I shot a wedding today and went to check out Josh & Shannon’s new home! It’s is awesome you guys so happy for ya! :) Being that I have been busy all day you all get old photos. This is me playing with new radio poppers that I got back in October. Selfies seem like a great real world testing ground for photo stuff.
Tomorrow we are moving J&S into their new digs :)
This week has been all about the moving for this jerk. For those not in the know (which I know is most of you because it is summer and I am to busy to blog anymore) we are shrinking our space in a effort to not spend preposterous amounts of money. We are hoping that by January sometime we can be on the hunt to buy a home somewhere. If all goes according to plan we should be able to keep our water street office and have a separate home somewhere else that is completely devoid of all work related things and contains nothing but life type stuff! That is the plan and step one is to give up the second suite that we have here and suck it up and live in the single space again for a while!
So I have been moving us slowly back into the left side, and when I say ‘I’ I really mean Reka the Intern and Darren the Tiger because I managed to pull a reasonably important muscle in my back lifting the very first thing. So props to Reka for making 70,000 hand cart trips to the recycling room and Darren for hauling all my wife’s lead. (when I say lead I really mean lead! She has like 700 lbs of lead type for a printing press) you both rock!!
I have large boxes of Computer parts (most of it/them work even) for free/sale so if you wanna come rummage you are more then welcome to! Come quick though because goodwill is about to receive a multitude of computer craziness!
In other news saw the Weakerthans and Iron & Wine last Friday! Wicked show for them both! I bootlegged it with the Zoom but I haven’t gotten around to listening to it.
Tonight is jam #2 for My Friend Lisa at the new jam space. The Tiger & I have been making noise on a fairly regular basis but this is the second time that the band we be together here. I am going to attempt an off the floor recording of a line in mix of the evenings adventures so we will see how that all goes. The Lrbaggs will rock out for the first time in a loud capacity as well!
We spent the Sunday/Monday on Galiano Island for a wedding last weekend as well. What a genius place to hang in the wilderness. If I ever get rich/eccentric and feel the need to record a solo album with nothing but my mac book in a cabin in some secluded location I am going to do it on Galiano island! Man I Love that place!
I need to collect a case of free Rock Star now so ya!
Yuppers it is. I am super tired being that i got up at 5ish so you get no explanation other then I was bored and multi-tracked this with Johnathan Livingston the Seagull, Bobby da’ Bad-ass Bass, & Chester the Gretsch. Super excited for jam tomorrow! Aaron will be rocking out with us!
While I had a super sneaky weekend hobnobbing with movie stars, but I am waiting to hear from the powers that be if i can blog about it. So you instead get more photos of random kitchen music gear. My Friend Lisa should have a fully functional website soon which will mean this sorta thing can happen there and not every fraking day here :)
Here we have the guitar triptych! Chester the Gretsch, The Yamaha Electric, followed by Johnathan Livingston the seagull.
I looked down and saw a rats nest of stands and cables.
Guitar cases to firefaces!
The drums in their complete form!
The main ass recording unit! !
I figure with D buying a place with jamspace, the random kitchen jamspace we have now will come to a close so I must take as many photos as possible while its all here!!
The Weekend started early on Friday with the arrival of our friend John Edgar from Toronto. For those not in the know about Edgar read this and check out his blog. Having never been to Vancouver before we drove him about to give him the nickel car tour. We hit up Booster Juice on the North Shore, toured Gastown and came home to finish up some of the pressing work we needed to get done before the weekend. We hit NetChick’s Friday night rock band party for a while but for the most part we played it fairly low key. I have been nearly getting this sick that people are dishing around to each other like a hot potato, so a reasonably relaxed evening hanging out in the jam space was precisely what I was looking for.
On Saturday morning we hooked up with the Tiger and hit up Locus restaurant for breakfast. For those not in the know about Locus it is the sweetest little restaurant on Main Street. They have a wicked breakfast and hardly ever a crazy line up at 9:30am. Edgar hit on the waitress and twitter was aglow with all sorts of thinly veiled references to Darren’s penis. Sounds like a perfect morning right!! Well the only way that it could get even more perfect was if we went and spent an hour at Tom Lee poking at music stuff, and not wanting to mess with perfection that was exactly what we did. We spent over an hour wandering about the different sections of the place. Darren was there to look at some new drumheads and such, while I wanted a new guitar strap.
