More Canadian Music Week

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Day 2: If you don't have anything nice to say...

Day 3: I finally got to see Bend Sinister at a place called Comfort Zone. I say finally because for over a year I shared a jam space with them while working with Marty Zylstra on various music projects, but of course that means we never were there at the same time, though based on the instrument setup I'd been curious about them from the start. They have a nicely curated modern-but-classic-rock glam-prog sort of sound, and as a keyboard player I am doubly interested in how they use various keyboard sounds in their very high-energy upbeat show. I'll be seeking them out again soon here in Vancouver, from where they also hail!

I think the main thing working against them was the venue they drew in the CMW stage lottery. The sound system there was quite good, I'm not sure how much of it was supplied by CMW - but Comfort Zone, while not quite shit-hole status, had too low a stage and almost no lighting, so any band playing there would have trouble shining, or even being seen. Also I walked by the bar several times while looking for the bar, because it was covered in signage hawking cigarettes, wristbands, glowsticks and other junk, I thought it was a merch booth (no taps??).

After CZ my mate Dan from The Record Room and I went to the Dakota Tavern - which somehow I forgot how much I love - to see a few more acts. I was happy to meet and see The Sumner Brothers, a band fronted by two Vancouver brothers that take turns sounding like Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen. Very laid back set from them, excellent songwriting and a very accomplished, intentional sound with a bit of that American roots twang (paired Strat and Telecasters, lovely.)

My personal highlight, however, was The National Parks from Utah. These guys were FANTASTIC! With keys, fiddle and acoustic guitar in the band the are well-placed in any mixtape alongside Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, Of Monsters & Men, etc - but they are no emulators. They have superb arrangements and songwriting, and they have crafted a sound and show that really shines. A five star pick. Look them up.

 

Sadly I probably won't get to see much else of CMW this year as I have to return to Vancouver to play my own shows this weekend. So many of the people I know are jsut getting into town for the week, I think they've been missing out!

Notes from Canadian Music Week

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‎CMW‬ Day 1 notables:

Caught the tail end of the set from Machines Géantes at the Central - most clearly described by three words in their bio: "riffs and fuzz." These Montrealers rocked out nice and loud on the little stage they had to work with, but were really groovy and fun. Kind of like a French Monster Truck.

Archie Powell & The Exports: WOW! These guys were fun. They swayed from a slightly more raucous Weezer all the way to the borderline rock crazies of the Vines or Jet. Five piece energetic rock from Chicago. They used every spare decibel The Piston had to offer. Super fun - and they're doing another set on Wednesday at Bovine Sex Club. Kickass.

Don't fear the REAPER

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(note: I am fully aware that the majority of blog entries on this topic share the same article title)

There is so much to learn about REAPER!  The scrappy DAW alternative that has been slowly building is reputation over the last 10 years is so incredibly modular, customizable and flexible that to go into it without having a goal in mind of how you want it to work for you is almost counter-productive. It's best to bend it to your will, to mould it in the image of the DAW you want it to be, the DAW you'd like to use.

There are plenty of useful (and some not terribly useful) resources but I can't see anything more valuable or educational that Jon Tidey's The Reaper Blog with articles, tutorials and inks to workshops and personalized training - it's the gateway to a community of power users that revel in sharing their expertise. It's worth any price, and secondary to buying yourself a proper REAPER license (which is kinda sorta not totally necessary but HOT DAMN should you ever do it - SUPPORT)  it is wholly deserving of a contribution to the tip jar. Jon was good enough to visit a meetup I attended at the Centre For Digital Media a few weeks ago and do an intro talk to REAPER. He's an excellent sales pitch and makes it all seem very accessible.

And who doesn't like a good acronym? 

REAPER: a Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording. 

Heh. Sure.

One Of Us: Episode 3

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Episode 3 went live quite some time ago, I am posting about this now, as this is the new blog page!

Billy The Kid is a long-suffering touring performer of which a great many wonderful and complimentary things have been said, particularly in the year or so since this podcast went up since her latest album has been released to much friendly acclaim and she has been performing all around Europe and North America with the likes of Chuck Ragan, Northcote and Billy Bragg when she's not hanging out with the likes of Ryan Adams and Frank Turner (stories within!)

Please enjoy the attached interview with Billy, and check out her latest record (referred to within) at billythekidonline.com!

One Of Us is available on iTunes

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades by Billy the Kid is available on iTunes

Festivals, classes, books and radio

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So I'll start on the regular front: The Carnegie Hall Show. The summer's been an interesting season - while most shows take breaks because so many of the performers have opportunities to tour shows, do theatre festivals or follow the Fringe around, we too have lost each (and sometimes all) of our cast to other engagements during the summer but soon will have the whole gang back together, at least for a while. Not that the "original lineup" is the only recipe for a sure-fire show of course, we've had a slew of awesome guest performances.

The reunion of the cast is just in time though, as our show has been picked for both the Toronto Improv Festival and the Montreal Improv Festival this fall! Unfortunately, after some attempts at shuffling dates around we are unable to make the Montreal party - but there's always next year. Our Toronto date is September 23rd - Wednesday! That should be easy to make.

This week's show will be a bit of an experiment too, only in the sense of re-purposing the show as a fundraiser for a charity I'll be doing a bit of work with next month, The Sandals Foundation. Through them, while on a trip to the Turks and Caicos next month we'll be building community gardens and playgrounds in some of the less fortunate villages on the islands, and also doing a bit of environmental protection work protecting the local reefs. We're going to use this week's event toward a fundraising goal I've been challenged with through my office and we'll see what the community can provide us.

