No online store?

Well, I tried out the online store with the shirts and the posters, a fun little venture for the past few years, but the novelty passed (not to mention the hassle of dealing with tax filings & stuff), so I’ve closed down the Internet store. I still have plenty of guitar lesson shirts and posters available, but most of my sales are done through my private music lessons now. Anyone outside of Novato want one? Email me and we can work it out through Paypal.

If you’re a non-profit based in Novato I might also be interested in donating some quality goods to your auctions or raffles.

BTW, if you Google “rhythm guitar poster” you can get a good look at the poster and features. Or you can click About Keith & This Blog.

KGO Fires Burns, Gross, Rothmann, etc.

Seriously bummed out that Cumulus Media has fired a bunch of my favorite talk show hosts on KGO.

I listen to Gil Gross on my lunch break.

Driving into SF for various things I listen to Gene Burns.

Driving home from those events I listen to John Rothmann, who helped me fall asleep many nights (after I got home, of course).

These guys have taught me things for ten years. They help me see other perspectives besides my own, often through letting their callers express their own views freely.

So they’re being replaced with new talk show hosts? Nope…KGO is extending the news feed through their time slots. Oh, boy! So they’re going to expand the seven minute news bits they normally reserve for the top and bottom of the hour to 14+ hours a day.

Could Cumulus make a more arrogant, misguided decision? KGO was number 1 for almost 30 years, only slipping recently. How about tweaking the formula instead of destroying it? KGO is a unique voice in the Bay Area. Sure, it’s cool to catch a syndicated cat like Limbaugh* or whoever, but Bay Area radio folks talking about Bay Area issues…these people were like family to me.

I know it’s just a radio station, but it feels like an evil force just kicked my family to the curb.

I hit up CNN.com when I need a minute or two of headlines. No interest in getting the same thing from KGO.

 

*I give both lefties and righties airtime on my dial. Try it sometime.

Sutter Health and my $3790 kidney stone

Ah, the health care industry. The love just keeps coming…

I got my first kidney stone several months ago. A big one. Had to spend several hours in the hospital getting GOOD drugs because the initial Vicodin the doc sent me home with didn’t help with the alternating stone movements and vomiting. Definitely appreciated the help at the time and knew I’d have some out of pocket expenses in this visit despite my health insurance.

I expected it to be around $16,000 charged. How much of that would I have to pay…praying for a low number…praying it’s something my meager guitar teacher salary can handle…

Four separate bills totaling $3790.

At the time I was averaging around $3000 a month from my teaching job, a number that was dropping because the corrupt music store owner where I was teaching was sending all new students to his favorite teacher…favorite because he put the guy on a salary and kept a huge part of his profits instead of charging him rent like the rest of us. Then there’s the other mountain of debt that builds up through usual life stuff.

I apply for financial assistance from Sutter Health, send in a fat envelope of paperwork detailing how I haven’t had a vacation in years, my car is ten years old, my 30-year-old countertops are being held together with packing tape…which I suppose I was happy to give up the night I had a stone traveling through me.

In the six months of waiting for a response to my FA request I was forced into a retail job, the situation with corrupt store owner unbearable. SERIOUS pay cut, dealing with commission and all that. So when I finally get my rejection letter last week it’s pointless because my financial situation actually got WORSE in the time after I submitted my request.

But in the form letter they sent I realize the whole effort was pointless. In the five boxes available to check off as reasons for rejection the following was checked off: Property/Assets exceed Novato Hospital’s guidelines.

Surely they’re not referring to my condo…which is deeply underwater? Or my lone rental property, which breaks even every month and would leave me with some pocket change after the real estate agent and IRS took their cut of my selling it?

Then I see articles like this one at SF Gate. YES, doctors and nurses should be paid well for their services…as I appreciated first hand with my kidney stone. But while $3790 is a drop in the bucket to them, it’s the universe to my currently $2000/month, most of that paying the mortgage and bills. How am I supposed to pay $3800? Oh…I can pay it off in a year, split over 12 monthly payments! How generous…except I was originally told it could be paid over 18 months. But no, it now had to be 12 months!

I explained my current job situation and how some months that might be workable and other months it certainly wouldn’t, meaning they would damage my frail credit sending it into collections. It took a day making phone calls to various offices to get it back to that 18 months. Whoopie.

Part of me has this horrible wish that hospital administrations and health insurance officials were struck with horrible diseases and cancer to understand the financial prisons they put us in. But I’m guessing said people have fantastic coverage that pays for everything, so there wouldn’t be any light bulb of compassion. Just the usual, “I got mine, now you pay for yours.”

What next? I’m on the verge of needing dental work, crowns, root canals. I was supposed to get yearly freckle exams because I’m seriously white and need to keep an eye on the moles & stuff. But each one they find suspicious needs to be removed and biopsied…the last time that happened I was out $600. Don’t have it, credit is dangerously close to maxing out

They should have warned me about this stuff when I was pursuing my Film Studies degree.

Mixolydian Jams & Chord Progressions for Guitar

Home sick, getting in a little extra practice time. Specifically, the Mixolydian mode because I have a student asking about it.

Not going to get into the theory behind WHAT Mixolydian is because you can Google that info a million different ways. Just wanted to throw out a few things I found helpful. For starters, this cool jam track…

Modes can be a pain in the butt to finesse. If your chord progressions get too elaborate your leads will end up sounding more like the parent key (say, A major/Ionian when you’re trying to play E Mixolydian). But who wants to jam on a single dominant 7th chord for an entire song or even a solo section? Then again, compelling melodies and harmonies can be that simple, so you might as well start there.

