mmm

So, we didn't have our CD ready for Quad Day :'( boohoo!

I was actually going to finish it on sunday, but that awful mess of a show I had on saturday prevented me from getting much done. Then I started playing around with the guitar hero controller too much. *sigh*

Well, Dave and I are both in our new apartments, but I have yet to see Dave's. He says it's crazy awesome, but I'm gonna wait until I see it to start believing it.

I finally found some velcro online, so I can start making our pedal boards (for dave and me). I hope they turn out well.

Got crazy booking coming up, what with IMCfest and talking to Seth to get bands for it and all sorts of stuff.

Today I jammed with Holly from Triple Whip, which was pretty fun. She's really cool, and I got to play through some songs with her. They've got a pretty sweet house with a large back yard with a garden (she listed off all of the herbs/spice/vegetables) and a garage where the guy has a woodshop and he makes all sorts of art.

fliers fliers fliers!

-t

PS this is mine from ebay:

omg almost a month

ah it's been so long i can't even remember my name, but i'm pretty sure it's David.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED?

Well, not too much, but I've been fairly busy moving out and then moving in, and I haven't had much time to do "band things", but hopefully that will change soon.

I am now living at my new apartment with C B and O, less than a block from a convicted sexual predator (according to B, who found this out on the internet). Originally we thought he lived across the street from us, which really was exciting, but now it turns out he is a couple buildings down the street from the building across from us. Hopefully this won't prevent us from inviting him over for dinner and playing scrabble (travel edition, of course).

This new apartment is nicer than the old one, in my opinion. Cy seems to think it is about the same. So far it's had an eerie quietness about it, but my guess is that things will liven up fairly quickly.

I got some new RAM for my laptop - one gig to be precise - so I should be able to resume work on the vocals for our CD (it was draining my computer before).

We're playing on the 25th for the sweetcorn festival, thanks to seth. Then we've also got a show on the 31st at the iron post, but we haven't found anyone else to play with us, which kinda sucks. I'll have to get on that later tonight.

There's been a lot of IMC stuff going on - new speaker system, new mixer, new pricing details, BYOB?, police intervention, and lots more. I still need to book a lot more for September, though - it's not really "complete".

I started putting up ads today. I made some ads for the next five IMC shows, and I also put up some more tutoring ads. I put up a couple IMC ads on the construction outside what used to be Record Service, and these two assholes came buy and started ripping things off, telling me "you can't put things up here!". They obviously weren't a part of the construction, and didn't seem to realize that nobody really gives a shit if you put some pieces of paper on some wood that is just gonna be torn down in a couple weeks anyway. Oh, well.

Oh yeah, we had our show on the 9th. What a....delightful surprise. The power cut out about 3 times during our set, mostly because of the TVs and cameras I set up. I didn't spread them across enough outlets, so it sucked up too much of the power from the two main outlets. The easy fix to that problem is just not using the TVs, which I think is what I'm going to do (at least for shoelove). We are actually talking about using security cameras for the building space anyway, so I might just donate the cameras for security use. I really just need to focus on the music.

So far I haven't made any money from my shows, mostly because I've been nice. On the 6th they got about 100 dollars, but because I forgot to set a doorman I let them take it. Then on 9th we made about 80 dollars, and since Panda and Child were on tour I decided to just let them have it all (that's just barely enough for gas and food and hotel). Hopefully more people will be coming now that I'm putting ads up and also now that the new school year is started. I'm fairly optimistic about this year, although I probably don't sound like it, mostly because I'm really tired right now. this seems like more of a massive update than a blog post, so i bet the next one will be better.

until then, check out the new recordings on the myspace, wish me luck keeping the cops out of IMC tomorrow night, and stay away from stale gummy bears.

-t

introducing...

this is another one of those entries where there is so much to write about that I don't even know where to start.

Ok. how about recording?

Shoelove took a couple days and recorded some demo tracks of our 7 original songs, using the...

"

TASCAM 2488mkII 24-Track Digital Portastudio Recording Workstation"

Apparently it is THE most sold Tascam product on musiciansfriend.com. (dot com dot!) It seemed pretty nifty, and nick is able to transfer all of the individual tracks to the computer for mixing and mastering and effects and all that jazz.

Recording went pretty well - we finished everything in time. There were a few issues along the way - most, of course, involving dave's equipment. The jenga song in particular proves to be a difficult song to perform on bass because it involves so much pedal work (wah pedal and distortion pedal, switching between the two at the same time...) At first Dave asked me to press his distortion pedal for him at the appropriate time in the song, but we eventually gave this up and decided to let him record that part of the bass track separately.

I haven't heard the recordings, yet, but i have a feeling we will be able to get some good sounding stuff from them (with the aid of computer wizardry, of course).

Well, before that, actually, was the open mic night. This was an interesting, and somewhat eye-opening experience. Actually, this past week has been a very eye-opening time in terms of my perspective of the local music scene.

So, Dave and I arrived to find Collin sitting down outside Cowboy Monkey with a guitar and a drawing pad with words scribbled over it. He quickly told us how he had devised a plan - a plan to win back his audience. You see, the week before Collin pretty much bombed his stand up comedy act and started yelling at the audience (not making a very good impression in the process). This time, he decided, he would try not to be so offensive.

