Take one crazy baby.

Add one Gramma Agnes.

Equals tired baby.

Lest I leave you with the mistaken impression that she slept the whole trip, please understand that I was only able to take pictures when Mary Anne and I weren’t actively chasing her around the floor of the airport terminal, feeding her, changing her, carrying her through security checkpoints…

… where the gallant forces of the TSA chemically tested the boiled water we brought for formula. Three or four bottles that we had to open ourselves in some sort of “You’re responsible for that frightening clear liquid, so YOU touch it” sort of way. She waved little strips of paper over the open bottles to check for tell-tale fumes. Let the paper develop. Checked it against something. Took ten or fifteen minutes, was a hugely formal production, I’m sure the gear cost a lot, and I still walked through there with the biggest container of water not even noticed, let alone inspected.

Have you noticed that the bins the TSA give you to pile all your shit into now feature local advertising printed on the bottom?

Anti-terrorist measures in America are a vehicle for advertising.

ADVERTISING.

Talk about your captive audiences.

Ok, this is totally random. Yesterday, I discovered POLAR, the RAM-based loop recording environment tucked into DP5. Turn your laptop into an over-the-top loop pedal, oh yeah… anyway, I sat with an acoustic guitar in front of the Powerbook’s built-in microphone, with Evie playing and chirruping in her playpen to my right, and recorded a bunch of loops, and more-or-less accidentally caught loops of Evie singing along.

But that’s not the clever part!

*insert Clever Part Credit to Joel for doing this first and telling me about it*

The clever part is this: you record loops of various lengths… some 4-bar, some 8-bar, some 3-bar, some 5-bar, etc… and as the loops all repeat, they move in and out of sync with each other, evolving over time.

This technique isn’t very obvious in what I posted (but maybe that’s what’s cool about it, the movement of what are obviously loops, but whose relationships to each other keep changing), but Joel has done some really cool evolving ambient electronica this way. Perhaps he’ll send me another mp3 and I’ll post it here along with mine.

EDIT: That photo is messing with me in an Umber Hulk kinda way.

EDIT: Joel’s offered example:

Quoth The Joel: “Each of the four loops in this piece are of a different length, all more or less voicing a gm7 chord and using preset sounds that came with Logic Studio 8: sampled marimbas, physically modeled plucked strings, and a simple FM synthesizer.“

And yes, that’s one of Lily’s white hairs stuck in the corner of Evie’s mouth. Evie gives Lily her toys, and Lily chews on them. Lily gives Evie her toys, and Evie chews on them.

Evie and I went to the Zoo today!

The gardens are very nice. It was crowded because of the awesome weather but fortunately there was space for Evie under an elephant.

Then for awhile she hid in the desert.

Her only squeal of delight was for some fantastic flamingos right up next to the walkway.

We had a nice fountain moment.

… or: What I Did Over My April Vacation!

Among other things, we did this:

This was our closer for the show Friday night at the Cigar Parlor. When we arrived, the PA we were expecting to use had up and vanished. So what’s a bluegrass band to do? Play acoustic, of course, except for that cretin with the slab of solid wood, four strings, a cable and an amp. The vocals were low, but we had both Kevin and Mike belting it out, and on some songs the audience sang backup. It worked out.

At one point the rest of the band filed past me and went out into the audience to play. As Kevin passed me with his banjo, he leaned over and said something to the effect of “Nyah nyah, you’re attached to your ammmmmp…”

The Cigar Parlor was packed (which means about 30-40 people at the most) and the show was a blast. For a while we had Willis on mandolin (apparently any Mike Smith musical effort has to have at least one member with waist-length dreadlocks, and after Mike had his all cut off, Willis stepped up to the plate), and it occurred to me that I was playing in a lineup I’d casually daydreamed about for a long time… banjo, dobro, mandolin, guitar, harmonica, vocals… I would have liked to play upright bass, of course (and Collin apparently thought of bringing his upright for me to play, that’s freakin’ nice, as we’d only heard about each other and not met until Friday. Cool guy.) but I have no experience with the double bass, other than realizing how difficult it is to play. I’m comfy on my Jazz Bass. Someday there will be an upright here in the house.

The charming teenage Sugarbottom Girls screamed for Mike Smith and Bobby… “We loooooove you, Mike Smiiiith! ” *squealgiggle* “We looooove you, Bobby Cerruti!” *moresqueals* The Sugarbottom Girls are crossover fans from Mike Pfeifer and the Associates (who have a song called Sugarbottom Road that the girls love to sing along with, hence the name) and I like the way the bands up there are all involved with each other’s efforts to greater and lesser degrees… The Mike Smith Band and The Happy Dog, The Grassholes and Mike Pfeifer (and all the Associates), Bobby, Emma, Rocky and Kevin putting a band together to play the Band Of Gypsies album live. Cool stuff.

