When do the guitars come in?

So the name of the blog implies that I will occasionally speak of guitars as another reason I am broke. Well, probably not today either, but this will be a music-centric post.

So, as it stands, I am in a hotel room in San Juan, Puerto Rico as I write this. The band has a show here tomorrow, and we were doing a media promo tour today, starting with a TV appearance at 9am, and then a series of radio appearances. I was only required for the TV show, so came back to the hotel. I have seen everything on ebay I could possibly  be interested in, and it's only 5:30, so too early for bed. Thought I'd check in on my lonely little blog. It's been a while, huh?

So, I have a recording studio. It was my main job for a while, but the industry was changing at the time I started with the band, and going on the road was steadier work. Then when my daughter was born, something blew up in my mixing console. Long story short, It has been neglected for 7 or so years. Oh, I stick my head in every few months. My partner is also my doctor, so whenever one of us has an appointment to see the good doctor, I usually hang out in the control room instead of the waiting room. But, functionally, it's been a non-issue for years.

Well, the band wants to make a new live CD to sell at shows, one that features the guys who are actually in the band now. It's been 15 years since the first one came out, and only one member in the band is on that album, so the time is right. It is planned that the song selection will be largely different, so people who have the first one won't feel cheated if they buy this one.

Anyway, with my studio in limbo, something had to be done. The band was asked to do a version of "All You Need is Love" for an ad campaign for the Ecuador Tourism folks, and so it was decided to throw money at fixing my Harrison console. Something is wonky in the audio routing, and what ever it is, caused the power supply to have major issues. I found a tech who agreed to make a housecall (a wall needs to come down to move the Harrison!), and he decided fixing the power supply was the best way to start.

While the tech was working, Mark and I went to a different studio to do the Ecuador track. It's a Pro Tools room that does everything "in the box", without a mixing console. I thought I used to be pretty fast at editing the squiggly waveform lines, but Nathan, the engineer, was FLYING through things. It was a sight to behold. Mark and I knocked out our cover of "All You Need is Love" in three days. We are still waiting to see if they use it for the campaign. There seems to be an issue with the Lennon guy in the best Beatles band in the business sounding "too much like John!"

Meanwhile, I was having an epiphany. It was the first time in YEARS I was having fun in a recording studio. I was just there to toss ideas around, and play bass (My fretless 5-string! haven't had it out of the case since 2000!), and try and keep everyone focussed on getting done before we had to go back on the road. All the stress of making it all work, and keeping the client happy was on Nathan's shoulders. It was kinda glorious.

I started looking around at how their place was set up. Very similar vibe to what I was doing in my place, but instead of a large format console with scads of history (my Harrison was originally owned by Warner Brothers' Amigo studio in Hollywood in the 70s and 80s), they had an old Mac Pro with some high dollar boutique mic pre's. My rusty gears started turning. How should I get my studio going again? Same as before? Time to bite the bullet and decide between that Otari MTR90 or the computer upgrades? And what was going on with the tech and my power suppy, anyway?

The tech was doing great work, but it was taking a while. Apparently, he is a stickler for doing it right, and unfortunately, the power supply was built in 1977, using many parts that went obsolete years ago. He tracked them all down, and even ordered extras of some, so we'll have them. Sooo....

Four months and $1800 later, the board is behaving the same way. I began trying to figure out what the trouble is, and found a resistor on the phantom power circuit that was so burned up, it crumbled when I touched it. I replaced it, and for 15 glorious minutes, my Harrison was back! Then it went wonky again. I turned it off and started doing some soul searching. How much money do I really want to throw at this?

Ultimately, I decided, not much. I haven't even used it in 7 years. We have right of first refusal on our lease for 15 years...oops, that's nearly up. What if they don't want us to stay? A doctor's office is a good, stable, steady tenant, but who can predict these things? All I know for sure, is that this console will emphatically NOT fit in my house. I have done a few projects for the band entirely in my laptop in the recent past, and while I hate not having faders when I mix, it IS possible. Time to radically re-think how our studio does things!

Having FINALLY made a decision about the console (something I have been hemming and hawing about since I got married and we started thinking about how to buy my house from my Dad), I got to work. First things first. Analog or digital? Much as I have wanted an MTR-90 since first using one in 1986, the reality is, I cannot afford tape. $450 for every 6 songs is just not going to work for me anymore. When I was just in a band, and we wanted to make a record, 2 or 3 reels for an album was hard, but possible. But now, I am used to having a studio at my disposal 24/7. I have long since stopped thinking in terms of budget for my recording endeavors. Digital it is.

