Jabulani Jonny

Well my posts are a little delayed right now.  I've been lacking the discipline to blog when there doesn't seem to be a lot going on. 

This past Wednesday I met up with college roommate Danny, and guitar playing buddies John and Jeremy in Atlanta.  About 2 months ago Danny sprung for 4 tickets to the My Morning Jacket show at the Fox and told us all to make it happen.  Make it happen we did and we had a phenomenal time. 

We met up at the Holiday Inn Capital Grand in Atlanta and I set up my recording equipment for what would be a late night acoustic jam session back at the hotel room.  We played a little guitar that afternoon then headed to the show.  MMJ rocked it.  I mean, this was an excellent show and the crowd was waaaay into it.  If you've never heard of My Morning Jacket then you need to check them out, definitely one of the best bands out right now.  Go here and listen to I'm Amazed.  Then go here, which is a live album, and listen to Gideon, Off the Record and It Beats 4 U.  Awesome show, awesome band.

We left there about 11pm and headed back to the hotel for our jam session.  This happens everytime we all get together.  We basically stay up til the wee hours playing guitar and singing some of our favorite old songs.  I usually record the event for posterity's sake.  Here are a couple songs from that night.  Audio is embedded for those using a reader.  Come 'on to the site.

This Ol' Cowboy

Wait a Minute

But wait, you say, you’re already married.  Yep, but that ain’t what I’m talking about.  You see, I’m a guitarist as many of you know.  I play lead for a pretty rockin’ P&W band at church and have been in that role for 9 years.  I don’t mean that I strum and electric guitar behind an acoustic, there is a difference.  So for the last 5 years or so my main guitar has been a Line 6 Variax.  I realize that other guitar players that see this are gonna go "What the…".  However, it really has been a good guitar and there’s a reason why I’ve been using it. 

On a typical Sunday I will have have a song that needs the sound of a Gibson Les Paul played through a Marshall stack (think AC/DC’s "You Shook Me All Night Long).  The next song will need a Fender Stratocaster through a Fender amp (think some of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s blues); while the next song will need an acoustic or something.  So you see, versatility was the key. 

However, now I feel like I’ve been "dating" guitar tones for the last 5 years and I’m ready to settle down.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been happy with my tone, and I get complements, but I sometimes feel like I’m playing a toy.  So I’m ready to settle down and I think I’ve spied the beauty that will be with me for quite some time. 

Let me introduce you to the G&L Comanche, with premium flame maple top, tobacco ‘burst finish, Z-coil pickups, gun oil rubbed birds eye maple neck, natural wood binding, tone siren with six strings.  These pickups run a little hotter than a typical Strat single coil and offer a ton of flexibility.  So here’s the darling that I’ll be partnering up with for years to come.  I’m very close to pulling the trigger…just a little more saving to do.   (courtesy of  ProGuitarShop)

Tonight we had a going away dinner for our great friend, Elizabeth.  Her job, the charity Food for the Hungry, is moving her to Nashville.  I’ve known Lizzie for 10 years.  We had an acoustic trio for several years, playing around the Columbus area and making some great music.  Unfortunately, for some reason none of us can really explain, the trio kinda fizzled.  Danny moved to Baltimore, we all got jobs and things just kinda moved on.  I always long for the synergy that we had in that group, we made some pretty stinkin’ good music.  I might be biased, but I’ll take this opportunity to introduce you to it.  This is Elizabeth, Dave and I when we were taking some shots, planning on "getting the band back together".  Dave is the percussionist, Lizzie’s in the center of course, Danny, who played rhythm, was in Baltimore so he wasn’t in the shot, I played lead and am on the right.   

I’m gonna miss Lizzie and the wonderful music that we made.  So, to honor her, our friendship and the music I’m going to post 13 of our original songs that I recorded several years ago.  That way you can download these tunes to your iPod or whatever and sing along.  Let me give you the background.

A couple of years after we stopped playing together regularly, Danny let us know that he was heading to Baltimore.  We had about 25 original tunes that we had never really recorded and I decided that we would meet at Lizzies cabin, play the songs and record them live, since that was the most true to our nature and the music.  So we met on a Tuesday night, I pressed record on a little Roland VS-1680 recorder and we played through 13 of the songs in an evening, no practice runs.  Just play and record.  I then came back and added bass and percussion to it to fill it out.  The CD is raw and organic.  There are definitely some human elements on there, but I love the tunes.  I think the energy of the group comes across and I don’t think I could replicate that with a studio redo.  So that’s the story, two years of not playing together and we get together to knock out some songs, which is what’s presented here.  I call it Two Years on a Tuesday Night.  I hope you enjoy.