Got a handle on your diatonic harmony/major & minor chord scales? Here’s the chord scale for Mixolydian:

I-ii-iiidim-IV-v-vi-bVII

I like to make the I chord a dominant 7th much of the time. Or you could go jazz and make anything a 7th chord…more theory for another time. I find emphasizing the I chord and sneaking in nearby chords gives you cool Mixolydian harmony.

For most of my college years I’d fit minor pentatonic into anything and everything. Now if I have a simple power chord groove that drops down a step here and there I think, “Oh yeah–I to bVII…Mixolydian. Or switch between that and pentatonic because if the power chord is just the root and 5th then the lead gets to choose whether you’re hearing a major or minor third–Mixo/minor, that is.

Here’s a cool progression that I think sounds cool with C Mixolydian:

C7 Dm7 Bb Or with a bit C9 Dm7 Dm9 Bbsus2
//// // // of spice… //// / / //

So we’re talkin’ I7-ii-bVII. You could explore the usual I-IV-V progression, but in this case the V chord is minor so you’d get I-IV-v.

Anyway, these are a few ideas. I’m sure there are guitar scholars who could school me on this stuff many lifetimes over. Maybe they’ll stop by and add something cool in the comment section.

New Video Game Score: Trigger!

I did a little music for an online game earlier this year called Trigger, a cool word puzzle deal with vibe reminiscent of The Matrix. Bay Area developer Ryan Williams and his company Glug Glug are behind it. Sweet!

Play Trigger!

Mixing dialogue with different room tones?

A post for the filmmakers out there…

Haven’t been much of a blogger lately because I’ve been working! But I posted a question on one of my linked in groups and I wanted to pass the thread along because I’ve gotten some great responses. I’m working on a short film with a bunch of different background rumblings based on where the scenes were shot. Voiceovers have one roomtone while the action in the room has another…and other shots for the same scene were shot at another time so those sound different, etc.

Got some cool pros to engage on how to handle this stuff. Check out the discussion.

Axe Heaven: Cool Guitar Gifts!

I was at the Santa Rosa Fair last weekend and came across a booth that sold mini replicas of guitars by famous players. Really amazing detail, brought out the guitar nerd in me as I pointed out to my fiance who played each one. And because I appreciated seeing something different from the usual booths of cookware, sunglasses and iPhone accessories I’m giving them a plug!

Axe Heaven

Best places to register for wedding gifts…

1. BevMo.

2. Sift Cupcakes.

3. Bananas At Large. I know, I work there–but I just spent two hours in Bed, Bath & Beyond with the fiancee, watching her DROOL over matching towels and bedsheets!* What about the things *I* need in our new life together???

4. Craftsman Tools. OK, I’m lying…don’t care about tools. But I’m a guy, so I feel like I need to exert my manliness here because I know getting as excited as I do about Sift Cupcakes is a little disturbing. But I’ll cage fight for them suckers!

*In all fairness, I drooled a little over the 1000 thread count sheets.

What is compression? Bass Compression?

Doing a little reading about the MXR Bass Compressor pedal. Really cool primer on how compression works and it’s a quick read. So I’m giving it a shout out.

And the fact they just arrived at Bananas is a happy coincidence.

Checking out Buckethead & Wolff at GAMH/SF

Hanging out next to the Great American Music Hall, waiting for my pal because he has my Buckethead ticket.

Buckethead. Sold out show. Nice!

Anyway, this dude walks up to me with a handful of CDs. “Hey, look–The Cars Greatest Hits” he says, referring to the disk on the top of the pile. “Want to buy it?”

Seriously??? If he’d offered a Buckethead CD I might have considered it. Or maybe he’s shuffling his CD deck and testing different titles on each person he panhandles from. STILL…what goes through a dude’s head when he sees a guy standing next to a club (which next to Mitchell Brothers on top of that!) and thinks, “Maybe this bald guy was a fan of The Cars in the 80s!”

I wasn’t…remember I’m waiting to go see Buckethead.

Seeing his failed opportunity to sell something (which I can relate to now ) he asks for spare change anyway. No. And NO!

Oh yeah, Buckethead! He was cool, as you can see here, though the dude didn’t hit the stage until 10:30 for a show that was supposed to start at 9:00. His opener was this hip dude calling himself Wolff and Tuba, basically an electronic-based gig where all the singing and many of the sound fx came through the tuba. Definitely one of the cooler opening acts I’ve seen in a long time, especially his electro-tuba rendition of Prince’s “When Doves Cry”. But it was Buckethead’s name on the ticket only and this dude played for an hour. Opener gets half hour to 45 minutes. Thems the rulez!

Keith’s Logic Studio ES2 Patches

The current song I’m working on is being held up by my desire to have an amazing pad sound in the bridge. Presets won’t do it here! The problem is my skills in subtractive synthesis are lacking, so I’ve been spending more time with tutorials than composing.

On the bright side I’ve created about a dozen cool sounds using Logic’s ES2 synth that will be used in some songs in the future, but not the current one. AAAAAHHH!

I was leaning away from those buzzy sawtooth sounds when I made these. A couple of them reminded me of Nine Inch Nails–the more subtle sounds, so I labeled them appropriately.

Only used the ES2 here. Didn’t get around to adding other plugins on the channel strip.

Keith’s ES2 Patches.