Tuning and Intonation

There is an anecdote that tells of a notable musician from Indonesia who was visiting New York and was invited to attend a concert of the Philharmonic Orchestra. After the concert, he was asked how he enjoyed the evening's performance. His reply, made through an interpreter, was that he enjoyed the beginning of the concert very much indeed, but that he lost interest after the "man with the stick" came out and began waving at the musicians. The Indonesian orchestra, or "Gamelan" uses scales in which an octave may be divided into as many as twenty-two notes. Small wonder that the limitations of western harmonies wouldn't be as interesting to that musician as the sound of an orchestra tuning before a concert.

That story illustrates what has become my mantra as to tuning and intonation, which is, There Are No Absolutes. I define tuning as the process of adjusting the open strings or notes of an instrument to certain, arbitrary pitches. I define intonation as the manipulation or adjustment of an instrument in order to provide for predictable interaction and cooperation between notes when played melodically or harmonically, alone or in concert with other instruments and voices. Those are big words that mean you gotta do something to make your instrument sound right...and I don't mean plug into a tuner!

Plugging a guitar into a tuner is a good place to start. It will put you into the ballpark. But as soon as you start to play open chords with your "perfectly tuned" guitar, you will find that some notes don't sound right in relation to others. Fret placement is a compromise. Frets are placed as they are so that a guitar can easily play in more than one key or tonal center. But the nature of intervals is such that the note 'B' as the fifth of an E major chord is not the same as the note 'B' as the third of a G major chord. 'G' sharp, as the third in E major is not the same as 'A' flat in 'F' minor. The tuner will say that these notes are correct, but how the note functions within the harmonic structure will dictate slight variations in pitch. The interval of the fifth, as defined by the overtone sequence, is bigger than the tuner says it is. If you were to stack fifth upon fifth until you arrive at the starting pitch, you will arrive at a note quite sharp from where you would expect. And the major third is a bit smaller. This can be demonstrated by playing the natural harmonic at the seventh fret on the 'A' string and listening to the difference between adding the 'G' sharp at the fourth fret of the 'E' string and then playing the harmonic at the same position. Notice that the harmonic occurs just a bit inside the fret and not at the fret itself. The harmonic note is lower in pitch than the fretted note, but when played with the 'E' harmonic, it just sounds better.

There are some new tuning systems being touted as solutions to these variances. But no system can replace a discerning ear. My solution is this. Tune to the song. Determine the key of the song and what chords are to be played. Determine the position of those chords. Are they barre chords? are they fingerings which combine open strings with fretted notes? After making those determinations, tune the notes that are actually to be played. It doesn't matter if the tuner says that the open strings are in tune if the first chord is a big open 'G' chord. Play the ''B' at the second fret of the 'A' string and tune that note to the open 'B' string. Tune the 'G' on the 'E' string to the open 'G' string. you will find that your chords will sound richer...until you go to another key. And then you'll have to start all over again.

The point is that you can't be lazy. Tuning and intonation are very personal and are much more a matter of taste than most musicians will admit. If you play music, that alone indicates that you have some sensitivity. An electronic tuner has no feelings. It doesn't care if you sound like crap or not. You have the responsibility to fall in love with tuning and intonation, and to make these things more important than how fast you can shred. If you love music, it's the least you can do.

Tuning...I Mean, New Mexico or Bust

This was going to be an essay on tuning…but I just received an email from a reader who said that she was hooked on my family’s emigration to California so here we go, on to New Mexico!

New Mexico! To kid from Cleveland it seemed every bit as exotic as Old Mexico. Little did I know at the time that the road to this romantic sounding place would be only the first stage of the most boring fifteen hundred miles I would ever experience. We had pulled into El Reno after dark and it wasn’t until morning that I realized we were in the middle of a part of a countryside that had no features whatsoever. I could look in any direction and see only a pale blue sky meeting the brown, scrubby horizon. There was no rise of hill or fall of valley anywhere to be seen. Only the white grain silos of El Reno interrupted the flat vista in the distance.

At this time, the interstate system was far from completed and much of our trip through the western states was over what is now called “Historic” Route 66. As “Route 66” was also the name of a popular television program, my brother and I naively expected to see movie stars whizzing by in red corvettes. The weather had changed noticeably. And so we stripped off our jackets, took our places in the Ford and set off for our goal, Gallup, New Mexico.

The remainder of Oklahoma was uneventful save for the stop we made at the Texas state line. Now this was something new and exciting. A real trading post! Surrounded by a real log stockade just like in the movies. And inside they had real Indian stuff, ostensibly made by real Indians. Piles and piles of real Indian drums, real Indian blankets, dolls, head-dresses, keychains, snow-globes, pen and pencil sets…WAIT A MINUTE! Keychains, snow-globes and pen and pencil sets??? The dew was off the lily as far as this “real Indian” shit was concerned. Even a kid who’s experience with Indians was limited to the TV article knows that Indians don’t sit in their teepees gazing into the distant hills, their thoughts drifting to the gallant tales of the warrior exploits of their forefathers, while hammering out plastic, “real Indian” key chains! Ah, but then I saw a sign that promised to make the stop worthwhile. “Come see the Genuine American Bison” it screamed, “Ruler of the Great Plains”. My brother and I ran out and found ourselves looking over a rail fence into a muddy corral pock-marked with bovine landmines. Leaning against the fence where what looked like two clothes-racks covered in brown, matted fur, each one crowned by what seemed to be a chewing buffalo head. For a quarter each, we could pet the clothes-rack and hold a handful of hay under its nostrils…to see if it was breathing, I supposed. Real Indian stuff and Geuine Bison my twelve year old ass. Back to the car we went.

I’ve driven through the Texas panhandle a dozen times since that first trip and I still wonder if they’re ever going to finish the goddamn place. Not once, ever, never have I driven across that part of the state without encountering at least five hundred miles of road construction. We must have thought that the countryside was interesting though because I have boxes of pictures marked “Texas” but they all look the same. Cement pavement disappearing into brown horizon. The only difference from shot to shot are the clouds. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the sign speeding toward us. “Entering the State of New Mexico” it said.

We shot past the sign and the obligatory stockade trading post, chock full of real Indian bullshit. We had stopped at one more of these shams just outside of Amarillo and had learned that the “Genuine American Bison” must indeed have been hunted to extinction. The samples that were available for the pleasure of the westward migration could not have outrun a real Indian pony, wooden or otherwise. The part of New Mexico that I saw from the back seat at seventy miles an hour is just as boring when seen from thirty thousand feet up at seven hundred miles an hour. I learned the first time around that I’m just not a desert person. I keep hearing about how beautiful the desert is and how lovely the desert flowers are and how beautiful the sunsets burn on the western horizon. That’s all bullshit written by the New Mexico Chamber of Commerce. Those things only seem beautiful in contrast to the total absence of any discernibly recognizable life forms. Show me some trees, some grass, a river with real water in it…I mean Christ! They call the Rio Grande a river! And they do it without laughing out loud. Well, as I said, I’m just not a desert person.

Which brings me to the crowning glory of the day, dinner in Gallup, New Mexico. Our very first experience with Mexican food. From that time to this, I have learned to love Mexican cuisine. Not only to love it, but to honor it, respect it, savor it. On that night so long ago in Gallup, New Mexico, what I learned was to FEAR Mexican food. At least I learned to fear the repercussions of that particular Mexican food. I have enjoyed many types of cuisine that qualify as Mexican food. But I have never eaten anything that was in such a goddamn hurry as I did that night. And prolific too. It seemed to grow inside. I could swear that I left more in the way of Mexican food in Gallup than I ever put inside myself. And I certainly didn’t think that I took any with me although I kept making donations all the way to Barstow the next leg of the trip. I wish that I could have a bank account that accrued interest like that meal did.

One more day of travel and we would be in California. But that is for another time. Until then, don’t forget to tune your guitar…and pass the hot sauce!

Great Guitar Sounds

A great electric guitar sound is a matter of personal esthetics, and, like all beauty, it is in the eyes (or, in this case, the ears) of the beholder. Getting a guitar sound for recording purposes always must be the result of a close partnership between the player, the producer and the recording engineer. A good producer should have a solid concept of what he wants to hear, and the foresight to have hired a player that has not only the talent, but the proper equipment, physical as well as mental, to bring to life the concept in his head. My favorite recording engineers as far as documenting guitar sounds to media, be it analog tape or in the digital realm, are the ones who understand the concept of simplicity. They tend to take the shortest path from the players fingers to the studio monitors. And the best sounding players usually stick to what they do best, plug a guitar they know into an amp they know, and play.

