Scott Andrew

(View this video at YouTube.)

The new EP from Explone is on its way. Prepare yourselves! You may want to sit down.

Posted January 5, 2012

It's pretty easy to get a gig. If you live here, there are hundreds of coffeeshops, open mics, art galleries, restaurants and other venues that will let you work your craft in front of an audience, without expecting you to pack the place. You might be competing with an espresso machine and people might have their noses in their MacBooks and regular books, but if you're content to be background music while you work up your chops, you won't be lacking opportunities to play.

The locals are still proud of the grunge thing. When I moved here I was hesitant to even mention "grunge" to anyone, figuring most locals would be sooo over it. I'm happy to say that's not the case at all. Those who grew up here in the 90s remember how exciting those days were, when the city was the heart of a new musical groundswell. I haven't met any locals embarrassed to still be Pearl Jam or Soundgarden fans.

It's more tribes-y than clique-y. Every scene has its inner circle, but I don't think you can buy your way in with expensive equipment and stage clothes. Despite Seattle's reputation for being chilly, its musicians are some of the warmest, friendliest people I've met (that goes double for the native sons and daughters), and they tend to form tribes and small communities which are not impenetrable to anyone who puts in a good faith effort to know them. (Best way to do that? Join a band.)

It's isolated. It's three hours to Portland OR, four hours to Spokane and forever to anywhere beyond that. Unlike anywhere east of the Ohio River, where an hour or two in any direction gets to you to a considerably populated metropolis. This leads to a kind of self-containment, where a band from Portland might have a hard time finding a gig in Seattle because there's no shortage of local acts to choose from. This also works in reverse for Seattle acts trying to land gigs outside of Seattle. A challenge all around.

It's not all indie folk. There are thriving hip-hop and metal scenes, a resurgence of indie funk and soul, and we even have an upstart rock orchestra. KEXP might be our most famous FM station, but we've also got major triple-A in KMTT, hard rock and metal in KISW, and more than a few country, pop and dance stations. We're home several independent electronica festivals, and the annual Folklife festival draws thousands of spectators every year. (And yes, we do have quite a bit of folky stuff at the moment, thank you. Guilty as charged.) Whatever you're into, there's a niche for you here somewhere.

Despite entering my eighth dark, miserably rain-soaked Seattle winter, this place still tops my list of favorite places I've lived.

Posted December 29, 2011

Last weekend I experimented with GarageBand's built-in guitar amp modeling. My god. I could not believe the sounds I was getting, and just from default settings! I don't know if Apple's amp modeling is done in-house or not, but it certainly rivals anything I've heard from Line 6. I did some rock demos that to my ear sound like they were cut in Butch Vig's garage, and I didn't use a single microphone.

Apple software is amazing. At some point in the past few years, Apple figured out how get the software out of the user's way and just let you make stuff. It goes beyond the user interface stuff and deep into the product itself.

For example, iMovie comes with a limited set of filters and transitions, so you can add special effects to a clip or make fancy jump cuts. But here's the genius: you only get a handful of filters, but those filters are nearly perfect with default settings. If you're a knob-twiddler you won't appreciate this, but iMovie is not about knob-twiddling, it's about letting you make a damn movie on your laptop.

This tendency toward ease, toward letting you make something, is even more evident in GarageBand. There's no "mixer view" like you'd get with Logic or ProTools, but who cares. The stock instruments actually sound good, and while you can tweak the settings of plug-in effects as much as you like, the default settings of the various reverbs, compressors, EQs are so good, you can almost sense the hand of some anonymous Apple engineer who had the good sense to say "hey, how awesome would it be if whoever uses this thing doesn't have to mess with it?"

And then there are those guitar amp modelers. It's almost comical.

I'm a late, reluctant Apple convert. I had one of the first iBooks and grew to hate early OSX, nothing seemed ready for any serious work. I tend to view computers as I do automobiles. For some people, a car is a lifestyle expression. For me, a car is a chair on four wheels that takes me where I want to go. I've only owned one new car in my lifetime, and I chose the basest base model I could find because I truly do not give a damn. Likewise, I never cared that my main machine was a beige box so long as it let me do the stuff I wanted.