Besides, let's face it. I am pushing 50. My days as a rock star have passed me by. Unless I want to spend endless hours working on music I don't like for money, this thing is back to being a hobby. And I am fully OK with that. I only wanted to be a rock star so I could afford to build a studio of my own. Somehow, I did it without the wealth or stardom. I get to live that life anyway, albeit behind the scenes, since my day job is touring with a successful show. Sure, it's a tribute band. But it's the tribute band with an attendance record at Red Rocks, and 13 shows at Carnegie Hall under it's belt.

So I am selling the Harrison. I love it and will miss it terribly, but I have already purchased the UAD plug-in that models the Harrison 32 series EQ. Bruce Sweidien endorses it, and the guy that owned my console between Warners and me says it's "very, very close." We'll see about that. It's time to pass it on to some young pup with fire in his belly, and who is on a quest for the perfect marriage of vintage warmth and current technology. I kinda don't care anymore, sad to say.

So, since I am no longer chasing that elusive "big label sound", I decided to buy a Yamaha LS9-32 to be the central element in the new, streamlined studio. Is it the best sounding console of all time? Certainly not. But it's not the worst either, and since I use the 16 channel version every night on the road, I know my way around it pretty well. Besides, I can use SSL and Harrison recreations in the computer for fidelity, the LS9 is little more than a fader bank at this point. I rarely do "live in the studio" sessions. Most things I do, require one or two mics for overdubs. I have some nifty tube-based gear for that stuff.

My darling wife, who really has no experience with this sort of thing, agreed to let my use our (hers, really) credit card to float this transition. She has never put anything more expensive than a day at Disney World on this card. I slammed $6k on it in a matter of minutes, causing her to become nauseous. To her credit, she never really freaked out at me, but I suspect she was internalizing a LOT that week....

Now I was on the hook to not only do all the work building a studio entails, but I had to pay off a sizable balance on the credit card before I woke up short of breath with a pillow on my face. What to do, what to do. Selling a large format console is not a simple endeavor, so that's not where it's gonna come from. It was time to check with my eBay buddy who sold a bunch of my camera gear last year. He came over to my studio, and we started "going shopping" in reverse. What could I sell with out defeating my purpose?

Sometime during my studio-for-a-living days, I accidently started to become a collector of vintage keyboards. It was silly, really, as I am not much of a keyboard player. I just realized one day that I had collected a veritable showroom of desirable keyboard instruments. A Hammond RT-3, a Rhodes, a Wurlitzer 200a, a Minimoog, a Hohner Clavinet. A Mellotron, for heaven's sake! But, you know, Beatle band and all that. Might need to record a version of "Strawberry Fields" someday! Plus it apparently used to belong to Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO. And why not? How many Mellotrons do you think we had in Akron, OH over the years? There ain't that many of them!

That was just some of the stuff. The stuff I knew about. When we got in the storage room, I found things I have only the vaguest recollection of buying. A Kawai SX-210 that didn't even power up. A Roland Jupiter-4, that was broken when I got it, and was just as broken 17 years later, because I haven't even LOOKED at it since we moved the studio in 2002.

You know what did best on eBay? The broken shit! Desirable, vintage compressors that adorn the racks of every major studio since 1973? $800. Totally broken synthesizer, ignored for 25 years, needs parts made from ionized unobtainium? $2000. Not that I am complaining, mind you. I thank those people from the bottom of my heart. Not only did I pay off the wife's credit card shockingly fast, but I also made enough to buy a new computer, the new interface and processing cards that were needed because said new computer rendered the ones I have obsolete. Oh, and all those wonderful vintage keyboards I used to have, that I just sold for thousands of dollars? Every last one has been replaced by a single piece of software for 300 bucks. Sure, the nuance of the real thing is probably not in the samples, but I am nowhere near the level of keyboard player I would need to be to notice. The only downside is, I haven't done anything with MIDI except make a click track since 1994, and everything I knew then related to how to hook up to a Motorola 68000 based Mac. The times they are a-changin', indeed.