Electric guitars are really very simple. The complications arise when a musician tries to be all things with a minimum of equipment. I love the ability to simulate five hundred guitar sounds with a single rack space piece of gear. But a real room with a real tube amp is just, well, it’s just more fun, goddammit! And if we’re not having fun, what’s the point anyway?

Some time ago, I was working with a guitarist on his solo record, I’ll call him Sam. Sam was probably the best pure blues/rock player I had ever been in the same room with. Not the most famous, although he had done some notable things in the past, but clearly a most exciting and masterful soloist. And his rhythm playing was equally as jaw-dropping. We were struggling with his gear and just couldn’t quite get what he wanted. Sam was playing a stunning piece of quilted maple furniture that was fitted with the latest in electronic innovations and was plugged into his own amp, a modern channel-switching hybrid. You could, with the push of a button, instantly get one of a half-dozen sounds…non of which were usable. I asked Sam what the rotary switch on his guitar did, and when he couldn’t come up with a coherent answer, I thought I should ask the ultimate question. “Sam” I asked, “what sound are you looking for on this song?” He answered that he was going for a vintage fat Stratocaster rhythm tone. I told Sam to take thirty minutes, and I would see if I could help out.

While Sam took a break, I put a set of .013 through .056 nickel-wound strings on my own Strat (in a future blog, I’ll discuss how to get a guitar to stay in tune with a quick string change) and aimed a Shure SM57 into the speaker cone of a beat-up tweed deluxe that lived in the studio. I put the pick-up selector on the neck position and taped it, turned all the knobs on the amp to five, and called Sam into the room.

Sam stepped up to the plate, took a few swings and told me that this was the sound that he had been looking for all week. I guess I must be some sort of magician. Let’s see. Sam wanted a sound that was, in the early 60s, the only rhythm sound available to most guitarists, a fender guitar, strung with what was standard at that time, played through a fender amp with the simplest mic in the studio hanging in front of it. No magic here. I would have had a much harder time trying to figure out how to make something sound as cheesy as his high-tech rig. The engineer opened the mic, brought up the fader, said “fuck yeah” and rolled tape.

You see, an engineer is only as good as what he has to work with. There are not enough knobs, effects, bells or whistles in the studio to make a crap rig, or a crap player sound good. A good engineer will take the time to actually listen to the amp and use his ear to find that spot where the mic will hear the amp best. But if the sound is not there to begin with, there is no way it will get to tape.

Now some players will think that I’m nuts to put set of .013s on a vintage Strat. They’ll talk about issues like tension and neck adjustments, but what they are really concerned with is playability. BABIES! The fact is that old guitar records sound big and fat because old guitars came with big, fat strings on them. You can’t baby a guitar. If the neck can’t take a healthy set of strings, then what makes you think that it will sound worth a damn with slinkys? Yeah, sure, I would string a guitar with lighter strings for playability purposes. But man, if you’ve never chunked out some power chords on a Les Paul with .013s through a nice simple Marshall or strummed full, open chords on an ES345 through an AC30…well, you should try it and see if playability is really such a big issue.

It’s all about the sound. And a great sound is worth a few callouses. So my advise for the day is, keep it simple, don’t be a crybaby and TURN IT UP!

Deterrence

Deterrence. Does it work? What is it, really? Why do we refrain from “breaking the rules”. Is it because we are afraid of getting caught, or is there some higher moral code that dictates our behavior in a society in which our freedoms frequently overlap the freedoms of those around us? What makes it wrong to speed, to steal, or to kill. What makes it right for society to kill a killer? What makes a kindergartener think twice before confiscating his neighbor’s cookies?

Big questions…huge answers. I read in the porcelain library every morning and my latest diversion has been one of those yearbooks issued by publishers rounding up the major stories in world politics, sports and the arts. This book chronicled the events of 1952 and the international affairs of that year cast an interesting light across the years toward many of the issues facing our society at present. I am left with the impression that there was much to be changed, and frustrated that we have seemingly learned little from the experiences of our recent history.

Solving the problems of the world can be daunting so I decided to distill some of these questions into the small doses concerning my own experiences and the personal opinions formed by reconciling personal, versus public behavior

Two societal “deterrents” about which I have strong feelings are the death penalty and nuclear arms. The permanent nature of the execution of either of these events is undeniable. When a murderer is put to death by the state, that particular individual will never again cause harm to the society which carried out the final, irreversible punishment. But my question is, does the “threat” of punishment deter criminal acts? Or is it just a case of “wait til your father gets home?”

The big story of 1952 was the successful detonation by the United States of the largest, most destructive single bomb in world history, the H-bomb. The political world of 1952 was one of widespread unrest in many of the same geographical areas that we read about today. The Korean peninsula was far from peaceful. Southeast Asia was looming as the next bone of contention between the power structures of capitalism and communism. The Mid-east was continuing in its role as the age-old cauldron of religious and cultural hatred. Up to that point in history, the United States was the only world power which had executed the ultimate deterrent in modern warfare, nuclear weaponry. And it worked. The total annihilation of two Japanese cities deterred Japan from continuing their war efforts. The United States held the club of nuclear warfare over the kindergarten class that was the world of 1945 as if to say, “Allright, everyone keep your hands to themselves or nobody gets recess.” After seven years of club-waving, a survey of the world situation of 1952 indicates that the deterrence of nuclear enforcement of the “rules” was approximately nonexistent.

How many times have we heard or said the words, “ If you do that again, I’ll kick your ass”? And how often was the promised ass-kicking not forthcoming? If a galley slave, chained to the oar gets the lash, it will have the effect of subjugating that individual because there is no chance of retribution. The lasher knew that he need not look over his shoulder. A family dog can be terrorized into submission only because he depends on his master for food. If that dog had a ready and independent supply of kibble, he would chew, dig, piss and shit to his hearts content knowing that he could simply duck out of harm’s way.

Enforcement of rules does not rely on the threat of punishment in the world of relatively free individuals. We break rules all the time. We drive too fast until we get a ticket. Then we pay the fine and speed off as if nothing had happened. I believe we expend more energy and thought in circumventing the rules than we do in actually following them, especially if the rules seem to impede the natural flow. When I was a teen-ager, I frequently went out the bedroom window after my family was in bed to roam the neighborhood with my like-minded friends. I was caught sneaking back into the house three times in one summer. This frequency indicates that I learned something…I got better at sneaking back in before my absence had been discovered. My punishment for each escape was a week in my room…with no visitors…the same room with the same window through which I would escape the very first night of every new sentence. I was of the opinion that if my actions were de-criminalized, if I were allowed to go out late at night as I pleased, my parents would be saved the embarrassment of authoring ineffectual disciplinary measures. I don’t believe that we ever came to an agreement on the issue, but I did take notes for future reference in the event I ever owned a dog.

The years passed and I did own a dog or two, none of which I ever had to ground, or beat into submission for that matter. But as the saying goes, “Wisdom from the mouth of babes.” I learned a great deal about the ineffectual nature of deterrence when I began to take my oldest son to the grocery store. I suppose that he was just over two at the time that the trouble started. He was just old enough to sit in the shopping cart, reach out with his arms and pull down an entire row of breakfast cereal boxes as I sped down the aisle. I tried all the usual dad-like tricks. “Knock it off” didn’t work. I suspect that he was just taking me literally. Yelling, begging, pleading…nothing worked, and he continued to reach out with both arms, fingers working, and repeating, ”daddy, I wanna look”.

Hmmm…daddy I wanna look, eh? I decided to think like a two-year-old (not a big stretch for me) and it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, he just wanted to look. The aisle that caused us the most problems was the aisle in which the drugstore toys were displayed. Squirt guns, balloons, eggs filled with silly putty, crayons, toy cars etc. I decided to experiment. The first stop on our next trip to the market was the toy aisle. I took him out of the cart, lowered him onto the floor, and told him that he had five minutes to look and that he could pick one thing to take with him. He exhausted his curiosity in under four minutes, and concentrating on his new toy car kept him too busy to interfere with my shopping for the rest of the trip…for the rest of the time that he fit into a shopping cart for that matter.

I have no idea whatever what that story has to do with world politics. But I do know a few things about human nature. I know that if my daily needs and the daily needs of my loved ones are met, and if I have the freedom to work, play or worship if I so desire, according to my own conscience and without political conditions…well, if that were the case, I would not feel the need to enrobe myself in explosives and order a cappuccino from a dead person.

Weird Gigs: Part 1

I'm going to interrupt the story of my family's move to California in order to pull a few examples out of the "weird gigs" bag. A gig qualifies as weird if something out of the ordinary occurs, surrounds or pervades the natural course of events. Now, gigs in general are by definition already pre-loaded with circumstances that can tend toward weirdness so I try to cull the ones that offer something more than just "there was a big fat chick in the front row" as a qualification.