For me, the switch to a MacBook was not for fashion-forward reasons but because I just wanted stuff to work, good lord why can't this stuff just work instead of requiring me to don scuba gear and go cave-diving into the Settings menu, scanning ad-laden messageboard posts for out-of-date clues as to what this ASIO error means and why that driver doesn't work because it's not ported to 64-bit yet and suddenly it's two or three hours down the drain and I really wanted to record vocals tonight but now I'm tired and I have to be at work early tomorrow and screw this, I just want to make this one thing, why is all this stuff in my way?

This is how the world ends, not in fire or ice, nor with a bang or whimper, but when everything can be done satisfactorily on a MacBook Pro.

Posted December 28, 2011

Last night I watched the Cameron Crowe Pearl Jam documentary, Pearl Jam 20. Some thoughts:

• in hindsight, Mother Love Bone was a lot more glam than I remember.
• I had forgotten all that crazy climbing Eddie did during concerts. The shots of Jeff looking up at Eddie hanging overhead were great.
• there's an early scene where Stone (I think?) talks about returning demoralized from LA and considers giving up on being a rock musician. It seems to me this is a common thread in a lot of rock docs, with one person on the verge of washing out completely but deciding to give it one last go.
• the scenes during the Ticketmaster hearings where various committee members admit an ignorance of "grunge" and "alternative music" are as cringe-inducing as the recent SOPA hearings.
• I never really bought the whole "we hate being famous -- ohh, the spotlight, it burns" shtick and I still don't. Equally cringe-inducing. Although if the doc is to be believed, that was mostly Eddie.
• Confidential to Mr. McCready: you look badass with grey hair.
• the whole doc is comprised of footage shot in the 90s so the whole doc feels like an unearthed episode of MTV's 120 Minutes. I think I've seen the future of Instagram filters.
• the "drummer story" bit was cute but unfortunately that was the part I most most wanted to hear about!
• I like AIC better.
• I don't miss the 90s as much as I thought.

Posted December 27, 2011

Drummer and good pal Josh Williams is moving to Boulder this week, thus leaving Explone to carry on without him. Patrick has written some words you should read about Josh over here -- they've been friends for longer than I've known either of them and have a lot of shared history. Josh and Pat were Explone for the debut Crooks album, which I first randomly discovered via MySpace and it was Josh's high-precision drum work that drew me to that record in the first place, long before I came aboard as bassist.

If you listened at all to Dreamers/Lovers or Crooks, you know that Josh isn't content to just hold down the pocket. While tracking the new Telescope and Satellite EP, Josh's criteria for what made a take worth keeping came down to what he thought would inspire kids to take up drums. I think that says plenty.

I'm sad to see Josh leave town, but also really happy for him and his wife Katherine, because awesome people deserve to have things like careers that pay bills. I'll miss his drumming, but I'll miss his jokes and stories even more. Treat them well, Colorado! Or else.

As to the fate of Explone? Read Patrick's post for those details. Safe travels, big guy.

"Well guys, looks like we are awesome." -- Josh Williams

Posted December 21, 2011

Last week Kirby Krackle went in-studio and blasted out a version of "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" Foo Fighters-style in about two hours.

It's free! Go get it!

Here are some making-of snippets (RSS lovers, you may have to click through to the post to watch the videos):

Posted December 20, 2011

"Like most things on the planet, thinking about doing it is a lot worse than simply sitting down and doing it. The writing wasn’t hard to do, you just need to plant ass in seat and go from there."

Sci-fi author John Scalzi, declaring the completion of his first novel to a newsgroup in 1997. Reminds me of the the songwriting advice I got from Pat DiNizio years ago: "No. Nope. Ass in chair. That's the only way."

Posted December 18, 2011

So I went bananas and got myself a DM6Kit electronic drum set a few months back. I did this because, while I'm currently a less-than-amateur drummer, I've always liked the idea of having an electric kit so that I could work out human-sounding tracks and fills instead of drawing them on a grid in FL Studio. With the advent of USB-enabled kits, this is something I can actually do now.