So here I sit in my Puerto Rican hotel, trying to decide how to build a new patchbay for the studio, and trying to learn new areas of Digital Performer that have apparently always been there, I just never needed them before. It's rather daunting, and I no longer have the luxury of staying up all night tweaking things at the studio. I have to get up early and take my kid to school, or catch an early flight to the next show. And help the band get the new CD together, working at another studio. I haven't slept this little since my daughter was born!

But you know what? I'm kinda digging it. I forgot how much fun building a studio can be.

Printing Money(pit)

Last Thursday night, when I should have been in bed, I finally did something I haven't done for at least 12 years, and COULDN'T do for at least 8. I printed a photograph in my darkroom.

I have had a darkroom in my house since I was a senior in high school. My friend George gave me his Federal enlarger, a custom made timer box he and his dad built (way cool: it turned off the safe light while the enlarger was on, as a precaution against fogging, I guess), and as an added and still treasured bonus, a Yashica 635 TLR, complete with the 35mm adapter kit. That Federal saw me through a few years, and covered up to 120 film. Basic, but it worked well.

When I got into college, I was exposed to large format via the school's 4x5 view cameras. That was so much fun, I ended up buying my Cambo 4x5 view camera. That brought on the need for a bigger enlarger, so I found a used Omega D3, and installed it in my darkroom.

I soon discovered that having my own darkroom was a double edged sword. My professor started grading me to tougher standards than my classmates, because I had unlimited access to a darkroom. Never mind that my schedule as a musician kept me busy enough that I often missed the open lab time at school, so having my own was more necessity than luxury. It's not like I was learning more from him by doing it all myself. Throw in the fact that I liked more contrast than he did, and we have the makings of a classic adversarial relationship. After three semesters of classes with the same guy, I was disillusioned with photography. I gave it one last try by switching from the fine art program to the commercial art program, where I had the best photography class I've ever taken.

The professor was very knowledgeable, and had an easygoing teaching style. He assigned each student different films and papers to buy, and then we all traded with each other, so we got to try a range of products. We learned to use the studio flash system, and played with different processing chemistry. It was everything I ever wanted in a photography class.

The entire time in class, the prof would tell us how when he was in school at Kent State, he would mix his chemicals from scratch, or coat emulsion on different substances, or all kinds of awesome sounding stuff. By the end of that semester I learned the most important lesson of all: I had to transfer to Kent!

That's when I learned that at KSU, Photography is in the Journalism school, not Art. My English grades were not up to snuff for journalism, so I had to bring up my grades before I could get into photography. Well, that didn't work out like I had hoped. My casual attitude, coupled with an incompetent professor, actually earned me an "F" in English Comp. When I asked him what happened, he actually said to me (and I remember it verbatim, because it pissed me off so badly, it ended my college career instantly), "You didn't do what the class required. You wrote your own original essays, instead of quoting from the reading material. The sad thing is, you are the only one in the class that has even a spark of talent for writing, and yet, you got an "F". That's what is wrong with the modern university system."

Here it is 20-some years later, and all I can say is, "Fuck you, Professor."

So, time passes. In the late 90s, I took some pictures of a very pretty singer friend of mine for use on the cover of her demo record that we were working on in my recording studio. I printed some up for her, and we decided my limited talents behind the lens didn't do her justice, so she hired a pro. Alas, nothing ever happened with that demo record, and unless you live in Cleveland, chances are you wouldn't know who she is. Great singer, though!

That was the last time I printed photos in my darkroom. I had only added a darkroom sink and running water a few months before that, and very soon afterward, I was on the road with the Beatle band, and never had time to even mix chemicals, let alone print.

Then my daughter was born. I took time off from the band for that, and it morphed into a year of stay-at-home work for the band, then a year long lay-off, before my substitute remembered he hated the job, and I got called back. During my time off, I re-discovered photography in general, and film in particular. I started processing film again, and of course, the madness of camera purchasing that has inspired these rambling missives, but printing was still a far off dream.

Boxes containing cameras arrived with alacrity, and soon enough I had so much crap piled up in my darkroom, I was lucky to have a clear enough path to the sink for film developing. The enlarger was just sitting there taunting me, buried under lenses with stuck apertures, and a growing collection of cameras that use 126 film. I bought a couple packs of paper from Freestyle, thinking it would nudge me forward, but alas, all I managed was film, then a pass through the scanner, then upload to Flickr. Wet printing was still a dream.