For whatever reason the best way for him to be non-offensive was to write out jokes on pads of paper and have a volunteer from the audience flip through them and show them to the rest of the audience while Collin sat there and played guitar. Hmmm. This sounded completely ridiculous.

"Collin, I know this is gonna bomb, you should at least give your stand up comedy another chance." I begged.

"Tommy, you weren't there last week. There were people about to throw furniture at me. If I go up there and even start talking they are gonna be pissed" he replied.

"But there is NO way they are gonna like this! This is weird, it's too artsy. With stand up you at least have a chance of success...."

This went on for about 15 minutes, and somehow I convinced him to go on stage and do stand up with me playing guitar on the side while he did it. He was excited and so was I. We were gonna do it.

We even did calisthenics before our set. We were READY.

Then, when it was time to go on stage, Brandon T. Washington von Hoffenberg the Third pulled Collin aside and said something to the effect of:

"I don't really like comedy at my shows, and I've been talking to the manager and he said if anything like last time happens and you offend someone we aren't going to let you back in here"

So, after that, with a face of sheer determination and revenge, Collin went over to the table that our friends were sitting at and said

"Where are my fucking cards?!?"

He then proceeded to do his "silent page turning" while I strummed away on his acoustic. It don't go so badly, I guess. No one booed, at least.

Then there was another act, and after that it was Shoelove - 3's turn to play. It went ok. Well, it was really the first two songs that went well, and then the last one sucked. The last one also happened to be our brand new song, which is probably why it sucked, but whatever. I completely forgot the words, even with the paper sitting right in front of me. I think it would go a lot better if mike was playing guitar and we added more words and we changed a few things. It could be a good song, but right now it just isn't much of a crowd-pleaser.

The first two songs, "Alkaline", and "Daisy", went fairly well. On the latter I played guitar, but it wasn't anything extremely hard, so it didn't "cramp my style". Some guy even said "good job" to me on my way out.

I really need to dedicate at least a paragraph or two more to this open mic night, not because of our performances, but because of the other performers. They were all exactly the same: acoustic, poppy, and boring as fuck. I didn't see a single act that I would actually GO to see. Now this may be my personal opinion, or taste in music, but I really don't see how anyone could get something out of all that stuff.

It IS an acoustic mic night. This, however, doesn't mean "non stop poppy chord strummin folk shit" night. I think I MAYBE saw one guy NOT play chords. It really made me want to puke. Granted, Staci is worse than all of them, but there were so many of them that it just multiplied the effect. And the fact that the audience applauded it, and not just as an of being polite, they were fucking cheering for this shit. UGH. AHH. EEEK!

Ok, moving on.

The digitech pedal. Oh, the digitech pedal. So, dave and I found an awesome deal on ebay for used Whammy and Boss DD3 pedals for 200 including shipping. Good deal. Everything arrives ok....but then we plug dave's bass into it....and....utter shit comes out of his amp. GOD DAMN IT. Seriously, it isn't even funny at this point....just the sheer amount of problems dave has had with equipment. It's like he's got bad music equipment karma.

So, of course, we start analyzing the problem, like the little techies we are. We tested the wet and dry outs, both of them sound shitty. The fact that the dry out continues to puzzle us....shouldn't the dry out just be a direct output of what is coming into the pedal? "Maybe the input connector is screwed up" I suggested....but it looks fine.

But we couldn't even figure that out, because after taking out all the screws on top the thing wouldn't open. We looked and looked, and could not find what it was that was keeping the thing closed. We narrowed it down to one of the corners, but we couldn't find anything over there that would lock the top plate of the pedal to the bottom. We even tried to unscrew the expression pedal, but we couldn't get the screws to move. Then grant almost pried it open with a screwdriver.

I decided to take it home with me, but not after I was forced to walk to Collin/Grant's from the Esquire, and THEN all the way back to my apartment. It was ok on the first half because Collin and I got to talk, but after that it was a little annoying. But when I got home I took another look at the pedal. What was wrong with this piece of crap? It was like they didn't want you to be able to even open the thing to fix it. Hmmm. But there was that MIDI port on that side that still wasn't unscrewed....

So I unscrewed it, just to see what would happen. And, believe it or not, that was it. The top plate was unlocked and came off the bottom plate, but with the circuit board attached. Phew. Now we could find the problem...or could we?

It took me a while to find anything remotely "broken looking" on the circuit board, and even then it wasn't the right thing. I pointed out to dave that the part of the circuit board with the LEDs was broken off from the rest of the board - maybe it needed to be reconnected. This, however, could not be the problem, as Dave pointed out, because they didn't need to be connected (he backed this up by showing how nothing was electrically connected between the two pieces except some wiring....which wasn't broken...) This meant that the problem was elsewhere.

In the current situation we don't know what the problem is. I want to try using the pedal with Dave's one spot power supply again, to check some more things, because I don't have the appropriate adapter to power it. We might just end up sending it back to the guy who sent it to us. Hopefully he won't be an ass about it.


Ok, one more topic, and then I'm gonna eat something.

IMC promoting....yeah, so I'm taking the "not so professional" position of "IMC promoter" by finding bands and putting together shows at the IMC. In the past couple days I have started putting together 8 shows, ranging from "folk/acoustic night" to "rap night". Hopefully they will all work out and I will make some money out of it.

