Yah baby.  2019 is drawing to a close and it can't come soon enough. This year I have been embroiled in various dramas with characters like The Cowardly Postman, The Vain Armchair Farmer, The Cinderella Narcissist and The Malevolent Troll. It has taken quite a toll. I could regale you with their antics as they are certainly noteworthy (if being disgusted by one's fellow man, can be called noteworthy) but if only for the sake of my mental health, I will take the high road and put them on permanent ignore. Instead, what I would like to do is offer a hearty round of thank-yous to the OTHER people in my life who have been simply amazing.

I will start with Andrew Burns and Alex Wickham (bass and drums respectively). They have been an absolute joy to make music with. There has never been a time when I play with the lads that I have ever felt less than totally comfortable. I play with some players who, although good, always need to be referenced and adjusted to as their time and grooves wobble along. That is never been the case with the lads; their pocket is deep and steady and I never need to re-calculate time, rather I can play whatever enters my mind with complete confidence and easy control. Given the fact that 90 per cent of our music is on odd meters, that is a stunning accomplishment. Not only are they immensely talented, they are both intelligent, kind and responsible men. After last night's Rebel Wheel rehearsal I drove home delighted that the band is kicking ass and totally on point, especially considering the chaos and general "running-amok" all the other facets in my life have taken. 

Lately I have been writing songs with Becky Abbot and that is another total delight. Becky is one of Canada's best vocalists and it is privilege and honour to be in the studio with her writing and recording songs for her next album. I haven't been so jazzed by a project in years. Like the lads, she is also smart and kind (qualities I admire greatly) and also happens to be drop-dead gorgeous. I don't think I have met many people who I am totally convinced will be STARS and house-hold names given the chance. I am working industriously to ensure that if the chance is given, the songs will be worth her time.

Sometime last year DeeDee Butters asked me to join Claude Marquis' band for some gigs that promoted his solo stuff. He is the main force behind The PepTides, for whom I used to play and Andrew, Alex, Becky and DeeDee still play. From that she and I went on to do a jazz duo act, a trio act and a kick-ass Aretha Franklin tribute. DeeDee is one the single best improvisors I have ever worked with and her stunning range and perfect singing pitch astound me time and time again. She kicks ass in ways few entertainers can and I consider myself lucky to be a part of her many projects.

As I mentioned, I used to be in The PepTides, and am still called upon to do any gigs the new replacement guitarist can't make. In effect I end up replacing the guitarist who replaced me.
Claude Marquis is the brains behind the band and his music is at once, poppy and other-wordly. Full of unexpected twists and turns, it never fails to astound and invite. His vision is unique and his vocal talents impeccable. Again, like all the others I have listed, he is smart and kind and talented. This of course leads me to Scottie Irving, the keyboard player for The PepTides, as well a Rebel Wheel alumnus. He is another brilliant musician and all around brilliant guy. I love talking with him and he is impossible to lose and always has the most esoteric and serendipitous information gracefully at his disposal. I thoroughly enjoyed doing gigs with the band, and the drive from Orillia to Hamilton, where Scottie and I, along with vocalist Dale Waterman, spent several hours in deep and meaningful conversation. Dale has perfect pitch and is one of the single best soul singers I have ever heard. He is brainy and decent and works super hard at his craft as well as taking a ton of responsibilities for the band.

The only other pepTide I have to mention is Olexandra Pruchnicky. She is the third female vocalist in the band and she and I wrote quite a lot together when I was in the band too. Many of the songs from Vinyl cafe were our co-writes and she is an esteemed writing partner. I am delighted to say I have re-kindled the magic we shared and am whipping up a few tunes for her perusal. Not only is her singing informed with an academic, almost acousmatic sensibility, she also has an amazingly sultry and breathy voice which I find so invitingly easy to write for. She is a sweetheart and a dedicated talented artist.

In the other Non-PepTide associations I have formed this year is a working relationship with ex-Blinker The Star drummer, Colin Wylie. In some ways we are soul-mates, having had many extremely similar experiences in the business, in studios, and with writing and producing our own music. We did a remarkable gig this year at the Ottawa Folk-Fest where we debuted his latest album in a four piece setting. We both love guitar, XTC, effects pedals and pop songs (although quite frankly I have very very few in my repertoire) and Colin is a gifted songwriter whose music is multi-layered and brilliantly done. I consider myself lucky to be involved with his project, and probably not surprising at this point in the blog, I am in total admiration of his brain power and innate goodness.


