So back to the drawing board. Here is version number two! This time the iPhone (or iPod Touch) is hooked to a RadTech SLAM clip case that I got online for $7. This has a clip in the back that could be hooked to various possible support structures.

What I figured out concerning the boom stand mics and the single straight ones is that there has to be one single place where to attach the support structure. Well there is one — the XRL connector for the mic cable! What I tested out was using a document clip, those you use to clip together lots of paper, the big size. I attach that to the XRL connector, bend the clip pins over and hook the SLAM clip case to the top one. I use the bottom clip pin to support the case so it’s nicely aligned. I think the second picture shows how it all works.

So the end result is a system that is cheap, quick to set up (sometimes, as with jams, important), robust enough and also as invisible as you could have it concerning lyrics in front of your eyes.

Which leads to eye sight. Most of us that are somewhat, eh, older, we lose the short sight over time. My son could easily read the text in the iPhone from the distance close to the mic. I could barely read it. What’s the solution? Well, it’s cool to have sunglasses on-stage when performing and now I have a real need for them. In other words, from CVS and similar drug-stores you could get sunglasses that are bi-focal, the lower part has reading-glass strength lenses. The upper part is transparent.

The last thing I’m still working on is the lyrics delivery system. I set up a special email address on my ISP so I could send lyrics to an IMAP server — rich text emails. These I could then arrange in folders online and then sync these over to the iPhone. This means I have backups out there and could download them to any iPhone or iPod Touch in case I need to do it. As well as constantly sending over and updating my lyrics setup.

I’m sure I will be working on version 3 based on the experiences I have with this setup, but as the Japanese know, kaitzen (constant improvements.)

It does not even need to be very talented musicians, rather the right mindset concerning inviting anyone and ’see what happens attitude.’

One of my best memories of a specific jam session was when three of us took Louie Louie, an otherwise torn-to-pieces-played song, and made constantly new arrangements and improvisations around this simple song. All it took was musical courage and not being afraid of doing mistakes while trying out something new.

The opposite — unfortunately — happens a lot in the Bay Area jam scene, and somehow I suspect it is not the only place where this is happening. For example, the jam band takes over most of the show, starts late and plays until 11am leaving little room for other musicians to take part in the jam. Either it is for practice purposes for a new play list, or then to show off their band rather than collaborating with other musicians. I don’t think a jam session is an efficient PR event. It should neither be.

Another situation that happens is that insecure musicians  roll-call other musicians they know and feel comfortable playing with, in combination with picking the same songs over and over with the same musicians. The end result is the same, tired old songs played over and over. Another bad case scenario are those where the jam leader insists that the song should be played like the original, rather than doing a funky new arrangement for it all.

Worst of all, the audience is really bored. Tired of hearing Mustang Sally the millionth time. Or blue scales and shuffles that are so stiff and boring that it is not even sad. Nothing new under the sun. They usually can’t or don’t like dancing to a three minute long solo that has really nothing interesting to say. At some point those musicians who wanted to collaborate just fade away, so the same group of people get together week after week, same old songs, same old patterns. The final situation is that the jam club cancels the whole jam band, hoping that someone else will bring in new blood, for a while.

For me, I know some places and jam evenings where I know the musicians dare to experiment. I tried last year to go to a lot of different jam sessions just to have fun with other musicians, but as of tonight’s experience at a certain location in the Bay Area best not to disclose — that is it. From now it is better to be very selective, find out who else is going to a specific jam and then make a decision to go there. That or arrange private jam sessions with a selective set of musicians.

This all is really sad — there are so many famous jams that happened in NY in the late sixties with Jeff Beck, Clapton, Hendrix and others having fun. I hope the next generation of musicians will learn a lesson from this current generation that has lost all hope, interest and creativity concerning jams.

Feel free to comment if you feel otherwise.

Well, I do believe it, after all these years. Takes a while to grasp this due to the long distances of time. Whether you aspire to be a singer, producer, DJ, roadie or whatever, you need all that time doing the task until you reach a high level of talent.

