Steve Shares Some Acoustic Fun...

and pain... Holy crap this hurt my hands figuring this one out. Weird changes (not really, a G I vi IV V pattern is pretty common in rock music) But my pinky on my left hand is pretty much limp anyway and having to hold that on for the verses was difficult. Yeah I messed up the bridge but I am done trying to record the best recording. It sounds best actually on my 12 string. Unfortunately my pick up is not working.

Anyhow... here is Shallow, originally recorded by Unwritten Law.

Everybody Get Dangerous

Shit this song is awesome...

Buy the album if you haven't yet... It's freaking cool!!

New Weezer Album

Holy Crap!! Where did this come from? I am a fan and I pretty much buy what comes out from them and sing their songs and shit.

I did that split second click on iTunes this morning to send my 12 bucks to Apple for the album which downloaded in 2 minutes.

What a collection of songs, I am speechless. Best album since their best (and possibly the best) album of all-time, Pinkerton.

What is cool about it is they broke the mold a little bit and switched instruments and Rivers isn't singing every song. Which is odd that such a pretentious little control freak he historically seems to be has let go. The album flat out rocks with cool 3 minute songs and a couple long ballads.

I have listened through it a few times but I keep getting hung up on the first song Troublemaker and it's lyrics, riffs, vocal style, backing vocals... the whole enchilada:



Cool shit... Buy it!!!

Grunge or what's left of it...

My music tastes are weird. One minute I can be listening to Buddy Holly... the next to Disturbed.

I woke up sometime early Saturday morning and I suddenly had a hybrid of Alice In Chains Down In A Hole and The Day I Tried To Live by Soundgarden running through my brain. I have no idea what that was about. I immediately grabbed my iPod to listen to both songs and shockingly, they were not on there. I had 4300 songs on my iPod and not those two songs. So I spent some time Saturday pulling all the old "grunge" cds and installed them on my computer.

All my Alice In Chains stuff... Old Pearl Jam... STP... Mother Love Bone... you name it, I was installing away. Up to 4500 songs now on the old iPod.

Man... and who forgot STP?? They had like 10 hits or something... They are back together on tour with a new album. I saw them in 1993 here in Sactown. We sat in the back of Arco Arena. I forgot how good STP was until I found this collection of videos on the net. These guys put on a rocking show. And that is what you want to see when you spend your hard earned jack on a concert.

I saw STP, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam...numerous times, Smashing Pumpkins... missed out on Nirvana and Soundgarden. Perhaps Soundgarden will reunite... who knows.

Ah... 1992-1993... out of high school, in college. Flannel shirts, holey jeans... long(er) hair... Blue suede Doc Marten's. I was the shiznit. I bought my first guitar in 1994. Bought my first electric soon afterwards... I think it was the summer of 1994. A white Peavey Strat copy. My first guitar was stolen along with my red Epiphone hollow body I had in 2002. My Fender Tube Amp... twin speakers...300 watts sits behind me. One of these afternoons I need to fire up and cut loose... I am a shit blues rock guy.

Kind of weird... all that shit was 15-16 years ago. Here I am still listening once in a while.

This Blog Helps At Least 15 People Everyday Install Their IKEA Faucet

Muse

Everyday, my IKEA faucet posts get hits. Multiple hits for it by the same people hours apart too. It's a fun hobby reading my statcounter to see who is coming in and where from. It's funny reading the weird searches and the people hoping to glimpse Jessica Biel naked or something off of one of my meaningless tags at the bottom of each post.

I did a lot today. Washed the car (like that takes effort). I repaired the stair on the backyard staircase that has been broken for the last year or two. I was in the Porsche and near Home Depot and I was like, "What's 3 bucks for piece of 2X6?" Getting it in the car was fun. I miss having a truck to haul shit around. But life goes on...

My big project today: Re-stringing the Takemine 12 String Jumbo acoustic guitar. What a bitch this always is. I wanted to start playing it again. I stopped playing it because of the the pain in my wrist and arm and stuff. It is hard to grab those strings and play. But, I have been living lately to live life through it. I just look funny limping and shit with my numb and tingly left side when I get out of a car.

The guitar was a bigger endeavor than I thought. I was sitting on the couch staring at the guitar hanging on the wall while watching Tiger's run in the Master's today. Nothing like HD TV and golf!! Holy crap! But I figured since I was sitting there I could at least start twirling the tuners until the 11 unbroken strings on my guitar came off. I hadn't touched the thing in a year or two.

Once I got the strings off I found my new packet of strings and started twirling the tuners one by one to get the new strings on. Then I got to the high G string and snap!!! Son of a bitch, I thought. The string is so feeble. I bought 11 gauge strings for my 12 string but that one string is a .008 string and it is so weak. My tuner on the guitar is not working at all but I am pretty good at tuning a guitar by ear. I must have went a little too high. I got pissed and set the guitar aside. I picked up my classical and started strumming out of frustration, playing some STP and some DMB, lol.

Elijah came down to watch the end of the golf tournament with me and after it was over, I decided to take Elijah to Mecca the Guitar Center so I can buy a 9 gauge string to replace my 8 gauge string I had broken. Elijah likes to point at my guitars and say Da da or papa and stuff. I decided to show him a room of like 300-400 guitars and see what he would do.