I was Musical Director for Gary Puckett (yes, that Gary Puckett) and, as we were out on a string of one-nighters, the office had booked a few "fill-in" dates to cover expenses. You never really knew what to expect on these dates. Usually they were rock clubs in smaller towns and could be quite well attended. But every once in a while it could be the type of show that made us look at each other as if to tacitly promise that what just happened would never be mentioned again.

On this occasion, we found ourselves in San Leandro, California. The theater was one of those mission-like auditoriums that work really well for chamber music, barbershop quartets, or SAT testing. This type of theater, and there's one in every town in california, puts the saying "you can hear a pin drop" into extreme focus. My first shudder came as we neared the back entrance for sound check and I saw two guys in salmon jumpsuits setting up what looked like a circular chain-link dog pen. I don't remember the exact name on the truck but let's just say it said something like "Acme Trained Dog Company". We were opening for a dog act fer chrissakes! This was going to be a long frigging day!

One look inside and our sound man turned to us and said, "Look, fuck it, it's not going to sound good...period, no matter what you do, no matter what I do, no matter what those goddamn poodles do. So let's not piss these people off until we hit the stage." Agreed all around. Incidentally, there were three poodles, they were the big boingy kind and all of them white. Of the three, two were always trying to hump and one was always shitting in that hump-back, shaky-legged way that only a smart-ass white poodle with two guys in salmon jumpsuits cleaning up after him can do.they all looked exactly the same so I hope that they were trading off between the humping and shitting.

Backstage, I got the details. This was a variety show for some sort of charity and our office had decided that it would be fun for us to spend the day in this circus rather that take a day off in San Francisco. Yeah! We decided to hang out in the dressing room and drink until we either had to play or the governor called the backstage telephone with a stay. The call never came.

Our part of the show was dismal but we had invoked road rule 1a, namely, "It never happened." The acoustics in that barn were such that i'm certain that the snare drum is still reverberating in some corner of that room twenty years later. The dogs were a big hit though. It was, after all, a variety show and there were a ton of kids in the audience. I had thought that they would have humped and shitted themselves into some sort of civilized state before they hit the stage but I have an abiding respect for the stamina...and capacity of crazy white poodles as a result of what I saw on stage that evening. Between the hind-leg walking with a beach ball on the nose and the fire hoop jumping and the shaky-legged shitting at the stage apron and the crazed squeal of the kids as the poodles humped their way about the stage...Ah, I was actually glad to be there.

But then came he weird part. Yep, it got even better, at least for me. On the bill that night was a ventriloquist. I recognized him from having seen his act on TV. After his act (which was the usual talking while pretending to drink water, and the dummy making a dummy out of the ventriloquist), some kids in wheelchairs were brought backstage to meet him and probably to get the dummy's autogragh. And then happened a truly extraordinary thing. A thing so unexpected and with such delicious results that I'll never forget it. As the kids were wheeled around the ventriloquist, he did a little impromptu act for them and pretended to argue with the dummy. Just as the argument became heated, he twisted the head right off of the body, tossed it into an open bowling bag and threw the limp body into his briefcase, slamming it shut. As he zipped up the bowling bag the kids were horrified to hear the now disembodied head plead for air as the ventriloquist seethed, "Who's the dummy now, dummy!" The kids were very quickly wheeled out of the dressing room emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives.

I'll never know if he snapped or if he was just a naturally sick bastard, but that moment, the look on those kids faces when the head was begging for air...that made the whole day worth while.

Young Man Going West

That first night in St. Louis we stayed in a small motel which was really a U-shaped group of individual bungalows surrounding an open space with a swing set, picnic tables, some barbeque grills and a swimming pool which had been covered for the winter. It was called "The Colonial Motel", and was decorated to give the guests the impression they were staying in the very room the founding fathers had occupied on the first Fourth of July. Hurricane lamps, sampler-stitched wall hangings and wood-paneled walls convinced me that the place was much more of a historical landmark than the blinking neon sign that buzzed just outside our bungalow would indicate.

My dad woke us up early in the morning and we drove two hours before stopping for breakfast somewhere in the heart of Missouri. As it was past midnight when we pulled in to the "Colonial", I missed my first opportunity to experience what would become such a fascination for me on this trip. When our breakfast waitress drawled "ah'll gitcha cowfee in jis' a minit." I felt that I had finally come to America. This was how I imagined that Americans should talk. "lemme gitcha s'more napkins." The only waitresses I had known before this were the German ladies who served sauerkraut and bratwurst at the German-American Club functions in Cleveland. And they definately didn't drawl. It seemed that the further southwest we travelled, the weather and the speech patterns changed by the mile. We were also driving on the new interstate highway and I was equally fascinated by the many layers of different colors and textures exposed as the highway cut a path through the hills of Missourri.

It seemed to me that Missouri had earned the name, the "show me state." Every five miles or so a billboard appeared enticing us to "See the Indian Caves" or "Visit the Outlaw Hideout" and "Climb Up On a Tractor Made Entirely of Old Overalls!" They really wanted to show us some...stuff.My dad resisted the urge to have our family portrait taken with plywood cutouts of the holy family in a chapel where they apparently displayed the entire New Testament carved into a single melon seed. We had to make it to Oklahoma City before we stopped for the night.

OOOOOOOOOH-klahoma da da da dee da da da dee daaaah! I never knew the words to that song but all of us sang the Oklahoma part as we crossed the border. Oklahoma! Now THIS was going to be exciting. Cowboys, outlaws, shootouts and Indians...real Indians! I half expected to be surrounded at any moment and Iimagined how my friends back home would envy me when I was kidnapped by a warrior chief and made to adopt the ways of the noble red man, scalping wayfarers along Route 66. Well, the only Indians I saw in Oklahoma were the approximately 80,000 dolls, statues, pictures, clocks and ashtrays in the gift store attached to the gas station on the outskirts of Tulsa. But one thing I did see was a real, live, walking Bison. I said, "damn! look at that buffalo!" but I was corrected in yet another dialect by a real cowboy. At least he wore a real cowboy hat, had a giant belt buckle and spit brown tobacco juice. As he hoisted himself up behind the wheel of his semi, he said to me, "That ain' no buffalo, that there is a bahs'n boy. Stanks don't it?...stoopid kid" and off he drove leaving me with a sense of admiration for his hat and accent, and profound wonder at his ability to differentiate the smell of the bison from his own. I couldn't do it on a bet, but I was a tenderfoot and by habit and training tend to leave important matters to the experts.

A short time after Oklahoma City, we found our motel. The "El Rancho Motel" in El Reno! We were sleeping in a motel that had a Spanish name! In a town that also had a Spanish name! And it was right smack dab on Route 66. In those days there was nothing "historic" about it. Just a long ribbon of cement that got you from here to there. I fell asleep dreaming of tomorrow and knowing that Route 66 would take us through Amarillo, Texas some time tomorrow. Surely there would be some Indians.

Second Exodus

It was Easter week, I was thirteen years old, there was still snow on the frozen Ohio countryside, and we were embarking on our second exodus. We were going to California! Goodbye storm windows, salt/slushy winter streets, frozen toes, and staying home from school on blizzard days. Goodbye sweaty summer nights, millions of bug bites and the smell that hovered over Cleveland in the sixties. Hello to...what? My brother and I could only wonder. All that we knew about America we had learned in the nine years spent in a Cleveland that was, for us, no different than what we might have expected if we had stayed in Europe. Weddings, funerals, holidays, picnics and most get-togethers were Austrian food and fun fests complete with home-baked bread, stuffed peppers, goulash and apple strudel .We were leaving the bosom of a large extended family. And except for Disneyland and "Beach Blanket Bingo", we had no idea what to expect of the Mythical land of California. It was as if we were going to Mars.

My father had rented a U-Haul trailer and it was hitched to our 1960 Ford Fairlane. In the trailer were my mom's sewing machine, dishes, housewares, clothes and boxes of mason jars containing the fruits and vegetables of my mom's canning efforts. Up to this time in my life, I had never seen the inside of a store-bought can of peaches. My Aunt Ruth was seeing us off. After the hugs, tears and promises of a reunion in the not too distant future, the tires crunched on the snow of our familiar street for the very last time. The street, the house and many of the neighbor's children and grandchildren are still there, but none of us have ever seen that house again.