We inadvertently made fun of/joked with a staff member, while Darren checked out microphones and studio monitors. All in all it was a really good time!
We dropped the tiger off and took John on a small tour of the Deep Cove area. While tooling about on random roads it became apparent the John had never really been 4x4ing so we messaged Josh to meet us under the bridge for redneck style mud’n shenanigans. We cruised around in the ocean for a while and I am sure we basically blew John’s mind. Having to deliver my wife to the opera at a particular time we didn’t really get into anything too serious but we did manage to set a new milestone for deepest water forded, which incidentally is well over waist deep, and I am also happy to report that the doors don’t seem to leak even when submerged. :)
photos by Me Edgar and Josh
While Miranda was at the opera I thought I would try some new strings on my guitar. On the advice of a guy at Long & McQuade I am currently giving a set of Martin light 80/20 Bronze a whirl and I am sort of not really all that impressed, I will play em a bit but I am reasonably sure that I will be changing them back to the D’Addario lights that I normally use before our recording session on Thursday.
Speaking about recording sessions Darren came over with his Macbook and the fireface to set it all up for Thursday. We hooked it all up just in time to test it out when Shan and Josh popped over! :) I would toss up our mp3 from the testing we did before we went to the frog, but I have absolutely zero clue how to work Cubase and I haven’t had time to sit down and take a look at it all. I am sure that it is uber rough sounding as I was half drunk on this cheap American beer
I will dig into it all that later tonight I think, but it looks like with the exception of a couple of cables we should be all set for the first serious My Friend Lisa recording session. We all next hit the Frog for some food
When Josh and Shan arrived they came with tales of preposterously large cardboard boxes in our lobby, we thought that we should do something with them. It was suggested that we take some sort of My Friend Lisa photos in said boxes. In fact josh even had a proof of concept photo from his iPhone. So we simply grabbed the better-looking box on our way up the elevator. It was quite the adventure as the box was the exact size of our elevator door so I went in first to operate the elevator while every one else was in the box in the elevator. We did this all trying to be sneaky but we failed to notice when we hopped in the elevator that it was going down so when the elevator doors open in the basement to allow one of my neighbors on they were affronted with a cardboard box filled with people and nothing more. My neighbor mentioned something to the effect that this was precisely what she was thinking of doing and happily hopped on in the dark cardboard box with everyone else.
We went through such care to take the box in one piece up the elevator and up to my door but what none of us thought about was the fact that my front door is nowhere near the size of an elevator, so we had to dismantle the box in the hallway to get it into the studio anyway :) having reassembled the box we got down to the task at hand.
Thanks to Edgar and Josh for shooting photos that I was in :)
I thought it was truly awesome that with two small exceptions I was able to produce everyone’s ridiculous demands when it came to things to place in the box.
Sunday was a day of Dim Sum and mini road trips to show off the see to sky highway to the guy from Toronto. We all met up at Sun Sui Wah for Dim Sum greatness which despite my irrational hatred of seafood was a delicious time. I am still dreaming about the Mango pancake thingy. Our server who’s name was Ronald wanted to know if any of us worked for / or knew some one that worked for a courier company like UPS or FedEx. None of us did so we asked him why? He replied that he was looking to get a job with a company like that because he was really trying to move up and out of the restaurant industry. I have to give him an A+ for initiative because he was, as Kimli put it, a walking resume. He is a fantastic driver (stick even) as well as being extremely hardworking he has stated that he is very trustworthy.
Look at him as if he isn’t trustworthy really? If I were in need of an employee I would hire him in a heartbeat simply based on his initiative. We all have his phone number and such so lets try and get this guy a courier job shall we.
Next we were off to Squamish for the heck of it. Shan Kimli and Josh piled into the delica and M, John & I fired into the Xterra. And off we went!
We made it home in time to quickly prepare for the little photographer party we were having. It was a blast and we want to thank everyone for braving the quarter inch of snow that fell and coming out. The Box made its second appearance in two days as a photo booth
All in all it was a crazy jam packed weekend!!
