11:16 pm May 13, 2010

Good news everyone! I don't need the cast anymore! My middle finger and index finger are now individually wrapped and I can use my other three fingers to play bass. So I'll be playing Tuesday the 25th at the Lion (Melbourne Street 7:00 - 11:00).

There's obviously a long way until I get back to where I was before and there's still a good chance the bone graft wont work (as there was only the tiniest piece of bone left there to attach to) in which case they'll have to cut the finger off at the joint at a later date.

If it comes to that I'l still be able to play Hammond - I just might have to learn guitar left handed - which I can do if I have to - my right handed handwriting is about as good as my left (just a lot slower)...

Anyway for now I'm enjoying being able to make my own cups of tea, butter toast, turn on the oven, do up my shoelaces, drive the car - it's fantastic!

2:14 am May 12, 2010

I know it's been nearly a year since I put anything on this "news" page - but I thought I'd use this space to keep people informed on my recent injury - I appreciate all the sympathy and kind words I've received, it really is helpful in keeping a positive outlook - and I have been very positive, it's just getting very frustrating doing everything with one hand (doing up trousers is the hardest thing but I refuse to wear tracksuit pants! The next hardest is buttering bread!).

However I know a lot of people are curious to know more details and to be honest, the more I explain it, the worse I feel about it! So I'll explain it all here...

On the 23rd of April I was sawing some wood on my table saw and it was starting to get dark but I was nearly finished (you can see it coming now) so I just concentrated a bit harder as it got darker - when I finished I hit the stop button and put the off-cut down on the table - touching the still spinning blade as I did so...

Now I should explain that I've always been wary of table saws because of all the people I've met with missing fingers only one was a butcher - all the rest were done on table saws - and being a musician of course you can't really afford to lose any part of your hand - you'd rather lose a leg than a finger-tip! (although a Hammond organist can't lose a leg either...)

So, paradoxically my extra fear and caution caused me to relax too much once I hit the stop button - I was so relieved not to have cut my fingers off that I cut my finger off!

Anyhow I felt the blade go through my left index finger and I felt a chunk of wood or finger hit my arm and it really felt like I'd cut my whole finger off at the knuckle.

But very fortunately it was only the one finger and I either moved it very quickly or it was flung very fast away from the blade - a lot of saw table injuries occur when you're really using your muscles to push a piece of wood through...

So the cut went through like this -

So the surgeons took some of the bone from the "amputated remnant" and stuck it onto that tiny sliver of distal phalanx you can see remaining. The amazingly lucky part is that, as you can see from the outline of my finger, the entire pad is still there as is the tendon - so I could both move and feel the end of my finger even though it was almost completely filleted!

The worse news is that the bone that was cut out was really trashed (and indeed some of it is still missing or was disintegrated) so it wasn't a matter of just sticking my finger-tip back on.

Instead they had to stick as much bone back on there as they could and hope it grows onto the remaining part properly. Then, to fill in the missing flesh part they made a "cross finger flap" where they flip a chunk of middle finger over onto the index finger, covering the bone graft. This flap remained attached to the middle finger for ten days while it grew into the index finger (they were sewn together during this time).

Then the fingers were separated and my arm put back in a cast - I had hoped that, after the separation they might be wrapped less constrictively and I might be able to gig with my other eight fingers but, of course, the tendon in that finger is as strong as it ever was and by bending my finger even very slightly it could rip that bone graft right apart...So it's completely immobilised for at least six weeks and I'm probably not supposed to use it for some months after that...

But the good news (besides not losing more fingers) is that, as long as everything goes well, my finger will only less than a centimetre shorter which I could definitely get used to on organ and probably on piano - I really don't know if or when it would be strong enough to play guitar again but time will tell I guess.

That's about all I know for now, I'll keep this up to date anyway.

12:27 pm June 4, 2009

The "CD's for Sale" page is back! I was going to wait until I had one of these new albums out before I put the old ones back up - but now there are torrents of all my old albums and I realise I can't complain about illegal downloads of my albums unless I have a legitimate option for obtaining them!