The first reply I got from this rap group was one sentence: "how much you payin us?"

Oh, boy. If that's what you are here for, you can look elsewhere. There are tons of people who just want to play a show, not make lots of money. It's not like you are spending much to do your rap show, anyway. You just put in a CD and rap over it, for god's sake. I replied to him by saying "it depends on how many people you bring", sorta putting the pressure back on him.

As I've begun booking bands I'm slowly realizing the near complete monopoly Seth Fein and Co. has on the local music scene. pygmalion, for example, requires that all of its participants NOT play in CU from august 20 to sept 22. WTF? That means *I* won't be able to book a lot of bands. Then I was trying to book Shipwreck for a show, and I went to their website and it said "for booking, email seth fein..." hmm, ok, sure. So I emailed him asking about the 17th of august, and he replied saying "no, they are playing on the 23rd at the canopy, so they can't play the 17th." MAN, COME ON.

What this means for me is....if I want to book shipwreck I need to book them so far in advance that there is no "seth booking" in conflict with it. Shipwreck is an active band, and I know they are gonna have shows about once a week, and, according to seth, if any of them are in CU, then I can't book them for that week. *sigh*

I'm also trying to get a lot of "up and coming" bands, hopefully inspiring them to do more shows, not only at the IMC, but all around town and elsewhere. There is no cost for them to perform at the IMC, but they WILL make some money, no matter what. This is pretty different from most other venues, where you rarely actually get any money as a new band.


Ok....i'm a hungry hungry hippo, and I know there are at least a couple apples in the fridge so.....SEEeeeeya!


-t

the forbidden cherry

We were supposed to record this past weekend, but, of course, we didn't. Damn that gypsy band! If it weren't for their jazz we would have had all the members in town....

So, Dave and I worked on a new song for the first opening mic night tonight. It's not...polished, really. It's treading some new waters, which I think is good, but it also leaves me a little uncertain. First off, I am required to play guitar, which makes any musical project uncertain, but this one even more so because I need to rap while playing guitar. That's right - I'm finally fulfilling my ultimate dream of make a rap song in a non-traditional time signature (in this case 7).

It's not going quite as well as I wanted, but now that no one is in the apartment I can practice my "rap voice" (because when you rap you gotta be a tough motherfucker). My inexperience combined with the odd time signature and the bizarre nature of the lyrical content really makes this a difficult song to pull off effectively.

In writing the bass part for the song, Dave and I ran into some creative issues, mostly because I didn't feel comfortable dictating a specific part for him. I made a guitar part and a drum part and I said "you can make your own bass part". But when it came to the bridge section, which I so audaciously declared would be in 6/8 to contrast with the rest of the song (in 7), we ran into problems when Dave would play a part and then ask me "is that what you wanted?"

I guess it was partly the way he posed the question to me and partly my desire for the idea I had in mind. I tried to present it to him in a vague way: "It's percussive... or syncopated, with lots of stuff on the offbeat. Sorta like the bass part to 'The Pot' by TOOL" I said. This didn't quite yield what I had in mind, but I didn't really care. Dave, however, cared. Oh, Dave. Dave, Dave, Dave.

Dave.

He said something like "well, if you have an idea, I want to play it". Fine, I decided to write out a part. "I don't like to dictate parts to people," I said. "but whatever."

I wrote out the part, which you can hear by going here:
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rgriscom/shared/black%20cherry.mp3

The original part I wrote was extremely difficult to play, so I modified some parts to make it easier by using hammer-ons and pull-offs. While this made it fit the instrument better, it still proves to be a challenging riff. The first half is fairly easy, falling in line with the time signature pretty closely (albeit with quite a bit of offbeat notes at the end of the first two measures). Halfway through, however, it throws a wrench in the whole process by playing something that sounds like it should be in 4, and then proceeds to complicate things by playing a series of offbeat descending notes in the upper range coupled with a constant lower root note. And all the while the part is meant to be slapped/pulled. Hmmm.

It was later that first night that I made the following observation "It's funny how I put you guys through musical hell and then just sort of sit here and laugh". You can hear this in a lot of our music - I made complex song structures or rhythms (or both) that challenge the band, but I don't actually take part in performing any of them - I just sing over them.

The next day we worked on the song I started learning the guitar part and working more on the vocals. Because it was taking so much time, Dave proposed we just play "Daisy" as our third song (next to this song and "Alkaline"). Now it's just up to me to learn all those silly words and figure out how to say them while playing my fairly simple guitar part at the same time. *sigh* I guess I actually need to do some WORK now that I need to deal with my own crazy musical creations.

In other news, Dave quit BLEEPing. That's right, he stopped. FOREVER. Well, except in the presence of other BLEEPing friends, assuming they offer him a BLEEP to BLEEP.

Yeah.

Also, I purchased shoeloveband.com for a whopping 8 dollars yesterday. Right now it just reroutes to our myspace page, but hopefully it will have something original up fairly soon. Something awesome and original.

