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Open Mic Night and the Allure of Playing Country Blues Roots Music…

The scene at Cup of Joe in Cedar Falls during the early stages of Open Mic Night… Hosts Rick Vanderwall and Bill Guernsey…

It’s been two months since I played at Open Mic night at Cup of Joe, located in downtown Cedar Falls, IA… I missed the last one to attend a Wilco concert in Cedar Rapids.

Wilco playing at the Paramount in Cedar Rapids, IA

The Wilco show was a lot of fun and it was a treat seeing Nels Cline play guitar, as he is one of the top players in the country. The venue in which Wilco played was also quite marvelous. It was an ornately restored old downtown theater with marvelous acoustics.

Nevertheless, I was glad to be back at the Cup again with a chance to perform in a small intimate setting… I am clearly not a headline performer… instead, the specter of performing in front of people really motivates me to work at the craft of playing guitar!

Me and my Taylor Solid Body Custom Walnut, with a newly replaced neck…

In the above image, you can see I was delighted to be back. This is me posing before the coffee counter just before my performance… Call my performance costume, ” old man cool-eclectic.” 😁

It was a big night for me because I was going to play publicly, for the first time, Stefan Grossman’s arrangement of A Tribute to Lonnie Johnson… this piece is epic in length and requires a reasonable amount of finger-style skill to pull it off so for me at least it marked a stage of development along my guitar playing journey…

I’d been working on the Lonnie Johnson piece for weeks and weeks and though I’ve pretty much mastered it, it is still difficult for me to play it flawlessly even alone at home, so playing it publicly was going to be quite an adventure for me, but I was looking forward to seeing how well I could do.

A year ago, my fingers would sometime disassociate themselves from my brain on pieces of music much simpler than the Lonnie Johnson charts, so I set a high bar for myself.

Taylor T5z Pro Ltd; Molasses Burst…

I actually began working on the Lonnie Johnson piece using my newest guitar, shown above, the Taylor T5z Pro, which is an acoustic/electric hybrid that sounds great whatever you play on it, but especially nice when playing old finger-style country blues; however, at the last moment I decided to play that night on my Taylor Solid Body Custom, which you can see me holding above. After playing the T5z for weeks on end, I think I just needed a change of pace. I am holding the Solid Body in the photo at the top of this article. It is a lovely instrument and plays like butter… While the T5z plays beautifully too, it is bit more demanding than the Solid Body, and that is probably why I made the last moment switch…

I’ve written before on this weblog about finger-style blues and why I am so dedicated to that genre:

  1. It’s a musical style that can be played strictly instrumentally or accompanied by singing. In instrumental form, the music holds up on its own, so it is suitable for a single guitar player to perform without accompaniment. Since I have no interest in being in a band, this genre is perfect for me.
  2. Country blues pieces span from the elegantly simple to the moderately complex and there are available lots of charts and educational videos from which to learn, so it is a great genre to develop playing chops, which can be very satisfying.
  3. While there is a very active global community of country blues players, they are still diminutive in size compared to other musical genres, so it is a smaller fairly supportive group of players.
  4. As a baby boomer, I grew up with early rock ‘n roll and this music serves as its foundation. Country blues are THE essential roots of much of the popular music that I grew up with. My experience is that audiences are not exposed to country blues that often but like it when they hear it. Much more interesting than the millionth cover of Moondance they’ve heard before.
  5. While players use picks or strum through country blues, the really authentic way to play it is with the fingers. Finger-style playing is way too cool… just sayin’

As testament to the roots nature of country blues, I am embedding a link through the photo of classic bluesman Charlie Patton on the right. It leads to an interesting blog article that gives a nice comparative sampling of rock music to its original country blues form. The blog is called Please Kill Me… This is what is cool… Click on Charlie Patton and then come back!

Grant and me at Bob’s Guitars, our favorite hang out…

As is typical for me, I signed up to play first. There are actually only 6 15 minute slots available for open mic wannabes, so I usually get to the shop about 45 minutes before Rick and Bill, the hosts arrive and when they do I hit the sign-up sheet promptly. My friend Grant is almost always there too and he signs up to play second. In fact, we are hoping to play a full set on our own at the Cup some time in the near future!

That particular night I played in the following order:

  • A Tribute to Lonnie Johnson in Drop D tuning… (Stefan Grossman) – I did ok… shanked some into the rough, but pulled it off… at Open Mic it would be too challenging to record myself; however, I do have a decent sampling of Lonnie Johnson that I made at home, which is embedded below. Note that I am playing the T5z.
  • Spoonful in Drop D tuning… (Charlie Patton, arranged by Stefan Grossman) a briefer and lighter tune to cleanse the palette after the heavy low down Lonnie Johnson piece…
  • Cocaine Blues… (traditional, arranged by Stefan Grossman) a favorite of mine and the rare tune I have completely memorized… breezed through it… a crowd favorite too… a lovely, complex finger-style tune that stays at home in the top three frets… relaxing and also cleansing to play…
  • Police and a Sergeant… (Robert Wilkins, rearranged by Catfish Keith) I love this piece and it’s a great way to end the set. It’s very meaningful to me because I took a lesson with Catfish Keith to work on it! Last time I played it at the Cup, I pretty much lost my way and unravelled, though I got through it somehow… The other night I played it clean as country water…

Below you can see a photo that my wife took of me playing… it’s been post processed and posterized a bit to make it more fun… Note that I am for the first time performing with my iPad and foot pedal for page turning…

It was a great night closed out by the Jacobs playing some jazzed-up seasonal tunes!