Maybe free downloads are the future of music - maybe musicians will pay all the studio costs out of their own shallow pockets for the love of music and then give it away in a spirit of sharing and freedom of ideas and all that (actually I believe that might be the case in all seriousness and it has good and bad points just like the current business model has) - however these previous three albums still have a lot of money tied up in them - as well as un untold amount of grief, stress and heartache - one day I'll tell the true story of these albums and it might turn your hair white like it did mine!

2:04 am June 1, 2009

This isn't exactly news - I really ought to start a blog for this kind of thing but I gotta say it...

We had a great gig on Friday night! For one thing, my Hammond and Leslie were sounding better than they have done in forty years! I installed new percussion switches, a new key comb (to stop keys "clacking" together) and most importantly - I replaced all 43 capacitors on the tone generator - these capacitors form part of a tuned circuit for half the tone-wheels in the organ - the tonewheels produce the sine waves which combine to make up the 256,000,000 tones available - the tuned circuit is to filter out unwanted frequencies, motor rumble etc. from these sine waves - as they age they filter less and less of this unwanted noise - as well as filtering out more and more of the frequencies you actually do want!

The difference is staggering - all the tones are much more even in volume now, they're less blurry, clearer, more defined, breathier, cleaner and much louder - so I was able to back the preamp drive level back from 100% and the treble control from 100% to about 30%...

Anyhow all of this enables me to play with much more confidence - so I can try more difficult things - and is generally much more fun to play...and it was a lot of fun before!

Also I replaced the crossover in the Leslie speaker and the bass is a lot cleaner and tighter now, with a better balance between bass and treble - also I replaced the missing speaker carpet underneath the top baffle - I don't know exactly what it's for, but Don Leslie put it there for a reason - so I put it back...

As well as that, however - I've always wanted to put the Hammond back in the place where it really excelled through the 1950's and 1960's - now I don't mean trying to historically recreate the music of that era - but the Hammond used to be a popular as a good-time, grooving, party instrument - then it became so popular (in the late 1960's - 1970's) that a bunch of hacks jumped on the bandwagon and made cheesy "Hammond Hits" albums - these were people with no love or understanding of the instrument or the techniques developed by the master jazz organists in the previous decades - and the Hammond itself became unfairly associated with corny, cheesy, daggy music...

On the other hand there has been a (greatly welcomed) resurgence of Hammond music in the jazz world but this world is inaccessible to a lot of regular folks - which the 1950's - 60's Hammond trios used to cater to - so I'm very proud to say that I think we're starting to bring the Hammond organ back into the front bars it used to frequent and make it do what it does best - create a groove people can have fun to...

12:07 am March 13, 2009

I apologize for the lack of news once again (if anybody ever reads this! There's no counter on this page!) There have been no new bookings in the past six weeks so there have been no mailing list mailouts or anything new to report...

Except that the "Live At The Wheatsheaf" album is moving ahead - I'm dropping off the first hard disc tomorrow for evaluating and preliminary mixing - and we're organising the printing and cover photos and all that...

Also - on a less musical note - I've spent the last month or two designing my CNC machine which may enable Two Tone Electronics to break even! At the moment I make effects pedals by laser printing the circuit board designs onto junk mail (seriously this works much better than the commercial iron-on PCB material!), iron it onto copper clad fibreglass board, etch the board in Ferric Chloride or Ammonium Persulphate and then drill the holes on a Dremel drill press - this works very well and produces fantastic sounding effects - but there are two major problems - it takes a couple of days to make each pedal and then I still have to do the lettering! The pedal lettering I have done very successfully with decal paper from art supply stores - but this scratches off fairly easily, the sheets cost quite a bit, and they seem to react unfavourably to any lacquer or protective coating...