Yesterday, Cyrus and I saw some really awesome African music on the quad (along with hundreds of other people). I didn't really hear the name of the first band, but the second one was called something like "Chico". I haven't found any info about this event or the bands, but I'd be interested if anyone knew something about them (supposedly they are local). I also witnessed Krukid casually walk on stage and do a really cool rap over one of the opening band's songs. Awesome.

AND the lead singer of the opening band had an Mbira with about 3 octaves with a contact mix inside so he could plug into an amp. AMAZING. I want to get one off ebay, but some of them are expensive. There WAS a lot of 4 for 100 dollars, but that's a little much...especially since I only need one of them.

After the opening band was finished, Cyrus gave me enough confidence to walk up to the band leader and ask him about his setup. The conversation went something like this:

"Hey, I was wondering - did you have a pickup in one of these?" I asked, pointing to the pile of three mbiras on the table.

"Uh, well, I have a contact mic inside one of them" he replied.

"Oh, cool. That's awesome. Did you make these yourself?"

"No, they are from Zimbabwe"

"oh, where did you get them?" (whyyyy did I ask this?)

"Well, I was in Zimbabwe when I got them" he said.

"oh, awesome. I just thought it was cool - my dad had one of these but it only had, like, one octave. How is this thing tuned?" (anooother question...)

"Well, it's got a scale going up here" he said, pointing to the small, upper-range pieces on the top left. (he failed to mention how the lower notes were tuned, but whatever...)

"Ah, yeah, I know my dad's had, like, thirds going to right and to the left (so you would alternate between sides to make a scale)"

"Hmmm, I'm not sure where that is from" he said

Then the conga player said "Maybe it's from ..."

I wasn't really interested where that silly one-octave mbira was from, so I said "Yeah, I'm not sure where it is from. Well, that was awesome - you guys were great." and then walked back to where Cyrus was sitting.

Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on one at some point in the near future.....(to add to my never ending collection of musical goodies)

Speaking of musical goodies, Dave and I purchased one of these and one of these for $200. SWEET. Dave is gonna be the coolest bassist on the block after he gets that whammy. He can make some crazy ass sounds with that thing. I want the delay pedal mostly because of the "HOLD" function, where you can press the pedal and it will cycle through the last sound running through it over and over ad infinitum. This is especially useful with the separate wet out and bypass out...so you can have the delay sound separate from the original sound, making it seem like two different things. The melt banana guy uses this a lot....It was cool that this one guy on ebay had BOTH of the pedals we were looking for. Well, to be honest, Dave WAS interested in the bass whammy (out of production), but it doesn't sell for quite as cheap.

Hopefully, we should be getting those in the mail at the end of the week.

I just got word from the almighty ND that we WILL be doing demo recording today, starting at 4:30. Sue told me she wanted to do a tutoring session tonight, but she hasn't emailed me about what time....so....as they say,

"bros before hos"!

-t

drizzle dry

hmm, lots to say, but i think i'll restrict this to fixing dave's amp and tuesday night....

So...sunday night dave came over with his nonfunctional bass amp while i was finishing what i believed to be the end of the soldering of my zoom 506II bass multi effects pedal. It was only a loose connector, so I didn't see how I could screw up, but for some reason it has started making weird shrieking noises from time to time. I'll have to look into that.

The reason I thought we should take another look at his amp was because he said the tweeter speaker was actually outputting sound (as opposed to the main speaker). This, I thought, limited the range of possible problems with the amp down to just a few, most of which we could fix ourselves.

We cracked it open and took another look. As dave was saying, the tweeter put out a little sound, which meant the speaker input circuit was completely functioning (although dave doesn't like referring to it as a circuit, even though the presence of the green circuit board warrants such a term, he claims it is purely an input connector, a compressor, and a potentiometer...whatever, it's a fucking circuit). This left us with the wires going to the speaker and the speaker itself. The problem could only be in this small area.

To fully locate the problem I needed to test both parts, and so I came up with the idea of taking one of my stereo speakers and connecting its wires to the wires that normally connected to the main speaker of his amp. Lo and behold some noise came through. This narrowed it down to the speaker itself.

Looking at the speaker, you wouldn't think there was anything wrong with it. Hell, it looked brand new. I noticed, however, there was some bizarre glue connecting the wires that go to the magnet to the posts (that in turn are connected to the wires that come from the input circuit). "Why didn't they just solder this?", I thought....hmmm. One of the wires was a little loose. I told Dave I thought this might be the problem, and since it was the only thing we could really test, I went ahead and took the wires from the input circuit and pressed them against the two wires going to the magnet (bypassing the metal posts in essence). This produced sound! YAY.

So we found our problem: the motherfucking glue shit wasn't connecting the wires to the posts. I quickly turned on the soldering iron, not so quickly cut the wires and stripped them, and then soldered the wires to the posts. Then we connected the wires from the input circuit, and all was good (or so we thought).

Dave's amp is rated as 160W, but the speaker claims to handle 400W, so I proposed the idea of using a power amp to make it louder. Unfortunately, the power amp I have (XP-350, the CHEAPEST available), is meant for use with a PA, and does not have amp friendly connectors. This forced us to use my 4 track portastudio as a mixer just to get the output through the power amp, but this distorted the sound, and didn't help anything. We eventually abandoned the whole idea, but not before we noticed a problem:

the sound was cutting out again.

whaaaat the fuck? we just went through all that trouble and now it isn't working AGAIN? I had just claimed dave to be my eternal slave because I saved him from his amp troubles, but now it all meant nothing. Dave, wanting to display his soldering skills, opened it up again, and put some more solder on the posts. Then we plugged it back in. No sound! WTF?