Alex, Andrew, Becky, DeeDee, Claude, Scottie, Dale, Oly, and Colin, have all been very, very bright points in my otherwise dark year and it is working with friends and artists like these, that keeps my faith in the whole life style together, especially important when the charades of the Ottawa Valley Viper's Den C-S-R chapter have derailed so much of my goodwill. Cheers

Well here we are in the cool fall weather. Finally. It seemed a fairly abrupt change really. Aug 31 was hot and humid and then on Sept 1st, it was like summer never existed and fall had taken over. You can almost see the edges of these months.

So we are busy at work on re-tooling the band, the web-site, the album and the stage show. We have written most of the tunes, but now that we have drafted a new member into the fray, we are both rehearsing old material, as well as opening up the arranging process to accommodate a new voice. As such we are delighted to introduce our newest member, Marianne Dumas.

She is a wonderkind keyboardist with a meticulous ear for synth programming. On top of that she is  incredibly fleet fingered, a great singer and an overall delight to work with. She will be able to help us get our old songs dusted off and presented closer to the album versions than we have been able to do with the three piece. We are all excited about that and with her input on the new material.

We did our August 15th gig with aplomb, for, what can only be described as a small but enthusiastic crowd (if five people can be termed a crowd). We didn't get on until late as the other acts had a shit-load of gear to set up and tear down (the smaller the act the more gadgets seem to be needed). They acquitted themselves admirably however and were fun to watch but all in all, they took as long to set up and tear down as they did to play.  That put us on around midnight on a Thursday night in sleepy ByTowne; not a great position to be in. Nevertheless, we all had fun and played well. I really am lucky to have such stalwart companions as Andrew and Alex, both of whom deliver their complicated and convoluted parts calmly and professionally.

Now, we are taking a bit of time off from gigging to get this album done and to embrace Marianne into the fold!

It has been a weird summer; stifling hot and chillingly cold, wet and dry and all within days of each other (or on the same day). Here at the Rebel Wheel HQ buried deep in the farm-land of the North Ottawa Valley, things are progressing quite nicely. We had written a plethora of tunes and we have finally decided which will be used for the album. There is only one Alex tune that needs to be finished but other than that everything is ready to record. Finally. I was hoping to be done in July but there were a lot of events (cool and uncool) that made that impossible. I won't detail the uncool events (LOT'S of that in earlier posts), but one of the cool ones was Andrew and his dad rode the Tour De France bike rally route together. Hills and dales baby, hills and dales. They are both in amazing shape and had an amazing time.

We have been asked to play an Aug 15th gig at the Avant-garde Bar in Ottawa along with two other bands (L'Orchidee Cosmique and Chloe Dances In Twilight) and are rehearsing a few of the new songs for that gig. Here is a poster Flo from the L'Orchidee band put together. We all love it. Noisy Prog Fuzzy Gig indeed!

 
Well that's all the news that fits, lest I go into bent finger pointing mode again, so we will end it there. Play safe, have fun, be decent.

For a lot of us songwriter-y types, our tunes are a consequence of our lives and relationships. Songs become our diary in a lot of ways and are a creative way to expunge the hurt and abuse all of us feel.
While relationship woes are hardly the inspiration for this current batch of Rebel Wheel tunes, they do create an impetus to get the album finalized and finished. I might even include a tune or two about how the intent to deceive is the emotional distillate of lying even if the carefully chosen words are technically true. Pointing a bent finger is still pointing a finger (and it's pointing at you Missy).

The album is coming along nicely; almost all of the songs are written and fairly well-rehearsed. The band members play in a lot of other bands as well (often together in fact) so with the current spate of Dee-Dee, solo and PepTide gigs, Andrew, Alex and myself have had a lot on our plates. Thankfully things are slowing down, and with the consequences of TWO May 25th revelations (2018, 2019), I suspect I will have FAR more time to dedicate to music. 

Right now I am starting pre-production and I hope to be recording the band live off the floor in June or July. We'll see I guess; there are always factors that hit you sideways, but for now, that looks like a realistic goal.