So the CNC machine will be able to engrave the lettering or cut stencils for spray painting, as well as drilling the holes and milling the circuit boards etc...I only mention this here because sometimes I run into people who seem to think that I do absolutely nothing in between the two times they've seen me! But there just aren't as many gigs around as they used to be!

Also I've been fixing my cars! One rainy night several months ago the master cylinder finally died and I ran the 1968 Beetle into a post - and we've been too broke to fix it since then - so we've relied on the 1976 Kombi since then until finally the clutch cable broke. But for AU$57 we put a new clutch cable, clevis pin and conduit tube in and it's better than when we bought it - so I ruined one Op-Shop shirt crawling around under the car - try doing that with a new car! Plus my five year old daughter threaded the cable through from the front for me (for a dollar!) so I didn't have to crawl in and out so much...

In fact - a lot of people don't know how much an air-cooled Volkswagen nut I am but I've had the same 1968 Beetle for more than ten years (in fact the exact model ^{and colour!} that's on the cover of "Abbey Road") and I've replaced the transmission once, had the replacement one rebuilt!, replaced the 1500cc engine with a 1600cc myself (because it was becoming insanely difficult to find 1500 parts) - then removed and rebuilt the 1600 engine, replacing the pushrod tubes, cylinders, pistons, rings, cylinder heads and all the seals and rubbers, as well as the clutch components - the aircooled Beetle is a masterpiece of design - they have a reputation for being noisy, unreliable and for spontaneous combustion - but this is simply because they are so reliable that people never adjust the valves, check the fuel lines, make sure the battery cover is still there (the first time someone takes out a Beetle battery, they lose the cover - and, because it's under the steel sprung, horsehair (or whatever it is) filled seat - as soon as you get a heavy person or four in the back seat, the metal springs contact the battery terminals and ignite the horsehair or shredded coconut or whatever that stuff is! - what is that stuff?)

Anyhow, treat your Volkswagen nice and it will be nice to you - adjust the valves when it's nice and cold, check the points, the timing, change the oil and it will last forever...I feel an "article" coming on...

2:59 am Jan 24, 2009

Sorry there hasn't been any news for a while - the reason is that my Rhythm Aces Revival Experiment was a total disaster! Musically I mean - I know I've revived this band three or four times since I first realized it's time had passed! It's just that the overwhelming majority of people tell me I should keep doing it and that they prefer that band to my newer material - and there's a terrible paradox at the heart of the job of being a live musician - the audience aren't irrelevant as they may be in some of the so-called higher arts! (I don't believe there's an art higher than music!) - but you can't just play what the majority of people want either - or every band would be a Cold Chisel, AC/DC cover band...

So occasionally I've decided to revive the Rhythm Aces and "give the people what they want" - but I'm just not excited or even interested in it anymore - while I can completely see what people liked about the old band - and I'm very thankful for their appreciation also - It's just not interesting for me musically anymore - and it's not going to go anywhere musically...

So, the gig at Bachuus went very well and people seemed to really like it - but it's just not the sort of music I want to play anymore...so we're stuck with the Hammond trio..

Which is another thing - the John Citizen Trio (formerly the Jesse Deane-Freeman Trio) is now the Jesse Deane-Freeman Trio again... I know, I'm sorry!

The original reason was that we used to do both bands at once and people would be disappointed that it wasn't the Rhythm Aces - but now every band gig is going to be the Hammond trio and every solo gig is me on the National guitar....

11:14 pm Dec 15, 2008

The Rhythm Aces are returning to the place where many South Australians saw them first - Bachuus Wine Bar in Henley Beach. After the Grace Emily Hotel, this was the first S.A. venue we played after my time in Cairns. We'll be back on Sunday the 28th of December and if we're going to be able to re-re-relaunch the Rhythm Aces successfully we really need a lot of people to turn up that day! So if it's possible to make it down please do - we'll put on a vintage Rhythm Ace show for you! (If you can't make it, at least ring to ask what time we'll be on!)

