This week on Live Musician Central I’ve been doing several posts on the recent Fender price increase. In case you weren’t aware, Fender musical instruments increased prices by as much as 30% at the beginning of March, 2009. This will have a big effect on all live performing musicians who use Fender products. I wrote a post earlier this week about how the Fender price increase affects working musicians. These instruments are the tools of our trade and I personally like using good tools but I don’t want to spend every penny of my earnings on them. That’s why I’ve been putting up posts this week with links for buying Fender guitars and Fender amplifiers on eBay. Buying used instruments on eBay is a great way to pick up some excellent instruments for decent prices. I’ve bought and sold a lot of equipment on eBay over the years and I’ve learned some tips and tricks for getting decent deals from good sellers on eBay. Today we’re going to discuss some tips and guidelines for buying used instruments on eBay.
Yes AC/DC really is one of my favorite live bands of all time. It was truly a sad day when lead singer Bon Scott died from choking on his own vomit after a long night of heavy drinking. Let that be a lesson to you to never leave a totally drunk, passed out band member unattended while they’re unconcious from the alcohol. All they need is a friend to roll them over if they let the ol’ stomach contents fly.
That being said, while Bon Scott captained the AC/DC ship it was truly a rocking site to behold. I hope you enjoy todays clip of AC/DC playing “Let There Be Rock” live at Golders Green, England in 1977. Long live Bon Scott wherever he may be! (more…)
Yes fellow musicians it’s true, Fender musical instruments has raised prices on their professional level instruments by approximately 25%. That means the American Deluxe Stratocaster you’ve been saving up to buy for $1249.00 is now going to cost you $1599.00. That’s quite a painful price increase when you’re saving up your hard earned gig money to buy a professional level Stratocaster. Is it fair for Fender to do this? Of course it is, this is America and you can charge whatever the market is willing to bear. As always, it’s the choice of the musician’s to buy or not to buy and it’s going to be very interesting to see how this is going to affect buying choices.
I’m not only a live performing musician but a studio musician and producer as well. I have tried dozens of different headphones over the years and almost invariably breathed a sigh of relief when an old pair died just so I would have an excuse to buy another pair. It seemed like finding the perfect pair of headphones was like searching for the holy grail. To be honest, I still haven’t found that perfect pair of headphones but I have found a couple headphone solutions that have kept me satisfied for a while now.
One of my favorite live musicians is Rick Wakeman who is best known for his keyboard work with progressive rock group ‘Yes’. Rick also has a huge body of recorded work and has played studio sessions with many famous artists. It’s his skill as a live keyboard player that we’re going to enjoy today though. This is a video of Rick playing a keyboard solo during the Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe tour of 1989 (that must explain the mullet!). I think this video showcases Rick’s skill as a live player quite well and it’s fun to see a player of his skill get a few minutes to just break loose and play. (more…)
So why am I reviewing the Oscar Awards Show on Live Musician Central? For the live musical performances of course! That and the fact that many musicians have great careers in the movie-making industry. This years awards had quite a few musical numbers in it. In fact the show started off with Hugh Jackman singing a full musical number doing a spoof of all the years movies that was really funny. Hugh has a surprisingly good voice and it looked like he was carrying it live. As you know, I just can’t stand to watch lip syncing. Anne Hathaway got up there with him and did quite a good job singing as well. Hugh was the real surprise though and I liked his finishing line of the opening number, “I’m Wolverine!” that was classic.
When I started playing in live bands the hottest synthesizer on the market was the Yamaha DX7. Back then it was great to have a keyboard that could play lots of notes simultaneously and do a decent job of sounding like the instrument it was emulating. Most keyboard players brought multiple keyboards to the gigs and there was a lot of setup time involved. I remember spending hours working on the perfect soundpatches for my Roland keyboards. The thing about playing keyboards is you can never have too many sound options. It was an expensive proposition to be a keyboard player as it would cost the player thousands of dollars to get the necessary equipment to play in a live band. The dream was to have racks of synthesizer modules at your disposal to create the incredible soundscapes that you could hear in your head. But only the top paid musicians could afford to live that dream. The rest of us had to make do with whatever synthesizer equipment we could afford. It’s amazing how times have changed with the development of incredibly powerful, software based synthesizers like those found in Reason 4.0.
If you’ve never heard of Reason which is developed by Propellerhead it’s basically a virtual studio rack into which you can load mixers, effects and synthesizer modules. If the equipment that you have access to in Reason 4.0 was sitting in a rack in your studio it would cost you thousands and thousands of dollars. You can place multiple copies of the same equipment into the rack to work with for sound creation. So if you want 15 analog synthesizers to work with, you got it. The virtual rack is infinitely expandable as long as your computer is powerful enough to run all the devices you can load into it. What types of devices can you load? Reason 4.0 comes with synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, REX file loop player, mixers, vocoder, studio effects, mastering tools, pattern sequencers and more! It’s amazing how many devices come in this software package. If you have the urge to load 11 compressors and 10 samplers with 5 synthesizers, you can do it. You can chain as many mixers together as you wish to mix all of your devices. You can keep adding gear until your computer chokes but it will take a lot to do that as Reason 4.0 is quite conservative on your system.
My live band, In Stereo, played at the Canyon Inn in Salt Lake City this weekend. It was a decent gig and a lot of interesting things happened. It was also interesting because it was on a Friday the 13th followed by Valentines Day. You would think that would give us a lot to work with from the stage but we didn’t really come up with a lot of good jokes. I think the Friday the 13th effect was in full force though because I totally lost my voice after about 5 songs. Let me start at the beginning.
In recent years I had given up on watching the Grammy awards so I was determined to watch this years show. The one thing that I’ve always enjoyed about the Grammy awards is the live performances by the nominees. As a live musician myself I enjoy seeing who can pull it off and who can’t. I always find it interesting that the weakest performances of the night come from the current years pop sensation. This year the weak performance award has to go to Katy Perry. She’s sort of cute but she has to hate the fact that her big hit is about a faux lesbian encounter. She looked quite uninspired although I did laugh out loud when she came riding down to the stage in a gigantic banana! Ha ha! Phallic symbol alert for Katy. I’m sure it was intentional.
Another performance that had me scratching my head and saying “What the hell?” was the pairing of the Jonas Brothers with music legend Stevie Wonder. I’m sure glad Stevie is blind because watching the Jonas Brothers pretend to be rock gods was stomach turning. I felt so sorry for the poor Les Paul Custom guitar that Jonas boy was beating on and pretending to be playing. It was sad really. Miley Cyrus was also quite irritating although Taylor Swift sounded quite good. There’s something about Miley’s voice that’s grating to me.
Here’s a really cool live jam George, Paul and Ringo did in 1994 during the production of The Beatles Anthology. The beginning seems a bit uninspired but they really kick it on “Blue Moon Of Kentucky”. The best part is hearing Paul and George harmonize on “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” towards the end of the clip.