Adios for now, play safe and ALWAYS trust your instincts.

A little south of Nowhere's-Ville, there is a tiny cottage that houses a weird black lab and an even weirder composer. If you were to walk along the meandering creek that runs fast around the place you would hear strange music emanating from the cottage, music that moves among areas of angular dissonance, textural soundscapes and full blown shredding.

Right now I am re-designing my pedal board for the current iteration of the band. I vacillate among several states; having no pedals at all (usual state), to incorporating a few, then to having a HUGE pedal board. During that sequence of events there are many tearing sounds as velcro-ed pedals get torn off and re-positioned and minute details like having a buffer before a wah, or after, or between a wah and a fuzz are posited, researched (You-tube time) and experimented upon.

It is hard to achieve a perfect balance between sonic variation and onstage usability, especially on the budgets I work with (read NO budgets at all). Nevertheless, I am close to having a pedal board that works well. It is by no means finished, but the basic infrastructure is there. Let me detail the set-up.

To begin with, one of the biggest problems with guitar effects, especially those that have a lot of knobs and tones, is tweakability. On the test-bench there is no problem, but onstage it becomes a major one. Say that you use an analog delay pedal and you want to alter the knobs in real time to create a wee bit of sonic mayhem. If the pedal is on the floor, then you need to crouch down, squint (at least I do) and spend an inordinate amount of onstage time hunched over your pedal board. Not only does it look weird, it also irks me that thousands of dollars of pedals are put on the floor getting dusty and trod upon (I guess they come by the nick-name "stomp box" honestly).

There are options of course; mostly expensive and mostly for digital pedals where different parameters can be controlled by OTHER pedals attached to the main one. You can use an expression pedal to control a set parameter, or use another pedal to switch between several pre-programmed states. These options do work, but they never are as powerful as twisting knobs and, in the case of the analog delay mentioned earlier, there really is no alternative but to bend over and tweak onstage. It seems silly. The other option is to have one pedal for one sound only and get yet another one for any other tonal variation. That seems sillier still but explains why so many pedal boards get HUGE quickly.

Over the years I have migrated pedals from the floor up onto a platform (a music stand) that allows me to tweak the knobs by hand. It is so much easier to adjust a delay parameter in real time while playing, than to plod about looking for the expression pedal on a dark stage, and hoping it is still connected to the parameter you actually want to adjust.

In order to do that though, I have had to populate my pedal boards with a lot of boxes that don't anything other than turn things on and off. I will explain my signal path and you can see what I mean.

From the guitar I go into the tiny floor pedal board.

That is "Effect Chain One". In it is a wah pedal (a Morley Wah-volume which is probably the pedal I have used most over the years, having bought my first one way back in 1977; in fact I think it is the very first effect pedal I ever bought.) Then to a boss tuner, then to a MXR overdrive-boost pedal (which given its associations to a snake-referred purchase has, through no fault of its own, a VERY negative connotation and is destined to be swapped out soon). That chain can be bypassed by a quick stomp on a Road Rage loop pedal. The beauty of this set-up is I can have my wah pedal cocked to a position I like going into my distortion and turn them both on at one go. The pedal order is the result of MUCH experimenting and I find it gives me the best sound.

On the floor board is also a Gig Rig Remote Loopy II, which turns on two other loops remotely. They are "Effect Chain Two" and "Effect Chain Three".

In "Effect Chain Two" is a EHX Ring Thing and an EHX Small Stone Phaser. The Ring Thing has an expression pedal plugged in so that I might control seperate parameters on a patch by patch basis (the Ring Thing has 9 presets and one WYSIWYG setting). It is fundamentally a ring modulater, but is equally a trem pedal and harmoniser. It does all of these things splendidly. The phaser is a pretty standard thing and used seldomly but is fun to set to crazy settings and does offer a lot of tonal variation. The fact they are both on the music stand means I can reach over and tweak any control easily and in real time.

In "Effect Chain Three" is a TC Electronics Echo Brain analog delay and a Hall of Fame 2 digital reverb. They both have a lot of knobs that get tweaked a lot. I can get any number of sounds from them with ever having to run through presets (the delay has no presets but the reverb has 11). It is so much easier to adjust the delay setting to tempo with a quick twist of the wrist than to tap it on a excruciatingly small tap tempo stomp box. Of course the analog delay doesn't even allow that anyway so...