10:47 am Dec 7, 2008

We're now booking all three acts - my solo acoustic set, The John Citizen Trio and The Rhythm Aces - nothing actually booked yet! But check the gigs page.

6:18 pm Oct 3, 2008

Here's one of the songs rescued from the hard disk here (9MB - it's quite a long song!)

11:00 pm Oct 1, 2008

We finished recording on Friday and had a good time at last - I relaxed a bit more, maybe too much! But I thank you all for coming along and hope you enjoyed it - the trouble with recording is it's hard to concentrate properly on the gig itself - serious music and good entertainment are not always the same thing - they don't have to be mutually exclusive though and I think I got the balance a bit better on the last gig!

However, since then I've been messing about with IDE hard drives trying to recover the audio from that gig! We've been recording with an Alesis HD24 which is a very handy machine - fairly similar in operation to a tape machine but of course an almost unlimited amount of time on the "tape" - it uses IDE drives (the standard hard disk drive in your PC) in caddies as removable "tapes" - but you can fit quinquagintillions of hours of audio on there...

However, as you record, the audio is written to a data section of the disk and only when you press "stop", a header is written providing the system information such as the length of the song, number of tracks, the place(s) where the audio files are stored etc.

If you don't get to press stop (for example if you were chatting to people and forgot to press the button - just hypothetically) and the power gets switched off (say...) then the header doesn't get written and the song is described as having a length of zero seconds!

And because the HD24 formats the drive in it's own proprietary way, it can't be read by a computer or anything else...Unless - you find this fantastic program with which you can put the HD24 drive in yer PC and the program can read it, copy the files (including the "missing" ones) onto your computer's hardrive and then back onto your HD24 drive - or another spare one - you can also back up your drives and do all kinds of cool stuff - all I know is our whole gig vanished and now it's back!

So I've been taking old computers apart and swapping drives around and that kind of fun stuff - I'm just recording three hours of silence onto another hard drive so I can copy the gig onto that one (it has to overwrite an existing recording) and then I'll be able to make a rough mix an put an example up here...

Also I'll have a "not news" page up later tonight - a reincarnation of the old "stuff" page for those who've been here before...

2:31 am Sep 15, 2008

Some people have asked me whatever happened to the album Thommo and I recorded (known variously as "Where Are They Now?", "The Ashley Street Sessions" and "Waiting For Parts") and the short answer is that it will come out someday before too long...

I'd definitely like to re-mix it on better equipment (which I can't afford to do for a while) and possibly even re-record some of the vocals - because I was honestly at a low point when I recorded those and I was drinking more than I should which really affects your vocal chords if you didn't know - now I haven't decided about that part yet - because in a way, my depressed, alcoholic vocal tones were part of the era it was recorded in - so I probably shouldn't mess with it - also I don't really want to cos it's pretty old now...

Anyway I was very happy with that album because it achieved a lot of the goals I intended it too - largely it was an experiment to test three things - 1: whether it was possible, in the 21st century, to record an album with the vibe of a mid 20th century album, 2: whether it was possible to record an album with only two people but with multiple instruments and still have a lively musical interaction (I had already discovered it wasn't possible on my own but it really is with two people) and 3: whether we could create a unified theme or picture of a band even if there was no such band...

Now these were the things I had been wondering about - and we answered these questions at least to my own satisfaction - but once they were answered, the motivation to push the project any further kind of disappeared! And there's a considerable amount of money to be spent to turn it into a commercial product - we have to pay copywrite's for the cover versions, pay for mastering (after paying for remixing), printing etc...

So it will happen, but not just yet. Also, had we released it before, it would have been my first "Hammond album" and I really didn't want it to be seen like that - the instruments on it are supposed to be irrelevant - it was meant as a sound in itself - so you can't tell whether the guitar, Hammond, piano, Wurlitzer or accordion is leading the song. But the live at the Wheatsheaf album will be more suitable as a first "Hammond album", and a little bit of space won't do "Waiting For Parts" any harm...