I told dave to keep playing his bass, testing if the speaker was working (which it wasn't), and I moved around the wires connecting to the magnet on the speaker....after a second the sound came back. Apparently the wire was soldered down to the post, but that wasn't enough to get the sound through. I'm still not exactly sure what was wrong, but I think the wire may have been unraveling before it reached the solder, and so could not carry the signal.

For the last time I whipped out the soldering iron and put some more solder on, this time on the opposite side of the post. Finally, we were done. Dave was happy. I was happy.

Then that fucker called.

Yeah, cyrus was back from delaware, and he needed someone to pick him up from the bus station. we agreed to pick him up, but after we hung up we proceeded to mess around with the bass stuff for a good 15 more minutes before considering picking cyrus up. I mean, after all, he *DID* forget to bring my goosebumps books, so he fucking deserved it.

Now onto tuesday, the day of grayish tones (at least in july). So, last time there were problems with the vocal not being loud enough, and I agreed to try to make things better by offering my services as a somewhat knowledgeable sound guy. I quickly ran into some problems, mostly due to that ultimately shitty ass mixer they have on stage at the canopy.

I had the vocals up all the way. Maxed out. I had the bass all the way down. It could go no less. Yet, somehow...the bass was way louder than the vocals. In fact, you couldn't really hear the vocals. This was quite unnerving. I decided to use the EQ to raise the MIDs and HIs of the vocals, and lower the bass of.....the bass. This worked out fairly well, but the vocal came out a little edgey (sometime distorted), and it was still hard to hear.

I told dave I would only go to the show if he tried a solo with my zoom 506II, and then, of course, as fate would have it, naturally, to be expected, as one would think, the pedal started screeching in the middle of the song. So, I had to run up there and tell dave what the hell just happened, and why he had to unplug the effects pedal. Oh well, I guess I need to look at that thing again....

So, my ultimate and final conclusion for successful use of the shitty Rehearsal Space sound system:

If the mixer can not make the vocals louder, and it can not make the instruments quieter, they need to lower the actual output from their amps. This means volume knobs, my friends. Dave didn't like this idea for some reason when I proposed it to him during the show. He seemed to think it would take a lot of time (probably thinking I would have to tweak the sound...which is true, I would...but if we just wanted to get the vocals louder we could have done it...)

If we try this next tuesday at the beginning, I think it should fix the situation. The only potential problem I could see happening is if someone thinks they are too quiet and then turns up their amp (which I have only seen mike do, but I will get to that). If this happened then there wouldn't be any way to make their volume go back down....so we would be sorta stuck. But that's what you get when you work with a shitty mixer that can't lower the volume of something (you'd think that you would be able to silence a fucking track on a mixer, but NO, you can only bring it down to the original input volume....WHAT THE FUCK?)

So, yeah, I noticed mike turned up after a few songs, and that's fine...I mean I thought he was a little loud most of the time after that, but when he is doing solos that is fine. This is another situation where I would advocate the use of a volume pedal so you can kick your sound up when you solo, and bring it back down for the rest of the songs. You could also use an EQ pedal (which usually has a volume slider on it...so you just kick it and your volume goes up, kick it again and you go back down....)

This morning I totally fell asleep and missed a tutoring session, and I felt so bad about it, but then I went online and read that my student was feeling sick and didn't want to do it anyway. Yippee!

So, we are supposed to take a stab at recording demos on saturday. I don' t have TOO much experience with recording with people (outside of dave), so I'm not sure how they want to go about it. I get the impression that they want to go track by track (or multi track but with editing control of each track). I think this might be a little time consuming, and if we could get the basics of the songs recorded all together, and then add vocals and solos...I think that would be best.

I'm also not sure what equipment we have available. I know nick was talking about using that digital 8 track to record, but I have no idea what microphones we have. I asked garrick if he still had those drum mics, and he pretty much ignored my question (so probably not). Oh, well.

Another thing that is coming up is this whole open mic thing....dave suggested that we work on new songs for the band, and try them out at the open mic night at cowboy monkey (every monday). Sounds like a good idea. He said mike wants to do it, too, but I think that might complicate things (if we are going to write new songs every week, at least)...Also, collin bullock is supposed to be doing stand up at the open mic, and I'm looking forward to seeing that. The obviously potential parallels between shoelove + collin bullock and tool + bill hicks are almost overwhelming....especially when we talk about collin performing on our august 9th show (which i think has been given the green light by IMC...)

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Time for essen of the essen, my friends.

-t

extras

I thought I would just add a little more info before I head off to allerton park on my bicycle....

1. Sue was pretty nice. She's a korean ed psych grad, and she speaks really really well.......but i guess she doesn't think so. Perhaps it is just the colloquialisms....

2. shoeloveband.com on the way, with free hosting offered by our good friend cyrus. web design, however, is still a big question. cy did say we could steal the cyology.com setup and make it our own, but i dunno if that would be awsum enough.

5. it sure doesn't feel like saturday.

