Music Geek-Out Moments

Goodness gracious, it’s been a heck of a long time since my last entry.  The longest in fact since I started this nonsense over a decade ago.  I keep mentally writing the beginnings of blogs, but for reasons that probably have something to do with the exhaustion of living through a pandemic and an election simultaneously, I haven’t been able to pull the trigger.  That ends today.  I’ve got a bunch of things to write about, but since it’s been a while I’ve decided to ease back in with a bit of music-nerd nostalgia.

If you’re really into music you can probably identify a few times in your life when you connected with a fellow music lover on a visceral or intellectual level.  You met someone who “gets you” or “gets it.”  In my museum of recollection, I could probably find dozens of worthy events to exhibit, but allow me to share just two with you today.  They’re nothing earth-shattering, but they’ve stayed with me all these years and I get a kick out of them.

Alpine Valley Music Center parking lot (i.e., a big grass field), East Troy, Wisconsin, probably in 1989 or thereabouts. 

I walked with my friends from the field packed with cars where people had spent the previous hour tailgating to the gate entrance to see Elvis Costello or Rush or Billy Joel.  (Or maybe Jimmy Buffet?  I didn’t have many Alpine Valley concerts left in me – my last time there was in 1991.)  For some reason I was explaining to my friend that although I was excited to see whomever we were there to see, that I would love, just LOVE, to see Yes on stage and have them announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, ’The Gates of Delirium.’”  Well, you would  have thought I’d just announced that Jon Anderson himself was walking behind me, because some nutjob (as in, fellow music-nerd nutjob) in cutoff jeans and a t-shirt turned toward me and shouted “Oh my God!  Yes!”  He ran toward me and literally – I’m not making this up – knelt down in front of me and prostrated himself in mock adulation.  “I bow to the altar of Yes.”  When he righted himself, his right knee was badly bloodied – he’d knelt down on broken glass!  A little remnant from someone’s tailgating a little too hard with glass bottles.  The bloodied fan looked down to examine his knee and said, “Ah well, Yes is worth it.”  We spent the next five minutes or so avoiding going to our seats and instead exchanging our thoughts on Yes, who at the time were either on hiatus or completely defunct.  I shared my opinion of the non-Jon Anderson album Drama, and we both agreed that it was good but that it shouldn’t have been called Yes.  (I’ve since changed my mind about that.  I believe that not only is it Yes, but it’s among the band’s best six albums).  We wished each other a good evening, but I’m sure we also wished that we were seeing a different band, like being stuck on a date when the woman you really want is on the dance floor with another guy. 

Fortunately, I got to see Yes five more times after this interaction, and they played “Gates of Delirium” at two of those concerts.  They even brought out “Machine Messiah” and “Tempus Fugit” from Drama on one of those tours.  I imagine that my bloody-kneed Yes friend was at some of these shows front and center.

A gas station in western Wisconsin off of Highway 94, en route from Milwaukee to Minneapolis, probably in 1992 or 1993. 

Minnesota may border Wisconsin, but going back and forth between Milwaukee, where my family lived, and the University of Minnesota, where I was in grad school, was getting mighty old.   I found that I’d regularly have to pull over at a rest stop north of Wisconsin Dells and take a 20-minute snooze just to stay awake.  It didn’t help that I couldn’t make it all the way on one tank of gas in my Toyota Tercel, so more time was wasted having to fill up along the journey.  On one such stop, I filled up my tank and walked in to pay the cashier (automated pumps weren’t a thing yet, or at least not at this station), a young guy with dark, long curly hair and a black t-shirt.  While I was waiting for the transaction to be completed, I noticed a song playing on the radio playing next to him, and the music bounced around in my brain for a bit, jump-starting old synapses in need of a good lube job.  I titled my head, nonplussed, certain that I was about to make a fool of myself, but I tentatively proceeded.  “That isn’t…is that Michael Schenker?”  The cashier froze, looked at me in eye with no emotion whatsoever, and then in one fluid motion, opened the till, took out a bill and slapped it down on the counter in front of me, as if he were jubilantly showing his winning straight-flush over an opponent’s full house.  “That, my friend, deserves a dollar!”