Recently, though, things fell together in my favor. My daughter is old enough now to not need CONSTANT oversight. The band had a couple weekends off, resulting in extended periods at home, so I could apply myself to the task of cleaning and organizing the darkroom. A sizable pile of cameras was handed off to a friend who freelances doing eBay auctions for a cut of the proceeds; one day while our kids were having a play date, he offered to turn some of my extra cameras into money. I took him up on it, and that got me some floor space, and inspiration.

A week of dedicated effort finally paid off. I had all the 126 shooters in a box, where they shall remain until I can devote myself to the problem of re-loading the cartridges. The table with the enlarger was cleared (perhaps the only open, flat surface in the house, although I have been gone for a couple days, so...). Developing trays were washed and ready.

A couple years ago, the band had a gig in New Hampshire. On the drive home, I found a guy on Craigslist that was giving away (!) the last of his darkroom chemicals to whomever showed up wanting them. Much to my stage manager's chagrin, I insisted that we stop by. He lived a mere four blocks from the interstate, after all. From him I got 10 bags of D76, 10 bags of Microdol-X, 4 bags of Dektol, and 6 bags of D11. All old, but powder, after all, and more importantly, free!

So Thursday evening, while waiting for a friend to arrive from California, I set about mixing up the chemicals needed. Alas, the four bags of Dektol from the guy in Boston were all VERY past the due date. The powder was a pronounced brown color, and the addition of water made it even worse. Luckily, I had a more recent bag from the local shop, and that mixed up just fine.

While I waited for the Dektol to cool, I straightened up a bit more, put my daughter to bed, kissed the wife goodnight, and sat down to wait for my buddy to arrive, paging through the last few years of negatives to see which would get the honor of re-opening my darkroom.

He showed up at midnight, as flights from LA tend to do around here, and after getting him a beer, we went into the dark. He was charmingly impressed with the process. He had dabbled in photography in high school, but never in a darkroom. It was like magic to him.

The first thing I did was make a contact sheet of a roll from my Koni-Omega. When I had scanned that roll with my $5 Goodwill scanner, it left a bit to be desired. The contact sheet looked MUCH better. As it showed up on the paper in the Dektol tray, my buddy's eyes bugged out, and he said, "Whoa! Photography!" like he never knew how it actually worked. Kinda fun, actually.

But, this being the first sheet into the bath in 12 years, I HAD to screw SOME thing up. I noticed I had laid the page of negatives down on the paper upside down. Looked good, but reversed.

The second sheet came out great, and I was thrilled with achieving my longtime goal of getting back in the darkroom. Just in time for the band to get busy again!

Being WAY past my bedtime, and with a 9am departure looming, I had to wind things up. But before I did, I wanted to make one print that actually used the enlarger to pass light through a negative. I wanted it to be 35mm, because I just got a good deal on a Nikkor 50 enlarging lens that I wanted to try.

The negative I chose was one that my wife (who has an innate talent behind the lens that dwarfs mine) made of her father at a restaurant on his last visit up north. Now, just before she took this shot, I had snapped a couple of her and my daughter. The window was behind me, light looked good, should be fine, right? Two perfectly exposed snapshots. Story of my life. I handed the camera across the table to my wife. Camera is still on Program mode, so nothing changes. She shoots into the setting sun, and grabs two magnificent shots: one of me, one of her Dad. She makes me nuts....

Anyway, the winning negative was the shot she took of her Dad. The first print revealed a dust speck on his eyebrow, so I did a second pass after blowing off the negative again. There are a couple smaller dust issues, but it printed fine with a 25 second exposure and no contrast filters added.

200 dpi scan of the 8x10 print. Scanned with my $5 HP 4890 from Goodwill.

I can't wait to have time to do more work in the darkroom. After all this time, it might be fun again.

Oops, I did it again!

SonofaBITCH! (One word, accent on the last syllable. Thank you, Peter O'Toole.)

So, it appears that Kodak is on the verge of going tits-up. For real, this time. Bankruptcy looming, and all that. I can't really say it's a surprise. The end of Kodachrome was a strong indicator that the beast was looking for a quiet porch to crawl under to die in peace. I mean, 75 years on the market, and it was STILL not only unsurpassed, but mostly un-equalled in quality. I really loved shooting those last 18 rolls of outdated Kodachrome I got on eBay.

