Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Where to get your installer cd.

According to Steve Holden’s blog, Monty Python decided to give away their complete works on the internet.

Their sales would plummet, you say? Think again.

They must have had miniscule sales to begin with? Think again.

So how do you explain having a 200% increase in sales when people can have your content for free?

Looking over my collection, I have the following dried, ground peppers,:

• Habanero (powder and flake)
• Pequin
• Arbol
• Jalapeno (ground and dried chunks)
• New Mexico
• Guajillo
• Ancho
• Cayenne
• Black pepper

Some were gifts, some were purchases, some I ground myself, others came in baggies or jars. Each has a pretty unique character and burn profile.

What peppers do you keep around?

The consumerist has bad news.

A common situation is explained at AgileOtter (my professional blog).

I play in a church band. One of the things that’s common in church bands is that the piano players really love an acoustic piano in a way that only drummers and acoustic guitarists really understand. The acoustic piano (a baby if you’re lucky, a full grand if you’re in megachurch heaven, upright if you’re poor) is alive in a way that keyboards and synths are not. I started to understand that when playing a midi guitar once. It sounded like a les paul, but felt kind of like a plank.

Churches tend to invest in a nice Roland, Kurtzweil, or (Yahama) Clavinova keyboard for the same reason that solid-state amps make sense for churches. There is more flexibility, reliability, and lower cost. The electric piano doesn’t have the same maintenance needs. It’s less sensitive to heat, cold, and humidity (appropriate HVAC for sanctuary spaces being expensive). It makes sense. The latest models have many sampled voices, but typically the church pianist only plays the Grand Piano patch. They have nearly-real keyboard feel as far as weighted, full-sized keys & the like. But it’s not acoustic.

The rock world made peace with synths and organs and electrics a long, long time ago. In rock, the piano is not *the* lead instrument, it is atmosphere. And better yet if it’s not a piano at all, but a nice synth or (nirvana!) B3. But in church, when they play the keyboard they hear it as a solo instrument and not as part of the ensemble. A lot of keyboard patches sound great behind a band, but a little funny on their own. The “chuff” of the keys sounds “hokey”, the tones seem thin or over-the-top.

When I think of how a keyboard should sound behind a band, I immediately think of The Heartbreakers’ “Refugee”. Sadly, I can’t embed a video of it here, but you can click on the song title. If you don’t like Tom P’s voice, still listen to the keyboards and how they work with the guitars and bass. It’s so simple, but without the keys the song would be so flat and thin it would be intolerable. The keyboard solo after the bridge, right before the guitar kicks in is classic.

The other great keyboard rock song is the Talking Heads cover of Take Me to the River. The sound of the bass and keyboards together is simply amazing.

I want to recommend these non-Church songs to church pianists everywhere, that they might consider widening their palette of sounds, consider washing a few new colors over their old songs.

This morning I hit gold. I had been playing with my settings (amp, compressor, overdrive, distortion) for a while with my humbucker-equipped guitars, but today I decided to take the strat to church. It had been out of the rotation for a little while.

During warm-up/practice, I was wholly unsatisfied with my sound because I was getting no tone at all. I messed with the amp for a while, then tried it with each of the pedals kicked in and out. I ended up adjusting the tone & gain on almost everything, and cranked up bass & treble on the amp. I played with everything on the guitar. I tried every pedal individual and in combination.

Finally, I hit on some of that holy grail strat sound with a combination of settings on the amp, the overdrive, and the compressor. Well, it was as close as I was going to get on a solid-state practice amp (I miss my tube amp).

It was really wonderful. It was chimey and sweet on the neck pickup, sweet and smooth when I mixed neck and middle, and was nicely swampy in the middle. The diamondback humbucker was doing its job quite well. Every pickup setting distorted nicely, cleaned up well, and sang those nice “oooo” sounds when I was up at the octave mark.

It wasn’t my very best performance day ever (don’t ask about the offeratory) but the tone was just wonderful. I would have liked to have nailed the guitar duet, but we didn’t really get time to practice beforehand and I was pretty tired, so the wheels did fall off a bit. I tried to recover, but those off-by-one errors needed more bending and finesse than I had handy. But the tone was awesome.

Sometimes when things are a little less rosy on the financial frontier it is nice to fall in love with the things you already have instead of chasing tone through additional gear.