I’d gotten it right.  I wasn’t a fan of Michael Schenker.  I wasn’t even aware of him, really, but I remembered a song that had gotten a bit of radio play on WQFM back in 1981, and since my older brother had purchased it (the vinyl record is now in my possession), the album cover and name were somehow stamped on my brain.  Why I was able to remember this, and not, say, the name of a woman seconds after introducing herself to me, was a question better left to that great DJ up in the sky.

But damn, I was proud of that one.

So there you are.  Two geek-out moments.  I hope there are many, many more, but of course these types of interactions that make life richer aren’t possible in 2020.  Here’s hoping in 2021.  In the meantime, I’m going to get cracking at writing another blog entry.  Stay well out there!

Build Your Own Record Rack

I’m not a naturally handy guy, but over the years I’ve managed to take on some modest home improvement projects with a degree of success, mostly the result of YouTube videos and frantic emails to my exceptionally handy friend, Rick.  Last March when it became apparent that the pandemic would result in a lot of unwanted time at home, I decided to overcome my typical trepidation and take on a new project, one I’d been grappling with for some time:  building a few shelving units to store my growing collection of vinyl records.  I’d been searching for a replacement of my plastic-bins-scattered-around-the-basement approach for quite some time, but nothing on the market satisfied my three criteria:  forward facing, attractive and inexpensive. 

Enter, the Google search.  Actually enter dozens of Google searches. And lo and behold, several pages deep into one of my explorations, I came upon a marvelous blog post called “I Built a DIY Vinyl Record Shelf, And you Can Too!”  This sounded right up my alley.  The post was over seven years old, but the concept was timeless:  build a great-looking unit that holds around 500 records with one sheet of 8x4 plywood.  Fantastic.

The author of the blog got his idea from what is now a decade-long thread on AudioKarma, a website I’d never heard before but whose entry is a treasure trove of information from dozens of helpful contributors.  It all started with a great concept and has since evolved to include every possible variation you can imagine, with multiple draft designs that accommodate different needs.  If you’re interested in building your own rack, I strongly encourage you to read the entire thread before you begin.  I did not, and wish I had.  It may take you several hours, but it’ll help you determine in advance which features are important to you and which design works best.  Had I read these comments in full I would have avoided a few mistakes along the way.  As it is, I built two identical racks, and then a third of my own design that includes record storage on the bottom and bays for a receiver and turntable on top.  None of my three projects went perfectly, and my lack of craftsmanship certainly reared its ugly head from time to time, but I learned a lot about woodworking and ultimately made decent-looking alternatives to the plastic bins I’d been using for years.

Along with screws, glue, casters, sandpaper, and polyurethane, lights, etc., I figure each unite costs somewhere around $100.   Not too shabby!

Above: records will fill the bottom eventually. Far left: speaker stands that I built to practice using a pocket hole jig. Left: extra support for the bottom shelf.

Here are a few things you may find helpful:

1)     Beware cutting your plywood at the store.  The guys at Home Depot were well-meaning, but their cuts of my red oak plywood (around $53) with a dull an imprecise cutting tool ended up shredding my wood something fierce.  It took a lot of energy and frustration to work around the most dreadful-looking cuts.  If you have a friend with a truck or a van, consider doing this at home.

2)     Buy or build a square jig to hold your plywood together at right angles.  I built one very similar to the one in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPA8FDTcfcE

3)     Get a table saw or borrow one.  I did not and it showed, because even though I used a guide with my circular saw, I was never able to make my cuts absolutely perfect, resulting in slight gaps and mismeasurements that affected the final project.  I’m still happy with my units, but they could have been a bit better. 

4)     Since being able to move your record rack once it’s filled with records is key, definitely include casters in your design.  I purchased reasonably-priced 90-pound casters from Home Depot and they work fine.  Don’t forget to include a few that swivel and lock.