Adventure! that's what I felt. Pure adventure. My father was eager to get to his new job, my mother was scared to death of the unknown and my brother was heartbroken at leaving his big-breasted first real girlfriend. But me? I was ready for anything. I knew that before we stopped for the night, I will have eaten in a coffee shop for the very first time. Before we stopped for the night, I will have travelled in four different states and seen four different types of street signs, four different types of traffic light, four different state patrol cars. And as we rolled past the snow-covered farms of Indiana and Illinois toward our first night ever in a motel somewhere across the Mississippi, my thoughts drifted to the new world in front of me. Was it all like Disneyland? Did everybody run up and down the beach carrying surfboards and chasing after Annette Funicello? Would the kids like me? And would my brother ever finish that first letter to the girl he'd never see again.

It was a long day's drive to St. Louis and I fell asleep somewhere in Illinois with the taste of my first coffee shop fried eggs still fresh on the taste buds of my drowsy mind. As I rubbed my eyes we were getting close to the Mississippi. I had never seen anything like it but had so many virtual images etched in my reading memory through an early fascination with Mark Twain. Even though it was nearing midnight, I thought that it must be warmer here. This was, after all, the beginnings of "the south", and as we crossed the river, the cigarette-tinged air from my dad's wind wing seemed almost balmy.

I fell asleep that night thinking of all that I had seen that day and how strange the voices of the newscasters on the motel TV sounded as they drawled my parents to sleep. Whatever tomorrow had to offer, I knew that my daily life would never be the same.

Falsetto Anyone?

I gave a great voice lesson today. It's one of my rules that every lesson must have an "aha" moment, a realization of some concept previously unknown. Normally the "aha" issues from the mouth of my victim...er, ah...student. Today, however, in attempting to explain the physical process called "Falsetto" by some and "Head Voice" by others, I simply was not making myself understood. I was pulling out all the stops, using every abstract image I could muster, and I was coming up short. And all at once, as I scribbled pictures on a legal pad..."AHA!" The fog lifted and the simplest, most logical explanation of my concept of the Falsetto fell together like a reverse film of a building implosion. And I owe it all to my girlfriend, the designer.

Well, I suppose a bit of explanation is in order. In very simple terms, we speak every day, in what I call the chest voice. That is also the register that is used for the bulk of singing in most cases, aside from the pure soprano voice. When we say "oopie doopie, what a cute little hootchie kootchie" to the neighbor's new tea-cup chihuahua in a little baby voice, chances are we are using the Head Voice or Falsetto. Increasing the range of the singing voice upward is a very misunderstood process and one which, if not done properly, can have disastrous results. The vocal mechanism is not something to be weightliftingly trained into submission.

If you can picture the vocal cords as parentheses, connected at the top and bottom, you have a rough idea of the physical form of the mechanism that vibrates to make sound in your throat. The gap between the parentheses is called the glottis and through this gap passes all of the air which comes from outside our bodies to fill the lungs. A fragile little machine but meant to last a lifetime. As we raise the pitch of a note, the vocal cords stretch like a rubber band and they vibrate faster. After a certain point, they simply won't stretch any further and the voice "breaks" or cracks and out comes the "how cute is your doggie" voice.

Extending the vocal range by trying to extend the lower voice higher, one note at a time, will not only be frustrating, but damaging as well. The only way to extend the upper register is to build the upper voice by patient, dilligent exercises after which exercises should be done that bring the upper voice down in pitch over the break. The goal is to build a voice that passes through the registers effortlessly and imperceptibly. only after extensively exercising the upper voice is this possible.

In explaining this concept to my student today, I saw that I was not making myself understood. None of my metaphors or picture drawing was making sense to her and I began to get bored with it myself. My mind drifted to my girlfriend, whose image is my default when my mind wanders. And then my thoughts drifted to a design she had been working on and how powerfully a slight graduation in color could affect a visual image...BAM...my "aha" moment.

I told my student to think of her lower voice, her chest voice, as being the color blue. And her upper voice, her head voice or falsetto, as being the color yellow. Now, what we had to do is strengthen the yellow voice and bring it down in pitch over the range of the blue voice until the entire voice would consist of slightly graduated shades of green. The lowest note she could sing would be pure blue, and the highest note she could sing would be pure yellow. But as she sang up or down the range of her voice, the color would change so impeceptibly that the break would no longer be obvious. My student was able to grasp the color-coded concept immediately and we were able to get a good start on what would be needed in the coming lessons to prepare and train her upper voice.

I don't know how exciting this is for the reader, but i'm nuts about having such a simple way to illustrate a confusing concept. And the best part of it is...it came to me as my mind drifted to images of a pretty girl. Ah...now that's education.

American Idol is not the Super Bowl

There is an interesting article in the Washington Post by Robin Ghivan this morning entitled, "We Get the Idols We Deserve" that tries to make sense of a senseless circumstance. I agree completely with the analysis put forth by the author, but I ask myself the question, "How is it that people sensible enough to use i-pods, drive cars, and come in out of the rain, can get caught up in the mystery that this injustice can exist in a world smiled upon by a benevolent god?"

I find comfort in the findings of my unofficial, "man-on-the-street", poll in which I asked the probing question, "Who won American Idol last year?" The results of my poll were as revealing as the empty spaces in a high-school graduate's job application. Quite simply put, nobody really knew who won last year...and I even went so far as to load the poll by asking primarily those people who I felt should know.

My first ringer was the guy in the cage at the pawn shop with his eyes fixed to the wall-mounted tv and his ass glued to a barstool that once said "Budweiser." He lied and said he didn't care, but did ask about my watch. I asked the lady up the street with the permanent, plastic-wrapped hair-curlers as she stood in her fuming house coat draining the yappy little fucker she calls "Reuben". Nope. Go figure. I asked the grocery checker with the orange hair, purple nail polish and quarter-horse ass that you KNOW has got to be beating the shit out of her sofa at least five hours a night. No Dice. I had to capitulate however, when I approached a teen-aged skater-punker type as he rolled out of the corner convenience store sucking on a "Huge Gulp" and wearing, of all things, a black T-shirt with the day-glo "American Idol" logo screaming from his bony chest. His answer to my poll question was, "What's that?...hey...hey, um, sir, can you buy some candy so I can go to camp and don't get into a gang?"

And this brings me to the title of this entry, "American Idol is not the Super Bowl." Who won the Super Bowl? The Steelers, Right? Why did they win? They scored more damn points than the other team! Who was the other team? Get's a little harder now, doesn't it? Who did you vote for to win "American Super Bowl?" Oh, you didn't get to vote? You mean that they decide that thing on who is actually better? That's not fair...is it?

I don't mourn the unforeseen expulsion of Chris Daughtry from American Idol. I'm more than certain that he has plenty of viable prospects to sift through in the very near future. I don't know for sure if he is as real as he seems to be, but he does give the impression of having real talent and knowing who he wants to be. And that is a strong start.

Now the remaining three? This is all they are ever going to have so give them a break, okay? And if any of the three were my child, I'd be wearing a dumb-ass T-shirt, waving a hand-painted, glittery sign and jumping up and down in the audience with the rest of them. My heartless and reality-based predictions are that one of them will be a finalist in the new reality show, "America's Next Top Shoe Salesman", one will get a job selling plastic statues of Wayne Newton in Branson, Missouri between auditions, and one will be seen in a tv spot for men's hair darkening products muttering, "Well... I hope THIS shit works." I'm sure that they are all really nice and I wish them all the best, but Idol-hood is not in their future.

But Chris? ...Don't worry about Chris. He'll be fine. Now that he's loose he can resume chasing his dream armed with a load of video showing him a lot of things that didn't work, and some that did. If Chris is to win the REAL competition, it will be because he's better.

Remember. American Idol is not the Super Bowl.

Intuition and Repetition in Education

Experience has taught me that teaching and learning are two sides of the same coin. Yin and Yang, plus and minus, hot and cold, whatever phrase best describes it to you, each requires the existence of the other for a meaningful exchange of information to occur. I associate learning with the process of correctly executing precise repetitions of a given exercise until muscle memory replaces conscious effort. I associate teaching with allowing my intuition to play a valid part in discovering or designing the most effective and most efficient exercises to be repeated.

Repetition requires a stubborn adherance to a sometimes painful regimen. Repetitive exercises may seem boring but a true student will work through this knowing that the skills he is seeking depend on following directions each step of the way. Allowing intuition a place in teaching requires the courage to admit that something I may think is brilliant has failed, and the imagination to look further and try something completely contrary to what I had thought to be most effective. Each student is unique and it is the teacher's responsibility to use every tool possible in providing the student the best opportunities for success.

My first formal teaching experience occured during my third year in college. I had no business teaching private voice at the community college level but there I was, at the piano, and there they were, looking to me for the key that would unlock the secret door of stardom, or in some cases, just matching pitch. As the only teacher on staff without credentials, I was assigned the most beginning of students. In retrospect, it was a blessing. Any auto mechanic can make any car run better just by changing spark plugs. My intuition told me to think along those lines and I learned quickly that too many wrenches under the hood will screw up the finest car, especially if all that it needed was spark plugs.

