Keith at Irvine Spectrum - 23Apr2010

A slow but very fun Friday night. I had some kids come by right off the bat, so I got a good start. Most of the night was pretty empty, but even then there were at least a few people really listening and joining in with requests. It got really good toward the end, with lots of people into it. I happened to look around and saw the maintenance guys standing there. Whoops -- I checked the time and it was 10:15 already. Time flies and all that...

The ice cream bar place behind me has a new employee, who came out and asked if I knew "Michelle", 'cuz it was "the best song in the world", and, not so coincidentally, also her name. I do -- or *did*, it's tricky to play, and I haven't for a long time, but I got through it OK. A while later I confused the heck out of a, in retrospect, *different* long-and-very-blonde haired girl by asking her what her *middle* name was. It was Taylor, though she was baffled as to how that was relevant...

The New Song of the Week was Paul Simon's "American Tune", which I've been "learning" for 20 years, but I think I can sing high enough now, and I've finally decided that the way I play it is the way *I* play it, and it's fine. I played it twice, and the second time through it went quite well.

I tried to capture some video, and just to make my life even more complex, I brought 4 (!) cameras: my old standby on its boom on the top of the amp (to my left); my old still camera clipped to the music stand, pointing (theoretically) at my guitar-playing left hand; and two Flip cameras from work, one strapped to the back of the amp, and one on top of the other speaker, to my right.

The first one performed admirably, as always: got great sound and recorded two 1:40-long battery's worth of good video. The other still camera turns out to record at a very low-res 320x240, and it inexplicably gave up quite early, but at least it got something. The Flip on the amp worked OK, but quit (as it's unforgivably designed to do) after an hour, and when I tried to restart it, its memory was full.

The Flip on the speaker froze up after 35 minutes, and when I hard-rebooted it, lost that file. On restart, it ran only 12 more minutes and quit. Massive fail. Luckily, of the three songs it caught, "Carolina in My Mind" was a pretty good take, so I can salvage that, at least. The big problem, of course, is that I can only set the cameras up pointing vaguely towards myself, start 'em up, and hope -- I can't see if they're properly aimed, or even actually working, 'cuz I'm on the wrong side.

Not sure why I had such bad luck with the cameras, but it was probably because I was singing and playing the best I've been for a month or more...

Or the cold. It was plenty chilly out there, and I had some trouble with the more intricate fingerwork towards the end, but at least I wasn't shivering. I made $40.04; half of that was from a guy who had been transmitting me live to a girl on the other end of his mobile video phone (!) for a half-dozen songs, and then bought one of each CD with a twenty. I could see her face on the little screen as he was pointing his phone at me. Is it the future yet?

Keith at Borders South Coast Plaza -- 16Apr2010

Started off really well, with several nice people already in the up-front comfy chairs, including one guy who I've seen before and apparently also remembers me, since he told a cellphone caller, "I'm gonna hang out here a while -- there's a guitar player setting up and he's pretty good".

That gave me someone to play for right off the bat, which helps a lot. And a lot of people heard the little intro speech that it was possible to make, given someone to make it to. So then a lot of people were willing to step up and request a song... Snowball...

In fact, I hadn't expected such participation, and my plan was to play my second-string material for a while to warm up/clear out my voice, and then start the video cameras to record the Good Stuff. But, all the requests were unerringly for the good songs, so I'd already done them all before I got a point where I could start the recording. I also couldn't afford to crash the momentum by stopping playing to start the cameras, so my plan was out the window.

Which made a great night, performing- and fun-wise, but not so good recording-wise. I did manage to get a few decent song takes towards the very end, so not a total loss, but it's more about the moment than the recording thereof. And it was good to have my voice back to near-full strength, after so long.

Keith at Borders South Coast Plaza -- 10Apr2010

We've been playing at South Coast Plaza exclusively on Fridays for over a year now, and I was hoping that this special-permission Saturday would be more lively. I was wrong.

Same usual group of Asian kids studying (or pretending to), and bored, lost, or ex- husbands hanging out in the bookstore for lack of anything better to do. I failed to get any connection started off the bat, and played to stone silence for most of the night. Nice acoustics, though. And no interruptions...

I tried my best to win someone over -- playing my biggest hits, but they weren't interested, and my voice was still pretty clogged up so I wasn't really getting anywhere. After a while, since no one was listening anyway, I took the opportunity to play some new stuff. That's always fun, and good practice.

But finally, the judicious black guy who asked for some great songs last week came in and gave me someone to play for. And as soon as he started clapping, several other people joined in. See? That wasn't so hard!

Unfortunately, he got there pretty late, and with the new early closing time, it was over before it made up for the previous hour and a half.

Probably because his own hair and beard are prematurely white, as I was packing up, he mentioned that he liked the color my hair was turning. I've been thinking that whatever amount of color "dirty blonde" originally claimed is essentially fading out, but he said it looked like it was "turning to bronze". I like that.

