High Gas Price Blues?

All I gotta say is that you guys state-side otta try buying gas over here. 3$ a gallon sounds like a deal from here, in the UK it works out to be around 8$ a gallon. Feel better yet? It would cost around 300$ to fill up the gas tank in my old Suburban at that rate. Now that's the blues. Wonder if Chevy will ever make a Suburban Hybrid?

I'm on a tear about volume

I'm really tired of waking up the morning after a gig with a sore throat. Of having to whisper, drink tea and nurse my voice for a couple of days. Yeah, I know, you're thinking something like "wait, we've seen the rig of doom with the 50 watt Marshall and the old Fender, are you for real?". And the answer is yes.

I have all my amps running on power-soaks so I can control them, reducing the volume to a level that's easier to manage. I've been keeping my stage volume down. Way down in fact. when we started at the Tunnels the other night we had our volume under control and Les was able to use bundle-sticks at a gig for the first time. See? It's possible. It just didn't last the night.

It's the rest of the world that now needs to adapt. Soundguys that won't turn the monitors on, or keep turning my mic off (like Friday night), or stare at you with a puzzled look on their faces when you're cupping your ear because you can't hear otherwise. It's not just sound guys too.

I'm going to be difficult about this. I'm tired of coming home from work injured, which is what this is, plain and simple- a work-related injury that's avoidable. Time for this to change.

The Lemon Tree

I had a chance to try out some of the new material that I've been writing at the Lemon Tree on Friday afternoon. If you've been there you know that the lunch-time audience is really there for lunch with background music. I think they like the music, but it's the food-music combination that works and fills the seats. And you compete with the coffee grinder and lots of ambient noise. On the good end, the acoustics are good, the PA is top-notch, and all my friends seem to cut out of work and sit and listen to me sing over a cup of java. So, there I was on Friday, sick as a dog, and playing new songs.

Something about being down with this horrible cold puts you into an alternatvie head-space. The cold medicine gives me the shakes. Hate that. But, enough complaining. It was a good set of music, and I've heard that from my most honest, insightful and brutal critics. Oh, by the way, they're also good friends, and I love them for their honesty.

I'd warned everyone that this was going to be a little folky, rather than a straight blues set. I stuck to that. The folks there heard me do songs like 'Ball and Chain', 'Hole in my shoe', 'Man in the mirror', 'Sackcloth' and one or two others that have never been performed for an audience before. They all worked. I'll take them with me to Dundee where I'm doing two acoustic sets and planning on recording them both for release on SnoCap, MySpace and as downloads for the people on my email list.

OK, need sleep. Be well, see you soon!

Making a Diddley-Bow: Getting Started

Just a shot of good whiskey and a one-string diddley-bow
(Jake Matson)


The one thing I dont have these days is a Diddley-Bow. And today when I was helping my oldest repair his guitar we ended up with a tuning machine to spare. I had an extra guitar pickup so what to do? Well, make a diddley-bow, of course!

My goal was to get to the local DIY store and spend under 10£ for the remaining materials. And so, we bought a bit of framing lumber and some angle-iron and we were out the door for £7.40




Here are the boys holding the wood we'll use for the body.



And in the next picture here's the peghead. I used a hand-saw to cut a large notch that I could use for mounting the tuning peg. It's a little rough, but it'll work.



The bridge, nut and tail piece are made form the ange iron. Drill a couple of mounting holes and cut to length. It's screwed down with some left-over wood screws that came from lord-knows-where. Some old honey-doo probably.

Making a Diddley-Bow: Mounting the electronics

I had an old pickup that I wasn't using, and I planned on top-mounting it to the wood. Not really all that hard. To prep the wires I wrapped the part coming out of the pickup in heat-shrink tubing so that it was really strong, as this tends to be a really vulnerable spot on most pickups. No good having a dead one. To mount it, as to can see in the first picture I drilled a small hole with a brace and bit to feed the wire through. It's small enough diameter that the pickup will cover the hole.