That is the basic rig, but I am currently awaiting a few more pedals to include into the fray.
In EC1, I will swap out the MXR for a Rat2 (I LOVE Rat pedals and wished I had never sold my 1985 Rat) and add a EHX Nano Looper 360 at the end of that chain.  In EC2 I will add an EHX Mono Synth pedal (it will be the first in the chain) and a Tube Screamer clone (probably a...Behringer clone!) between the Ring Thing and the Small Stone. In EC3 I will add another looper (TC Electronic's Ditto) at the very end of the whole path and it will reside on the floor. I would also like to add an EHX Attack-Decay and a Grand Canyon into Chain 3 but space and budget are a problem there.

With the EHX looper at the end of chain one, I can basically get it to act like a step sequencer into the Mono Synth and Ring Thing, allowing me a pretty cool modular synth type set-up. With a Ditto at the very end of the entire path, I can record an effected step sequence (say a guitar figure looped by the nano, sent into the Mono Synth and Ring Thing and tweaked in real time) and then play over it. I am hardly a fan of solo artists building up layered loops one by one, but given the nature of the current line-up and our analog synth paradigm, this seems a cool way to incorporate synth sequences and arpeggiated patterns into a guitar-based "synth" set-up.

So that is basically it.

To sign-off I will include a picture of the weird black lab I mentioned earlier.

"Work, work, work...work, work, work...work, work, work...hello boys; have a good nights rest?"  Lot's of work going on over here...not so much hanging with the "boys" but hanging with the lads is good too.

The album is getting put together slowly but surely with well over half the music written and solidified. Andrew has brought in a large piece as has Alex. We are going for a Diagramma-ish vibe here, using a lot of analog synthesizers and fewer traditional prog nuances (read mellotron and organ). We have been compared to Porcupine Tree before and that is probably a reference that will be used again.

Alex's piece is probably the strongest foray into that aesthetic and is quite exciting. He has written a nice guitar part too...very idiomatic with some nice natural harmonic melodies. Andrew has written an odd-metered latin-ish piece that is proving to be quite challenging to play. For my part I have brought several pieces in that use the simple machine motifs, but are all over the map stylistically. As we produce this stuff up I know there will be a consistent aural vibe that will unify some of these seemingly disparate elements.

So last night I had a bit of a disaster. I have a new studio buddy: WallyDog. He is a Black lab and very, very boisterous. Last night I put my guitar down on the couch and as he walked by his collar snagged one of the tuning pegs. He panicked and took off running, twisting the collar firmly around the peg. He scrambled out of the studio, into the kitchen and off up the stairs, dragging my guitar with him all the way. It is my favorite guitar; a Howard Roberts Fusion III. The guitar is a semi-hollow body and I was terrified the hollow body part would shatter on its wild ride through my house. It didn't. But it got LOTS of scrapes and dings. Two of the tone-volume knobs were broken off and two of the very cool finger style tailpiece thumbscrews were sheered off. The neck was unscathed (which was another worry) and for the most part disaster was averted. Wally was scared for hours (my shouting didn't help) but now, twelve hours later peace has been restored to the studio and my guitar, much the worse for wear is again being used for recording.  

The new band.

Well well well. Despite the lurid "Year Of The Snake" 2018 proved to be (as well the lurching spill-over into the current calendar) at least 2019 is off to a great start band-wise. The new line-up has been rehearsing for our upcoming shows and I am delighted to say that it is shaping up very well. There is a new energy in the unit and the two new members are doing an amazing job. The lads have been doing their home-work and the thorny odd meter stuff the band is known for, is being played with aplomb. It is all very exciting.

It makes sense then to use this opportunity to introduce the new members of the band. I will go alphabetically starting with....

Andrew Burns-bass, vocals, keyboards. 

Andrew is part of the new incarnation of the band, but actually has been the Rebel Wheel bassist since 2012. He brings a calm air of quiet virtuosity into the band. Although his main instrument in the band is electric and upright bass, he is a multi-instrumentalist who is equally adept at keyboards, vocals, guitar, banjo and mandolin. David and he met at an early PepTide's rehearsal back in 2010 and have kept a strong working relationship ever since. A full-time musician, Andrew plays with a whack of artists (The Rebel Wheel, The PepTides, The Powergoats, Al Tambay, Ty Hall, DeeDee Butters) as well as releases his own music. He also runs a studio and music school (Living Music Studios).