So I taught...and I learned. And what I learned was that most students are not in any way inspired to PRACTICE! Now, I don't care how much a teacher knows, there will be no inmprovement in technique if the student is not inspired to practice...and with a purpose. I knew that repetition had to come into play in a big way for my students to succeed. And all the impressive bullshit I could spew about "inter-costal diaphramatic breathing" and "glottal strokes" or "the arc of the soft palate" would not get them interested enough to reserve a practice room on their own. And so I resolved to find some way for each student, in each and every lesson, to achieve some breakthrough, no matter how large or small. I decided to take it upon myself to leave no stone unturned, to get to know every detail about each of the forty odd students thrust upon me by the learning mill, with the express idea of making tangible progress at some point during each lesson. And THAT...took intuition.

One student in particular comes to mind as a prime example of the interaction between intuition and repetition. "Mary" came into her first lesson with the score of the Italian art song "Tu Lo Sai" in her hands. She would be required to perform this song in her voice class in six week's time. Mary had a pretty soprano voice and the range of the song suited her very nicely. But mary had a problem...when she tried to pronounce "Tu lo sai", it came out as "too low thigh" and that's a problem better attended to with repetitive use of a stairmaster. My intuition told me that this was not a new issue with Mary, I was certain she was aware of her extremely pronounced lisp. So I very tactfully said to her, "Jesus Christ, Silvester, did you thaw a puddy tat?"

Well, that broke the ice and we went to work. Mary didn't come from money so she didn't have the benefit of a Beverly Hills speech therapist camping out in her house as a child. She did have some limited experience working with therapists but as she told the story, the work they did with her was not inspirational enough for her to work at it on her own so she just "got youth to it."I knew nothing at all about speech impediments but i was determined that we could do something if we could get past her resignation.

Every sound we make is the result of one or more pieces of meat in some way interacting with one or more other pieces of meat. I brought a mirror into the room and made an esss for Mary and asked her to observe, in the mirror, what parts of my mouth were involved in making that sound. She discovered that the esss was produced when air was released between the tip of the tongue and the roof of the mouth just above the teeth. Then I had Mary look in the mirror and think...just think at first, and then methodically and without making a sound, put the tip of her tongue just above the tooth line against the roof of her mouth. Then I asked her to let her tongue relax right where it was and gently exhale through her mouth. And out came the first esss Mary ever made!

After intuition helped us to identify the cause and the remedy of the impediment, Mary and I invented a series of repetitive exercises which isolated and trained her muscles to remember what to do. It was a real victory for both of us when she sang "Tu Lo Sai" flawlessly in her voice class.

Intuition and repetition, no matter how the coin lands, you win every time.

My Favorite Guitar

My favorite guitar is a Fender Mark Knopfler Signature Stratocaster. I love this guitar for two reasons. For starters, she is just a fantastic guitar not only to play but to look at and admire, and I'll get into that in a moment. But what makes her so very special to me is that she was placed into my care by Mark as a "thank you" for the small part I played in support of the SHANGRI LA album.

Electric bass is my weapon of accomplishment but I've always had a few guitars around for writing and teaching. On a more sensual level, there are some guitars which pay their way just by being beautiful to look at and touch in ways that result in wonderful noises. This is what my '62 P-bass and my first girlfriend once had in common. After forty-some years, the bass is sexy as ever and still makes wonderful noises when I touch her just right. I can't say with any certainty, but I'd hazard a guess that the old girlfriend hasn't aged as well.

Everyone has a favorite "the one that got away" story. My stories tend to fall more into the "Pete, you are a friggin' idiot" category. I once bought a "63 strat for $75.00 and decided it was ugly, so I sold it and made fifty bucks! Now this was in the early seventies and fifty bucks kept me alive for a week so it was cool...I thought. It was ugly to me because of the color. I found out later that Inca Silver is a rare color and had I put that rare bastard into the the case and under the bed, well...it would be worth two or three of my cars now. Everytime I think about it I imagine a big pie hitting me in the face.

I could write all day and into the night...into many nights, about my knuckleheadedness but let me get back to my favorite guitar. MK arrived at Shangri La the evening before we were to load in the instruments and digital recording gear. Some days before, I had taken delivery of the fourteen guitars which he planned to use for the album. We spent the evening unpacking his guitars to get them aclimatized to the Malibu air. Mark proved to be a true guitar junkie and we spent a most enjoyable evening fawning over each of the instruments as we set them free of the flight cases and let them run loose in what would be their home for the next five weeks.

One of the guitars that Mark is known for is a "frankenstrat" which, to my knowledge, is a '59 red Fender Stratocaster with a '61 neck with a rosewood fretboard. This guitar, with the middle and bridge position pick ups out of phase, was the sound heard on "Sultans Of Swing." Fender now markets The Mark Knopfler Signature Strat and I was surprised to find that both Mark and Richard Bennett play these guitars on stage and in the studio just as they come from the factory. I admired the guitar and told Mark that it seemed like an instrument worth having and that I would look into getting one for the studio.

The weeks spent recording the album are another story but it must be said that a good time was had by all concerned. About a week after the circus left town, a guitar was delivered, addressed to Mark, in care of Shangri La Studio. I emailed Mark's tech in London and asked what was to be done with it and when the answer came, so did I. The guitar was no longer an anonymous "it" but a "she"...and she belonged to me!

In describing the manufacture of the guitar, Mark had told me that he thought Fender had done an excellent job of reproducing his original Strat. As I had played both Richard's and Mark's guitars, I had to agree but these guitars were in the hands of world-class musicians and I suspected that they were handmade at the factory especially for them. I was surprised to find that this was not the case at all and that my new Strat was a spectacular instrument right out of the box. The first thing that impressed me was the finish which is a bright, hot-rod red nitrocellulose lacquer and absolutely flawless. The use of nitrocellulose insures that the guitar will age beautifully and actually sound better as the years pass. Her first impression simply knocks your eyes out. The neck is also finished in the old school lacquer with a beautiful, aged amber tint. The grain of the rosewood fretboard is vey straght and runs the length of the neck with no run-out. This is not only visually attractive but will contribute to years of stability.

I always judge the musical voice of an electric guitar un-plugged. When I play a guitar without amplification, I can hear and feel how the wood reacts to string vibration. Some guitars "speak" more clearly than others and there was an unmistakable similarity between the Signature Strats used on the session and my newly arrived beauty. There was a pronounced consistancy in these instruments that speaks very highly of Fender's quality control. But what impresses me is that when I have this girl in my hands, all the techno talk melts away and I'm left with a guitar that feels like she was handmade only for me.

Mark once said to me, "A beautiful guitar will be a friend to you for a lifetime." I am in love with this guitar. It is a Mark Knopfler Signature Stratocaster.

I Said "Fuck" to a Nun

As promised, here is the story of how I said "fuck" to a nun...when I was six years old. If you had an opportunity to read my previous entry, you will know all about my foreign background and the difficulties which I faced fitting into my new life in America as a non-English speaking youngster.

I attended first grade at St. Procop Catholic School in beautiful Cleveland, Ohio. I will never forget the first day of school when my father held my hand and walked me to the yellow brick penitentary on Clark Ave. When we arrived at my new classroon, he delivered me to Sister Bonaventura and told he that if I became in any way troublesome, they could treat me as their own and give me a good beating. NICE! This was still in the days of what some people describe as flowing robes and pure, white habits. To a six year old, what the nuns wore was fucking scary. Long, black robes that smelled of incense and old lady butt! With a menacing cross hanging on a rope belt that I was certain was intended to inflict exquisite pain in the right hands. And the white thing around the face? Well imagine the expression on Dick the Bruiser's face if BoBo Brazil had him in a headlock and you'll understand why the nuns scared the shit out of me.

Sister Bonaventura was the prototypical scary nun with her chafed, red jowl meat bursting out of the sides of that habit and the wooden ruler stuck into her rope belt the way kids wear toy swords when they play pirate. If we fucked up in any of a hundred ways, she would make us hold our hand up with our finger tips together and smack the goddamn fingerprints right off. Ah...Sister Bonaventura...I hate that bitch like it was yesterday...but back to the point.

By the time I started first grade, my English was beginning to come around. Although we spoke only German at home, I had made some friends and was doing well enough in school to stay in class with my own age group.My older brother was in the fourth grade and was helping me to learn some of phrases that would be more useful in interacting with my new playmates. Many of these phrases find their way into my vocabulary even now.