Listening to it now, it's hard to describe how many hundreds of hours (and thousands of dollars - which I'm paying for now!) I put into that recording. I hired equipment specifically for certain effects I couldn't produce on my own - I even bought musical instruments I couldn't afford to get specific sounds on some tracks.

I've never spent so much time or physical and emotional effort on a single project in my life - so I'm not going to let it go un-released! The current plan is to wait until after the Wheatsheaf album launch - and then we may sneak "Waiting For Parts" onto the market without much fuss...

4:06 pm Sep 14, 2008

Last Thursday's recording went very well - although it must be said we had less than a quarter of the people who came the first Thursday...was it something I said? But of course we can't expect people to come out midweek every week and also the Royal Adelaide Show was on and a lot of people spent their weekly entertainment budget at that wonderful institution...

(Actually as we went past the Thebarton Theatre it was clear that every living person in Adelaide who wasn't at the Royal Adelaide Show was the "Thebby Theatre" - it turns out it was to see Bill Bailey! Hell if I'd known that at the time I would've have been there!

However three of the four technical problems with the first weeks recordings were solved and I know what to do next week to solve the last problem!

Anyhow I've had a few comments or suggestions about my approach to music which I think I should try to clarify - over the years many people have received the (mistaken) impression that I don't seem to take music as seriously as some other people seem to for a number of reasons - for one, we're usually laughing, joking or otherwise having fun while we're playing, two, many of the starts and endings (and some of the middle parts!) of songs are sloppy and/or have mistakes in them and three, there are usually longer pauses between songs than other bands have.

Now all of these things are true but the reason is that there's no such thing as a free lunch - you can't have vibrant, interesting, exciting, creative music that's also polished, practiced and "perfected". You can essentially have one or the other.

When you practice a song over and over, you're essentially committing it to memory and then playing it back like a CD - of course it get's tighter, more polished and has fewer mistakes, but it also starts to sound like you're playing a CD over and over again...

But when you make something up on the spot you're relying on a different part of your brain to come up with what to play - you rely on muscle memory to choose the right notes and you can get to the point where you're almost listening to yourself as a listener rather than a player - then you can draw on all the things you've listened to to make requests for what you want to hear/play next - sometimes you get some real surprises - many times I've listened to recordings I've done this way and had to work out what I played by listening to the recording over again! Which is my goal - I want to play stuff that I actually can't play!

That sounds a bit vague I know but that's really how it works - so of course there will be mistakes because we've never played these songs before - so we've never got to the end and had to work out how it should go...this is the price you pay for getting the added excitement, adrenalin and creativity you get from this approach...

But it's not through laziness or drunkenness as some people say! (because, of course, people only see me when I'm in a pub and what are you supposed to do in a pub?). Indeed the opposite is true - it's far easier to rehearse songs until all the surprises are taken out - even a computer can play a song without any mistakes - but this is part of the modern world which I'll rant about later - people don't realise how easy it is to do something competently - but to do something brilliantly (not saying I'm brilliant - but I'm attempting to make brilliant music - not competent music!) is much harder...

The pauses between songs are due to the fact that, for the reasons outlined above, I don't have a set song list - the next song might be one we've done before or something I've heard but never played or something I'm about to make up as I go (either based on something I've thought of before at home or something that occurred to me during the gig). Of course it would be a better "show" if the songs were faster, slicker and better organised but I think the individual songs are "better" this way - it's just a different way of doing it - it's not that we're not as good as doing it the standard "showbusiness" way...

As for having fun on stage I can't apologise for that! If the music's good and people are enjoying it - what could be more enjoyable than that - I know you're supposed to put on a serious (or anguished - or pained) face when you bend a note or something but if it's fun I figure - just grin!

I should also say (though it's kind of obvious!) these songs I'm posting are direct mixes straight out of the multi-track - they've been roughly mixed but they haven't been "produced" or "mastered" - I just made a quick mix to hear what the music sounded like - not what the album will sound like!