The Jacobs knocking out jazzy holiday tunes…

Thanks also to my friend Grant for the call out at the end of my set! He played a fine set too!

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More than just frets and strings… or Jacob makes a house call…

Gretsch Silver Falcon, my first electric axe…

When I purchased my first electric guitar I was really not sure what I was doing. I’d played only acoustic guitars for years and decided to dip my toes in the electric waters, so I googled around looking for the best acoustic to electric transition guitar, and as a result decided to acquire a Gibson ES 335.

I remember marching into my local shop and asking to see their ES 335’s and was informed immediately that the store did not carry new Gibson’s in their inventory. There were some used Les Pauls hanging on the hooks but no ES 335’s. Ever mindful of making a sale, the store guy stuck a Gretsch Silver Falcon in my hands, which was a semi-hollow bodied guitar sort of like the ES 335. I fumbled around comparing it to a Fender Strat and a Les Paul and eventually purchased the Silver Falcon, which was a big heavy guitar. Because it was so big and heavy, I suffered some buyer’s remorse when I got it home. I also felt like a poseur playing such an iconic guitar with so little experience.

El Dorado Fancy-Pants guitar strap

To cope with massiveness of the guitar, I went shopping for a strap that would mitigate the weight of the instrument and I ended up purchasing a rather lavish and pricey hand tooled leather strap with a sheep skin cushioned shoulder pad. It was pretty cool and included a cowboy-belt buckle up front! If you click on the image to the right you will connect with El Dorado, the strap’s manufacturer. I subsequently bought a very cool snakeskin strap from El Dorado that I use with my resonator guitars.

Taylor T3B

I never did bond with that Gretsch guitar and eventually traded it in for for a guitar reminiscent of a Gibson 335, that being a Taylor T3B, which suited my sensibilities much more and I remain very fond of that guitar. I added two other electric guitars to my stable since then and will typically pick an electric up to play more often than an acoustic guitar nowadays. It is important to note that the sound I prefer from an electric guitar is more acoustic sounding the then often over-driven, distorted sounds frequently used in rock and roll.

The El Dorado strap I bought does not work with my electric guitars so after it hung in my closet for months I had a brilliant idea. I would barter the strap for some in-house guitar set-up consultations with Jacob Lampman who works at my local shop. Jacob, who works the floor, teaches lessons, and plays all over town is a local treasure and he agreed with the deal!

My music space with left to right a Taylor Solid Body Custom, a Taylor T3B Custom, and a Taylor T5z Pro. Note the pedal board and the Fender Princeton Reverb (Black Face) Amp.

So last Thursday evening Jacob arrived at my home for my first consultation. We’ve planned on three visits in total… In preparation I set up my music space and pulled out all three of my electric guitars. In the end we only worked on the Taylor T3B as it takes quite a bit of time to set up a proper tone palette for a particular guitar! Perhaps it will be easier when we do the other two… I don’t know for sure…

After Nettie, Jacob and I consumed a pot of Chili that I had previously prepared, along with cheese curds and Egg Nog that Jacob brought along, we went down to the music space and began the program.

Jacob running the T3 through its paces.

Jacob began the process by running the T3 through its paces. It is important to note that I play finger-style country blues so the tonal set-up we created was done within that musical context. Jacob, having heard me play in the guitar store and at open mic night from time to time was aware of my musical predilections.

Jacob plays a Gibson ES 335 so I was curious how he thought the Taylor T3 compared. He was very complimentary of the tone palette and playability. You will note that I replaced the original high definition pick-ups with vintage Alnico ones for the rounder/warmer sound that appeals to me for the country blues. He pointed out that the T3’s neck was considerably wider than the ES 335, which is actually a good thing for finger-style players like me. He did say, however, that the individual pick-up volume controls on the ES 335 was a feature that was not available on the Taylor, and it was a trait he frequently used when he played.

Jacob set out immediately after playing for a bit to adjust the dual layered tone controls that are on the Taylor. In sum, he suggested that I had the high tones boosted too much, which caused the guitar to “scream out that it was electric!” Instead, it was his philosophy to boost the low mid-tones to pull out the real beauty of the guitar’s combined of wood and pick-up construction. Given the challenges I have with hearing (yes… I use hearing aids) I suspect that I boosted the high tones to compensate for my incapacities; however, after playing the guitar the way Jacob recommended I have come to appreciate the mid-tone sensibility he suggested. In fact, the tone set-up of the guitar may have been the most important thing I learned that night!