My latest linguistic accomplishment had been the pronounciation of the word "fuck", as in "fuck you" or used as an adjective to modify a word with particular emphasis, as in "Jesus, just take a whiff of that fucking nun!" You get the idea. We practiced secretly at night in our shared bedroom. He even made an attempt at explaining the meaning of the word by describing some sort of ritual consisting of a man peeing in a lady's butt.

While rough-housing on the asphalt playground one afternoon during recess, a second-grader named Joey was bullying the first-graders mercilessly and I decided to put him in his place after he had made me his target. I gathered myself and in my very best English, I told him to "keep his fucking hands off me!" He stopped dead in his tracks, pointed his finger at me and said "ooooooh, you said a bad word." Second-graders are not known for snappy comebacks, so I came back with "fuck you Joey!" This was starting to draw a crowd and may have actually been the beginning of my career in public as well as my career as a filthy talker. Joey told everyone that I had said a dirty word and vowed to tell Sister Bonaventura. To which I replied, "go ahead and tell Sister Bonaventura...fucker." He did.

A minute later the hag stomped over to me in those scary, black, big-heeled shoes and with that smell, dragging Joey by the upper arm and asked me to repeat what I had said to Joey. Proud as i was of my English, I did just that...and got the back of her hand, with the wedding ring of our mercifull Lord, smack across my face. Then she asked me if I knew what that word meant. Not aware that this may be a trick question, and still thinking that I could redeem whatever transgression I had commited by answering promptly and in English, I recounted the "man peeing in the lady's butt" explanation which my brother had furnished. Wham! Turn the other cheek my ass!

By the time I got home from school, the hag had called my mom who, still being afraid to speak on the phone, had promised to have my dad call her when he got home from work. My dad, fresh from a 10 hour shift working at a metal lathe, dialed the phone, listened for a moment, then asked me to tell him what I had said to Joey at school. I did and...whack! Another backhand heard from. My mom had no idea what the fuck was going on but when my dad explained the whole thing she went red, then white, then red again and then she went...whack! I was beginning to wonder if it was worth learning English after all. After things settled down a bit, they got me to tell them where i had learned these words. At least my brother knew what the whacks were for. Now, if you remember, my brother and I shared a room so you know what happened next.

So, the moral of the story is, if you have a little brother, teach him how to say "fuck" and you may get smacked, but he'll get his first and it'll be fun. Oh, and the other moral is, I don't know about now, because I won't go near one. But when I was a kid and nuns walked the earth in full regalia...they didn't smell good.

Immigrant Childhood Trauma

My family came to the United States from europe when I was three-and-a-half years old. My father had seen enough. He had survived service on a German u-boat, spent six momths in a British P.O.W. camp, started a family in the midst of the socio-economic turmoil that was post-war Austria, and something told him that we might be better off in the country that had just kicked everyone's ass. And so, with a wife, two boys and fifty dollars in his pocket, we set off on an adventure entailing a train ride to Bremerhaven, twelve days on a converted troop carrier and a bus trip from New York to Cleveland.

Second and third generation immigrants can be quite judgemental when newly arrived immigrants speak their mother tongue, cook the food to which they are accustomed, wear strange clothes and join church congregations or social clubs made up of ethnically familiar faces. Relocating in a strange country is not magic. You don't get off the boat speaking flawless english, holding a box of Hamburger Helper in one hand, an Eddie Bauer catalogue in the other, and asking around for the nearest Rotarian's meeting. Blending in can be traumatic...and good for some laughs as well.

I had my share of "what's wrong with that immigrant kid" experiences. Before I started attending school, my life was exactly as it had been before the move. I played with the same toys and looked at the same picture books, and aside from a bit of teasing from the neighborhood kids who ran the alley behind the house, I was fine. Then I started Kindergarten and it all changed...fast.

My biggest problem was that I didn't speak English. This deficit made itself painfully apparent during my first week at Sackett Ave. Elementary school. Twice a day we were led, single file, to the rest room. I learned by observation that this was where they kept the toilets. One morning, my oatmeal was in a particular hurry, but class hadn't started yet and my teacher wasn't there to lead us, single file, to that porcelain oasis. I went on my own and stood outside the green door of salvation, my bowels in advanced cramps, and waiting the patient wait of a scared little kid accustomed to mindless regimentation. I didn't dare go through that door unless I was led to it, single file, by my teacher, Miss Curtain. So...i stood there,,,and shit my new school pants!

Well, I'll never know how they found out, but they called my mother on the telephone which was an instrument of horror in her mind as she spoke less english than I, having just learned from my classmates that "pee-yoo" is English for "who shit their pants?" They told my mom that "Peter soiled himself" so she thought I had dirtied my clothes (which was the case to a degree). When she got to school and learned what had happened, she was mortified. SHE was embarassed! I was standing in a brand new pair of shit-filled school pants, in an office full of strangers, and SHE was embarassed. The long walk home was my private death march. I couldn't help walking stiff-legged and with my feet as far apart as I could manage. But my mom insisted that I walk as normally as possible. She didn't want to be known as that foreign lady with the foreign kid that shits his pants. At one point, I was striding wide and she forgot herself and smacked me on the ass. That was extra nice for both of us. Right then and there I promised myself that I would never shit my pants in school again. And I kept that promise clear into college...

The point is, Being a non-English speaking five year old with a pantload of former oatmeal in a strange land can be traumatic when you're trying to make a good impression. And if you think that was tough, tomorrow I'll tell you about the time I said "fuck" to a Nun...in first grade.

I Don't Believe In The Supernatural

I don't believe in the supernatural. I don't believe in ghosts and spirits, good or evil. I think readers of minds, palms, tarot cards and tea leaves should be licenced with the Better Business Bureau after they've proven their skills at the race track, the Big Spin or the New York Stock Exchange. I spent the better part of the summer between second and third grade obediently following the instructions of Sister Veronica of St. Ambrose Catholic School in Cleveland, Ohio, praying for roller skates to no avail. To say that whatever "faith" I have is based solely on empirical evidence is a vast understatement of the facts.

Having said all of this, I had an experience the intensity of which would have convinced a weaker soul than mine of the likelihood that supernatural or paranormal forces are at work in our lives. In the summer of 1976 I had a dream of such vivid character that I remember every detail even now, many years later. That dream came back to me, in all its vividness as to colors, textures, sights, smells and sounds at what may well have been a critical moment four years later.

In 1980 I was playing around Southern California in a club/dance band. I had traded an old Rambler wagon for a '68 Olds Cutlass that looked like hell but went really fast. One of my band-mates and I switched off driving to the club. This particular night, it was my turn to drive, and after the gig my band-mate, Ivan and I were packing up and making our way to the door. Just as I was walking away from the building, Ivan called out to me from the doorway and asked if we could give a lift to a guy that had been at the bar most of the night. He lived in North Hollywood, which was on our way, so I told him to have the guy meet us at the car and it wouln't be a problem. As I opened the trunk lid, Ivan and our passenger rounded the rear fender of the car. I couldn't put my finger on it but something about this guy made me feel as if someone had dropped an ice-cube down the back of my pants. We shook hands and made small talk while we loaded up our instruments and as we were opening the car doors, the guy asked if it wouldn't be to much trouble to give his friend a ride as well. I nodded okay, and his friend came out of the darkness between the buildings toward the car. The moment I saw this "friend", a shudder of absolute fear shot through me the likes of which I had never experienced...EVER. I shouted to Ivan to get in the car, NOW, and screamed out of the parking lot in a cloud of blue burning rubber, leaving our two riders to fend for themselves.

I didn't say a word until I had reached the freeway on ramp. Ivan's eyes went from the white knuckles on my steering wheel to the road speeding by and back again, wondering just what he hell had just happened. by the time we were half the way home, I told Ivan the story of the dream I had four years earlier.

In my dream, I was driving the long stretch of highway which follows the Platte river across the state of Nebraska. I saw a hitch-hiker at the side of the road and pulled over to give him a ride and to have some company. He was of medium size and very fit, wearing engineer boots, jeans, and a white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled into one of his shirt sleeves. Across his other arm he was carrying a brown leather bomber jacket. As I rolled down the passenger window to ask him how far he was going, he looked into the car and smiled crookedly. I noticed that he had the kind of brown teeth you only find in a Midwest tobacco-chewing farmboy type. He started to open the car door and, pointing past my head, he asked if we could also give his buddy a lift. I turned toward my left and saw an older, white-haired and unshaven guy in jeans and a sweaty undershirt grinning at me and holding a shotgun to my chest from outside my car window. I stepped into the gas pedal and sped off, waking from my dream in a sweat.