I have a new "Flip" digital camcorder on permanent loan from work, and I had an idea -- I set that one up, and also my usual point-and-click camera in Movie Mode, at two different angles, and ran them both for the last half-hour or so. Yesterday, with a lot of fiddling, I was able to make a video of "Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye" that cross-fades back and forth from one view to the other, with a little "Ken Burns" slow zooming thrown in. Makes a far more interesting video. You can check it out on my Facebook page (since my YouTube account got shut down...) http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1393143159307

Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- 03April2010

Started off crazy, with 3 teenage girls (who I've seen hanging out there a lot) sitting right down front, impatiently waiting for me to finish setting up so they could have me dedicate a love song to the "hot guy" who works in the ice cream bar shop right behind the stage -- despite them not even knowing his name. Not exactly what I'm there for. Between them and the guy who owns the BBQ shop in the Food Court, who, for several weeks running, has tried to get me to hype his shop in return for a free dinner (which I don't need, 'cuz I eat before I get there) -- it's too much pressure!

They stayed for quite a while, until I got my camera out and they leaped out of their chairs. I thought they were gonna get together and pose, but they were really jumping up to run away! I sure didn't expect that these particular girls would be camera shy...

But the night was generally very slow (only $35 in tips). It was surprisingly cold, and I'd only brought my vest, because last weekend it was nice and warm. This was a huge mistake, 'cuz I was freezing and shivering long before it was even half over. I kept telling myself that I could just go home, but there was always just one or two people really listening somewhere out there, so I couldn't do it. I'm such a sucker...

Finally a nice couple came and listened for a while, and after a couple of songs the girl jumped up and suddenly asked "What's your favorite hot drink?" Taken off guard, I said "Hot chocolate", and she said, "I knew it!", and took off. A minute or two later, in the middle of a song, she set a Starbucks hot chocolate down on my table, and then she and her boyfriend waved and left before I could even thank her. That was amazingly nice.

K&W at Borders South Coast Plaza -- 02Apr2010

I usually only play South Coast Plaza on the third Friday (the standing K&W gig there), and this one would normally have been Jim & Warren, but Jim couldn't make it, so I filled in. Maybe I shouldn't have -- my cold had evolved away from the sore-throat phase to the full-of-crud-throat phase, and I had a really hard time singing. It would clear up a little occasionally, giving me (false) hope, so it was kind of off and on.

Anyway, there was a nice lady there right at first who was really interested in hearing us, but she had an appointment to get to, so we tried to play the songs she wanted right off the bat. But there was also a 11-year-old girl there (with her parents) who wanted to hear some songs, so there was a bit of a bidding war going on for our time. That made it fun, and created a good start, but they both were gone too soon, leaving us with the usual only-partly-interested crowd.

There was one guy later on who had a particularly specific set of requests, all great classics that have been on the list for a while, and that I've been neglecting. That was pretty fun, trying to get those de-cobwebbed. Didn't do too bad on 'em, either.

And we must have been doing something OK, 'cuz we made 16 bucks to split, which is pretty good for a Borders gig.

The weird part is that I'll be back there next Saturday (just to have somewhere to play 'cuz Spectrum was unavailable), and then the next Friday for my usual monthly SCP date. An unusually SCP-intensive couple of weeks...

A New Guitar Trick

I seem to have invented a new way to play a guitar. Now, I'm not stupid enough to think that I'm the first guy to find this trick, but in 38 years of playing guitar, I've seen a lot of guys do a lot of different stuff and I've never seen it before. So I've probably only "re-invented" it, but whatever. This won't make any sense at all to non-guitar-players, but if you play, read on.

The trick, simply, is to put a capo on the guitar's second fret, but only covering the 5 highest strings, leaving the bass (6th) string open. (You have to use a C-clamp style capo -- the stretchy kind obviously won't work.)

At first glance, this is very similar to just lowering the bass string by a whole step, which is probably the most common non-standard guitar tuning, called "Drop-D", and well-known to almost everybody. In fact the trick does act a lot like Drop-D, (though up a whole step), and some of what you learn in Drop-D does apply -- especially the big grand sound of the normally-anemic D chord (though it's now an E, because of the capo). In both Drop-D and this trick (which, I suppose, could be called "Drop-E"), the usual D chord (xx0323) with its very weak bass (caused by the two unusable low strings) becomes 000323, with a huge bass end, and great Travis picking potential.

But the beauty of the trick is that it does *not* change the fingering shapes of other chords that use the 6th string. Unlike Drop-D, the G chord is played completely normally: 320003. Same with F#m, or even the alternate bass note of Bm. The only weirdness, and this is very weird at first, is that you have to manually fret the "0" fret of E chords. Em is still 022000, but that bass note 0 requires a finger, because the open bass string is really "-2" (see the picture). So you do have to set the capo back in the fret (unlike the usual practice of putting it kinda forward, to avoid buzzing), so you can fit your finger in beside the tip of the capo.

Since I came up with this, it's been surprisingly useful and I'm using it for several songs now. I "invented" it while working up "Peaceful Easy Feeling", but now I use it for "Leaving on a Jet Plane", "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Lyin' Eyes", "Dear Prudence", "Can't Find My Way Home", and probably a few more that I'm forgetting.

One disadvantage is that, because it relies on the capo to start with, you can't "capo up some more" to get a different singing key. (Unless you want to use *two* capos (one all the way across, and one not), two frets apart.) But it's occurred to me lately that my vocal range is about a third or fourth lower than most (tenor) pop stars'. I very frequently have to transpose popular songs down a fourth (an interval that is very convenient playability-wise on the guitar), but sometimes that's a little too far, so I end up with a capo on the second fret anyway. (Transposing down a third usually results in unplayable chords.) With this trick, I get that same amount of down-transposition (down a fourth and back up two frets), and a big fat bass note on the D chords (actually D shape, E sound) for free.