| What I Play, What I Play It With | ||
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My Music Three kinds of music made my music. First the American folk music revival of the 50's and 60's which meant playing the strange and wonderful music that was once too ubiquitous to be recorded. This is the music Bob Dylan heard and it taught him how to be a songwriter, and that changed the way we think about a song. A few years later some of the folks that heard the same thing plugged in electric instruments and started trying to make sense of a very frightened and hopeful time by playing adventurous music. At the time it was expected that the players would try to play to the utmost of their abilities so to transcend from fear to hope, that by doing so it would midwife a new reality. You no doubt heard it was about drugs, but that was just the cover story. It was an experiment in mass belief that limed all the boundaries of belief. And when they felt the belief start to contract, they tried one last time to make it happen. The last troops were thrown onto the field of battle: the artists, the poets, the bohemians--the irregulars--and they were to fight a guerilla action to keep the hope of a new reality alive. The flag was D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself), a music scene that would will itself to exist on the edges of commerce. You were told this was about being stupid and some new fashion trends and it got called "punk". I started in this as a poet who picked up a guitar because there were things I wanted to say that I couldn't find words for. So how can I say all this when someone asks what I play. I say well I'm really a folkie at heart. Or I say I play a lot of different stuff. When I was in a band we called it Punk-Folk, but one gig poster got misprinted as Punk-Funk. Well I play that too.
My Tools I play a variety of cheap guitars. In fact I'm quite besotted with the sounds that different guitars make. Acoustically I play my beat up "Halfway to Willie Nelson" Seagull S6 Folk the most, but I also play a Martin 00-15 and my old small bodied Maya guitar. I'll also pickup a 12 string from time to time. As far as electric guitars go, I'm from the "Leo Fender got it right the first time" school of thinking and so I'm likely to reach for a Telecaster. When I'm not playing a Telecaster, I play the field. Over the years I've shopped around and picked up a number of inexpensive electric guitars: copies of more expensive instruments or interesting and uncollectible dead ends that are off the beaten guitar path. To see some of the guitars I play, click this link. My experiments with the Line6 POD have caused me to think broadly about guitar amplifiers. No matter which guitar I play or how many effects are in the chain, I lean most often toward a foundation of the Fender combo amp. Currently the amp I play the most is a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe, a 1x12 open backed combo that for my uses is a great versatile amp. But I still have my old black faced Princeton, a Blues Deluxe 4x10, and a Music Man 1x12 combo all touching on other parts of the Fender sound. I have a small Marshall and Boogie combo for when I want to visit other sounds. And though I still use my Pod from time time, my favorite current "modeling" setup is the Vox AD30VT, a little closed back 1x10 combo that can get a bit of the Class A Vox overtones going. I currently record into a Digidesign ProTools Digi001 installed into a Equus mintower with an old but trusty ASUS P2B motherboard holding a Pentium III 1 gigahertz CPU. Even though I record with ProTools, I still tend to edit with Adobe Audition, (the successor to Cool Edit Pro), just because I can hack my way around in it OK. My mixing board is a Yamaha 12/4, to my mind a very straightforward and cost effective piece. Microphones are predominantly the Platonic blue-collar mic: the Shure SM57s. My recordings prior to this set up were done onto a Tascam 424 MKII 4 track cassette deck.
What Does It Sound Like Since the host for this web site is limited to what it can handle in terms of streaming audio and storage space, you'll have to go to other sites to hear stuff I've recorded and played on. For my solo work or for my work outside the LYL Band, the best single site is my Soundclick page. For music made with The LYL Band, see the band's Soundclick page.
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