As I told my dream to Ivan, describing every detail in the appearance of the two hitchhikers, it became clear to him that I was also describing the two guys we were going to take to North Hollywood earlier, because they were dead-ringers right to the stained shirts and teeth. My heart was still pounding when I finally pulled into my driveway.

I have no rational explanation for the events of that night. All that I do know is that it happened... and it scared the shit out of me.

My First Band

My first band was called "The Blue Bathtub." At least this was the first band I was in that made money. I was in the eighth grade and had played around the neighborhood with all the guys that had electric guitars, garages and parents who were either deaf or on the back patio, looking for solutions to the world's problems in the bottom of a rocks glass. I played bass on a Teisco Del Rey copy of a 335 with heavy, flatwound strings tuned down as far as they would go. My pal, Don, got to play lead guitar because he had a Kalamazoo amp...with REVERB! I remember walking into his garage one day, it was a week before Christmas, and he was sitting on the top rung of a paint ladder with his guitar cord disappearing into a gift-wrapped box hidden in the rafters where his parents had stashed it. He grinned and whispered, "Reverb!"

There was a high school kid who lived up the street called Dave. He had a sister that let us...oops, wrong story...he had a blond Fender Bassman and an Old Kraftsman short-scale bass and that shit changed everything. Dave wasn't a dropout, he just didn't like to go to school. I would go to his house after basketball practice and he would be sitting next to the radio, playing along with everything. I mean everything, every song, every commercial, every news bump...everything. When I think about all the phrase samplers and tempo slower-downers you can get now to help you learn solos, and all old Dave used was his ears. What a concept.

Every once in a while, Dave would let me borrow his amp and bass for band practice. I would take my skateboard to his house and with the bass slung over my shoulder, I'd put the amp on the skateboard and try to get to Don's house without dumping everything into someones ivy. Don's mom worked late as a waitress at an all night coffee shop and she slept into the late afternoon, which is why we couldn't practice in Don's garage but which also made it perfectly plausible for us to think that his mom really would let us use her car if she were awake for us to ask. Don was just fourteen but had the keys and the balls to use them. So we would load up his Kalamazoo, the Bassman, and Fat Mitch with his drums. Fat Mitch couldn't play that well, but he was the only guy on the block with a real drum-kit, which was enough to pass the audition.

The car was a powder blue Ford Falcon station wagon and we would drive up to Harrison Elementary school, pass the amps over the 10 foot high chain-link fence, plug in and practice on the outdoor lunch area until dark.We played "We Gotta Get Outta This Place", "Shapes Of Things", "House of the Rising Sun" and about five other songs. After practice, we'd boost the gear back over the fence, load up and get the car back before Don's mom had to leave for work. Every once in awhile that crazy bastard would have a hair up his ass and would cut across the grass ball-field spinning dough-nuts in that old Falcon, gear sliding around in the back and all of us laughing our asses off.

At some point, Don and I discovered the Blues scale and we became a Blues band. It was so much easier than learning all those songs. Fat Mitch learned how to play a shuffle, and we just played a twelve bar, sang some bullshit we made up on the spot, and thought we were heavy enough to have a name. That was the birth of "The Blue Bathtub."

There was this rich girl in our school who lived up on the hill above our neighborhood (isn't there always). Her dad was letting her throw a barbeque birthday party. We were loud, somewhat avant garde and poor. Just what she was looking for to piss off her dad, so we got the gig. At the end of the party, she gave each of us a five dollar bill. Man, I was hooked for life! In one night we became professional musicians in every sense of the word. We played music, ate their food, tried to make out with the rich girls... and got paid.

Later in the year Fat Mitch thought it would be smart to stick his head in a bag of airplane glue fumes. His shoes disappearing into the back of the ambulance were the last I saw of him. Don got into motorcycles and the Kalamazoo went back up into the rafters. I started to think I had a shot at playing some real hoops, and that was the end of my first band. But everytime I see the the black and white photos that Astrid Kirscher shot of the young Beatles in Hamburg, it hits me that no matter how much fun it gets to be, it's never as much fun as the first time.

Bernoulli, Doppler and Natural Vibrato

A number of students have asked me to teach them how to "belt". Apparently, belting is a term having to do with singing musical theater songs in keys that are just high enough to make listening painfully impossible to avoid at any distance. I call it by it's true name, "yelling" and explain that the range of a voice is measured in octaves and intervals and not in yards. The singers who attempt this sort of material without the proper background usually have a mistaken concept about volume, and horrifying breathing technique not unlike the forced wheeze of an old accordian...well hell, a new accordian for that matter. I'm not bad-rapping accordians, but they aren't a good mechanical example on which to model any sort of vocal technique. But the one vocal characteristic which forces me to make damn sure the dairy products are properly stowed in the refrigerator before the "belting" begins is the vibrato. It is too wide, too slow, too fast, flat or sharp. It is always conspicuous but never pleasing, It is a widely misunderstood thing, this vibrato, and it will turn a three minute song into an hour at the metal shop if it isn't atended to.

True vibrato is a shimmer, a patina on the voice, nothing more. True, a vibrato can be manipulated for effect, but this should be a matter of choice and not a lack of technique. Skeptic that I am, and trusting my instinct, I've come to believe that true, natural vibrato is the result of the Bernoulli effect and the Doppler effect as they occur within the singer's throat. Yeah, this may get real boring, but this is the shit that keeps me up at night when TNT runs out of "Law and Order" re-runs.

Now, the Bernoulli effect is what keeps airplanes in the air. Very simply, if you blow air across a surface, the surface will be pulled toward the flow of air. You can demonstrate this by holding a small piece of paper as if you were going to give yourself a paper cut across your lower lip. Now blow. the paper will rise and be pulled into the air flow. Think of your vocal cords as two pieces of paper facing each other. When an air flow is passed through the gap, the cords are pulled into the flow and toward each other. the natural tension on these opposing membranes pulls them back, away from the flow. This is called "Phonation" and when this cycle of events occurs 440 times per second, the note "A" is produced.

The Doppler effect is best illustrated as that thing that happens when a train goes by and the "ding ding ding" get's higher in pitch as the train approaches and lower in pitch as the train gets farther away. If Phonation occurs in a relaxed throat, with no undue tension , the Doppler effect will come into play and cause the vibrato, or shimmer. The vocal cords, being pulled toward each other into the airflow, are also being pushed by the flow ever so slightly up, toward the mouth. Being the delicate membranes that they are, and being under tension, they fight that tension and relax back, away from the mouth. This tension and relaxation cycle shifts the point of phonation closer then further from the mouth and again, given a relaxed throat, this shift back and forth creates a regular, almost imperceptible modulation in pitch and intesity which we know as the vibrato.

A masterful singer can manipulate the tension to make the vibrato more pronounced or disappear completely. Check out Joni Mitchell on the "Miles of Aisles" album. At the end of "Love or Money" she slowly takes the vibrato out of the last note to match Tom Scott's saxophone...brilliant detail.

Well, that's my rant of the day, Sometime soon, I'll try to explain the whole inter-costal, diaphramatic breathing thing. In the meantime, ask a lot of questions, and remember that it's always simpler than it seems. Cheers.

VocalTtraining

I have have had the enormous fortune of making my living in music for my entire adult life... well, up to this point anyway. In that time, i've worn many hats and one that I enjoy very much is teaching vocal production both privately and in group settings. I started my education by taking traditional approach but accross the years, I've drawn information and inspiration from a wide variety of sources, some coming from quite unexpected areas not normally associated with music in general or vocal culture in particular. Some of these "influences" will have to remain nameless for reasons which will become evident as this entry progresses.

When I was seventeen, I studied with a pompous ass with a big name and as much business teaching voice as an organ grinder's monkey. his "technical exercises" screwed up my technique so badly I couldn't make a sound for nearly three months. Looking back, I am thankful because that experience started me on the path of true skepticism. From that day forward, I made a vow to myself to assume nothing, ask questions, demand answers that I could understand and never to think that my education had been completed.

After my throat had recovered, I began a journey of vocal discovery with a teacher who had a genius for building the singing voice as well as the confidence to use it. He introduced me to a little book by Anthony Frissel entitled simply, "Tenor Voice." I loaned my copy to a student years ago and it was never returned but that student has since become a teacher himself so it went to a good cause. The book explains the "lift" and "break" and how to properly train the voice as one seamless register from top to bottom. An absolute must read for any student of vocal culture.

Some of my more off-the-wall inspirations come from the writings of Buckminster Fuller, from which i adopted the concept that inspiration is every bit as valid as data. Everyone is different and using your mind instead of your brain can be a key process in problem solving. Sometimes a student comes to a teacher wih a vocal problem and many teachers can only teach what they know. Being willing to think outside the traditional pedagogy is extremely vital when working with singers, especially professionals in the music business today. A teacher or vocal coach can't possibly think they are acting in the best interests of an established professional by attempting to change the singer's technique into something the teacher can understand.

