Gig Announcement! Woven Roots Festival

I'm going to be playing an actual concert this summer, at the Woven Roots Festival, held at the Brendan T Byrne State Forest in New Lisbon, NJ on June 28th, 2013 8:00 PM.

This is the only live performance I'm doing for the entire year. If you can be in the area and want to come to the show and not stay for the whole weekend, contact me or the festival organizers for a special Friday-evening pass. I will be distributing CDs, shirts and posters at the show and all through the weekend.

If you can't come out to the wilderness of New Jersey, and you still want to see me perform live, I will be making a video of the show, available exclusively for people who are able to support the festival with a minimum donation of $20. The video will be available for download later in July, after the festival.

It would be great if you can promote the event by sharing this post among your friends.

Festival link: https://sites.google.com/site/wovenrootsnj/
Festival Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/494728717250635/
Concert on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/242174255907868/
Supporting Member Link: https://www.wepay.com/donations/support-woven-roots-festival

Weekend Recap

I spent at least 3 hours, maybe 4 in the "studio" on Saturday after relocating the Korg Triton Extreme to the basement (which has become the rehearsal space) from the bedroom. Working on some songs for the gig and re-familiarizing myself with my old equipment.

What I didn't record was me jamming out to a jazz-based rhythm track with a piano track and doing a lot of scat singing that eventually devolved into the word "potato". This might actually become a song. We'll see.

Wizardwood, Revisited

Back in a previous lifetime, I wrote a song that was influenced, in part, by Luke Skywalker's encounter with "Darth Vader" in the forest of Dagoba. I placed the song in a fantasy setting and called it Wizardwood, and it was a progressive rock/hard rock song, full of screaming guitars and drums and keyboards.

Well I have a gig coming up. A solo gig. As in, I will be playing by myself (hopefully not with myself) for the entire set.

There are some really interesting presets on the VoiceLive Touch, and I was playing around with them last night and took Wizardwood in a completely different direction. It needs some tweaking and adjustment and slightly less cats, but I did all this with just my voice and the VoiceLive Touch, and I'm pleased with the direction this is going in.

I Have A Cat Named Panzi

And she likes to be sung to. And her name lends itself to some nice rhythmic patterns. Like these:




It took me a little while to realize that "Also Panzi" is in 5/4 time, which I really like.

So I Lied

Remember the post I made last week, where I said I wasn't going to upgrade my rig? Well last weekend my daughter came home from college for the day and I was showing her our practice set up in the basement and she told me "You need to see a Kimbra video on YouTube" which I did, and I discovered she was using a TC Helicon VoiceLive Touch vocal processor, which does everything that our 2 units do - in one unit - and it does more and easier... So the next day we took our old equipment over to Guitar Center and traded it all in for the VoiceLive (plus a small amount of cash, of course), and the thing showed up here today.

There is a learning curve with this thing, and I realize I need to make a set of presets for my specific needs, but I did these things this evening. I'm not completely happy with the mix as picked up by the iPad's microphone. I'm going to have to come up with a better way to record what I'm doing - finding the power supply for my M-Audio recorder would probably help a whole lot - I can record HOURS of mp3 on the 1GB flash drive in there. But, as I've promised to show you my process, here are the raw things I came up with tonight.

Boss Phrase Recorder

So about 6 or 7 years ago (or more - I don't remember now) I bought a Boss RC-20XL "phrase recorder" (a loop pedal with a lot of extra features). Of course, now you can get the new version that will hold like 3 hours of music, whereas this one only stores 15 minutes, but it's what I have and while I have a kid in school, I'm a gal on a budget, so I won't be upgrading for a while.

It's basically been sitting in the box since I bought it, until last week. It took days to figure out the right settings on the PA to get vocals to register on the thing (and also we discovered the PA needed a little work - all the pots on it were dirty and there was a lot of noise that a little tuner cleaner took care of). 

Last night, I started playing with it. However, I haven't worked out a hi-fidelity reliable way to record what I've been doing, and I didn't save anything I built up last night on the pedal, but it's an interesting way to compose a song using only vocals. Here is a poorly-recorded snip of a loop that I recorded last night.

I have a gig at the end of June

We are booked for Friday night at the Woven Roots Festival. at Brendan Byrne State Forest in New Jersey.  So I'm starting to check out my equipment, and put together a set list and maybe do some writing so I have some new material and surprises. I'm excited about playing out again and also seeing old friends and making new ones.