Today would have been my grandfather’s 90th birthday.  Every July 10th I tip back a few manhattans in his honor.

When I was in my early teens I desperately wanted a pro synthesizer.  I had my Casio, of course, but I wanted to get into the realm of real gear.

There was no way, of course, that I could afford the eight or nine hundred dollars required to buy a serious keyboard. I campaigned tirelessly for that ultimate holiday gift, but it never materialized.

One summer while I was staying with my grandparents, they took me out to a few music stores so I could check out keyboards. I fell in love with a KORG DW-8000, and the music store sales guy even offered to throw in a few extra banks of sounds (saved on a cassette tape, nice).

My grandfather was very unsentimental, a career air force pilot and general hardass.  But he dropped the coin to get me my first pro music gear that day.  I think about him every time I play, and I never forget his birthday.

Happy birthday Pappy, wherever you are.

Wow, it’s hot in Cleveland. It’s not a ‘dry heat’ either – you can feel the air sluggishly fighting with you when you are breathing.

I am grateful for the sunny day, even with the heat, but it also makes me glad that we’ve got climate control in the house.  This kind of weather wreaks havoc with guitars and other stringed instruments.  The heat and humidity can cause problems with other electronic devices as well.

It’s an expense to run AC, but a necessary one.  Any studio is going to need some amount of climate control to protect all the studio equipment and instruments. The investment in all that gear really outweighs the cost to keep things cool and dry for a few weeks in the peak of summer.

Just as a side note (and anyone in the CLE will tell you the same thing): I will take days like this all year long, as opposed to the heinous winter blizzardy days we get later in the year.

I’ve been fortunate that my friend “The Deuce” has lent me his Marshall JCM800 amp and cabinet while he’s off camping for a few days.

Maybe fortunate isn’t the right word, because now I really want one of these.

I’ve cut several guitar tracks thus far, and it’s been fun.  For some tracks I wanted some feedback so I played the part kneeling in front of the amp.  It felt like church.  Well, a church where there is a wall of roaring guitar in your face at jet engine volume.

I restrung the SG and used it for some of the parts.  The combination of that guitar and the amp create this amazing “biting” guitar sound, and the tracks really have more presence than tracks I’ve recorded using other amps.

The thing is, I haven’t been able to turn it up past volume = 1.  I can’t even imagine what it would sound like at higher volume levels because it’s deafening at 1.  Now that, my friends, is rock and roll.

Sometimes stringing, tuning, or fixing the intonation on my guitar can feel like a pain in the ass, especially when I’m just in the mood to pick it up and make some music.  However, it’s something that has to be done to keep the instrument in playing condition, and of course to keep it sounding appealing to the ear (we’ll make exceptions for bands that make their music sound crappy on purpose).

I’ve been fortunate enough to receive the gift of an orphaned instrument from a friend who found it, but doesn’t play it and doesn’t have room for it.  It’s a beautiful instrument.  It needs some cleaning up and a little bit of repair, but it’s in remarkably good condition as far as I can tell.

It also needs new strings.  Lots of them.

After I go through the exercise of getting this guitar/chord zither up and running I swear I am going to put it in a funk song (along with some toy piano, tinwhistle, home-built ukelele and possibly kazoo).

Saw this video the other day (tweeted by @wmcfest).  So cool.