I do have two criticisms of the way singing is taught or in many cases, not taught today. The first is a question of relevance. Singing is or should be communication. A singer could have the most cultured, flawless technique, and still communicate nothing to an audience on an emotional level. Peter Pears and John McCormack were amazing technicians. Joe Cocker and Van Morrison are not. All four are great singers. It would be a grave error to press the technique of the former on a singer who seeks a career in the arena of the latter.

My second peeve has to do with co-dependance. My first words to a new student are usually "Someday, you won't need old Pete anymore. And when that day arrives, we will know that we've been successful." Too many times I find that before coming to me, a singer may have been studying with another perhaps much more reputable teacher for six months to a year, and have no clue as to the mechanics of their instrument. That's just not right. If a singer has no talent, a teacher should recognize that and steer the poor thing toward a career in auto repair. And if the student isn't motivated to practice, that is the teacher's fault as well. A teacher should inspire and instill a hunger for learning in a student. But in many cases, a teacher may be dependent on the income from teaching and this can easily generate a co-dependent relationship which results in less than successful results.

I love to teach. And I love to learn. I'll never stop doing either.

"If you know I was there, I did a shitty job"

Some years ago, I played bass on a blues project led by a guitar player and songwriter named Jamie. As Jamie and I were both complete guitar junkies, we became friends right off jump street. We don't see one another or play together nearly as much as we would like, but we stay in touch and consider each other brother-in-arms. Now brother Jamie is a bad motherfucker in a lot of ways, which is to say that he is a multi-talented, multi-faceted individual.

Jamie Plays with more pure heart than anyone I've ever personally witnessed. He'll strap on that red 355 (the one that played the single note tremolo part on " For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield) and get up on his hind legs and just let you HAVE it right between the eyes with that one note that pokes you dead center in your third eye. But that's how Jamie does everything, all heart man, all heart.

One thing that Jamie does the absolute shit out of is fix guitars, I mean, the man can make or fix nearly anything, but guitars...forget about it. He's pulled my nuts from the anvil plenty of times with just a phone call. I'll get him on the phone and start stressing out about some '54 Strat with a noisy whammy bar or a neck that just won't sit right and in that Yosemite Sam voice of his he'll laugh and tell me what kind of chewing gum or rubber band to use and he's always got the cure.

I saw a neck repair of his once that was IN-Friggin-VISIBLE! It was a mahogany neck Les Paul that had been stepped on or fell out of a car or something, and the headstock off. It was a nasty, ragged break too. Well, Jamie, smart bastard that he is, took his ass to the library and studied up on orthapaedic surgury. He went to a machine shop and milled himself some stainless steel splints and chiseled extremely precise channels in the area to be spliced.The killer though was the way he comouflaged the repair. First he matched and mated every wood fiber possible on that ragged break. With the steel splints in place, he glued and clamped the pieces together. There were still little mahogany fibers sticking out everywhere so there was going to be some woodwork to do. After sanding the glue joint and cleaning up the area, Jamie carved slivers of mahogany to do the fill-ins, carefully lining up the tiny wood grains. After color matching the stain and before shooting a final coat of lacquer, Jamie put a piece of wax paper on some mahogany and heated it with a hair dryer which transferred the grain to the paper. Then, using the paper as a pattern, he used a cat whisker as a brush and painted each grain marking on to the neck repair. It was amazing! absolutely seamless, invisible and structurally sound.

Now I know this might be a boring blog entry for some of you, but this kind of stuff really blows up my dress. Sometime I'll have to write about what happened when Jamie took David Lindley's lap steel pick-up out and it disintegrated. It was insane but that's for another time. But now you know why Jamie's motto is "If you know I was there, then I did a shitty job."

Immigration

Monday, May 1st 2006 will be a day of...what? Protest? Celebration? Boycott? Will it be a day to be remembered for strides made in the brotherhood of the many cultures who dream the American dream? Or will all hell break loose as a primarily Latino throng takes to the streets of cities across the country, seeking recognition for the contributions made by immigrants to society. These are not simple questions, and there are no simple answers. The reason that simplicity can find no foothold in this discussion is quite simple however. RHETORIC, spelled o-b-f-u-s-c-a-t-i-n-g-b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t.

I... am an immigrant. My parents are Immigrants, my aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and most of their friends who had any sense were also immigrants. Now what could have been the cause of my family's mass migration to America? Well, as far as I've been able to find out in my research, as much as everybody loved the "homeland" on an emotional level, there weren't any jobs, there wasn't any food, and life had reached a level of intolerability that made immigration the only viable option. And I believe that any human being faced with such dire circumstances, and deciding NOT to do everything possible to ensure that their children and old ones have a roof, a bed, food and a future, is a coward. PERIOD. And personally, I could give a damn about "legal" or "illegal" when it comes to immigration. I happen to be legal, but if my family needed what they got "over there", than goddammit, that's where I'd go. And so would you. Let's never forget that we are talking about people.

The rhetoric, which comes at us from all sides, intends to take our focus off of the real issues. The real "illegal" immigrants are the huge multi-national corporations that take as much as they can, from whomever they can, wherever they can. The governments of the world powers want us to think that things such as borders, passports and visas are real and necessary. They whip us into an emotional frenzy by equating patriotism with belief in a god who has no place in the boardroom. Do you seriously think, even for one second, that Exxon-Mobile, Halliburton or Cargill gives a rats ass about patriotism? Shit! I would guess you could populate a small Central American country with all the so-called "illegal" immigrants working as domestics in the households that make up the bulk of those companies.

Let me set the record straight. Am I in favor of over-crowded schools? NO. Do I think it's a good idea to give instant health benefits away to recent immigrants while the elderly are completely fucked by their bullshit healthcare providers? NO. Am I in favor of foreign criminals finding fertile ground for their activities in this country? Of course not. But schools are overcrowded, under-staffed and under-equipped for well-documented reasons other than immigration, legal or otherwise. Healthcare in this country is in an appalling state of affairs independent of immigration. And criminals do what they do because those we pay to protect us from them aren't doing a very good job. Muhammad Atta wasn't some disenchanted loner who found himself suddenly behind the wheel of a jet liner. He was convicted for blowing up an Israeli bus in 1986, was serving time and with U.S. intervention, set free. Again, the people we pay to protect us didn't do their job. Personally, I don't lay awake at night, worried that a disenchanted Salvadoran will crash a Cessna into stack of strawberry palettes up in Oxnard.

Yes, there are major issues concerning immigration and documentation in this country. But I am a skeptic when the rhetoric requires waders. When I remember what my father did for us in bringing us here, and why, I can't help feeling that these issues have faces, real human faces, with the same hopes and dreams we all share. I...am an immigrant.

American Idle, or Fame Means Never Saying You're Sorry

Training is everything. To paraphrase Mark Twain, "A cauliflower is just a cabbage with an education." Last night, I watched "American Idol". The title of this entry is mis-spelled intentionally to make a point. I think that we have reached a stage in popular entertainment where a bushel of tinsel, a few shiny ornaments and a pile of blinking lights tossed onto a hat-rack can be admired as if it were a real Christmas tree, complete with the obligatory oohs and ahs. Is anyone paying attention to the fact that we as an audience are being entertained by flashing lights and shiny things?

This week's Guest artist was Andrea Bocelli. The popular Italian tenor is nearly single-handedly keeping alive the art of actual singing on the infertile desert plain of the music-buying ear. How it came to pass that we didn't witness sextet su-idol-cide after his vocal performance escapes my understanding. Instead, we saw a group of potentially talented yet obviously un-seasoned, in some cases horribly under-trained and painfully unaware individuals hugging and slapping high-fives as if there existed some rag of an idea that this was common ground. It is as if the beer boy leaped out of the stands, grabbed the ball and declared, "Move over Kobe, this is how we do it in Madison Square Driveway!"

If an individual is born with a gift, and that gift is recognized, encouraged and educated, that individual may someday be deemed to have "talent." And if that talent is combined with hard work, determination to excel and the focus of a strong will, that talent my find itself worthy of public display. Education and hard work, pursued by a moderately gifted individual will always have genuine and lasting results. An individual of a more gifted nature who bypasses hard work and education and is lured by tinsel and shiny lights, may truly believe those who call him a Christmas tree. But when the lights go out and the tinsel falls to the floor...well, the public is cruel. And nobody will pay the price of admission for very long just to see a hat-rack.

Learn something, work hard and practice. Not everyone gets to be famous.