I nearly missed my daughter's third birthday party because I was stupid enough to leave the house without checking the battery in the camera I was using, and spent too much time running around trying to find one. My wife was NOT amused. But the whole point of the last 18 rolls was to capture important family events while I still could. The E6 slides I shot in college are falling apart, but the Kodachrome slides my parents took when I was a kid are in a carousel tray right next to me as I type, and they still look better than any of my new E6 slides, and they are square, so they came out of a cheap instamatic. The first camera I remember my folks having was a 110 Kodak with the tele switch....

My daughter is already hip to my film fetish, and is showing interest even now, at age 4. Christmas morning, she insisted she be allowed to pull the Fuji film out of my Polaroid Colorpack II. She tried mightily, but isn't strong enough yet to get it. Maybe on one of the cameras with actual rollers, sweetie!

I want her to be able to pull out these trays of slides for her kids, in another 40 years, and tell 'em about their wacky Grandpa and his damn fool idealistic crusade to preserve family memories on film. It'll be just my luck that all these slides will end up on Etsy as kitchen curtains.

So what have I done again? I chose the superior technology over the popular. I did it in 1984 when I bought my first Betamax. I had fallen into the VHS camp first, but when I saw how much better Beta was, I got the Betamax ASAP. You all know how that went.

Then came personal computers. Most of you think the battle was waged between Mac or PC. Not me, gang. I went with an Atari!

That's right, my first computer was an Atari Mega 2. It had the GUI, proccessor and ease of use of the Mac, but the hardware was all taken from the PC camp- external drives, printers-you name it, and you could hook it up to the Atari.

I remember the salesman flipped when I told him what I wanted. "A Mega 2??? Nobody will EVER need 2 megabytes of RAM!" Those were the days. And I am still looking for MIDI sequencing software that works as easily and intuitively as the Masterpiece Pro program we had.

There was that one time, when I wanted a surround system for my stereo. Warner Brothers (WEA) got behind the DVD-Audio format, and the Sony empire was pushing SACD. That's fine if you only want to listen to Alice Cooper OR Pink Floyd. But I wanted to listen to both, and when the Toy Matinee album was re-released on DVD-Audio, I couldn't wait anymore. No one was making a single machine that played both yet, so I bought two players (one for each format) and an entirely new receiver that had not only two sets of analog 5.1 inputs, but a phono input as well (try finding one like THAT nowadays!), and completely re-wired my living room. Unfortunately, the Toy Matinee was re-mixed by Pat Leonard after Kevin Gilbert was dead, so the keys are too prominent, and the guitar part in "Jenny Ledge" we were hoping would be isolated in a back speaker so we could figure it out, was instead not even in the new mix at all. For the record, the best surround disc I own is the SACD of Steve Miller's "Fly Like an Eagle" album. Excellent for laying on the floor with the lights off while watching a midwestern lightning storm through the big windows in my living room.

At that point, I swore I would NEVER get involved in a format war again. I stayed out of the Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD battle. I had learned that one of them would win (probably the lesser of the two), and I refused to get into it. In fact, I STILL don't have either one. Blu-Ray obviously won, but I don't care. The kids at Best Buy keep trying to sell me on one, but I don't care. As I told the pushiest of the salesforce, "I just don't want to. When I am watching porn, I don't want to see the stretchmarks on Tera Patrick's ass that clearly." His eyes bugged out, and he said, "Shit, I never thought of it in that context!"

The 3D TV phenomenon is brewing right now, and that might pull me into the new millenium, but not until the issue of incompatible glasses is sorted out. If I can't take my $100 goggles over to a friend's house to watch something on his competitor's TV, then it's not worth doing. I belong to a stereo photography club, and even the hard-core 3D gang in that club won't buy 3D TVs for the same reasons. One of my buddies has an LG TV that uses glasses that aren't electronically tied to the TV, so they are only $10 a pair, so having enough for a room full of people won't break the bank. I suspect that's the way they'll all go in the end. If they go at all.