FYI, these files are M4a so if you’re not in iTunes, you’ll need to download a codec pack for Windows Media Player from here.  I’ll also zip these files up in a folder with the album art and make it available in the sidebar for download.  For those using an RSS reader, there are embedded audio files below.  Come on to the site, it won’t hurt.   

Looking Back

February Blues

That last one was about as impromptu as you get.  We couldn’t even remember the words, and it was Danny’s big chance to solo.  It fit perfectly.  I’ll put a link to download the whole album in the sidebar.  Grab your free music and enjoy. 

Elizabeth, I enjoyed making music with you.  I’ll always hear your harmonies when I write.  Godspeed, and here’s to the day when we can play these songs again. 

G&L Comanche.  Bookmatched Flame maple top. Z-coil pickups.  Birds-eye maple neck, gun-oil tint.  Beauty with six strings and tone of heaven.

As Sunette and I have been staying at the Ronald McDonald House just outside of Philly during the last week and a half, we’ve had several days of just doing nothing; which has been fantastic.  I was going like gang-busters before we got here and the rest has been nice.  Especially in light of the fact that we have our C-section next Tuesday and life is gonna get crazy quick. 

So I brought my little travel Taylor guitar up here with me, as well as my laptop, and a new little gizmo I picked up before I came up here.  I knew that I wanted to do some recording while I was here, but I couldn’t afford to pick up a mini portable recorder like the Zoom H4, super sweet I might say.  Instead, I picked up a Belkin Tunetalk for my iPod.


This is a cool little deal that you plug into the bottom of your 5g iPod and it allows you to record in stereo straight to your iPod’s hard drive.  You then just hook the iPod up to your computer and you can import the files to your software of choice.

For kicks, and since I’m completely stuck on Ryan Adams right now, I decided to record a cover of his song Easy Plateau from his Cold Roses album.  Excellent artist and an excellent song.  Lawyers:  this is not my song, I’m not selling it, I love the song and just recorded it for kicks, don’t sue me, I’m poor.  Now that I got that out of the way…  I recorded my little travel guitar using the Tunetalk and then imported those into Cubase, my recording software.  I then listened to those tracks and recorded vocals using the Tunetalk.  After that I added some percussion courtesy of Toontrack’s EZDrummer plug in, using the Latin Percussion add-on.

Yeah, the timing’s kinda all over the place, but it was just a fun little experiment.  I really dig the Tunetalk.  My only gripe is that the stereo mic is not very directional, so you can’t tell if I’m on the left or the right when I’m recording.  That kinda stinks if I wanted to record a jam session and get some separation of the instruments.  Anyway, check out the tune and lemme know what you think.

I think the vocals are a little hot.  I may remix and repost, but we’ll see.

Easy Plateau

Well, I’ve had this blog for a little while and I’ve never mentioned my CD.  I recorded this on my own back in 2000 and have made only a little effort in getting it into people’s hands.  Shame on me.  So I’m gonna make it available for purchase here on my blog for a ridiculously low price of $5 plus $3 for shipping.  How about supporting your virtually local musician?  Here’s a little background.

Back in 2000 I had several songs that I was working on that I wanted to get recorded.  Due to budget restraints and the desire to learn to record I decided to produce it on my own.  I wanted to try and capture what was in my head with what was available to me.  Thankfully a buddy of mine had a home studio centered around a Roland 1680, which were great little machines back in the day for home studios.  I didn’t have really fancy mics or other equipment.  He did have some nice guitars which I used and put to good use on the album.

I played all the acoustic, electric and bass guitars, as well as singing.  I had my buddy Dave Holland provide the drums and percussion.  Elizabeth Jones and Allen Levi sang backup on a few songs for me and did a great job.  Elizabeth and I sang together in an acoustic trio called In Need of Eve, which also did a homemade CD that I’ll make available soon.

Most of these songs were done in the studio using all acoustic instruments, no loops or synths.  A few were done live in a little home concert that I put on and recorded.  This CD is organic and raw.  I think there were some really nice moments captured and I still feel like these songs can speak to folks.  Below you’ll find some snippets of a few of the songs to give you an idea of the feel. 