Friday was fun. Somehow I managed to function on a serious sleep deficit… but that’s starting to catch up to me. As soon as I got home, the pollen and whatever crap is in the air here in Florida swooped down on my chest, and now I’ve got a cough and slight fever. All my joints ache. The new tattoo is more painful than expected.

Jamie inked me up again, and that’s worthy of an entire post. We added Evelyn’s name on a banner to the heart and swallow with Mary Anne’s name tattooed over my sternum (ouuuuuuch!), and a red swallow high on my left shoulder, traditional sailor position, with the end of the banner bearing Evie’s name in her beak, and surrounded by the same style of stars and dots in the original tattoo over my heart. Eventually, I’m hoping to add another name and another swallow.

After the show we hit the Moose and saw some more music and more people, then went back to the house and sat around playing music and drinkin’ till about 5am (video from that coming soon, I got some of Bobby and Emma noodling around on Hendrix and the whole crowd singing Angel From Montgomery). I got up Saturday, went and got tattooed, came home… and went to bed, yo. Crash.

Sunday Bobby played engineer, and Emma and I worked on some recordings. That also is worthy of an entire post… hopefully you’ll all get to hear what we did at some point.

Ugh. I need a shower. More sleep. Fewer tiny foreign bodies in my sinuses. Ick.

Here I go, watch me now…

John, Leo and LP came over on Saturday, and we banged around pretending to be a rock band, drank beer, took photos, drank beer, recorded random jams, drank beer, ate mighty tasty Tijuana Flats, drank beer and played on myspace. They seemed happy with the practice recordings I gave them from last week, I feel like I delivered a practice recording they could benefit from. They got to hear (more or less) what they actually sound like (important!) and I got to tweak my studio. This morning I listened back to the drunken meanderings we tracked yesterday, got up, tore down the mics around the drum kit, and reassembled them into something more closely resembling a Good Drum Sound Setup, Now With Tom Mics And More Properly Spaced Overheads!

Side note! Trey and Mary Anne have now eaten Mexican food three days in a row! Ole!

This week I’m headed nawth to PA to re-meld with Mike and Bobby (and Kevin and Bumma and Al and Dawn and Nick and Ashley and…) and also to look over some issues with the property we’re renting out. When I get back, I hope to start working on a demo recording for The Murray Hillbillies, starting with drums and working our way up and out… build it up like a brick house, baby.

The Murray Hillbillies on myschpace: www.myspace.com/themurrayhillbillies

I like “Tied Up” and the weird Baby Blue improv jam thing.

Peace.

-T

Three visible (third is just a line of white to the right of the upper incisors, now struggling to crest proudly like a tiny enameled humpback whale) of the six apparent.

Yes, she bites. Poor Mary.

Saturday night I played bass for The Murray Hillbillies, a hardish blues rock band… sat in for their regular bass player, Dell, cause he had a previous commitment with another band. First time in about two years I’ve taken the big SWR bass rig out to a gig, and it was a blast to be playing up on a “real” stage - with drum riser and actually some room to move, wahoo! - with big speaker stacks, good monitors and a sound guy who knew what he was doing. Two Strats through two smallish tube amps, a Jazz bass twanging and thumping through a pretty hefty SWR rig, and LP firing away on the drums just plain sounded like good old rock and freakin’ roll.

Woulda been nice if there were more than fifteen people in the club, but hey. The whole street was dead that night. I think Bike Week in Daytona took a lot of people, and I think it might be Spring Break for college kids too.

I went out with them last night and played an open mic, was a lot of fun. We got asked to turn down. Hee. “Y’all sound great! Everything’s clear, and balanced - but it’s LOUD…” Now, normally, I’m not at all into being obnoxiously loud… but I think all of us had a bit of attitude about getting up and playing, as we had to wait while a local favorite chick absolutely mangled six or eight songs. Normally, I am really really accepting of people who get up and do open mic night, but there is a limit. Imagine, if you will, listening to a girl with a very nasal voice whining through a PA turned up to the point of almost feeding back, while a band who obviously don’t know the song and don’t seem to be interested in listening to each other OR her try to take her through “Sweet Child Of Mine”. All of it. So yeah, we had a bit of attitude when we got on… we opened up with a John Mayall tune (”You Don’t Love Me”) that has both guitars and bass playing the same opening lick , so we came out of the gate hard, loud and TIGHT, thank you very freakin’ much. So yeah, we were loud. Hee. When the guy came up and spoke to us, I turned my bass down long enough to start playing again and realized that the other guys really weren’t any quieter, so I turned it back up and we finished the set. Dude running it came up to me later and thanked me for turning down. Sure, man, no problem.

Look! Random cute Evie!

Ok, she’s apparently decided just to bang these teeth things out as fast as she can. Upper left incisor has come out cleanly, upper right is beginning to peek through.

Crazy.

“The Admin O is out of uniform.

If this is an emergency then yell through the door.

Otherwise, please come back in 15 minutes.”