So what does any of this have to do with Kodak's woes? Nothing, really, I guess. It's just that I spent the afternoon reading the interwebs about Kodak, and now I'm depressed. Just as I make a deep commitment to getting back into film, Kodak chokes on it. KODAK, fer crissakes! They bloody invented just about everything. Well, everything since they invented film, anyway. They even invented digital photography. I bet they're sorry they did THAT now. I feel like everything was going along great until I got back into it, like I'M the kiss of death.  My growing supply of film has taken over the entire top shelf in my freezer, and along with it, my proccessing options have dwindled. Like an equal power crossfade.

Now, I'm not a complete idiot. I knew before I started this binge that the industry was shrinking, but KODAK? Dang.

The weirdest thing is, I generally like Fuji better these days. Fuji's E6 films look more like Kodachrome than the Kodak E6 stuff I have tried. Their print films pop more than the Kodak film does. I mean, depending on what you're looking for, I guess. I always liked more contrast than my teachers back in school, so the contrast and vivid color could just be pandering to my tastes. I picked up a bunch of Arista Legacy B&W film in bulk (re-branded Neopan, by most accounts), and I really like it, especially the 100 (Acros). I have some of the Arista Premium as well. I loaded that stuff up as well, and it's definitely Tri-X, just like I used all the time before music took me away from my camera. I love the edge marking that gives it away (K'ODAK, hee!) too. Now that the Neopan 400 has been discontinued, I bought 5 rolls on eBay, and I bought what may have been 2 of the last three bulk rolls that Freestyle had as Arista Legacy 400. Gee, I hope it's only ok. I don't want to fall in love with another film I'll never be able to use.

I have been gathering a bunch of outdated film on the bay lately. Trying to limit myself to people who claim it was kept in the freezer, but we'll see how that goes. A few months ago, I noticed that 220 film holders for my Mamiya M645 were a lot less expensive than the 120 holders, so I bought a couple, and so I have been watching auctions looking for deals on 220 film. I even just took delivery of 2 rolls of Plus-X in 220 yesterday. That should be fun. No boxes, so who knows how old they are. Fingers crossed....

So, 2 days ago, I pulled out the 645, and loaded a 220 roll of Portra 160 to try. Imagine my irritation when I discovered that the shutter kept sticking open. Battery light says the battery is cool, and so does my volt meter. Tried another battery anyway, but no luck. It opens fine, but then stays there until I hit the battery test/mirror release button. If I hold the red button down while shooting, the shutter runs at the same speed, regardless of the speed set on the knob. I muddled through the rest of the roll, and dropped it off at the lab today, leaving instructions to go ahead and print anything that is more than a blinding white rectangle.

I also gave them a test roll that I just finished in my Ricoh 126 Flex, a roll of Konica 200 SR that was dated 11/94. I bought a brick of ten rolls on eBay, just to get the cartridges. Because one of the windmills I'm tilting at is that I am going to RE-LOAD 126 cartridges and shoot the mini-arsenal of 126 cameras I have built up. Along with the Ricoh, theres a Kodak Instamatic Reflex, a Minolta Autopak 700, a Yashica, a Kodak 500, and an Olympus that has motor-drive. That makes me giggle, auto film-advance on  a 126 camera. What'll they think of next? Laugh if you must, but these cameras all take very nice pictures, head and shoulders above the Instamatic X-15 I bought in a fit of nostalgia.

This 17-year-old Konica film has a pronounced color-shift toward magenta in the prints, but nothing that can't be corrected during printing. I have made a couple attempts at re-loading the cartridges with some non-perf Portra 160 that I found on eBay. Can'ty figure out a good way to perf it so it works in the cameras yet, but I get about 17 out of the 24 shots on my best attempt, and the film looks fine, so I will keep trying.

So, I did it again. I got into a format war, and picked the losing side. I console myself that I can use adapters to put most of my old lenses on my 50D. And I have a freezer full of film to go through, and a little room on the top shelf to stockpile couple rolls of Tri-X and T-max films. Maybe some sheet film for the 4x5. I suppose I better get enough D76 and fixer before it's yanked out from under me as well.

Is this gonna hurt much?

Well...bless me, father for I have sinned...I am guilty if the sin of pride.

I somehow got it in my head that I am interesting enough to start a blog. Nothing like being on the cutting edge of technology and popular culture, huh? Jeez, all these years of reading blogs, many of which made me think some people just have way too much time on their hands.