12. there's nothing at the end of the tunnel except a big hole.

-t

"GEEZ"

That's the only word that could possibly attempt to depict my feelings about describing all the events that have come to pass since the last Shoelove blog post.

I think I'll start with the end - or in this case the present. Right now I have been busy playing Final Fantasy 8 in German for about the past 10 hours. To be honest, it has really started to piss me off. But now I'm just waiting to meet this guy/girl/monster at Moonstruck at 9:30.

Wait.
"Did he just say nine thirty on a Saturday morning?" Yeah, that's right. There's only one thing that could keep me up at this time of day: money.

Some crazy face wants me to tutor them conversational english, so I am meeting them to talk about it today. I have no idea who this person is or what they look at, but I think their name is "Sue". Hopefully it isn't a transvestite. Well, even then...if they gave me ten bucks I'd do it.

So, moving on to the past, I went to IMC "yesterday" for the weekly shows meeting, and, as usual, there were not that many people there. Actually, when I got there a group of 5 or so old dudes were talking about some sort of local lawsuit involving the first amendment - I wasn't paying too much attention. This slowly (d)evolved into the shows meeting after some new guy showed up asking the obvious n00b question: "is this the shows meeting?"

"yeah, it will be in a few minutes..."

So we sorta half introduced ourselves, even though I had met....fuck, I can't even remember his name. Well, I met him before. He's the....I dunno...he's in charge of the building or something.

Man, I keep breaking my concentration by listening to our WEFT recordings...I haven't even gotten to that. I guess I'm just bothered every time I hear my voice. Perhaps this is a sign that I should be the dedicated theremin player.And there is this goddamn fly in my room that keeps jumping on my leg. AHHH I WANT TO DESTROY YOU.

ok...where was i? Yeah, IMC. So I say "yeah the 6th of july is cancelled and i was gonna say that last week but last week's meeting was cancelled, sooooo...." and they were ok with that. Then I say "i'm thinking about the 9th of august, but there is this other dude trying to have some punk show that day". Then they said he didn't even end up doing a couple shows he set up, so they were thinking about just letting me have the 9th for myself. Hmm, ok. They said if he shows up to the next meeting then I might have to "work it out with him". I think by that they mean "duel each other with sporks".

The newcomer said something about wanting to set up a monthly electronic show on thursdays....his first one will be sometime in august...23rd maybe? He sounded like a cool guy. He definitely had some neat ideas.

Somehow we ended up talked about Seth Fein - I think the lady was talking about bringing lots of people in, and she said something like "Oh, well Seth Fein can bring in hundreds of people" and then I asked if he booked at the IMC and they said yeah, and it all went from there. Well, actually we didn't say very much, but it was neat to see that all 4 people at the meeting knew seth in some way.

Then what was before that...hmmm...probably me having the ultimate hell with myspace. I still haven't fixed that stupid shit. I must have uploaded those 4 songs 5 times each under different settings every time. It just doesn't work. Nick said something about needing to be 256 kbps, and I did that but it still didn't work. Then I looked under "Help" on myspace, and boy was I in for a treat. It was all organized like some sort of shitty faq, but for some reason questions were repeated multiple times.....and none of them had anything to do with the settings for the songs you want upload. Verpiss dich, Myspace!

Then before that I was working on the recordings of our WEFT show. I did some "enhancements" to make them sound a little better, did some extra vocals to fix a screw up of mine on "Daisy", and then sent 'em out to people. For some reason the first few are louder than the last few....The quality is pretty good, but....well, read on.


Yeah, our show went ok. There were quite a few technical issues and little minor things. Overall it was pretty good. I didn't really get any of my delay pedal sound through, so none of my screams were really how I wanted them. As anyone who was at the show would know, Dave's bass amp mysteriously cut out in the middle of the set. Later we supposedly pinpointed this problem to the "speaker input circuit". Poor Dave - he has had never ending amp problems as long as I have known him.

I don't know why, but the sound guy was intent on having a microphone that needed phantom power, even though it was fucking OBVIOUS that they had sm58's available. Would it really have sounded that BAD if we used a normal stage mic(come on, this is shoelove for god's sake)? i used a fucking HARMONICA MICROPHONE for practice! then he had to run my delay pedal through a loop, giving me absolutely NO control over how much of the delay was over my vocal.

Don't get me wrong - he was a cool guy. We had a nice talk about the future of the music industry and the transition from product to service. And he knew about Jane's solo marimba album, so who couldn't like him?

So, whatever....shit happened, things weren't perfect, and we all made mistakes, but life goes on.

Speaking of which, Dave called me to tell me about some supposed demo recording we will be doing this week. If I knew what song we were thinking about I would tell you, but I don't. Whatever it is, it will probably be chosen through the same process as the selection of our lyrics: animal sacrifice and black magic.


So, it's time to take a shower so I don't look like the bum I really am for this new student of mine. It's always important to look good for the first impression. I hope they don't make me buy a fucking coffee at moonstruck. God, I hate that place. Actually, I think I'll end this with the bizarre email I got about why we couldn't meet at Guiliani's:

This week I'm only available on Saturday
morning.
If you are, how about meeting at 9:30? And for the location, can we meet
somewhere other than the Guilliani? I used to like the place but I found
many mosquitos one day and stopped goind there. What about meeting at
Moonstruck?