I skip the built-in sounds and just plug directly into my MacBook. Then I fire up Garageband and assign EZDrummer to the active track. I've written about EZDrummer before and it continues to be pretty awesome.

The Good:

• sturdy construction and easy to assemble.
• did I mention it's sturdy? You can really whale on these things.
• the kick pedal and pad is surprisingly solid.
• the cymbal pads have different zones for the bell and the edge, nice touch
• the USB setup is a breeze. I didn't even bother with any of the built-in sounds. Paired with the MacBook running EZDrummer, it sounds pretty fantastic

The Not So Good:

• the hihat pedal, it really sucks. You have to really train yourself to open/close it at just the right moment or you'll drop a note. Also, not that I expected better, but there's only two positions: open and closed. There's no half-open or loose closed/tight closed. I've seen electric kits that can do this, but the DM6Kit is not one of them.
• you get one crash cymbal and that's it. There's no way to add more pads. This isn't a real problem for me as I can just grab a few notes and reassign them to different crash sounds after the fact. But get used to that one crash.
• the built-in sounds are weak sauce. Again, not a problem for me as I'm using the DM6Kit as a fancy MIDI trigger, otherwise it'd be a real disappointment.
• this isn't for nuanced playing, obviously. You'll have a hard time pulling off a realistic-sounding buzz roll, and playing with brushes means loading up another kit.

Of course, the whole benefit to this is to have realistic drums without having to set up mics or infuriating the neighbors. Bang out the best live performance you can, then edit the parts you're unhappy with. Add in a missed accent or scoot a late kick over. Straighten out a sloppy fill, or punch in on a separate track, re-do the fill, then copy/paste the notes into the final track. Or switch the whole performance from the Yamaha to the Craviotto kit by way of a dropdown menu.

Here's me playing along to a song I'm working on, running the DM6Kit into Garageband with the EZDrummer "Classic 4 Mic" setting with a Craviotto sound bank. Despite my middle-school rock band level performance, I gotta say it sounds a whole lot like real drums to my ear.

[audio:dm6kit-sample.mp3|no_dl=1|no_fb=1|no_twitter=1]

Status: happy!

Posted December 17, 2011

I haven't seen the new Louis C.K. digital thingy yet but damn well plan to, because his standup is state-of-the-art. I'm not at all fan of his brutal crushing downer of TV show, but the man is funny.

A lot of hay is being made about the nerdy and financial aspects of the thing, but I don't care so much. Here's something: did you catch that the material on "Live At The Beacon Theater" was developed just for that show and will never be performed again?

Can you imagine working for months creating and refining jokes that are only going to be told once? I find that weirdly inspiring. Not just the caliber of the work, but the willingness to fling it aside and start again from nothing. Thinking about it actually makes me feel a little nauseous, because as a songwriter guy I know how hard it is to sit down and try to write something good, anything good, where "good" is that nebulous region between hit song! and anything that doesn't make one feel like a no-talent fraud¹ who'd be better off doing something else that makes gobs of money instead.

But unlike a musician, a comedian can't tour on his greatest hits package.

I've developed a huge amount of respect for standup comedy over the past few years -- listening to podcasts like WTF with Marc Maron and TSOYA has contributed to that. It's probably the last remaining profession that you can't buy your way into with money or good looks. I mean, you can try, but eventually you have to open your mouth and say something at least as funny as the last time you opened your mouth. You're constantly woodshedding and workshopping, or you're dead. U2 could've stopped at Achtung Baby² and would still have their private jet today. Rock stars have it waaay too easy.

Where was I going with this? Anyway, note to self³: keep trying to make good stuff. But don't be afraid to burn the ships.

¹ not as self-effacing as it sounds, as I firmly believe that an artist who doesn't occasionally feel like a no-talent fraud is either delusional or an artist in name only. ² and I kind of wish they had. ³ this!

Posted December 15, 2011

Posted December 2, 2011