To mount the jack, I flipped it over on it's side and drilled four larger holes with the brace and bit again, and used a hand chisel to clean up a bit. My plan wasn't to make a museum piece, rather to finish this before the kids got bored with the project and wandered off to play football. Cavity is large enough, we're finished here.




Ok, this old BIll Lawrence pickup is perfect for this- there are no pole-pieces to worry about, so no concerns about how the string passes over the pickup. And I simply enlarged the holes and screwed it down on to the wood, passing the wires through the hole in the cavity.



And, then finally, scavenged an odd bit of plastic and mounted the jack to the plate. Here's what it looked like when it was finished.

Making a Diddley-Bow: Stringing up

OK, here's a picture of the string running through the tail piece. I drilled an extra hole on a diagonal to run the string through it. Works great.






And here you can see I made a diagonal cut across the peg head to mount the tuner in the middle of the neck, so it pulls the string straight. I also added a small notch in both the bridge and the nut to hold the string in place.

Making a diddley-bow: all done

And here's the final product, with Noah giving it a road test. He's obviously a slide player from the Lowell George and Bonnie Raitt school- he preferes to play with a socket wrench. Me? I'll drain a bottle of Corona and use that.

How's it sound? Totally awesome. Really raunchy. Dog hates it. It's a winner.

In an inspired couple of days...

All the guitar parts to several songs are done. Finished. Re-recorded and perfected. There's a lot of work left to turn this into a finished CD, more singing and mixing. But the foundation is one I'm happy with now. That's what was eating at me with the earlier versions of things, there were just too many little nuances that I didn't like. After obsessing about this and working it to death, we not have a solid base to build up from. The songs that survived are:

Cold Falling Rain
Deeper and Deeper
Man in the Mirror
Sackcloth and Ashes
Stranger Blues
Worrying Stone
Water Rising Blues
Ball and Chain
One foot in front

I know you'll as about the breakdown of the guitars used here, so the official count is:

Regular Guitar? 1, but in an open tuning.
National? 1
Electric Lap Steel? 1
Lap Steel (Acoustic)? 6

Not one guitar in standard tuning anywhere to be found. Not from lack of material, mind you, those songs just have been left behind for a bit while things settle in. The survivors all hang together well. Not to worry, you'll hear all of them in Dundee.

All in all it's been an interesting process thus far, focusing on this with this kind of intensity. Three weeks to get a few guitar parts together seems like a whole lot of effort. But the reality is that I needed to get inside the songs and push them around a bit. Hit back. Songs are bullys, they like to force you in a direction that may not be right. I needed to push back, put some in time-out and reward the cooperative ones.

Phew. It'll be worth it in the end, I'm sure.

Seasick Steve?

TIme for some blues, this one will change your life. Thank the maker for YouTube.

Click here, and thank me later.

No really. This is a blues blog, and we haven't been talking about the music enough lately. So, trust me and head over to youtube and check this link out. I wouldn't waste your time and mine putting this here if it was crap. Come on, do you have any idea how long my honey-do list is? I'm lucky to get time to be on the computer at all, as long as my chore list is around the house these days.

So click the link.

And as an update: My amp is still trashed from the flood, I'm still recording, The band is playing next week at the Tunnels in Aberdeen and the Dundee Blues Bonanza is right around the corner.

Phew. All's well with the world. So see? You can click the link.

Air Travel and Security.....

My friend Gene sent me this, I have not a clue where it came from. Only shade for miles, and there's your flight home, ready to depart. Wonder if you could make it?


Kinda puts all those new TSA proceedures in perspective, no?

I google'd my name

And it turns out that I'm either a porn star, or someone using my EXACT name is one. That's a little odd, no? I mean, what are the odds of that. I thought all porn stars were named things like 'Long John' , and 'Thunder' and 'Lace'. This is really, really strange.

I hope my mother doesn't read this. If you do, it's really not me.

Dundee Blues Bonanza!

Hey all, just a couple of weeks till the Dundee Blues Bonanza.

Mark your calendars, we're playing with Time Aves on Saturday the 30th, and again

This week's special....

Want to book the band? Book us between now and the end of the month of June, and we'll throw in a workshop of your choice! Lap Steel, Slide Guitar- I have several 1 hour prepared workshopes ready to go that you can use as an extra marketing tool, or a chance to raise a little extra money.