5)     Use a counter sink to hide your screws or use a pocket hole jig.  I did the former from the first two racks I built and pocket holes for the third unit along with a set of speaker stands I built (these actually turned out the best of all of my work).  I loved using my Kreg Pocket Hold Jig 320 and will find new uses for it in upcoming projects I’m sure.

6)     Use wood glue for all of your wood joints.

7)     Buy a bunch of clamps, including a few trigger clamps for ease of use and a few clamps that are long enough to accommodate your record bin.  I think mine are 48 inches, and they were hugely helpful.

8)     Consider adding supports for the shelves.  Records weight a lot, and though it might not have been necessary, I did add a cross-bar support for the lower shelf and perimeter supports for the top shelf.   If nothing else, they give me peace of mind.

9)     Be especially careful with the top shelf as this is the most visible.  On the last rack I made that’s housing a turntable on top, I ended up with gaps along the edges that required the use of wood putty, and it looks pretty bad.  So bad, in fact, that I decided to purchase a bunch of rock band stickers from RedBubble to hide my work!  I love the stickers, but they were not part of the original design.

10)  Which reminds me, consider decorating your racks with stickers!  This was a helluva lot of fun, and it requires no carpentry skills.

11)  If you don’t want to stain, don’t.  I personally hate using stain because I never like the way it turns out – just another one of those handyman skills I haven’t yet mastered.  I kept my red oak plywood bare and used three coats of polyurethane to protect it and give it a bit of a sheen.  Looks great.

12)  Don’t fret so much about how to best apply polyurethane.  I stressed out about this because everyone had an opinion and almost none of them were consistent.  Put a few coats on, sand lightly, put another coat on, and you’re good to go.  It’s just polyurethane.  It’s not life and death.

13)  Consider using real wood iron-on veneer.  I had no idea this product existed, but it’s another one of those great tidbits offered by the AudioKarma gang.  It’s an absolute bitch to work with in my opinion because it’s wider than the edge of the plywood and therefore needs to be trimmed.  Nothing I used – a trimmer designed specifically for this task or just good old sandpaper – worked well.  It either just folded the veneer or disrupted it enough to lift it off the plywood despite the adhesive.  I eventually got the job done and it looks great, but it was an unpleasant process. 

14)  Install LED lights for the bottom racks or your records are going to be hard to see.  This part of the project was easy!  I purchased these stick-on lights from Amazon and they work great. 

15)  Use record dividers for a professional look.  There are a bunch of options out there, mostly overpriced or formatted incorrectly, but I like the option I found at Amazon along with a white ink Sharpie.

I’m probably missing a few additional pieces of advice, but by scanning the AudioKarma thread you will have a lot of great ideas that people of shared over the years.  Happy building!

Logging Films and Music

Early on in the film High Fidelity, the character Rob says, “…what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.”  I laughed out loud when I first heard this quote because for many of us there’s a grain of truth to it.  How many times has your opinion of someone shifted based on their collection of books, music or sports memorabilia?  Does someone’s comprehensive Bob Dylan collection impress you or turn you off?  Does a person’s room decked out in green and gold as a sort of shrine to the Green Bay Packers repulse you or enthrall you?  Have you ever started to fall in love with someone, only to learn that her favorite books are romance novels?  Or that his are comic books?  Or vice versa?  Sure, judging someone on what they like is shallow, but really, if you were to quickly sum up who I am to a stranger, you could do worse than providing him with a list of my top twenty books, movies and albums.

With this in mind, I was excited to learn about a couple of apps that help nutjobs like me log the art they consume.   I was even more excited after I learned that I’d be more-or-less housebound for three months during the pandemic.  Finding fun ways to kill time has been paramount.

Enter Letterboxd and Discogs.