2:41 pm Sep 6, 2008

2:08 am Sep 6, 2008

Firstly I'd like to thank everyone who came along to the gig on Thursday - especially because we haven't played for so long it was a pleasant surprise to see so many old friends - I've always been in a quandary as to how (or whether) to explain my absences from the gigging scene over the past three or four years - because the reasons themselves are quite personal - but I certainly appreciate the loyalty of the people who used to come and see us - and I hope you all enjoyed it - we were a little rusty but we're all individually playing better as well so hopefully the next few will be even better!

Now the other thing is that, surprisingly (to me) the recording worked out quite well! I mean it was much better than our last attempt and there are only really three or four technical problems with it! Which we can easily remedy next Thursday - there are still several usable songs there though...

The difficulty is that it's very hard to engineer a recording and play the music as well - obviously they're supposed to be two separate jobs - but over the four live recording attempts I've made, Thursday night was by far the best sounding one...

We're rehearsing some more songs tomorrow but I'll hopefully have time to upload some of the songs we did on Thursday to give an impression of how it went - many thanks again to everyone who came - and we hope you can make it to some of the others

earlier in September...

We're recording a live album at the Wheatsheaf Hotel in Thebarton this month. Regular listeners may know that we've attempted two live albums before - one with the Rhythm Aces at the Semaphore Worker's Club and one of the Hammond trio at the FAD Bar. The trouble is it's very hard to record a good live album - because you know you only have one chance to get it right and that every note you play is going on the album - so you just can't relax and play...

I also have the added pressure of being the recording engineer as well and the financial responsibility of hiring the recording equipment etc. So the pressure to get things right becomes so intense that it's impossible to get things right! So the FAD Bar recording had not a bad groove to it (because it was our second attempt there - on the first gig the tape machine didn't work!) but, due to the pressures of doing everything at once I screwed up the settings on the Leslie mic and everything was distorted and nasty - and the Rhythm Aces gig was an almost perfect recording technically of a very nervous and uninspired performance! So this month at the Wheatie we're recording four gigs so we can hopefully bypass the tension and get back to just playing music...

Anyway, regardless of the recording, the band is sounding very good now - I've rebuilt my Hammond and Leslie so they're back to their original condition (almost - there's a little more work to be done on the Hammond but every thing's working as it's supposed to - it just has some funky, old-age quirks which are okay - it is 45 years old this year!) and I've been making myself practice for an hour a day whether I feel like it or not (which I haven't done for many years - to my shame - it's just when you're gigging every week you often don't bother to practice mid-week but you really should!).

We haven't been gigging regularly for a long time (for reasons I'll elaborate on later) but we did a few gigs earlier in the year and the band was so much better than it was the last time we played - so I have high hopes for the gigs this month - I hope you can make it - and that it's not too cold!

You may notice I've spell checked most of this site after five years or more(?) and there's a very good reason - which I'll discus shortly - but in brief I converted to Linux about a year ago and can now rely on my computer as a long term proposition - rather than awaiting the next operating system with fear and dread and being forced to buy all new hardware and software every time Bill Gates thinks he can get away with making me do it...

So now, not only does all my old hardware miraculously work again but I can now get programs to do all the things I couldn't do before - and I can invest this time into the machine which always promised so much but only partially delivered before...

I will rant about this later but this has caused a real revolution in my musical life - I've put all my CD's and almost finished putting my LP's on the computer - and it's amazing what a difference this makes - I've been studying music fairly intensely for the past twenty years at least - but now I can cross reference and double check things hundreds of times faster - in fact it's just so much easier to listen to music that I know I've been listening to a lot more - and learning faster than I ever have before... I know some people have been prompting me to do this for a long time and I did hold some mistaken views on digital audio which I'll recant in detail soon...

Anyhow, as part of my reclaiming of the computer (as a machine that does what I want it to do rather than me being able to do what it lets me do!) I've started updating these pages including - at last - spell checking the old pages...my punctuation and grammar is still going to be as infuriating as it's always been though...