Kingtone

I added a new sonic item to my experimental palate - a 4ms NoiseSwash. It is a crazy pedal that is a show unto itself. I saw George Cremaschi use one last year and he pointed me to the right place. It is a rather unpredictable super feedback distortion pedal with many controls and an LFO and if you are interested in composing with it, you let it lead…

I did not have my beloved Princeton Reverb amp with me , so it was ‘amp du jour.’ Always fun. In Portland, Oregon it was ‘no amp’ - I went direct to the PA, which actually wasn’t so bad. In Seattle, it was a Fender Blues Jr that was very nice. In Boise, I played through a Roland Micro Cube, which I think is the most versatile little amp to come out in years. I dragged one to Europe last fall and performed with it in many capacities, from the streets (battery powered), to using it as a pre-amp into a PA.

Pedals for the ‘User Error Tour‘ (right to left): Noise Swash, Zvex Fuzz factory, Blackstone overdrive, Boss OC-3 octave (set to poly), Boss Trem, 2 Line 6 DL4s. I usually use one, but found a used one cheap and dragged it along for this tour. One was for capturing noise beds and the other for setting up rhythmic loops if I felt like soloing. I sometimes used one for delay and one for sampling.

I’m currently doing a small tour thru the Pacific Northwest performing experimental music to throngs of trees and sometimes people with my friends Rob Price and David Grollman.

Tours always get names and I believe in letting early events name them. So:

Motel 6. Redding, CA. Tired after driving for several hours after the SF gig and having stayed at this very same Mo 6 back in 1990-something on a Ramona The Pest tour, I figured it was safe. BUT NO! In the a.m., Rob got first dibs at the shower. Turns out the tub drain was seriously clogged and since we needed to split for Portland for our gig, Dave and I were not going to be showering. So I went to work the manager for a refund of some kind. He says ‘We’ll need to send someone up to the room to see if it is user error.’ A woman comes up to the room, sticks her hand in the soapy water, yanks the drain plug up out of the drain and say’s ’see this is what you have to do.’ Apparently, the regular old drain lever isn’t enough at the Redding Mo 6. User Error. No refund. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.