So I haven’t had a lot of face time outside of work on my computers this last week so blogging and the like seems to be what takes the hit. One of the main things that has been taking away a lot of my time away from work is My Friend Lisa! I suppose that it is a good thing that I have been cultivating a hobby that doesn’t involve me sitting in front of a computer for a billion hours and/or taking photos of stuff. Mostly because what I do all day at work is sit in front of my computer for billions of hours and/or take photos of stuff, which makes My Friend Lisa a nice change. We set up a nice little jam space in the disused dining room area. It is not disused because we don’t cook but instead because we haven’t gotten a table for the dining area.
Last week was the inaugural jam in this space with Darren rocking out on his new drums and Aaron on bass. We sounded really and truly awful but awful with promise :) Tonight we are headed to Rockspace to really make a bit of noise and the like. In the upcoming couple weeks our goal is to get the website up and running. It is all ready to go on the back end, we just need some important things like… oh i don’t know…. content, which between us all is slowly coming along. We also need to finish the looks part of the site design meaning what we want the website and our stuff to really look like. I was out taking photos this morning to be used for the graphic design part of things, mostly because the idea of using other peoples photos (even if they are creative commons or purchased stock) is sorta making me feel icky :) The other super big thing is to record some really good cuts of our tunes and get them up on our site as well as all the various music websites (Ie: Myspace/LastFM/etc.) We are going to pool together all our equipment and hopefully do this all ourselves, which is turning out to be a really big task but we like challenges :) Between the ZoomH4, Darren’s Fire wire interface, and the smattering of mics we already possess we figure that with a couple of mic rentals/purchases we should be able to do a decent job. The question is do we four track it up, meaning each of us record our individual parts one at a time, which wouldn’t really require a lot of equipment other than what we already have, but would loose some of that played together sound. Or do we instead try and record all of us into our own tracks but while we are all playing at the same time using a combo of firewire inputs and mixers. Which would save that played together sound and would be the ideal recording situation but would require a heck of a lot more equipment then we have going on right now :) We sorta thought that this recording part was going to be easy, but as we are finding it is far more complicated than we originally thought. I guess that is why people do this for a living eh :)
So yesterday was the first revisit of ‘the band’. Yup ‘the band’! You haven’t heard me talk about ‘the band’ in while, mostly because we have all been busy and there was little happening on that front. Well not anymore! We are no longer ‘the band’, we have a name and we are even soon to have a website and everything. (soon being a relative term meaning as soon as I get off my ass and do something productive with that, what I should say is we have a url) Yuppers I would like to introduce you to ‘My Friend Lisa‘
So we got together last night at this jerks studio and sat around my office hashing though the 4.5 songs we have. That doesn’t sound like a lot but it was really hard seeing that we haven’t jammed together since November and most of this stuff hasn’t been touched since then.
You would have some thing to hear possibly if my new H4 had arrived before then. But it did arrive today and i recorded a little snippit to see how well it worked and man alive it is awesome!!
Take a listen that is just in the middle of our living room with the trains rattling on out side and such. AWESOME!!!
Now I’m off to a business function in shorts, tshirt, and weakerthans hoodie. Woot!
A: booked them a wonderful soothing afternoon at the cities top finger spa compete with cucumber/lettuce wraps, Papaya Pineapple Lotion bath, or whatever fruit and/or vegetable they may like to be soaked/wrapped/massaged in for the afternoon.
B: sent them on a nice Caribbean cruse that is filled with other young, physically attractive single available fingers with delightfully varying interests and abnormally healthy sex drives.
C: bought a new guitar and beat them un-mercifully with it until I am quite sure the rebellion they were raising against me has been sufficiently extinguished.