But you need to move quickly. Operators are standing by. Email me at info@sonhenry.com

This is my kind of site

"Isn't it time people stopped fighting and learned to play 12 bar blues shuffles instead?"

That's a quote from the home page for BluesForPeace. Guitar lessons and videos, and a great idea- turning swords into Stratocasters. Bless yer hearts, guys. It's a great idea.

Here's the link-

http://www.bluesforpeace.com/

I love the airport. The Anchorage airport is still one of the few airports around where you can get close to the end of the runway and watch the planes land and take-off. Just like when I was a kid. It's a rush watching these big things head out or land with a screech.

Great picture, no? OK, it's not blues. Still cool, though.

Is it true? Starting from scratch?

Sort of.

I cleaned up and mixed down about 6 songs today. They're good, I'm not sure they're something that I want to turn into a formal CD release. So, a little more clean up this evening and I'll wrap them up and give copies to some friends and family.

And then start on the blues CD in the morning.

I suppose I had to get all this out of my system. The songs are good, but a little too autobiographical for comfort. Sorry, we're going back to country blues again. As much as I feel like I'm walking the same ground over and over again, I think I owe it to everyone to take a craftsman-like approach to the next CD, rather than spit them out like watermelon seeds simply because I can.

Sounds like a bad car commercial.....

I lied about mixing. I'm still recording.

Yeah, I know. I'm picky.

But there's a few songs I'm going to try this week and then mix on Friday. Going to keep working and then take the best of the songs and distill them down into a well-mixed compilation.

It won't be ready by the Blues Bonanza at this rate. Sorry. I'd rather you wait for something good than start thinking that I'm only creating quantity instead of quality. It'll be worth the wait. The votes from here from my sharpest critics are that this is shaping up to be a real solid release that'll open a door or two.

TIme to re-pot the National

Oh....

the pickups in my National Dynamic are microphonic. Time to pot them in wax. Normal wear and tear, these were not meant to be layed this loud, after all.

more rig adjustments.....

Spent more time tweeking the rig this weekend. It's a keeper.

I'm running a Weber 100 watt attenuator on the Marshall, which is one of the ones that works with resistors, and I think it's a good backup but I'm going to swap it for one of the ones that uses the reactive load in the form of an old speaker motor. According to a buddy of mine that has one, they're more natural sounding, and that's really my issue with the one I have, it's fine but it acts like a brick wall. So the upper dynamic range gets squashed.

But it's a minor point.

The reality is that the bulk of the tone is coming from the Pro Reverb, I'm a die-hard fender cat. But it's nice to have that extra something beefy to add to the mix. That Marshall is the thing. I know my blues-purist buddies are cringing. But hey, Jimmy Reed recorded with borrowed gear, so take a cleansing breath and trust me, it sounds like the bees knees.

And it's god because my old 100 watt Super Lead was wiped out in a flood a couple of weeks ago. Did I post about that? I can't remember. Oh, well, we had a plumbing fitting burst in my flat and it ran water into the back of my other amp. It's toasted. It's repairable, I suppose, once it dries out. Actually, I'm in no great hurry to plug it in after bailing almost a litre of water our of it. And in fairness, would you plug it in? We'll leave that for the folks at the Marshall Service Center.

the lap steel rig of doom

I had a chance to road test my new lap steel rig last night at Cafe Drummonds. Here's a photo to show you the new set up. On the right it's my trusty old Fender Pro Reverb, it's one that I've had forever. On the left is a 50 watt Marshall 2x12 combo. It's the old Lead/Bass model, and insane amp in it's own right. Yes, they're both on at the same time, sometimes.

What makes it work is the Radial ABY switcher that I added to my floor board, so I can jump between the two amps.

And, to keep the sound people happy, and keep a lid on the volume, I'm running a Weber (www.tedweber.com) attenuator on the Marshall, and a speaker silencer on the Pro, which knocks the power down to 20-25 watts each.

How's it sound? Like chocolate cake, nice and tasty....