Now, some might mention Mozart as an example of a young talent with no need to practice. Well, to start with listen to any of his very early symphonies and other pieces of music. They are OK but nothing extraordinary — it is seldom symphony orchestras play those works. I would not even be surprised if his dad helped him out here and there.

Secondly, you need to read his biography and understand what happened, his father trained him in all kinds of musical styles, coached him every day, moved to different cities to hear different kinds of music and play with other musicians, provided other opportunities and so forth. So he easily clocked the necessary 10,000 hours of music making. This also points out that the more variations is done, the better use of the 10,000 hours.

I will actually add two more rules to this set:

100 hours — this is what it takes for someone to figure out if they are interested in the talent they want to cultivate. This could be done in less than three months if someone is focused.

1000 hours — this is the level needed to get to a point where someone is familiar and confident in the talent. It means you could go up on stage and do what you want to do without stage fright, or otherwise being worried about the outcome. This takes 1-2 years of focused activity.

10,000 hours — this is where you maximize your talent. You really know what you are doing, you could experiment, have fun, stretch out, try whatever you fancy and you feel you could do it. This takes 8-10 years of focused work.

Now, it’s important to realize that we are not taking about becoming a super-virtuoso such as playing guitar as fast as Yngwie Malmsten or singing like Elvis. There’s a personal limit and extension that will be filled — and that’s fine. We need more interesting voices and expressions, no more copycats or pure mechanical playing showing how fast or accurate  someone is. Even if it’s good to develop those skills, too. I would add that as part of the 10,000 hours, developing your own style is essential.

Going back to studio work, the same rule apply. Put in the hours and good stuff will happen. Same with song writing. Or going to the gym :-).

As for ear protection. Every time I see in a musician forum a discussion about this, my reaction is to post (and I often do) with a similar story. Just get them, it’ the first purchase a musician or producer should get. Those are far more important than reference monitors, or a new audio interface.

If you lose your hearing, even parts of the high end, that’s it, you can’t work properly as a musician or a producer. It’s like cutting off your hands. Does not compute.

The ugly issue with hearing loss is that it is gradual, seldom sudden. It means that each time your ears are ringing after a loud evening, there’s loss happening. It all builds up. At some point you actually notice it. To some degree we can’t do much about it as we age. At the same time we could prevent serious hearing loss from happening.

For example, if you play bass (as I do) next to a drummer, the cymbal hits is a sure thing to lose your hearing over time — not to even speak if you are a drummer. If you stay in a 120dB or so environment for hours and hours, which easily happens during gigs, it all will add up as hearing loss.

The cool thing with good earplugs such as the Musician earplugs or earlier mentioned Etymotic ER*20s is that you actually start hearing more details — believe it or not — as part of having a more linear hearing curve. Going back to bass playing, instead of hearing that nasty cymbal clash that overrides anything else, you start to hear other parts of the drummer and the band so you could play better.

Any hearing protection is better than none, even if you should try to get such musician-centric protection tools as you want to have this linear dampening. The customized musician earplugs are nice as they take a mold of your ears and make the actual body of the hearing protection fit your ears as closely as possible, so it should feel natural. Not that I don’t mind the Etymotic ER*20s by now, I’m so used to them in my ears. Even when singing (which takes a while to get the hang of, as you have to rely more on the head voice, unless you have good monitoring, something seldom available…)

Last preaching words — get them in case you don’t have those already. Take the car and drive to Guitar Center or a similar place, some Walmarks also carry musician-centric earplugs. Or order online. And here’s the link to H.E.A.R that has programs and links where to get customized musician earplugs.

Anyway, I watched through Nils Lofgren’s guitar instructional video yesterday, interesting techniques even if he uses a thumb pick and somewhat I think it would not work out well with my playing.

But there was another note of instructions that got stuck in my brain. Nils said that he got this from hearing  Keith Richards (Rolling Stones) playing. And this was to treat a guitar or actually any other instrument as a percussion instrument. It means playing in the pocket, use percussion elements and in all ways let the guitar playing work like another melodic drum playing.