Further, where I’ve been predisposed to use the warmer sounding neck pick up, Jacob recommended using both pick ups simultaneously to broaden the sound palette of the the instrument.

After guitar tone and pick-up set up we moved onto the amp and pedals. Jacob recommended setting the amp tone controls to a mid setting of 5. At my request we lowered the controls to barely audible for the amp reverb controls because I create tone modulations through my pedal board instead. I like this arrangement because my pedal board is portable and I frequently take it to performance settings, whereas the amp is more cumbersome to move around.

Here are the recommendations that Jacob made regarding how to deploy me pedals with the T3, within the context of the type of music I play

  • Do not use the Octave Pedal with this guitar. Jacob did not like the octave effect on the T3. I intend to reserve judgement on this recommendation because I don’t think Jacob used it properly.
  • Set the JangleBox compressor for constant use. Jacob recommended leaving the toggle at “dark” setting to avoid enhancing the high tones too much.
  • Deploy the Mesa Boogie Tone Burst to fatten the sound a bit, but avoid the more aggressive overdrive offered by the Mesa Boogie Flux Drive.
  • Under another MOST IMPORTANT recommendations, Jacob believes the plate reverb is a much more suitable setting for the Boss Reverb than the more overpowering hall setting I was using. Jacob, pretty much, recommended leaving the reverb on all the time, as he set it up.
  • Jacob convinced me to use the tape degradation feature on the MXR Echoplex Delay. I had avoided that feature because I thought it muddied the sound of the delay but Jacob was adamant that it was the coolest effect and we set it to “slurp-up” the sound a bit, as he described it.
  • Finally, we fine tuned the Vibrato, Tremolo and Chorus pedals for the T3. Of course, they are to be used independently of each other, not in combination i.e. one or the other but not together. The depth and time controls were set at Jacob’s recommendation though I pushed to limit the intensity of vibrato effects below Jacob’s preference level because too much vibrato makes me a bit seasick!

Below I am attaching the raw notes written in my hurried chicken-scratch for the pedal settings recommended by Jacob, if you’re interested in the finer details:

All in all, it was a great fun for me to have Jacob over for his consultation. Next time, after a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs we might tackle the Taylor Solid Body!

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A Tribute to Lonnie Johnson – or why and how to film yourself playing guitar

I can think of three basic reasons to film yourself playing guitar:

  1. It’s really informative to film yourself playing and then to study your technique, sound, and musicality. This can be a somewhat painful experience but one that leads to deep learning if you can fight through your feelings about lack of perfection.
  2. In many respects performing in front of the camera is similar to playing live before an audience. The nervousness, stage fright, fighting for concentration are similar and the more your do it, the easier it becomes.
  3. Filming yourself and posting it on social media is a way to communicate to your friends, family and perhaps general public about your level of development with the musical instrument.

Another important element is how to film yourself so that you look reasonably professional and the video recording captures the fidelity of the sound as closely as possible.

For a while I was filming with my iPhone leaning against a music stand or some other piece of furniture that was reasonably close to my performance space, but that gave mixed results both in my appearance and sound. For example, I run the risk of looking like a turtle when the camera shoots me from below.

I do own a professional caliber DSLR (Nikon D810) with an external mic which actually does a good job, particularly when someone is behind the camera managing it, but it tends to hunt focus in and out when left to its own devices on a tripod. In addition, it is a lot of trouble to pull out and set up and then to transfer the files to my MacBook. Secondly I have a mid-sized Brittany dog dashing around the house and don’t want my expensive rig knocked over by her occasional oafishness.

Just within the past few days I’ve established a reasonable filming set-up that allows me to make a modestly more professional film of my playing:

On the left is the front end of the camera that faces the subject and on the right is the screen view of the scene to be filmed…

The foundational set up consists of a Gitzo tripod and a Really Right Stuff BH-55 ball head upon which my DSLR is usually mounted. Both of these items are several years old and have been used extensively in my prior photographic pursuits… What’s new in this arrangement is a recently acquired Really Right Stuff phone clamp that is mountable on the original ball head. The phone clamp is flexible in size and is capable of firmly holding my rather large iPhone 11 Pro Max. Finally a Shure MV-88 microphone is mounted on the iPhone via the charging port (a lightning connector) allowing a high fidelity capture of the guitar’s sound coming from the amp. I think I got a sweetheart deal for the mic during Cyber-Monday. The MV-88 is pointed in the general direction of my Fender Princeton Reverb amp.

The raw video was AirDropped from my phone to my MacBook where it was edited in iMovie. The edits included clipping off some wasted time at the beginning of the film when I was settling myself in, some cropping of the scene, adjustment of the color to give an old time sepia sensibility to the video, and finally a sound fade and black out at the end. The film was then uploaded to my free Vimeo site and next embedded in my WordPress blog.

