Music
-
Cracker Soul
Saw Cracker at the Variety Playhouse last night in a very wonderful show. They only did two songs off Countrysides, but that’s my only complaint.
-
Sunday rapid fire
- Create Visio diagrams programatically
- An interesting interview with Frank Miller
- Creepy pictures from North Korea
- A new studio album from Ramblin’ Jack Elliot!
- I rode past this last week.
-
New gallery – HoundogRadio.com party
Not my best work, but some of them turned out well. I only got shots of the A-Sides and the Luxury Kings. -
Last night’s open mic
It went very well. I didn’t win, but everything was well received, and the playing and singing were good. For some reason the bass drops out in the monitors, but other than that, it was good fun. I did Magnolia Wind, Left Alone, Waitin’ Round to Die, Red Clay Halo and Walkin’ Cane.
-
Quote of the moment
“Money doesn’t talk, it swears”.
Bob Dylan -
Victory was mine (somehow)
I did the open mic last night at Limerick. I played a rather weak set of Walkin’ Cane, my Tom Waits’ song, the new one (Left Alone) and Raining this Morning. Somehow I won.
I’m going to be practicing the songs instead of the flatpicking all week now.
-
The power and glory of YouTube
In case anyone has wondered what I’m trying to do on the guitar, this video of Doc and Merle Watson says it all.
Also, check out these videos of the Velvet Underground (with Nico) doing acoustic versions of Heroin and Femme Fatale in 1972.
-
Last night’s open mic
Not so good. I couldn’t hear my guitar in the monitors, and my playing was a bit off because of it. It was a noisy, but nice crowd. The previous act was having problems too. Evidently the problems were only noticeable to me. I did the usual material.
-
Friday rapid fire
- Reno 911 is popular in Iraq of all places. It seems they think it’s real.
- A nice collection of flatpicking tablature, all in Tabledit format.
- Hounddog Radio seems cool.
- View System Uptime.
- A nice article on using curves and levels in Photoshop.
-
Recording attempts
Last night I attempted to record four flatpick tunes, and eventually to create a Steve French, Musician site on MySpace. I was unable to get the recording levels right on three of them (I blame the Samson digital pre-amp) and I can’t seem to get the musician page set up right on MySpace.
In any case, one of them did turn out okay; the volume level is very low (just like me!) but it’s not terrible.
I played Cooley’s Reel, which is an old Irish fiddle tune in E-Minor. I do it a bit faster than it’s normally done, but I think it turned out okay. I originally heard this song done by Steve Kaufman, but the actual music I got from BluegrassGuitar.com. I do both lead and rhythm on the song.
You can download it here (right click and choose “Save As” (Command-Click on the Mac)).
Thoughts?
UPDATE: Eric remixed it for me, which helped the volume levels a lot. The file is updated.