Typical Guitar Center... Lots of people that don't know shit about guitars and I am not necessarily talking about the workers. There is always one kid though at Guitar Center that annoys the living shit out of me. It's this stereotype... a 19-20 year old kid, usually not white but Hispanic or Asian (No Tina, not Arnold), with bleached tips in his hair and a lip piercing... black nail polish, hunkered behind a Marshall stack with a Blue Ibanez guitar shredding the same over played metal riff over and over. No one can hear in the store either with this fool playing. Anyway, Elijah's eyes seem to follow the kid as I did a lap around the room looking at guitars.

Once I got bored from staring at the $3500 Gibson acoustic, I headed to check out to buy my string. I also checked on a new tuner. They had this clip on one bought. It clips onto the headstock and it has no mic. It just picks up the vibrations on the guitar or bass or whatever string instrument you play. It worked right the first time too!! So I buy it because I needed it and the as the guy is checking me out he goes, "So do you want to buy the life time warranty for it?"

I start laughing. The guy wonders why I laugh. I pointed to the box where it says, "Lifetime warranty in the US and Canada included". He still wants me to purchase the little 15 dollar replacement thing... Whatever... NOT!

I got back home and installed my new string. The tuner was pretty cool and I got the 12 string already to go. Then I played "Learning to Fly", so now I truly can sound like Tom Petty. To test the tuner and my hearing, I clamped it to the classical guitar to check my ear. Nearly perfect tuning. I like this new thing though because it seems to be really accurate. Some of my guitars, like my Ovation, the B string sounds weird so I always flatten it a little. This is the tuner I bought... It's pretty cool, I think it is more accurate than the built in ones or the ones you plug into because it is basing itself on the vibrating wood of the guitar. It's pretty dope!

Steve Flies

44 minutes from recording to youtube... Should have done another take... Clipped the track a couple of times with a bad mic setting. And then the lyrics blew off the keyboard.

I was driving down the road listening to my iPod the other day going God that is easy. F C Aminor and G...

I need to practice more. I suck...

Anti-Guitar Hero...

Even with a bum left hand I still have time to blow all you guitar hero wannabe's away with my skillz... I even did it by ear foolz. Though I think it is a half step higher... Total time to record: 2 minutes 53 seconds... mixing and making everything sound right... a lot of time.

This song is off of Weezer's second album. One of the best albums they ever created. A must have. Not to sound egotistical but I am about as close to Rivers version on the album. That whole album was about rejection and hate. Was kind of cool back in college when it came out. Mine is scratched and won't load fully onto my Apple. Still plays though...

Bonus: I took the picture of the butterfly at Disneyland.

Guitar Hero Ruins Musicianship

As Stan's Mom points out clearly... "if they spend half the time learning a real instrument instead of learning the game who knows what they can accomplish."

I feel sorry for Stan's Dad when he shows the kids how to play a real guitar and he is called "gay" for it. Though... I am also showing my age. How can you say Guitar Hero is real? It's fake. It's a bunch of role playing, button pushing and quite frankly... It's stupid. You push a couple of buttons for points. What about the energy it takes to sit and learn say, "Lie In Our Graves" by Dave Matthews or "Ain't Talking About Love" by Van Halen? I know what it took for me to learn those songs. And quite frankly (again) it's something I can do at anytime and impress the shit out of my friends. But actually... I think it is more rewarding to know I can do that...instead pushing some buttons. It's different than other Xbox games

Now...something that really pisses me off. This new tid bit from Gibson. Automatic guitar tuners? What the hell is this coming too!! $900 to add this onto an already expensive Les Paul to keep it in tune... I don't know if I like this. This isn't what music is about. I mean... Eddie Van Halen must be shitting on himself because he has said in countless articles that to truly tune a guitar is impossible. All the strings are Perfect 4th apart in pitch which is the easiest interval for the human ear to pick up and learn. (Perfect 4th is the two note guitar part in verses of Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana) It's all perfect 4ths except for the interval between the G and B strings which is a Major 3rd. This "problem" causes the B string to be frequently out of tune in certain chords. Eddie flattens the pitch by ear when he tunes his guitars and stays away from playing the open B string with out fretting it some where. I do slightly the same thing because it makes the open C chord and F barre chord, major and minor sound better. It's more in tune.

The other thing I find difficult is how can this guitar pick on the change of air pressure and heat that cause your guitar to go out of tune in the first place. If you are rocking out with a electric guitar your guitar gets a little warmer because your hands are running up and down the fret board. Plus the ambient temperature changes, especially if you play on stage at the local bar. The more people that come it the warmer it gets and the farther flat your strings go because of the heat. That's why when a band like U2 plays, they have like 20 guitars on the side of the stage for Edge to pick from. If you watch there is always someone tuning a guitar back stage when a guitar guru like that is playing. The guitar tech is constantly battling this back stage. Does the guitar get in tune better when a bunch of sweaty frat boys come into a bar to see the local punk band?

Gibson should just leave well enough alone. They make a great product already that is unmatched in sound quality and tone. Why fuck it up with some electronic bullshit that will probably not work.

Also... I have officially banned myself from EVER playing Guitar Hero. It's stupid... lame and really does not make you a better person. It just gives you callouses and bad dexterity and improper posture. Learn a real instrument. It's more rewarding...