Men in Tights...a title for the ladies

Yay! First day of the Renaissance Festival was today! Got me a season pass, call me a dork all you want...it's fun :) My classic rock cover band (ROKAFONIK PHILHARMONIK)'s show is next saturday! Just a week away, I'm so excited! I'm going to try and keep this entry a bit shorter than the rest, I just feel like I'm writing a ridiculous amount. I wrote yet another song today. Actually, just now. I had written the lyrics a few months ago, inspired by the painting by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Philosopher. I had part of the music written years ago, just never had anything to put it to. But, as I was digging through some old recordings, I found it and started playing with it a bit and turned out to really like it. Added a chorus and it was ready to go! It's definitely still in it's rough state, needs some cleaning up and I'll probably add more fancy guitar things :) 

My band (Qualified For Response)'s show last night at the Talent Farm went really well! We were all completely "in the zone" and just having a ton of fun. There was a band that was getting ready to come on after us, called The Wholetones, from Naples, FL. Truth be told, I was very tired, so I really only stayed because they had a cello. So they set up after us, the instrumentation goes as follows: cello, acoustic guitars, banjo, upright bass, and drums. What came from the stage threw me for a loop! I was expecting kind of mellow music, jazzy and "chill". That's definitely not what happened. What I heard was some kind of incredible fusion of american folk, bluegrass, irish folk, pirate metal, and the power of the GODS! THE GODS I TELL YOU! I've never seen anyone's fingers move so fast. The guy who was playing the cello, banjo, and later, the acoustic guitar (Alex), made Yngwie Malmsteen seem slow. And not only that, it was completely incredible that he could be so amazing on all three instruments AND SING! After their show, I gave them a 20, they gave me 3 CD's, two stickers, and a shirt. Really great band, nice guys, definitely give them a listen. 

Also, I've been really wanting to write a bit about the band Elbow. Haha, short blog entry. Right. This band is from the UK and I recently heard about them. Another band that five minutes after hearing, I bought an album. The first song I heard was 'Grounds for Divorce'. This, however, is pretty different than the rest of their songs. What really got me interested was the sound of the guitars along with the overall style of this song. What the guitar player and bassist did was pan their sounds right and left. This means that the guitar player, in this case, mixed his sound so that his guitar sound will be prominent in the left speaker. And the bassist mixed his sound so that it's prominent in the right speaker. The bassist for this song made his sound very distorted and downright dirty. The guitar player mimicked that dirtiness to the sound, but since it's an octave higher than bass guitar, it adds a very interesting texture for the listener. The Civil Wars did something like this in their song, 'Barton Hollow'. Except, since they have no bassist, John Paul White (guitar) made two guitar tracks and panned them to both sides of the speakers. His acoustic guitar sound is prominent in the left speaker, and he either plugged his acoustic into an amp and dirtied the sound, or plugged in an electric hollow body and kicked the distortion. But I think, since he's always got his acoustic, that it's the former. What makes me think it's either an acoustic or hollow body he's using is the tone of the sound. Typically while using a solid body electric, like a Fender Stratocaster that many people are familiar with, the sound gets through very clear. And while you can certainly dirty up a Fender's sound, it's difficult to get anything but a clear cut, maybe crunchy, tone. Whereas, if you were to use an acoustic or hollow body guitar through an amplifier, the tone would become muddy and dirty with enough distortion because of the resonance provided by the acoustics of these guitars. A hollow body will resonate more than a solid body. In 'Grounds for Divorce', the guitar player is using an acoustic guitar plugged into an amplification system with a distortion pedal. In the video, you can see when the guitar player hits the distortion pedal and the sound becomes huge, and dirty.