Thank you,
Sue

-t

WEFT session

Hey everybody, we're gonna be on the radio on July 2nd!

WEFT 90.1 FM is hosting our wonderful sounds from 10:00-11:00 P.M. on Monday, July 2. Make sure to tune in and check us out!

I'm not sure about online streaming, yet, but if they don't have it already we can set one up manually with our digital tricks - so you can't use the "i don't have a radio" excuse!

(i don't sound sick anymore do i? must be because i'm advertising...)

-t

Dog Days

Well, sorry for not posting in a while, but I've been kinda sick. I don't get sick very often - in fact I don't remember the last time I was sick. It must have been over a year ago, but shit this really sucks. I feel really really really bad, comparatively, of course.

So we played our first two shows and we changed history - now what?

Well, we've got a lot of options, like most bands. I have started setting up a show at IMC and talking with other bands (over the series of tubes) about playing at the Highdive or Cowboy Monkey. Dave, on the other hand, is setting up a WEFT session for us on the 2nd of July (last I heard, at least).

Other than that...well, I think we should probably record something even if it is just a quick demo on the 8-track. We need something that embodies our band as a whole, which would probably prove to be very difficult seeing as we haven't really defined ourselves, yet.

Outside of that, Dave wants to make some merchandise of some kind, which I agree with, but I don't know much about making stickers. I suggested we spray-paint our logo around town because it looks like a footprint, to which my roommate declared: "If you do that then I'm not going to a single one of your shows".

Merchandising can probably wait until we get the core of the actual band experience out of the way - the music. I'd like to work on some more originals and getting some more shows. I also mentioned to Dave the possibility of doing shows out of town, but I have yet to receive a reply from him about that.

There are two guys downstairs talking about the repairs they need to make because of the damage the exploding jeep caused. The jeep, for whatever reason, is still down there.

"We're gonna need seven four by fours, and... let's see.....five....six.....i dunno how long of that railing we will need."

Little do they know that a certain pet rat of ours is running around the building...maybe I should take him in.

Speaking of pet rats, I also mentioned to Dave that we should take advantage of our connections with WPGU and try to either play live on the station or make a recording and start putting it in regular rotation.

Well, I'm gonna go back to sniffing and sneezing.

-t

Cool Dude

Today was a critical day for Shoelove, not because we practiced our music or performed any shows, but because our 3-camera-TV system was completed. I soldered one of the camera cables back together because Jan chewed through it, and I went to WAL*MART and bought two RF modulators, each costing twenty dollars (although they were advertised online as ten dollars...).

I will make sure to put a picture up soon so everyone can get all excited and wet their pants at the mere thought of being at our show tomorrow.


Almost as meaningful and definitely more mysterious, I had a bizarre encounter with someone today. I was walking down the alley behind the Courier Cafe to unlock my bicycle and go home when a man came into the alley and said "Hey!"

"Hi" I replied, and continued to unlock my bike.

He started to give me the thumbs up.

"You're a cool guy" he said.

At first I didn't understand what he was talking about - I didn't know him, and I don't think he knew me. Maybe he was just missing a few screws.

"You're a cool guy?" he said, again. This time I could tell he was ASKING me - "are you a cool guy?"

"Uh, yeah." I said.

He nodded and proceeded to unzip his pants and start peeing in the white bucket in front of him.


I decided to let him be and go back home - there were more pressing issues at hand than public urination outside my workplace.

Everything is fun in TV Land!

Today Nick and i picked up the organ from restore/homeworks, and it was pretty awesome outside of a few things not working (after my first organ i wasn't surprised). I *was* surprised, however, by the sheer complexity of this organ. It was definitely a world of difference from the other organ in terms of the number of features and the general quality (and it has a leslie built in!). I'm sure it would be a freakin' awesome instrument if it were working %100. A pretty awesome deal for 50 bucks.

After that Dave called and said he was "bored", so we went and picked him up like a hot chick dancing on the pole at Joe's. After he proceeded to perform lap dances for Nick and I (individually, of course), we drove over to the edge of Champaign on Springfield avenue to pick up our (maybe) final TV for the band.

Before we even got there I knew there was something weird about this apartment, because it was labeled "Y3".

Y? Who the hell has a "Y" in their apartment number?

Well, when got there it started to make a little more sense. Sort of.

It was a large complex with multiple buildings, each one marked with a letter of the alphabet. Why they didn't go with the rest of the world and use numbers to mark the buildings is beyond me - but it didn't end there. The buildings were organized in such a manner that "building D" was on the other side of the complex from building "C", and half of the buildings you couldn't recognize because their letters weren't facing the road.

Hmmm. Bad planning. It's probably engineers like Nick and Dave that cause this sort of shit.

So Nick did a half-ass parking job after almost hitting some hippie girl on a bike and then we walked in. Hmmm, that's odd....there are buzzers outside, but the door is unlocked. Oh, well. Then things got really confusing. None of the doors were marked.

"Well, shit. How do we know which one is which?"

"Well, obviously the first one is number one, the second one is number two, and the third one is number three." Dave said.