I will cop to reading quite a few blogs, and enjoying them very much. Some I check in on fairly regularly, and some have been invaluable sources of information and inspiration. But a lot of them leave me cold, in all honesty. Kinda like back in the late 70s and early 80s, when we were all putting out private release albums and singles with our bands. Just because you COULD put out a record, did not automatically mean you were good enough that you should actually DO it.

So what will this grand experiment in self indulgence concern itself with? I dunno. Will it be interesting? Probably not to most people, but I will try to keep it rewarding for you to spend a few minutes here.

I remember from high school that when writing a paper in English class, you were supposed to tell the reader what you are going to tell them, then in the next section, actually tell them that, and then in the end section, tell them what you just told them.

That always seemed to me to be like writing the same thing in triplicate, just to hit the word count the teacher inflicted on us. I think I was pretty lucky to get through high school with a passing grade with an attitude like that. It's the attitude that got me this explanation from an English professor I had at Kent State for a comp class in which I received an "F": "You're the only one in the class with even a spark of talent for writing, but you didn't do what the class required, so you got an "F". That's what's wrong with the modern university system."

That was back in the early 1990s when I tried going back to school after 3 years in music retail. It was also the last college course I took. I hope things have changed since then, but I bet they haven't.

So, a little bit about me: I am currently about 3 weeks from my 46th birthday. I have been playing music since I was in the 4th grade, mostly in the rock realm. My main instrument has been bass, since being busted down to that in my first band in 6th grade. I also play guitar, can fake my way through a gig playing drums (I can count to 4 and hold a reasonably steady groove, just don't ask me me to play any Rush or Yes songs), and for a while, I was an utterly incompetent keyboard player in a band. But I covered it up fairly well by insisting on hauling out an actual Hammond C3 and Leslie, and burying myself behind a fortress of vintage keys that subliminally made people think of Keith Emerson, while I snowed them with simple triads, swooping glissandos and switching gears on the Leslie.

During the 1990s, I tried my hand at running a recording studio. I filled a rented space with a dizzying array of audio gear, and hung up my shingle. I did some rock bands, a couple folkie types, some jingle work, and a massive amount of rap and hip/hop. I never truly enjoyed the rap sessions, but I did eventually learn to discern between guys who were pretty good at it, and guys who really sucked.

One high point of my foray into rap was my semi-legendary time as "Cool-Ass Dave". What would happen is this:

Guys would come in with their beats programmed into the sequencers in their keyboards. They would say something like "I need eight minutes of this beat for my rhyme" and we would proceed to transfer the tracks to my ADAT recorders. Usually, the keyboards only had stereo outputs, so we could only do 2 tracks at a time. We'd sync the keys to the recorder using MIDI, then run 8 minutes of the first 2 tracks. We would then go back and the same thing for all the tracks.

After 2 or 3 passes, I would get bored and pick up a guitar and start fiddling along with the track. The client would hear what I was doing, and say some variation of "You gotta play that on my shit, man!" So I would get to the end of the MIDI transfers, plug in a guitar, play a few wacka-wacka 9th chords, and we would move on to the vocals.

Some time later, one of the groups dropped of the finished cassette of their project for me, and I discovered that they couldn't remember my full name, so I was credited on guitar on a number of tracks as "Cool-Ass Dave".

That would be enough for me, but the best part was a few weeks later when another group came into my studio to check it out to see if they wanted to work there. They were a little worried that the white kid with the long hair and Floyd and Rush posters hanging in his studio might not get where they were coming from. Then one of them noticed the tape of the previous gangsta group sitting on the console. Dubiously looking back and forth between me and the tape, one of them finally asked why I had such a tape in my possession. I told them that it had been recorded at my studio, and that I had played some guitar tracks on it.

They all looked at each other with growing excitement, and one of them asked if I was stroking them. I said, "No, I'm credited on there as Cool-Ass Dave." The went nuts, and the leader yelled, "YOU'RE COOL-ASS DAVE??? We've been trying to find you, man! We want you to play on our shit!"

Alas, the studio business dwindled as the trend went toward doing everything in your laptop at home, and I went on the road with 1964...the Tribute, a Beatles tribute band that I had done a bunch of jingle work with, and after mixing and co-producing their "All You Need Is Live" CD, I went on the road as their Front-of-House engineer, which I have been doing for most of the last 13 years.