I am playing Stef Grossman’s piece entitled A Tribute to Lonnie Johnson which is comprised of Lonnie Johnson inspired riffs, licks, runs and bends. Lonnie Johnson was a highly respected and lauded blues guitarist in the 1920’s. Though I’ve been laboring to learn this piece for weeks, it’s a work in progress; still, I hope to play it reasonably well during Open Mic night a couple of weeks from this writing.

Finally, I played this piece on a Taylor T5z Pro and ran the signal through a Boss Octave, Jangle Box compressor, an MRX EchoPlex Delay and finished through a Boss Reverb.

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Muddy Waters Style on Bottleneck Slide

Because of holiday travel it’s been a while since I posted on my blog… I actually have some longer blog ideas that I am percolating, but this morning I was inspired to write a relatively brief commentary about the artistry of Muddy Waters on bottleneck slide and how it influences my approach to playing.

National NRP B Resonator Guitar

The inspiration was a combination of me pulling out and practicing a Charlie Patton tune on my National NRP, a guitar that I’ve neglected for far too long, combined with stumbling across a Muddy Waters video I had posted on Facebook a year ago.

Before I go further, I must note that there are a many extraordinarily influential and skillful blues players that established the foundation for this marvelous genre; however, I personally do not believe there is anyone who matches, let alone, exceeds the importance of McKinley Morganfield, more commonly referred to as Muddy Waters (1913-1983).

Following you can see a great example of a Muddy Waters performance of the classic tune Honey Bee using bottleneck slide on an electric guitar and below the embed I will offer some observations about his style of play with a slide.

  • In the case of this video, Mr. Waters is playing an electric guitar. He owned an array of electrics and acoustics. In the case of this video I think he’s playing a Fender Telecaster, which he frequently favored. He can be seen playing slide on an array of acoustic and electric guitar in still images and videos; however, I cannot find any documentation that he played a resonator. I like to play slide on a National resonator because it’s set up to do so with high string action and it evokes the old classic Delta sound that I like.
  • Similar to Muddy Waters I like to keep the slide on my little finger because it frees up my other fingers up to fret the strings, which I find most natural. The ring finger is also a common place to wear a slide, but I never felt comfortable using it at that location. There are no hard fast rules where to place the slide. You can see people using a slide on the index finger too. Nevertheless, small and ring fingers are most common.
Left to right: nickel-coated brass, brass, long ceramic, short ceramic, long ebony wood
  • There are a variety of materials that can be used to slide across the strings of a guitar, examples from my collection can be seen in the above photograph. Commonly used slides can be metal, glass, ceramic, and even ebony wood, which Taylor Guitars recently brought onto the market. One of the earliest references to county blues slide playing indicated that the guitarist used a pocket knife as a slide. Accomplished slide player Duane Allman supposedly used a glass Coricidin pill bottle.
  • It appears in the Muddy Waters video that he’s using a short metal slide that resides above the middle knuckle of his little finger. The above knuckle location allows him to bend his small finger as much as 90 degrees to play the slide, which is exactly how I like to do it too. Other players cover the entire finger with the slide and must bend at the wrist to engage the slide, which I find very uncomfortable, so like Muddy I ride my slide above the middle knuckle of the little finger.
  • I like a metal slide too that is a bit on the small side so that it is not ungainly feeling when located above the middle knuckle of the small finger. The two “tone dome” metal slides shown above on the left are my favorites.
  • The occasional problem I find with the smallish slide is that some tunes call for a full across six string slide, which is pretty much impossible with a small slide, so on occasion when I play a six string slide tune like Charlie Patton’s Spoonful I will use the longer ceramic slide that I own. Sometimes I will use the longer wood slide but it creates a somewhat undesirable muted sound.
  • Finally, it is difficult for me to observe from the video how tightly Muddy Waters likes the fit of the slide on his small finger. Personally, I favor a relatively firm fit, so that if I hold my finger down toward the floor the slide will not drop off my finger from gravitational pull. Other players don’t seem to mind a loose fit, but not me. Because my fingers are relatively small, I must do some alteration to the interior of the slide to “tighten” it up, and as can be seen in the photograph above I like to line the interior of the slide with a nice “grippy” moleskin that adheres with pressure sensitive adhesive. A good pair of tweezers will help do the job.
I usually play the Tone Dome backwards to get more string to string coverage…
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Local Treasures… Milkbox Bakery…

I was born in New York City, but came of age in Southeastern U.S., spending the most time in North Carolina and Virginia through my middle passages; however through some simple twists of fate I am now a Midwesterner, having lived in Cedar Falls, IA longer than anywhere else in my life.

My dog Nike looking dolefully at the early winters cape in IA…

Compared to the Southeast, the summers in Iowa are sublime; however, the winters here are long and brutal… hateful… I just read we are ranked 11th worst state for harshness of winters. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve fallen on my rear end because of ice, but it’s been too many times.