It’s easy to forget this when you are up on stage and playing, but a band or setup sounds even more tight if your rhythm or even lead playing is tight and has percussion syncopations that work well. This is then true of playing keyboards or anything else, even voice. During the heat of a solo it’s easy to forget this — I think Frank Zappa was a master with his guitar solos, they were very evolving and abstract, but super-tight.

It might even help to think like a drummer from time to time to see how the percussion world works. If all instruments work together like a gigantic drum system, it’s sounds really well and you get the groove, especially a groove needed for any cases where you also want the audience to dance.

As part of that one you need to engage in some kind of social communication with the audience. A simple step is to actually look at the audience with your eyes, or at least avoid watching the instrument. This is especially true of laptop DJs, I do believe a large part why laptop DJs have a bad reputation – “reading email on stage” — is that they don’t try to establish an eye contact with the audience.

This is also true of musicians, watching the instrument or fretboard rather than looking out looks like one tries to avoid a connection with the audience. Yes, there are passages that are tough to play without looking at the fingers, but in general it’s a good practice to start watching the audience when you play. In general, it’s easy to separate the beginner bands from the veterans, the beginner ones are not watching straight out, rather looking down at their instruments.

Another option is to actually use verbal communication with the audience, talk to them.  This is where I also think the DJ system breaks down, it’s seldom I’ve seen a DJ take a microphone and at least say: “Hi, thanks for having me here” or something similar. Instead there’s this coolness factor of hiding behind a non-microphone environment, play the records and then go home.

There’s of course no need to go to the extremes and chat the audience to death or be a lounge lizard. But taking small steps will make the connection, the audience is happy, remembers you, purchases your tracks, comes back for more live shows and so on. If you still are shy, use sunglasses as a half-way step.

If you want to learn from a pro, check out how Bono from U2 works on stage.

Meanwhile, today I hooked up my Yamaha DD-65 electronic drum kit to Logic to record drum tracks. After 2+ hours of drumming I was quite sweaty. So this is now one of my new exercises — playing drums in the studio.

It’s also true that if you stand and play on stage for a long time it is also a form of exercise, standing up burns more calories than sitting. In addition, if you carry equipment around — and avoid of course hurting your back by using a cart to move around amps — then you burn calories.

The thing to remember is to drink a lot of water as you get very dehydrated on stage. Still, if you want to lose weight or otherwise keep you in shape, it does not hurt to stand in a studio or on stage and play, or do a long set of drumming. Now, doctors would say that you still need to elevate your heart rate so you need to go to the gym, too… Or bike, or something similar. Another of my favorite exercises is to go out in national parks in California — the high elevations, the better.

There are many kinds of techniques how to memorize lyrics, associations, chaining of pictures in head and so forth. Here’s one technique I constructed yesterday, depending on how you are as a learner, what style, it might work or not in your case.

Many texts really either have the same patterns sprinkled out here and there, or a certain keyword. I will use two examples. To start with J.J Cale’s Cocaine, it really has three verses with a simple chorus that is easy to learn. Concerning the three verses, each has one or two important keywords, I isolate these out. Thus, “If you want to hang out, you’ve got to take her out” has the pair, “hang out, take her out.” So I just memorize this and it’s easy to remember the rest of the verse by association. Similarly the next section will be “get down“, “on the ground“. As you see the verse already has the repetition starting point “If you want” so it’s easy to just ignore that when memorizing and keeping it around.

This does not mean that you skip memorizing the whole verse, but it makes it easier to remember the verse, especially when you are in front of a mike and have to start doing something…

If we look at Neil Young’s Heart of Gold,  you could see patterns in the verse such as “live, give“,”miner“, “expressions, never give“. And again the chorus should be easy to memorize.

You could even get up one level and give each verse one single keyword a generic theme, in the case of J. J Cale’s Cocaine again, the verses could be extracted to:  “party“, “down“, “news“, “day“, “thing“, “fact.”

And remember, sometimes the original artists forget lyrics and ad lib, there are few in the audience that would even catch such situations, better than look dumb-founded and not sing. Besides, there’s something charming about not just reinterpreting the music, but also the lyrics.