In other news, I'm in at Second City! By "in" I mean that they finally called me in about the great new Musical Directors program they've started up. They have a very cool series of workshops sharing the tricks and methods that the Second City shows use to involve live improvised music into their shows. I'm most excited about this because since I've just been making this up as I go along (which in improv, I guess is allowed!), I'm very interested to really talk techniques and go-tos with other more experienced Musical Directors. I'm already going to start more regular session accompanying classes in the training centre soon and I'll also be taking the classes while I'm there. It's very exciting!

Outside of improv, I finally got a copy of And Here's The Kicker which is a very cool book of interviews with the relatively nameless writers behind the most popular TV shows and comedians of all time. So far I've learned a lot about the development of a lot of the templates for today's talk shows, sitcoms and film comedies, but also the writers themselves are of course very funny and insightful. There's also a lot of little inter-chapter sidebars about how books get sold, jokes turn into jobs and a few "Whatever you do, don't..." lessons learned the hard way many times over by writers over the decades. I'm not even halfway through but it's already the most satisfying read I've found about writing since I finished Crafty TV Writing.

Also I've gotten back into radio in a big way lately by finding out about a lot of public radio shows in the states, notably The Moth and This American Life. I've wanted to do some kind of radio-format podcast for some time now and so many forms are so appealing, but I think I'd have to settle somewhere around radio play or documentary. Obviously those are both BROAD categories, but I just don't know the words to form the specific type that I'm thinking of yet. I've reassembled my portable recording kit so I'll get to start experimenting on locations again soon. If only I knew anything about documentary...

Until next time!

Beer Pop/Music

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As I mentioned previous a couple weeks ago while I was in Vancouver visiting I hung with the TrueNuff boys and did some video-ing. While I was there James also showed me the newest addition to the merch store: a Cute little Japanese "safety bottle opener" they labeled as the "Beer Popper." We wanted to shoot some kind of commercial clip for the new item (even though by the time it went live they'd already sold half their stock!) We did land on an idea of something in the vein of Vince "Offer" Shlomi of ShamWow and Slap Chop fame:



What we ended up shooting was an improvised informercial pitch spot in that style. With a little clever editing on the dudes' part it came out this way:



Now one of the best things to ever happen to the Slap Chop brand was a killer video and music remix by the now-much-better-well-known DJ Steve Porter that was known as "Rap Chop"



So as an exercise in what I figured was inevitability, I thought I'd beat out the a) request for me to try doing a remix and b) the other fans that might just do one first anyway, and do my own. I wasn't going to do the auto-tune/vocoder stuff of the other one, I just wanted to edit, beatmatch and slice. While trying to make some drum beats for it though, I realized I was trying to replicate the beat from The Soulsonic Force's "Planet Rock" - so I figured screw it and I just decided to do a Mash-Up, which seems to be all the rage right now anyway (or at least it was, it may be on it's way out yet.) Here it is:



Doing the edit was a lot of fun and I forgot how much fun it was - I hope to find other little things like this to have fun with coming up.

Making it up as I go along

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So another long stretch between posts, but a busy and exciting one!

The Carnegie Hall Show is still going great. We've been playing every week, nailing down what is essentially a new improv format, introducing our show to the community and the city at large and response has been very encouraging. I do think that lousy Toronto weather has kept audiences on the conservative side (size wise, not politically) so I hope that if this God awful weather ever breaks, then we'll get more happy people on the streets looking for fun things to do. Kensington Market is very quiet this time of year it seems.

Also, another ongoing yet irregular show I've gotten to play is the improvised soap opera Dysfunctional Utopia: A Serialized Romance. Directed by Ron Pederson, the improvised soap features over-the-top characters in a developing overdramatic storyline complete with adultery, conspiracy, murder and mad scientists - and we're doing it again this Sunday! Ghost Jail @ Clinton's on Bloor St.

On the writing front I'm still doing more reading about writing than actual writing, but I'm reading a lot. The latest book I've picked up is "The Way of Story" by Catherine Ann Jones - A book that while it contains some good reminders of the process of builsing outlines and developing characters that I've read in better books, there's a lot of new-agey type stuff about visualization and seemingly letting the story write itself, which I can't stomach to believe is actually very effective. As well, Jones packs the book full of self-congratulatory anecdotes about the few productions her career has consisted of, which do little to sell me on her advice since all the stories and ideas she's sold are never ones I would want to put my name on. (This isn't to say there isn't a market for writing a movie where Dolly Parton plays a country singer (what casting!) who dies and can't get into Heaven so has to go back to earth and do a good deed to get eternal bliss - but good God who would want to?)

More educational than any book I've read or heard of so far though has been the community of TV writer/bloggers that I've be uncovering. Alex Epstein has a great book and accompanying blog [Complications Ensue] about writing, the business of writing and (most importantly to me) the business of writing in Canada. Through him I also found Denis McGrath's killer blog of similar themes [Dead Things on Sticks] which also led me to blogs, groups and a killer weekly meeting of TV pros from Toronto. Last Friday I got to have a beer with Denis, Ed McNamara, Rob Pincombe and Rob Sheridan just because I showed up. This week was even bigger, plus George Strombo showed up. I've never been a proponent of networking (probably only because I haven't ever been good at it) but I feel like I meeting a lot of the right people to know a thing or tow about where to go and what to do once I actually have some product to show.

Anyway, Carnegie Hall is still every Wednesday and Ghost Jail is every Sunday. Come say hello!