Now that I am retired, the natural question is do I want to remain in Iowa to muddle through what is essentially six months of winter, with an almost non-existent Springtime? While the winters here present a compelling reason to leave, there are strong arguments to stay. Iowa is ranked one of the top states for retirement primarily because of low cost of living and access to great medical services with Mayo Clinic being just less than two hours drive from here. I love the non-pretentiousness of Iowans too and there is such a thing as Iowa “nice.”

Another important thing to consider are the roots that I’ve sunk into my community during the course of 20+ years and that is to what I will speak to in a series of blog articles that I refer to as local treasures which focus on the small business enterprises that make Cedar Falls/Waterloo a special place to reside.

Located on College Avenue at the “Hill” adjacent to the University…

I’ll begin this series by referencing one of my favorite locations in town and that is Milkbox Bakery which is by definition a local treasure. Owned and operated by Andrea Geary, it is an old world, artisanal bakery specializing in breads and pastries; however, they do offer some meal worthy creations, such as Avocado bread and killer homemade soups!

an excellent place to hang out…

As I mentioned earlier, I lived in New York long enough as a child to appreciate that city for its fine breads and pastries. In fact, those New York creations are the standard by which I measure all others and Milkbox measures up big-time! The bakery holds its own with European breads too, which is no small accomplishment. Andrea has spoiled my family… we will no longer eat loaf bread unless she’s baked it and there’s nowhere in the midwest that bakes a better bagel! Yes… that is true, and I am an aficionado of such things.

I have great admiration for Andrea as she is the creator, heart and soul of this wonderful local treasure! She does it all…

the author and super-baker Andrea Geary in her domain…

So when I am feeling a bit of cabin fever during our long, cold winters, I am sure that one of the best options in town is to get a coffee (free-trade) and hang out at Milkbox Bakery for a bit. If you’re lucky, you may even have a chance to chat with Andrea when she emerges from the bakery where she does her magic. Oh yes… and when I leave I’ll be sure to have a fresh loaf of “Rustic White” bread and a bag of bagels…

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Trouble no more… Paper charts are gone…

A couple of weeks ago, I had the great good fortune of spending some time in the Evanston/Chicago area with two of my college frat brothers. It had been 8 years or so since we last gathered and was great fun. We are all retired or semi-retired and are coincidentally afflicted by some of the same age-onset challenges, including remembering where we left our keys, walking across the house to do something and forgetting what it was, or trying to remember the actor’s name who played Mick in the Rocky films… I used to fret about memory loss until I realized during my visit that we all experience the same phenomena, so I’ll just have to accept it and go with the flow!

  • Me and Widi
  • Me and Maish

I only mention our common memory issues as a lead-in to the challenges I face with my major retirement avocation, which is guitar playing.

Country Blues Tunes I am currently playing

I’ve been playing country blues tunes for the past three and a half years and have accumulated a substantial body of work. Sadly, try as I might, I simply cannot memorize them all and find it most effective to have the chart in front of me while I play.

So, for most of my practices, guitar lessons, and public performances I am surrounded by paper charts, ranging from a single to four plus pages in length. When moving from tune to tune, I can be found shuffling through a massive sheaf of paper, which can be seen in the accompanying photograph.

By the way, my music charts come almost exclusively from training DVD’s offered by Happy Traum’s Homespun and Stef Grossman’s Guitar Workshop. The charts are in PDF form, downloadable from the DVD. Typically standard notation and, most importantly to me, tablature are given on printable charts.

Recent performance at Cup of Joe in Cedar Falls, Iowa…

The massive sheaf of charts I’ve accumulated becomes a problem if I want to travel with my guitar(s), or when I perform, which is mostly at the local coffee shop open mic night. As you can see from associated photograph, I am typically hidden behind a music stand and overflowing charts, which separate me from the audience and that is not an ideal performance mode for someone like me who likes to interact with the crowd. And, why perform finger-style if nobody can see your hands at work on the guitar?

forScore home page…

My wife Nettie concurred with me that getting out from behind the music stand would be a good thing when I perform. She notices it when photographing a performance.

So, I did some research and discovered that there were iOS apps available for storing, presenting and scrolling through musical charts and one of the most popular among musicians was forScore which is downloadable for $15. forScore can be used with an iPhone and/or an iPad. (the app works on other platforms too, but for better or worse, I happily exist in the middle of Apple world!)

forScore is capable of storing piles of charts and those charts can be organized in a number of logical ways based on your choices. Bookmarks can be assigned to your favorite tunes for quick access and setlists cutting across your entire collection of charts can be conjured up for a performance.

iPad and forScore software mounted with Hercules mic stand holder…

While I own the larger sized iPhone it is still not large enough for me to feel comfortable reading a chart, so I opted to use an iPad which can be adapted to a mic stand with a holder, which in my case was made by Hercules.