Alex Wickham-drums, vocals, keyboards.

Alex and David met towards the end of David's five year residency with The PepTides. Together with Andrew they played to a crowd of 14,000 at Ottawa's Westfest (among a few dozen other festivals and gigs) and formed a solid working relationship. David drafted Alex for his folk-rock act The Rapids and then for the precursor to the latest iteration of The Rebel Wheel, The Bag of Snakes. Alex enjoys complex odd-metered material so gave his hearty assent when asked to be a fellow Wheel. He has chops galore and a strong work ethic and all in all is a joy to work with (as artists like The PepTides, Junkyard Symphony, Bradley Scott, Caveman Techno, Chantal Hackette etc. will attest).

Both players have at a high level of craft and professionalism and are making The Rebel Wheel V8 a really unique and overwhelmingly fun project to be involved with. Our first gig will be in four weeks time (as The Rebel Wheel, we have close to a hundred gigs playing together in other units) and we are very excited about it.

Here is a brief excerpt of our latest rehearsal recorded on my i-phone:

 Rehearsal Excerpt

This will be the last post about snakes. I promise. Well...I expect. 

So 2018 is over and the lurid details of The East Coast Percussion Syndrome have been already been mentioned. This post is about another snake I met in 2018 and is closely related to some other similar snakes I have met in the past, (poor snakes; they get such a bad rep when people like those I will detail are compared to them).

 Way back in 1991 or so, I was in a band called the Barbara Lynch Band. We were all full-time musicians with a pretty good management contract so we were able to rehearse daily and hone the band's sound and stage show pretty well. We did a ton of show-cases, and like any band who works hard and has even moderately good players and material, we were able to attract a fairly large following and generate a lot of buzz. Eventually we came to the notice of the Toronto press and for about a year or two, were the darlings of the King Street scene. We won a ton of press accolades (like best band in Toronto etc.) and were featured on Much Music's The New Music (along with Keith Richards) and on CITY-TV's music shows. In fact, I think there are some very bad copies of  a few of our performances at CITY-TV on Youtube.

The band eventually started to be wooed by labels and booking agents. We were offered quite a few tours overseas, and several pretty good deals with small independent labels. Our manager refused them all and was waiting for interest from the American majors. Given that he had just signed two of his acts to similar deals it made sense to follow his advice. The only problem was that we weren't really all that fashionable as far as commercial music went. We were more like Sword-Fish Trombone era Tom Waits meets Weather Report. Nevertheless a parade of deals crossed the table.

Quite a few producers offered us demo deals and we ended up in quite a few major studios in Toronto. Eventually we settled with Metalworks studio and recorded an EP with Roxy Music producer John Punter and Rush engineer Rick Andersen. It was a delightful time and something which I will detail in a a post about amazingly good experiences. This post is about the opposite.

So. Before we ended up at Metalworks with the amazing aforementioned production team, we did quite a bit of demo recording with other producers. One of them took us to a great facility. Back then it was all SSL boards and 24 track Studers coupled up via Adam-Smith synch units. It was all very impressive so we were awe-struck to be in the studio recording with this one producer. He was super friendly and kept telling us how great we were and how unique. All he wanted to do he said, was choose the best two songs we had and produce them up for a more radio friendly sound. We had a song that had this very cool drum intro we loved (think of I Mother Earth's Used To Be Alright, a wholly appropriate choice given that we shared management and a ton of stages...in fact I am sure that intro to their song was inspired by ours).

Anyway....the song chosen was one of our stronger pieces so we totally understood why the producer wanted to start with it. So we started tracking. We got about 40 seconds in and the producer called us to a halt. He wanted to iron out something in the drums he said. So we went over the intro with a fine tooth comb. Maybe not so many clicky rim sounds was the first directive, so Jim Casson the drummer began voicing the pattern on just the heads. None of us liked it as much, but we were doing our best to be professional and follow the producer. We started recording again. Forty seconds later we stopped again. Hmmm, maybe a snare hit on three would be better, was the next directive. Ok. Snare hit on three it was. On with the tune. Ten seconds later we stopped again. Maybe the snare should hit on 2 and 4 instead. Ok.