At their most basic level, these apps allow you to log the films you’ve seen (Letterboxd) and what music you own (Discogs), and that’s essentially the level I’ve chosen to engage in.  If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, there are plenty of opportunities to do so, but for me just logging things was a lot of fun, as it helped me to remember that small 1988 movie starring Joe Mantegna and Don Ameche (Things Change) or that I shouldn’t buy a copy of Pretzel Logic, but rather it’s successor, Katy Lied.  Any app that helps jog my aging memory is a tool worth considering.

First, Letterboxd.  This couldn’t be easier to use, though I’ve found the desktop version superior to the phone app.  You can look up films by director, actor, year, decade, genre, title – you name it – and a click or two will allow you to choose “watched” “like” and “watchlist,” the latter a list of movies that you want to view.  You can also create lists of films, as my kids and I did when we chose the best twenty movies of the 2010s (note: the only film to make all four of our lists was Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World).  Rather than go through the trouble of reviewing or ranking the films I’ve seen, I chose to use the “like” button more as a “love” button.  I only included movies that truly resonated with me a significant way.  Case in point, this month I watched two movies that were both were very good, but only one really got to me.  Molly’s Game didn’t get checked as a “like,” but Doubt did.   As of today I’ve logged 1388 films watched, and I’ve “liked” 260 of them, some probably unwarrantedly so, others probably overlooked.  Love of art can be a finicky thing.

For Discogs, I avoided logging my records for a long time because I felt overwhelmed with the process. For example, when searching for Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, 308 different versions of the album appear, based on format, country, pressing, release date, etc.  It’s enough to make even a devoted logger give up.  I didn’t particularly care about what pressing I owned for each album – only that I owned some version of the album – and I didn’t want to work hard at this endeavor, pandemic or not.  To make things far easier and far more enjoyable, the only three categories I worried about were format (obviously), country and the unlikelihood that I owned an original pressing for most of my records.  When narrowing down the aforementioned Supertramp album using the above filters, I was left with a more manageable 33 versions to choose from, and I simply picked one at random.  Of course, if you’re a very serious collector who’s buying and selling, you may need to go the extra mile, and for that you have my sympathy.

I currently own 823 albums and I’ve compiled a list of another 122 that I’m actively looking for.  Discogs includes a rough estimate of your collection’s worth, averaging the last ten sales of each album you own.  What I’ve learned is this: record collecting is an enjoyable and relatively inexpensive hobby, and that all of my records wouldn’t pay for even two months of my son’s college education.  Oh well.

Of course, all of these records need to be stored somewhere, and this leads me nicely into next week’s blog post, about building functional and attractive record racks for your collection.  Stay tuned, and in the meantime, have some fun with Letterboxd and Discogs.

Delving into the Harpejji (scales and fingering)

It had been in the back of my mind ever since watching Stevie Wonder tear into one during his Songs in the Key of Life tour back in 2015.  The harpejji.  This amazing, awe-inspiring instrument that seemed to be a godsend for keyboardists – a stringed instrument with an enormous expressional palette that’s played much like a keyboard instrument, with hands in a piano-like position.  Being the genius that he is, Wonder appeared to master this relatively new instrument created by Tim Meeks of Marcodi Musical Products in no time flat.  As for me, after finally taking the plunge and purchasing a beautiful G16 harpejji last winter, I found myself floundering after several months.  I’d thought that I could approach the instrument intuitively, eschewing the formality that accompanied my piano instruction decades ago, and to some degree, I succeeded.  But after months if piddling around and coming up with a few nice motifs and learning a few songs, I realized that I had to approach things in a more systematic way. 

A big challenge for me was fingering and how to best approach notes quickly and comfortably.  I kept on second guessing myself when viewing tutorials on YouTube, as the techniques they displayed seemed anything but efficient, offering one-octave scales that required sliding into notes and that didn’t allow for multiple octave movements.  Even the newly-added charts on the Marcodi website don’t achieve what I’d like to see.