It took me the better part of two days to get all my music on board the iPad and to organize it. It helped that there are multiple Youtube videos available by people who’ve developed expertise with this app. I’ve yet to annotate the electronic charts but intend to do so. I used annotations frequently when noting on which finger to begin a slide!

Firefly PageFlip on floor beneath iPad

Finally, it would break the continuity of playing a tune to have to release the guitar with one of my hands and slide a finger across the iPad screen to transition to the next page of the chart. Consequently, a necessary adjunct to this paper-replacement project was a foot-activated pedal to advance the chart page. The iPad and the forScore app work well with the bluetoothed Firefly PageFlip, so I acquired one and it gets the job done. It does take some adjustment getting used to advancing and reversing the chart pages with my foot while I am playing.

I just completed this project yesterday so I do have an experiential learning curve to travel through in the short term before I feel entirely comfortable with this new system when used either at home or in front of an audience. Nevertheless, I have high hopes for the benefits of getting out from under all that paper. Below is a shot of me on my first night of practice with the completed set up… It went reasonably well…

Thanks for any comments you wish to leave below:

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New iPhone Buyer’s remorse… not this time…

For the preponderance of my working career I was involved with Higher Education and as a result taught countless classes and gave a myriad of professional presentations. It was my philosophy to never stand before an audience without interesting visual imagery to support or augment the points I was making. This modus operandi holds true for this weblog. If you’ve taken anytime to glance through my various posts you’ll note they include quite a number of photographs. Consequently, possessing the capability of creating relatively high quality images is important to me as I communicate through this website.

me with the big gun… Nikon D810…

Since 2005 my primary photographic weapon of choice was a Nikon Digital Single Lens Reflex Camera (DSLR). I been through multiple iterations of Nikon cameras and currently use a 36 mpx D810. As you can see in the photograph to the left, the D810 is a large and heavy camera, especially when a telephoto or macro lens is attached.

For the ultimate in image quality (IQ), a DSLR is hard to beat and will always be my first choice when embarking on a serious photographic mission; however, lugging the big gun around is not always convenient and photographic opportunities often avail themselves when the big DSLR is not in my possession.

For serious photographers, another solution besides a big gun is to carry a point and shoot camera. If you’re willing to spend the money, a point and shoot can take a very nice image. For example shown below, I shot this Zion National Park landscape from horseback, one handed … No way could I do this with a DSLR because it’s too heavy to haul on horseback and I learned very quickly a horse has no patience for a rider who is not holding the reins with at least one hand and you cannot shot a DSLR single handedly.

Zion National Park shot from horseback with a Canon S100 point and shoot…

Despite the convenience of a small point and shoot camera compared to a DSLR, it still requires intentionality to always have the small device available when a photo opportunity presents itself and for me that’s simply not going to happen as I haul around too much stuff as is…

All of this discussion leads me to my main point and that is “the best camera” is the one you have available at the time a photo opportunity becomes obvious, and today the best camera is most often the one you have integrated into your personal communication device or handset, i.e. iPhone. Up until recently, I wandered through the world with an iPhone 6s, which takes a decent photograph, but does not hold up remotely to a “professional” point and shoot. That presumption may not be true anymore. The new phone cameras are so good, they’ve practically driven the point and shoot market out of business and even push the need for a DSLR. This advancement in iPhone IQ became obvious to me during a recent visit to my daughter Sally and her family in Wilmington, NC.

There is a Pocosin preserve in Wilmington located behind a grammar school just a short ride from Sally’s home. Pocosins are marshy areas tucked within a pine forest and are the only natural habitats for Venus Flytraps in the world. These Pocosins exist only in the coastal areas around Wilmington, NC so it is a real treat to visit one and photograph the plants that grow naturally in that region. Further, some of my father’s ashes are also scattered in this Pocosin.

So, while visiting Sally, I took out my big rig, equipped with a close-up (macro) lens and went out to commune with my father’s spirit and to take some shots of the carnivorous plants in the Pocosin, some of which can be seen above.

Along for the visit to the Pocosin were Sally and my grandchildren and it was there that she took the opportunity to photograph me with Edie B. and Π (Pi)  (known also as Peter), which can be seen below:

iPhone photo taken of me and two of my grandchildren, Edie B. and Π… note the big gun hanging from my neck…

Later when we got back to Sally’s home and I had a chance to see the photograph of me and the grandchildren I was awestruck by the quality of the image, including the exposure, color rendering and the detail. Sally took this photo with an iPhone X, which was at that point the state-of-the-art iPhone. It was then, after studying that image, I decided that upgrading from my 6s was in the immediate future. It is unusual not to have my iPhone with me and with the new improved camera, it’s a no-brainer if you love to take quality images!

