly to specs and ready for installing the OS. I would definitely buy from them again and even recommend them to others.

I also want to thank my dear friend Rodger for all his advice on platforms, standards, and practices in the industry. His insights were key for me being able to pull this together.

I dearly wanted my next PC to be a Mac. I have serious Mac-envy. My Windows PC, in fact, is tricked out to appear like a Mac, as is my Ubuntu desktop. But alas, the cost of admission still is too steep. (Although it amazes me, the twists of logic one can produce to convince oneself–and perhaps one’s spouse–that a purchase is truly required and justifiable.)

Now that school for me is close to complete, I intend to use my time otherwise spent studying and writing papers to delve back into making music. My mission is to gather some of my old equipment now stored in a closet (mixing board and some outboard effects) and combine them with a PC-based recording system. I looked at a lot of stand-alone recording systems, but the prices are high and I already own really great recording software. This also seems to be the way studios are going, software based systems on very high-end computing platforms.

So, I began looking around at PCs that were up to the task. I thought first of building my own PC. I’d heard that you can buy all the components and a case and build a new PC for significantly less than a major brand. While that is true, the system I configured and priced would still have cost near a thousand dollars.

I spoke with my brother Keith, who has made many purchases from eBay. I looked around on eBay and found some really kicking systems for astonishingly good prices (I kept thinking of the Crazy Eddie commercials of my youth: ‘Noooobody Beats Crazy Eddie!’). I wrote to several of the vendors to ask how they could sell these things so cheap and the answer, predictably, was that they make so many of them that they get their parts at discount rates. Another reason for the low cost is because most of them come with no OS installed, like Windows or Mac OSX. (I have a Windows XP Pro disk so this is not an issue).

So I took the plunge and ordered a custom system with the following specs, all for around $400 (I already have the monitor, mouse, and keyboard):

This past week was my Mother’s 75th birthday (and incidentally, my own 43rd). We celebrated in fine style: my brother’s and I taking her via stretch limo to New York City for a fine dinner at Ben Benson’s on 52nd Street and then on down to the Village Vanguard to see her very favorite jazz pianist, Bill Charlap, and his trio.

The ride down from Connecticut was better than it could have been had one of us been required to drive. With the limo, we were able to kick back, have a few drinks, listen to some Charlap and Bill Evans, and watch the glimmering Manhattan skyline reveal itself all around us.

Ben Benson’s was, in a word, fabulous. All heads turned at the sight of my mother dressed in her casual finery and followed by her four sharply dressed sons. We all had different cuts of steak, but each was cooked to perfection. Continuing my ongoing quest for the perfect crab cake, we ordered and taste-tested their offering. (In my humble estimation, their’s was a very, very close second only to the Four Seasons in Boston.) With the fine food we enjoyed a 2003 CakeBread Cabernet and a 2002 Schafer Cabernet (their last bottle). At the finish, they brought us the most remarkable cheese cake drizzled with chocolate and surrounded by berries.

We then cabbed down to the Vanguard. It was great to be screaming down Seventh Avenue on a Saturday night with our Borat-like driver careening through people and traffic. (I felt like a real bumpkin hanging out the window snapping photos with my cell phone camera.) At the Vanguard we got our seats and ordered some beers, taking in some old familiar jazz-club smells. My mother and I walked around the room picking out the people in the photos covering the walls: Miles, Dizzy, Mingus, Bill Evans, Thad Jones & Mel Lewis, Clark Terry, Charlie Hayden, Betty Carter (Coltrane was well represented with three visible photos). Just amazing, all the history and great music that happened here over so many years. (We joked with our older, sports-addicted brother that this for us (my mother and I) was like going to Wrigley Field for him.) The show was excellent (the drummer was a little loud), and was over in about hour. Throughout, you could see my mother’s ears pricked up, her held tilted toward the music, nodding and bobbing with the rhythm. Mr. Charlap himself even wished mom a happy birthday when she went to meet him after the show.

The next morning, the entire family gathered (grand kids and all) at the Redding Country Club for a wonderful brunch complete with giant happy birthday carrot cake. In evidence from the photos above, the little ones actually were quiet and eating for all of twenty minutes, which gave us time to quaff some coffee and bloody marys and gobble up a good plate of delicious food.

I know that for all of us family it was a wonderful weekend; I think for my mother it was something truly unforgettable.

I’ve seen Neil Young and Crazy Horse a couple of times over the years. I have to say that when he’s on fire, no one– older or younger–rocks like this guy.

But the Heart of Gold DVD is something different and truly magnificent. It’s a fabulous collection of old band mates (Spooner Oldham, Grant Boatright, Ben Keith) along with the heavenly Emmylou Harris and others. Jonthan Demme directs this gorgeous show from Nashville’s Ryman Auditorum (the Grand Ole Opry) and Neil points out that he is playing ‘Hank’s old guitar’ (which hasn’t seen this stage since 1951). It’s a mix of old and new songs, apparently made more poignant by the loss of Neil’s father just months before as well as his own struggle with a recent brain anuerism.

The ending scene with the credits rolling where Neil plays The Old Laughing Lady solo is amazing. It displays a guy who’s played this ax for decades, a true guitar strangler. The choice of notes and phrasing and artifice is brilliant.

I like watching guys like Neil Young and Bob Dylan getting old. There’s a mastery to their playing, a different level of weilding the instrument, the way they make the hard things looks so easy and effortless. There’s also that freedom of coming so far and seeing so much that allows you to not care what others think, a relaxation that comes with that maturity.