In the midst of my exploration, I happened upon a blog entry by Matthieu Amiguet of Switzerland through the “harpejji hangout” forum, and this cracked the door open for me.  It confirmed my suspicions about what I’d been viewing online, and it inspired me to really nail down fingering for the most useful scales.  The fingering that Amiguet decided upon for the major scales are exactly what I settled on, and I’ve since (mostly) settled on fingering for minor, harmonic minor, blues and pentatonic scales. For all of the examples below, I’ve written fingering that assumes you’ll continue to go up the scale. You might end up using slightly different fingering once you reach the end of your run.

Here is the fingering for major scales as I originally viewed at Amiguet’s blog.

After some additional exploration, I decided that for natural minor scales I’d use the same fingering as above, but starting on the scale’s 6th note.

For harmonic minor, it’s easy to adjust the right hand to accommodate raising the 7th note.  For the left hand, this isn’t as easy.  I’ve offered two solutions, the first without a sliding note, which would normally be preferred, the second including a slide.  Although the first solution requires a bit of a jump, it actually works pretty well. with a little practice.

For pentatonic scales, the following fingering allows for quicker movements than what you’ll find at some of the online tutorials.  It looks a bit awkward at first, but really works well once you get the hang of it. I’ve also included an alternative right-hand version that may come in handy sometimes.

For a variation of the pentatonic scale – the blues scale – once again the right hand fingering is easily achieved, fast and efficient.  This is a blast to play using only the first three fingers.  For the left hand, the fingering is clunky and hard to manage.  I’ve looked for other possibilities and just can’t find one that I like.  Fortunately, the times when I would rip through a blues scale on the left hand are few and far between.

That’s what I’ve come up with so far, and it’s helped me navigate the harpejji much better than I was able to before.  I’ve still got a long way to go, but thanks to Matthieu Amiguet I’ve been able to at least start cracking the code.

If you’ve got your own preferred fingerings for these scales or others that I haven’t yet address, please consider sharing them with me or adding them on the Harpejji Hangout forum.  And if you’re a harpejji player in the Chicago area, I’d love to meet you and exchange ideas.  Give me a shout.

Music Inspires During the Pandemic

I’ve never had more time to write, but pandemics and social distancing apparently don’t kindle creativity.  Lately my mind works best with logical, choreographed activities like woodworking, crossword puzzles and home improvement projects.  Not exactly awe-inspiring stuff.

But one idea sprung up on social media in time for my family’s roundtrip drive to Lexington, Kentucky and back: the 30 Day Song Challenge.  It’s a simple exercise to get you to think of music that’s inspired you in various ways over the years, to get you to mine some of the songs that maybe you’ve forgotten about, and to share your choices with others.

(by the way, our drive was to move our daughter home from her apartment, so no judging)

My daughter suggested that the four driving companions pick a song from each category, and rather than play one song a day, we’d plow through as many as we could during the six hour drive via a Spotify playlist.  I believe we got through about fifteen rounds on our way to Lexington, so about sixty songs, and it was a enjoyable way to pass the time.  Since our trip we’ve continued to gather together during the evenings to play a few rounds of songs, Zooming in my other daughter who lives in California.  It’s a great way to ensure a little family time instead of going off in separate rooms to pursue our own time-sucking activities. 

Each of us have our own proclivities, and the exercise has forced us to open up our minds to different genres and time periods.  My wife isn’t a music aficionado, but she’s come up with a bunch of songs that the rest of us never would have considered.  Case in point, and an example of one of the most egregious affronts to all that’s holy: Donny Osmond’s “Puppy Love,” my wife’s choice for “A Song You Remember From Childhood.”  Awful, awful stuff, but she’s also dug up some great songs, and my kids have introduced me to a bunch of newer tracks, including many in the hip-hop genre that I don’t normally gravitate toward.  In short, it’s been eye-opening and fun.  To make the exercise even more fun and challenging, many of us have opted to have no repeat artists, which is a feat after fifty rounds!

