Nearing the End

*It's sort of sad that this will likely be my final blog post.*

Tomorrow marks the day that I will be presenting on what I have learned throughout these past 16 weeks. I will also be attending and evaluating Joon Park's presentation, only a few hours before mine. I didn't really think about how tough that was going to be, due to the fact that I have a fair amount of equipment to set up for mine. Oh well, we shall see how that all goes.

Today, Adam Chafee came over to practice at my house, because I am most likely going to be performing in his WISE presentation on Wednesday. He just taught me a song that he wrote, and some of the other members of my band are going to help him as well. They have to learn it on their own, though. It's going to be a little rough, I'm guessing. The style is a lot different than what we're used to playing, so it may prove difficult for them to learn on independently. Luckily, I had him to guide me.

I'm working on the finishing touches of my presentation, and am getting rather nervous for tomorrow in the process. I'm worried that I may end up talking too much, or not enough about any given aspect of my project. I just want to keep calm and stick to the structure that I laid out for myself, though.

One week from today, I will be evaluating Ameena Farley's presentation, and then I can finally say that I am done with WISE. Yikes!!

Today's Session

First of all, I have less than one week until my presentation! Last night, I electronically delivered all of my materials to my evaluators. That was a stressful moment, but I feel so free now, having done so. Even though I'm nearing the end of the process, I don't consider myself "done" learning at all. In fact, today was a very successful day in the way of tracking. Parker Callister came over and we recorded two songs! One was an acoustic track, à la Andy McKee, and the other was a banjo track that was sort of a Lumineers style song, stomping and all. They have been tracked completely, and my only contribution was in stomping, and suggesting leads, etc. They are being mixed, as I type up this blog post. The two songs are fairly short, but really catchy. Parker is just such a good musician, it's hard not to enjoy his stuff. When he's home from college, he plays in his band Kaboosh!. My band and his have played several shows together over the past few years, and I've learned to love his unique music. If I get his permission, I may put one or both of them up on SoundCloud. If not, they will definitely appear in part of presentation, one way or another.

Equipment Rundown 2

This is my effects pedal.

It's a DigiTech RP55. Don't ask me what that means, because I don't know. I use it for pretty much all guitar/bass instrumental tracking. How it works is that you plug your guitar into it, and it outputs into the interface, which goes into the computer. This pedal is how I add effects like distortion, chorus, flanger, phaser, delay, reverb, or what have you. There are originally 99 pre-set effects. Some of them are crazy and I would never use them, and some of them are really cool. The other neat thing about this pedal is that you can edit and save any effect that you want. There are pretty much unlimited options within, and my bandmates and I have spent a lot of time making really good guitar sounds that we are able to use time and again. There are far too many displays and buttons to explain it all, but the two main buttons control the pre-set effect being used (right goes up the number line, left goes down). The arrow buttons control individual effects within a pre-set, which you can make louder or softer, or change the sound of entirely. The screen is a display that shows all of everything you are doing, and all of the little displays are some kinds of effects. It's complicated.

This is my guitar rack.

It's also not actually mine. In fact, none of the instruments pictured belong to me, either. They belong to my bandmates, but we're pretty much like family anyways. Plus we definitely don't have anything against sharing. They stay at my house, so I make good use of them when they aren't being used by their true owners at rehearsals. The instruments pictured (From L to R) include: a red gibson SG (in gig bag), a black Epiphone SG, a plum Mexican-made Fender Stratocaster, a red Epiphone Firebird, and a black Jay Turser Jazz Bass. All of these guitars have been used during my process, and each is used for something different. They each produce a different sound, and some musicians prefer one over another. It all depends. The bass is the only bass we own, however, and gets used for everything. Other guitars that we own and are not pictured are a Takamine Electric-Acoustic, a black Squier Fender Starcaster, a black Squier Fender Bullet Telecaster, and a red Gibson Les Paul custom. We haven't used all of those for recording, but the Electric-Acoustic is definitely a frequenter.

Ithaca Festival

Here's a shot of my band playing Ithaca Festival on Saturday. We played at the Lot 10 stage from 5 to 5:45 pm. There was a very large crowd, chock-full of Ithaca High Schoolers. Officials at the festival told us after our set that we drew the biggest crowd for a musical act yet, so that's exciting. That's without including the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday at Stewart Park, though. As you can probably tell, it was a very sweaty time. I don't want to gross anyone out here, but I lost a lot of fluid. Like a LOT. Either way, I had a blast performing! I helped the live sound engineer set up and tear down for my band, as well as help set up for the next band. He seemed pretty happy to have someone who knew what they were doing assist him, as I'm sure he had had a very stressful time with previous acts. He was a really nice guy.