Counting Down to the “Blue Future” Sessions This Weekend
I’m leaving for Philadelphia on Friday night, April 13 2018. Saturday morning we–me plus Mike Brenner, Mark Schreiber, John Cunningham, and engineer Pete Rydberg–begin recording the tracks for “Blue Future.” I’ve been working, working, working on these sessions. Practicing harmonica, thinking about the instruments for…
Reminder to self: Back It Up
A couple of nights ago I left my laptop in a hotel bar. I realized it the next morning when I picked up my laptop bag and realized that it was a bit light. For some reason I did not immediately freak out, notwithstanding that…
Digitech’s iStomp does a lot of cool stuff for short money (UPDATED)
For the last year or so, I’ve been using an effects pedal from Digitech, the iStomp, in front of my Digitech RP500 running my patch set. I just added another iStomp to my rig, and I reckon it’s time to talk about it.
“Blue Future” is delayed, but don’t be blue
As regular visitors to this site know, I’ve been planning to follow up my record “The Lucky One” with a new set of songs called “Blue Future.” The recording sessions were scheduled for October, but I had some family medical issues on the very weekend…
How I recorded “Put The Lever Down” (2017 version)
Where “Put the Lever Down” came from I wrote the lick and harmony on which “Put the Lever Down” is based while I was hanging out in my car at one of my daughter’s skating meets around 1981, playing with a Dorian Minor tuned diatonic…
How I recorded the big harmonicas that light up “Make the Noiseâ€
Sometimes it takes years to write a song. I wrote the first draft of some of the lyrics to “Make the Noise,†the leadoff song on my record “The Lucky One,†15 or so years ago for a piece called “In the Time of Your…
How I Recorded the Effected Chromatic Harps for My Instrumental Love Song “Deeper”
I released my first recorded version of “Deeper” in 2002-3, when I had just started a series of monthly releases of free original pieces for harmonica. The recording of this song that I made for my record “The Lucky One” represents the first time that…
The Harps and Gear I Used to Record “50 Grand”
“50 Grand” is the only piece on my record “The Lucky One” that has something close to a standard 12-bar blues structure. I broke up the 12-bar form with a vamp that includes a cool harmonica horn section, and the lyric structure–unlike a typical blues–does…
How I recorded “The Road Out of Here”
“The Road Out of Here†is inspired by Bob Dylan and Jackson Browne—I think of “Highway 61 Revisited†by the former and “Redneck Friend†from the latter. In style and to some extent theme (one verse is about lyin’ and cheatin’) it’s some kind of…
The Harps and Gear I used on “Orphan Black”
“Orphan Black” is the theme song for the BBC series of the same name (which is about a bunch of clones, in case you didn’t know). The piece was written and produced by Amon Tobin, who (if you’ve heard the original) is pretty deep into…