This went on until the intro had NONE of the flavour it originally had, but instead, sounded like every other drum part from that era. The producer was beaming; "see how much I have improved your sound in so short a time?" was what his face radiated. We spent the next 12 hours trimming off every unique burr we had laboriously inserted over several years of performing, writing and rehearsing. We took a wholly unique band song and trimmed sections off and idiosyncrasies away until we had just another mediocre pop pap piece.

Our manager was delighted: our producer was delighted: we were totally deflated. This was NOT how we envisioned the band. In the end we dropped the producer and convinced the manager to go with John Punter instead and we ended up with the songs the way we had arranged them only with a far superior sonic thumbprint and of course, world class production.

I now know that the demo producer was just another snake. He figured he knew how to make us better when he absolutely no idea what we were. I understand trying to be radio friendly. I understand wanting fame and fortune. What he didn't understand was that we wanted our music to be our music first and foremost. All of us made fairly good livings as musicians already (I was writing for TV's Nature of Things and 5th Estate etc. so was doing VERY well and the other lads were first call session guys) and wanted this project to reflect our musical tastes, not our need to be rich. But there will always be that guy who shows up and starts directing everybody, smilingly telling them how good they are, but all the while forcing their own weak aesthetic into the room. Behind the smile lies a conceit that their mediocre vision of music is real and that the band's is charmingly naive.

Fast forward to 2018 and a band I had been in for several years. We played the folk rock Tara and I had written and produced and were called The Rapids

We had just started doing gigs and in a attempt to incorporate more tunes in our set-list we asked a local top 40 guitar player to join our band. As most of the songs featured two guitars, I was excited about having another player involved. It meant we could perform the album with the same arrangements we had recorded originally, plus we could supplement our set list with some covers. Both Tara and I knew we wanted NOT to be a cover band, so we decided early on that we would approach the covers from a unique point of view.

So in came the local hero. Smiling. Complimentary. Humble. At the first rehearsal he started out quite amiable but by the end was making lots of faces. This went on for a few weeks until about the third rehearsal when he stopped the band and said that something didn't sound right and that he thought we should focus on the drums. So we focused on the drums. How about we play the song VERY slowly so we can put the drummer on the spot? Once we allowed him to do that we had opened the flood gates. How about we excise this whole guitar part so we can make the material more "radio friendly"? Let's lose these tunes from the set-list because they are downers. After half of our songs he played a country riff and laughed saying he thought of that every time he heard "songs like these", without thinking that his association revealed more about his lack of imagination than any real plagiarizing on our part, which was what he was really getting at. We were all good sports and let this guy have his way, but none of us were having any fun anymore and felt like we were being given some kind of "master class" by a moron.

We decided to change gears and just worry about covers instead. So we did a few the way we wanted to. The local hero was quick with his comments; "Oh we can't play "These Boots Were Made For Walking" like that! To begin with, it is a swing type song, sung by a woman, not a head banger sung by a man. And what is with the extended guitar solo? No-one wants to hear that!".

The truth is we had already played that version of the song and it went over like gang-busters. It was good that we had, because for me, my growing suspicions became confirmed. What we really had in our midst, was a conceited, mediocre cover tune musician who had never worked in an original band in his entire life, treating us like we were rank amateurs who needed his expert guidance.

He was able to derail our project for a long time with his antics and his bullshit. The fact he never learned a tune properly (he simply hadn't the chops to actually perform ANY of the guitar parts, preferring instead to strum campfire chords on his expensive 12 string, smirk and generally dis the material) and refused to gig with us (his "professional" top 40 reputation was liable to be sullied by our "amateur hour" take on covers) did him in in the end, but not before he brought us to a grinding halt.

That was a year ago and we are back up again, but just like that other snake on the East Coast mini-tour, not without a bitter taste and certainly not without some other far-reaching and actually gut-wrenching consequences. Just like in the studio 20 years ago and on stage in the spring, one should always be on guard for the people who not only don't understand creativity, but who are also consumed with a smug satisfaction in themselves and what can only be described as their overwhelming mediocrity.