Some of the 30 day categories are a little lame, so we’ve created a bunch of our own. The possibilities are limitless. Rather than share all of our specific choices, I thought I’d list the other categories that we’ve come up.  Including the original 30 Day Challenge, we’ve now done 50 categories and have a bunch more in the works.  Here are the ones we’ve added so far and the songs I personally chose for each category:

Song that’s acoustic (Hometown – live version, Joe Jackson)
Song that expresses satisfying anger (Hard to Laugh, The Pursuit of Happiness)
Song that reminds you of a specific person (Code of Silence, Billy Joel)
Song that’s creepy (Paranoid Android, Radiohead)
Song whose musicianship amazes you (Rosanna, Toto)
Song with stupid lyrics that you still love (Everybody Have Fun Tonight, Wang Chung)
Song that pumps you up (If You Want It You Got It, Bryan Adams)
Song about friendship or support (Trouble Me, 10,000 Maniacs)
Song that’s funny but isn’t a parody or gag song (Her First Mistake, Lyle Lovett)
Song about societal problems (Oh Jungleland, Simple Minds)
Song that gives you the chills (We Belong Together, Rickie Lee Jones)
Song that tells a great story (I Hung My Head, Sting)
Song that celebrates a breakup (Salt In My Tears, Martin Briley)
Song that laments a breakup (I Miss You, Randy Newman)
Song that fills you with awe (And You And I, Yes)
Song that’s under three minutes (Dear Madam Barnum, XTC)
Song that’s a guilty pleasure (The Name of the Game, ABBA)
First song you heard by a particular artist (I Remember Me, Innocence Mission)
A great song from an otherwise bad album (Breathe, Melissa Etheridge)
Song that blew you away the first time you heard it (Here With Me, Dido)

One note: for the category of great story songs, my son and I actually chose the same tune – “I Hung My Head” – by Sting.  One of the best.  When I learned that we’d doubled up, I switched to another Sting song, “Ghost Story,” and could have easily chosen another of his tracks, “Seven Days.”  The guy can write a good story!

Here are the original 30 and my choices:

Song with a color in the title (Red Rain, Peter Gabriel)
Song with a number in the title (Driver Eight, REM)
Song that reminds you of summertime (One of these Days, Adrian Belew)
Song that reminds you of someone you’d rather forget (Change of Heart, Tom Petty)
Song that needs to be played loud (No More, No More, Aerosmith)
Song that makes you want to dance (Escapade, Janet Jackson)
Song to drive to (Spirit of Radio, Rush)
Song about drugs or alcohol (Comfortably Numb, Pink Floyd) - NOTE: my son picked the same song, so I switched to Alcohol by Barenaked Ladies)
Song you never get tired of (New Sensation, INXS)
Song from your preteen years (Stay in Time, Off Broadway)
Song from the 70s (Logical Song, Supertramp)
Song to be played at your wedding (Sweet Potato Pie, James Taylor)
Cover song (Stop Your Sobbing, The Pretenders)
Classic favorite (Sir Duke, Stevie Wonder)
Duet You’d Sing for Karaoke (Common People, William Shatner)
Song from the year you were born (Hung Up on a Dream, The Zombies)
Song that makes you think about life (Fast Forward, Joe Jackson)
Song that has many meanings (Love and Hard Times, Paul Simon)
Song with a person’s name in the title (Alex Chilton, The Replacements)
Song that moves you forward (Chasing the Sun, Sara Bareilles)
Song everybody should hear (Tripping Through Time, Sunshine Boys)
Song by a band you wish was still together (Oscar Wilde, Company of Thieves)
Song by an artist no longer living (TVC15, David Bowie)
Song that makes you want to fall in love (Wink and a Smile, Harry Connick, Jr.)
Song that breaks your hears (Traveling Star - live version, James Taylor)
Song by an artist whose voice you love (Sweet Surrender, Sarah McLachlan)
Song you remember from childhood (Band on the Run, Paul McCartney and Wings)
Song that reminds you of yourself (Grounded, Paul Heinz)

So there you are! Music, as usual, finds a way to soothe the soul during challenging times.  Make sure you’re getting your daily dose, and maybe use some of the above prompts for inspiration.