During an 18-month period away from the band when my daughter was born, I rediscovered photography. It started innocently enough. I convinced my pregnant wife to let me buy a Nikon D40 kit by telling her "We'll need it for BABY pictures, honey!" We were in Norman, OK at the time for a series of 64 shows at the university. She had come along to meet my "harem" of friends that I have there, all of whom happened to be women. Anyway, we got the Nikon at the Best Buy across the street form the hotel in Norman. I chose the Nikon because I had a Nikon FG already, and knew I could use the lenses I had for that on the D40.

Then, when my daughter was almost 2, I found my first 35mm camera, a Minolta HiMatic G that my parents had given me when I was 10 or 11 years old. It was in a dresser drawer, and I found it when we were moving the dresser and cleaning it out for my wife to use in her sewing room.

When I was in high school, a friend had given me his darkroom equipment, and I had set up a rudimentary darkroom in my basement. It was fun, and when I was a Junior, I signed up for the photography course the school offered, but was told that I couldn't use the Minolta for the class, and would have to get a manually controlled SLR. A classmate sold me a Yashica TL Super with a 50/1.7 lens, and I was on my way. The Minolta went into the dresser drawer, and aside from 2 weeks when I gave it to my Dad to shoot while he and I were in Ireland in 1996, the Minolta stayed in that drawer for 25 or so years.

When I found it, I decided to run a roll of film through it to see if it still worked. The light seals were kind of a mess, but I put the film (which had been stored in the junk drawer next to the dishwasher and was left over from the Ireland trip) in anyway, stuck in an A76 battery and shot the roll while the wife and child and dog frolicked in the front yard.

Holy Shit! Aside from some minor color shift that made the wife's t-shirt look more blue than purple, the prints from Walgreen's looked spectacular. There was a depth and warmth that I had yet to see in anything I had gotten out of the D40, and certainly head and shoulders better than any of my digital point and shoot cameras to date. Why did I leave this camera in a drawer for 25 years???

Now, I must explain something here. As a recording guy, I have been involved in many, many "discussions" debating the analog vs digital mediums. Pro-analog guys all carry on about the warmth and punchiness of analog, and the pro-digital guys all go on about pristine clarity, lack of tape hiss, blah blah blah. I am firmly non-committal about this debate. I went with ADATs in my studio because I could afford them at the time, and 24 tracks of ADAT was 1/6 the cost of an Otari MTR 90II, the analog machine I wanted to own someday. In my experience, digital gave you back exactly what you gave it. There was none of that lovely tape compression you get with analog. You have to be happy with the sound before it goes into the machine with digital. It's more work, but that's what it is.

I was talking over drinks with Alan Parsons at a NAMM show once (not like we're friends or anything, just one of the luckiest incidents in my life!). A group of us had stepped out of the Audio-Technica 25th anniversary party, and one of the group asked Alan all the questions I wanted to ask, but was trying to be too cool to ask. One question was whether he was gonna go analog or digital in the new studio he was building. He scoffed, and said, "Digital, of course!" The other guy said something like "But, but...Dark Side of the Moon...Let it Be....warm...punchy...!" Alan just smiled and said, "Man, do you know how hard we had to work to make that stuff sound so good? Believe me, those records sound that good in spite of analog, not because of it!"

Now, just lately I have been thinking longingly of how easy 2-inch tape used to be compared with the endless updates and upgrades I have to deal with in the digital studio of today. I am seriously wondering if I should chuck the computers and track down an old MTR-90 after all...

So analog vs digital in audio? Both about the same as far as I am concerned. The pros and cons of each leave it a dead heat in my view. Your mileage may vary.

Analog vs digital in photography? Man, digital sure is a lot more convenient. Memory cards can hold a thousand pictures, and can be reused, so film cost is a thing of the past. The 1000 shots to get one good one accidentally works decidedly in my favor. Dump the stuff in the computer and tweak till you like it...no chemical stains on your clothes...all in broad daylight. Awesome.

But I really like film. I like how it looks better. Especially black and white. That grainy silver stuff just looks so yummy. And, dammit, I like the smell of fixer.

So that's gonna do it for my first-ever blog post. I guess I'm doing this as a new way to justify my obsessions. All I know is, I don't want this to be a clone of Matt Denton's camera blog. He already does it so well. I imagine his influence will shine through, however. I just wish I could shoot as well as him. Maybe someday....