So, in a nifty jiu-jitsu pivot move I handed down my 6s to my wife who had an iPhone 5 on its last legs and ordered the new iPhone 11 Pro Max when it became available, which I’ve had for a few weeks now:

Ordinarily in the past when I’ve upgraded my iPhone, I’ve suffered buyer’s remorse big-time because the phones look and act essentially the same from version to version. But having waited out multiple versions of the iPhone over the past 3.5 years, there are some remarkable differences, most notably with the camera. I’ve included some of the iPhone 11 images below. While I would not consider the shown photos super extraordinary they are very functional. The photo of the old Capital in Iowa City is one of the new iPhone night images. While the upper dome is a bit blown out, it’s not at all a bad handheld taken in the dark photograph!

So, to wrap this discussion up, I am delighted with the photographic capability that the iPhone Pro brings to my disposal. In summary, here’s some pros and cons of the new device relative to my older iPhone 6s:

Pros:

  • Great camera with telephoto, wide angle and night shooting capability
  • 12 mpx camera to capture pretty incredible details
  • Faster operating speed
  • Accurate facial recognition to open the device
  • Massive storage at 256 Gigabytes to store bunches of music, videos and photographs
  • Is still an iPhone and does all the things iPhones do better than in the past
  • Siri is smarter and will automatically put me on speaker phone, which is what I use almost exclusively
  • Now has a battery that lasts for days
  • Has a huge screen which is great for photo editing

Cons:

  • Expensive
  • Heavy and large… the Pro Max weighs almost a 1/2 pound (220 grams)
  • I wish I had gotten a grippier phone cover… the fancy pants Apple leather cover is like handling a wet bar of soap
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Wind it up again… Rocktober’s Open Mic at Cup of Joe…

(left to right) Bill, Rick and Colin open the night

Third Friday of the month is Open Mic night at Cedar Fall’s Cup of Joe and it is the event that guitar playing devotees such as myself use to motivate ourselves to develop new tunes and to enhance out musical technique.
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October’s Open Mic was again hosted by Rick Vanderwall and Bill Guernsey, as well as Rick’s grandson, Colin Simpson. They provide the sound system and some sense of order by ushering through performers in 15 minute time slots. Order was required that night as Cup of Joe was a full house by the time performances commenced. The payback for Rick and company is they themselves get to open the night with a performance.

As I said, Open Mic night is big stuff for those of us trying to develop our performing chops. Two of the regulars are my friend Grant Tracey and me. Here we are the day before Open Mic at one of our wood and steel gatherings, checking out some of the finer guitar instrumental offerings at Bob’s Guitars in Cedar Falls. Grant’s holding a Taylor GS Mini and I am twanging away on a Taylor T5z Pro Ltd., which is a singular guitar!

I like to play first, right after Rick, Bill and Colin do their thing. Perhaps it was nerves when I first started doing Open Mic, but now it’s a habit… I am rethinking opening the night in the future as this past Friday it was pandemonium while I was playing, with people milling around in front of me still signing up for slots to play. Very hard to connect with the audience or play cleanly with that sort of chaos surrounding me.

Nevertheless, I managed to get through my set with minimal “shanks” into the musical rough. For the first time ever, I played a medley of Take a Whiff on Me & Stagolee, both being in the key of D. My guitar teacher Tom Garman helped me create a “professional” transition between the two pieces. I also knocked out a couple of my favorite tunes, Cocaine Blues and Railroad Bill. Probably the highlight for me was to play a spirited version of Etta Baker’s Carolina Breakdown, a tune I stumbled through a year ago during my first sojourn into the world of Open Mic. The photograph of me on Friday night was taken by my wife Annette, who showed up just in the nick of time to catch my performance. She’d been on the road with her students touring the fashion industry in Minneapolis earlier that day!

Kudos to my friend Grant who played his set, including a Hank Williams cover and several of his own tunes, all played for the first time at Open Mic on an acoustic guitar. I thought for that venue it sounded far better than the Fender Mustang he’s played in the past! His home penned tunes, such the fan favorite, Black Sky, work really well with acoustic guitar accompaniment.

See you next month… and I must get to work on some new tunes!

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On the night stand…

Michael Connelly cranks out one to two mysteries per year and they are some of the best detective/police procedurals being written today. I’ve read everything he’s written and it is almost always a fun ride following along behind Connelly’s protagonists. His longest standing and most popular character is LA Police detective Heironymous (Harry) Bosch. If you take Amazon Prime then you will note that several seasons of Harry Bosch serials are available for your viewing, and they are done very well…

I usually wait about a year after the book is published so I can get a good deal buying one used off of Amazon and snatched this one up a few weeks ago… the problem I have is that because Connelly’s books are usually such page turners they do not last long on the nightstand so while I read them I fret about what to read next. In my house I have a queue of books waiting, but it’s the choice I wrestle with… Sometimes a book that I’ve acquired will be read right away, but others may languish for months or years before they are gotten to. The Connelly books never wait very long… like excellent customers, they move to the front of the line…

Having zoomed through the Harry Bosch story pictured above in short order, I am now involved with Caleb Carr’s The Angel of Darkness, which is a sequel to The Alienist. Both books take place in the late 1800’s and involve Lazlo Kreizler psychologist & criminal profiler who hunts serial killers. I read The Alienist several years ago, really enjoyed it and while reading it grabbed a used copy of the The Angel of Darkness; however for whatever reason, the second book languished on a shelf for years. Perhaps I was saving it because I knew that there were no more Lazlo Kreizler books in the works.