Over on the right you’ll see a link where you can purchase the CD using paypal.  If you have any questions feel free to post a comment or contact me via email. I hope you enjoy it!

There used to be links to songs you could listen to here, but Quicktime keeps crashing various browsers. So…. I’ll try to figure out another way for people to preview the music.

As some of you know I provide mobile audio recording services for local musicians and groups, which can be anything from local churches to drama productions to voiceovers for video.  I love the live recording aspect and I tend to focus on recording the Praise and Worship services for churches, my own included.  Typically it’s a 7 or 8 piece band with lead and backup singers which usually equates to between 15 and 24 tracks of audio.  I find that trying to capture the live feel of this type of setting and getting it to transfer to tape is a rewarding and sometimes frustrating challenge.

I’ve found that the more of this I’ve done, I tend to put my own recording on the backburner, way on the backburner.  Well after reading Carlos’ blog it prompted me to get back into my own studio to record some songs that have been knocking around my head for quite some time. 

Here are a couple pics of my humble studio.  It’s nothing special but it allows me to do everything I want and can provide some good results if I take the time to actually finish what I start.

I built some decent sound absorbers a while back and it has really improved the mix space by evening out the frequency response of the room.  You can see a couple behind me in that pic.  Basically I built a 2′x4′ frame of 1×4’s.  Then I found some insulation batts made of recycled cotton and cut sections to fit in the frames.  I then covered the frames and fabric with a porous cotton fabric that wouldn’t reflect sound waves.  They do pretty well and helps to keep the boxy room sound out of the mics.

  My desk is one from Ikea called the Jerker.  It is a great budget studio desk and I dig the workspace and the side monitor mounts that you can get for it.  Basically my setup is as follows:

Dell 9300 laptop (since I specialize in mobile recording)

Presonus Firestudio interface

2 x Presonus Digimax FS

ART Digital MPA tube preamp

Wharfedale Pro 8.2 monitors

M-Audio Axiom 49 MIDI controller & keyboard

With that rig I can record 26 simultaneous tracks and the ART tube pre gives some nice warmth for vocals and bass tones, while the Presonus Firestudio and Digimaxes have pretty clean preamps that I like to use for acoustics and drums. 

So that’s my humble setup.  Here’s to recording my songs again.  I’m currently working on a bluesy tune called Walk Like a Freedman that I wrote a couple years ago but never recorded.  I’ll post it as a work in progress when I get most of the rough ideas sketched out. 

I came across this site yesterday, it allows you to download free Classical music pieces to expand your classical repertoire.  Sunette loves classical, I’m alright by it so I figured I’d give it a go.  It comes as an .ogg file so you prolly need to convert it for iTunes or Winamp or your media player of choice.  Los posted a cool web app called Media-Convert which allows you to convert just about any audio file type to any other kind, which would be helpful here right?  So you can download the classical piece that you like, say… Vivaldi’s Spring.  Then go to Media-Convert and convert that file to an mp3 and drag it into itunes.  Quick, and most notably…free, way to expand your classical music library. 

Well it was time for a new In Need of Eve demo.  For those that don’t know, In Need of Eve is an acoustic trio that I’ve been playing with since 1999.  My buddy Danny and I started just the two of us.  We had some good songs starting out, but folks said we were missing something.  We figured out that it was a female singer that we were missing; hence the name In Need of Eve.  Well after playing together for several years Danny moved to Baltimore and we’ve been on hiatus for a while.  We started playing again last year off and on and it’s time we did a new demo.  So it’s just Elizabeth, Dave and I.  Dave’s the percussionist and he’s the one pictured here.  I went to his house last weekend to lay some percussion tracks.  His back room is a great percussion room with nice ambience so we tracked in there.  Here are some shots of tracking.  Yes…he’s playing a bucket in the shot below.  I’m gonna post a couple of the rough mixes for you to hear a little bit.

The second song has the brushes in it.  This demo was just covers, but we’ve got a ton of original stuff. Pretty good I think, but hey, I may be biased.  Does anyone want to hear any of our originals?  Post a comment if you do and i’ll oblige.  Go DAVE!!

These are rough mixes, all standard disclaimers apply, and it’s a demo.  Ok then.

The Letter

Going Back To Georgia