Yup this is a post to brag about my new guitar and not about my fingers at all! Because there aren’t enough companies with the name ‘Seagull‘ in my life I thought it best to try out another one. Yup I went down to Tom Lee today on an errand to maybe look at guitar stands or something to make my other wise wasted trip around town in a car worth something. You see I went to mail stuff as well as grab some printer ink only to discover that I couldn’t mail anything and they didn’t have any of the appropriate inks in stock. Normally this would have been an easy 15min jaunt about town and I would be home again happily using the internets to avoid work. Except today I decided that I would drive the car as apposed to taking the more urban friendly scooter on account that the sky was falling in the form of water and someone’s (of reasonable geographic relevance) face book status said something nasty about snow. Yup in order to make the largely unsuccessful outing somewhat meaningful I thought it best to hit the aforementioned Tom Lee. I have been in this place like five or six time maybe and I never really noticed the incredibly large acoustic guitar section to the left of the guitar shop entrance! Seriously I always wandered around in circles looking at stuff but I never really realized that there weren’t any Acoustic guitars on display where I was. Today I even had to ask where they may be!
Me: Hey where do you guys keep your acoustic guitars?
Tom Lee Sales Guy: indignant point to the east
Me: Ohhhh over there in the brightly lit acoustic guitar section!
Tom Lee Sales Guy: slight head shake of disgust as he walks away to deal with all the customers of the non-lobotomized variety.
I Seriously miss the blatantly obvious! An example… I go to the La Luna coffee shop on water street a few times a week to get coffee and some tasty lunch for M and me. I some times go for coffee just as an excuse to get out of the house for 5 or 10 min. While I am waiting for my food I sit at this table near a wall filled with a photo display that originally sat in the now defunct Storyeum that was across the street. The photo display is an awesome collection of works by Rex Weyler who was a photographer during the early days of Greenpeace. I have looked around the net for the this particular photo so I could show you what I mean but all my searching was unfortunately in vain, so you get a vague description instead. (or you can buy his book) The photo in question was taken during an anti-nuclear protest at Rocky Flats, Colorado. Now the photo seemed odd to me from the start and I couldn’t quite place why. You see the photo is of a really old woman standing very piously above a crowd of young protesters; she was knee deep in a tight group of people but stood straight up and above the crowd. This didn’t make any sense to me! I could see that she was most definitely not standing on a ladder; I couldn’t see any reasons for her to be standing four feet above everyone else. I ended up over the course of two or three months making all these crazy assumptions about what was really going on in the photo! I decided a first that she must be on stilts or something but then I decided that she was pretty old and I don’t know a whole heck of a lot of old people that go to war protests on stilts, so I then started to speculate that the woman was really a man dressed as an old staunch woman completely for the shock value. The figure was reasonably androgynous and the neck was covered with a scarf so couldn’t check for an adams apple, except her hands were really that of and old person, so that didn’t really fit either! I keep looking at it all the while applying my experiences in photographing protests and other such events. I was getting more and more complicated answers that all seemed more and more foolish only to one day to see that all the other protesters that were four feet below then the old woman were all simply sitting down! I am always totally missed the blatantly obvious but can tell you intricate detail about small insignificant things! I am not sure if this makes me a better photographer or not but I can tell you it makes me a very poor consumer!
I had been reading about some Yamaha guitars online as well as Larrivee, Takamine, and Seagulls. I have been reading about them for awhile but never anything more then read. I went in to the cleverly hidden acoustic section and looked at pretty much everything except the Seagull Guitars, not because I was boycotting them or anything I just didn’t pick one up. I played everything and was not really impressed with the sound of anything. I finally asked the previously mentioned Tom Lee sales guy a question that he needed to go in search of an answer (not due to his incompetence he was actually very helpful and knowledgeable once he realized that I wasn’t a complete idiot! I just asked a hard question) He suggested that I try out one of the Seagull Guitars while he was gone! So I picked up a very pretty Seagull S6 Cedar Slim, Sat on the nearby stool, pulled out a pick and fired into it! I was completely blown away! I am not so pretentious of an artist to start drooling out drivel about how an instrument chooses its owner or other similar such junk but I was basically sold right there and then that this was the guitar for me! I tried it out with an amp (it’s an acoustic/electric) and was still as impressed with the action and sound so I bought it! I played it all afternoon and still love it. I still haven’t come up with a good solution to Sundays musical puzzle but I am having a blast trying!
So these guitars need names! Discuss!!!!