Nevertheless, two things occurred that led me to pick up and start reading The Angel of Darkness. First, I discovered that Caleb Carr was indeed planning to publish a new Kreizler story! And secondly, I started watching the TNT TV series based on The Alienist.

New network for the Tarheels not supported by Mediacom.

I was aware that there was a TV treatment of The Alienist; however, I did not have access to a streaming version of it and I find watching a fixed scheduled TV series anathema nowadays; however, the television landscape has changed much for the better in my home as of last week.

First a bit of background. As you are all aware, Cable TV subscriptions are terribly expensive and the ONLY reason I subscribe to Cable TV is to watch my beloved UNC Tar Heels basketball team during the season. Well, much to my despair, I learned that the new ACC Network that would carry UNC games in the future would not be supported by my Cable supplier Mediacom and when I queried them about this, they were a combination of oblivious and unapologetic!


So, I dumped cable, purchased an Apple TV and a subscription to Hulu+ and now have access to the Tar Heels again. The transition away from cable went incredibly smooth and is saving money too! I am wondering why it took me so long to do this!

I also have access to a bunch of other stuff on Hulu, including a streaming version of The Alienist and after watching an episode or two, I decided it was time to dust off The Angel of Darkness and read it… so there you have it…

PS… Caleb Carr is an excellent writer and I look forward to The Alienist at Armageddon!
It might move to the front of the line…

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The Tone Zone… adding some crunch…

My primary, perhaps even exclusive focus in guitar music is to learn and play old country blues, including tunes by such luminaries as the Rev. Gary Davis, the Rev. Robert Wilkins, Elizabeth Cotton and Etta Baker. These tunes were mostly played on acoustic guitar; however, there are enough images out there to indicate that the country blues players were not immune to the charms of the electric guitar… Nor am I, and I play the blues tunes I’ve learned interchangeably on a combination of five different guitars.

Pedaltrain Board replete with a variety of pedals, each serving a distinct function…

I think one of the most fun elements of playing electric guitar is the great range of possibilities when it comes to sculpting a sound, as compared to an acoustic flat top.

Besides the guitar itself, which offers some tone control, electric guitars also have available tone sculpting capabilities with the amplifier itself; however, as depicted above, the marketplace offers a wide variety of pedals to enhance and sculpt the tone emanating from the guitar/amp combination.

To date, I’ve mostly restricted myself to adding tone modulation to my country blues tune such as tremolo, reverb, or delay, along with some compression beforehand, but I’ve been loath to experiment with or add in overdrive or distortion tone modification, which is currently so popular in rock and roll music, especially heavy metal. Those aforementioned tone modifications can have a huge impact on the listeners response to the music and can easily destroy the aesthetic of a country blues tune.

Mesa Boogie Flex Drive…

Well… I am still totally uninterested it big time distortion and wild horses could not get me to sit down and listen to a metal band, but I am going to stick my toes in the “distortion” waters a bit.

I decided to throw my infrequently used Boss Equalizer under the bus and remove it from my pedal board (it is sitting safely in its original box waiting for a rainy day). In place, I am going to put in a pedal that can add some tasteful crunch to the guitar’s signal. I do already possess a Mesa Boogie Tone Burst which can add some slight tone fattening but has limited impact, which is what it was designed to do; however a different pedal is required to get a more noticeable crunch.

The pedal choices for tone modification include overdrive, distortion or fuzz devices. The changes wrought by distortion and/or fuzz devices are so over-dramatic they offend my sensibilities, so I decided to acquire an overdrive, which I think will be more manageable and not destroy the aesthetic of a country blues tune. There are so many of these things on the marketplace that a decision can be overwhelmingly impossible to make from the perspective of my somewhat shallow knowledge base. So I decided to jump into the deep end and trust Mesa Boogie again by grabbing a pedal that was designed to add more crunch to the signal than the Tone Burst mentioned earlier.

Fortunately for me I had the great good fortune of getting a nice discount from Bob of Bob’s Guitars and acquired a Mesa Boogie Flux Drive. Bob has a history of taking good care of his constant customers, which I am. It did not hurt that this particular pedal had been languishing on Bob’s pedal shelf for years and he probably viewed my testing the pedal out as a decisive moment to finally unload it!

Well… my initial experience is very positive with the Flux Drive… the device works by pushing the valves in my Fender Princeton into modestly aggressive overdrive and adds a nice sonic crunch that does not obscure the essential elements of the tune I am playing… Check me out at open mic night because I will probably use it for at least one tune!