Following this questionable logic, Dave and I walked up the stairs to the third floor. Nick stayed downstairs, telling us he was going to buzz the 3rd buzzer.

"We'll knock and buzz at the same time and tag-team this shit" I said.

We waited for the buzz, and then I knocked on the door. A moment later Dave and I heard Nick talking to some women downstairs, so we started walking down. As we reached the first floor we realized our mistake: the unmarked doors weren't for apartments - they led to hallways...which led to apartments.

We followed nick into the first apartment on the right and were greeted by a somewhat cozy cream colored living room and kitchen. In the right corner was a flat screen TV on a stand.

"Is it that one?" Dave asked, pointing to the flat screen.

I looked around and saw another TV on the floor.

"No, it's this one" I said, moving over to pick it up.

Then the lady walked out with a THIRD TV, this one even bigger than the one I was about to pick up. I handed her the 10 dollar bill, told her thanks, and then we walked on out - Nick carrying the TV, Dave just walking, and me holding the cable.

As we drove back to my apartment - TV sliding around the back of the truck the whole way - we discussed The Greytones (I like to call them "The Gr8ones") and their current situation.

I knew from the beginning that Garrick was part of the problem - he always was - but I guess what I was trying to find out from Dave was why they weren't fixing that problem (which in my eyes, is the REAL problem). I suggested that they get a new drummer, and he said "we thought about it". He seemed to think that no one in the band was enthusiastic enough to work hard and find a new drummer. He also mentioned that the "downfall" of the gr8ones was one of the reasons he wanted to start Shoelove, which makes sense. Hopefully, we can, in a sense, learn from the gr8ones mistakes.

Dave brought the TV up to my apartment, and we discussed my bike trailer (which is still far from completion). He left with an IBC from our fridge as I told him the story of the stolen DDR mat adapter (quite an exciting tale, if i may say).

He and nick departed and I went back upstairs to check out the TV. It was indeed a little blurry, as advertised on Craig's List. I fixed it later, however, and it didn't require opening the TV or unscrewing anything. I just had to turn a knob....I guess the lady was too lazy to look it up in the manual. Oh well! Her loss, our gain.

I walked outside and saw Cyrus arriving on his bicycle...

"Hey, Cyrus!" I shouted down to him, "You just missed dave!"

"Yeah, he just gave me the middle finger!" he replied.

Cheeseburger!

Today we rocked it hard, playing our whole set for practice. We sounded pretty good (you know, except for ben sucking so much - GAWD!) Heh. Just kidding. Not really. Well.....i guess.

Today I got my free TV, but as I feared, it has an RF connector, so I need to get a modulator from walmart or some place to make it work with the cameras......hopefully that won't be too expensive.

It's taking forever and a half to get my bike trailer finished....mostly because i don't have a drill and I have to resort to make holes in the PVC pipe with a screwdriver. Yeah, that's my dedication! One of my English tutoring students who works at U of I said he has some tools in his lab i could use, so maybe I can finish it tomorrow.

I still don't have any photos to put up, or any real video. Well, I guess I have some crappy 15 second video of everyone saying "Hi", but that's about it.

I bought this organ yesterday:


I don't really have room for it, and I don't have a vehicle to transport it, so I think I'll just let nick have it, since he really wants one. I'm sure he can put it to better use than I could, anyway.

We noticed during practice today just how much *stuff* we have. Ben's set is pretty large by itself, then keyboards, bass, two guitars, congas, DDR mat w/ laptop, drum machine and various effects pedals. That's just how AWSUM we are, I guess.

I think we are ready to rock out on Thurs and Fri. I'm more excited about the Iron Post show, personally, because I know there will be more people from central there....and just more people in general.

It's gonna be one of the historic moments when the world is changed by the ideas of just a few people. Or something like that.

Cheeseburger!

-t

Preparation

We didn't have practice today, but I thought it was a good time to post an update about how things are going with the band. We have been practicing for our first two shows this week on Thursday and Friday at the Canopy Club and Iron Post respectively. We've worked out about 9 songs to play including the "four originals" ("Surefire/bleah" "Nagej/Jenga/Cardboard" "Schreiberism" and "Toolish".) Yes, I know - those are very creative names. We like to consider ourselves to be a veritable fountain of creativity.

Dave mentioned creating a band fund yesterday (no, not "band fun".) This seems like an interesting idea, especially if we are going to get those platinum chains around our necks like I was talking about. Gotta look like a playa to be a playa.

Today our band performance was thrown into jeopardy as my playstation to USB adapter was stolen. Under Cyrus' genius plan, however, we retrieved it. That will be a story for another time (probably during a show this week). Cyrus, we salute thee.

I am in the process of collecting televisions for our show (to use with the security cameras). I already have one, but I need two more. I'm picking one up tomorrow, the other I'm not sure when. You must be wondering how I, a car-less college student, could possibly pick up a TV and transport it. That's where the bike trailer comes in.

That's right. When you go to see the Shoelove show and you see those awesome TV's....they will have been brought to you by a handmade PVC bike trailer. If that isn't hardcore then I don't know what is.

-t

Footprint?

Today I set up the gmail, myspace, youtube, and openingbands.com accounts for Shoelove. I proposed changing our name to "Shooluv", but it was unanimously rejected by the committee.

-t