DiggyDog's Progress

I was being a bit sarcastic.

Maybe it didn't come through, huh?

I am trying to remember the joke we used to tell at the folk festivals about a Mercedes being double-parked.

The punchline was something aobut the lack of money to be made at folk music but I can't remember it right now.

I think I have blocked those days from my memory...

I've been there befor. You mentioned that you hope your playing gets good enough that you can pass your self off as a thereminist more often. I have a feeling that you'll do just fine. You seem to be serious enough about the instrument.

Thanks, Thomas.

Last night's gig went really well.

Cellular Terror was billed as the main act but we made a wise decision to play first since the other two bands were stellar.

Arch Trio had upright bass, drums and guitar. They did what the guitarist described as "noisy Jazz". He used an Electroharminx delay with very nice results, chooping up the loop and changing the pitch of it back and forth.

The bassist and drummer were no slouches either. The band went from calm and mellow to raucus and everything in between.

The last act, Dead Legs had electric bass, drums, two guitars with some nice effects, horn and vibes. They did a great job with all of it. I didn;t get to stay for their entire set but they were a little more mellow than the trio. I hate comparisons but John Zorn comes to mind for the Arch Trio and Dark for Dead Legs, only as possible influences, though. These bands were very original and very talented.

We, on the other hand, were the oddballs. We started with some cellphone ringtones and noises going thru the guitar pickups and effects.

Under neath this was a tape of some answering machine messages my partner in crime, Jay Peele had recorded. One of them was a girl who called his machine, left a message and then got into a fight with her boyfreind while the machien was still recording. Another one was from Krishna, one of the guys in Dead Legs. This generated a few laughs.

We then went into my new piece with the Synsonics drums through an old Peavey digital delay with SK-1 and theremin layered and looped over the top.

We ended up with a slightly Jazzy little ditty that Jay wrote for one of his other bands. It was a change of pace for us and a good seque for the two following acts.

Wow!, That sounds like you had a great time lastnight.

I'd like to have heared that performance.

There's a composer who recently did a performance that called for cell phones as well, only in this case, the audience was cued to make their phones ring at certain times, and from certain parts of the auidience. It made CNN news, but I can't for the life of me remember who the group, and composer was. You know?

I heard about it on NPR so I went there and found this:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6137729

The composer was David Baker. I want to do a show where the audience members give their cell numbers to us and we program them into an auto-dialer and call them durring the show. I don;t know if we would cal lthem all at once or at different times but since I don't have access to telemarketing dialing equipment it is strictly in the realm of theory right now.

One trick I didn;t get to do was when I call Jay's phone and put mine on speaker. Putitng the phones close to each other creates a feedback loop with a fast delay/repeat of whatever is said. Try it out with a friend and you will love the sound!

Not to toot my own horn but I think it was a really good show. It was kind of a departure for us. It was quite a bit more musical and less abstract than our usual set.


A kind of funny thing happened while I was setting up my equipment last night.

My friends Joel and Dan came up to the stage and Dan (the one I don’t know all that well) looked at my Peavey digital delay and said, “Hey, I recognize that pedal!”

It turns out that it used to belong to him He gave it to this guy Dave who gave it to Joel who gave it to me last year.

Joel also sold me the ART SGX 2000 that I use for the theremin and I bought the GT6B processor from Ken, another mutual friend of ours. Ken also used to own my Peavey bass amp.

In 1990 he sold it to a pawn shop and a guy in my band found it a few days later and called me from the pawn shop offering to pick it up for me and let me pay him back at the next rehearsal.

I turned to my friend, Ken and asked him what he thought about the amp and he said, “Dude, it’s a great amp. I sold on ejust like it to a pawn shop a few days ago”.

Then he told me to have my friend check for a sticker on the back amp. It was there and it was from the music store in Tennessee where Ken originally bought it.

I should have invited the guy I got my theremin from and that would have made the evening complete.

I have saved a lot of money over the years buying used instead of new. Most of my musician friends have bad GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). In fact, I am the only musician I know who has paid for all of his equipment with gig money.

Even the items I bought new like my amp and my Taylor 810-S acoustic guitar has paid for themselves. The Taylor was not cheap either!

Hint, I could have bought an Etherwave Pro (if they had existed back then) and gotten a few c-notes back in change.

That's cool! That pedal really gets around. A music shop opened up literally less than a block from me, and they specialize in vintage (used) equipment. The shop is Fondren Guitars, and the owner used to play in Austin. I got my peavey encore 65 from there.

I think it's cool to be able to pay fo all your gear with gig money.

Stange, yet cool that all that equipment you mentioned belonged to familiar faces to you.

I have a friend who used to live on the island of Guam. He drove an Opel GT and bought several sets of hubcaps during the time he was there.

Actually, he bought the same set of hubcaps more than once. It seems that they made the rounds. One guy would buy them and then they would get stolen and sold to the next guy etc.

That's a trip!