Get Off My Case

That's right, we're all about talkin' about cases all over again. But this time, rather than talkin' yakkity yak yak about it, I just bought the same brand Ethan has.

Of course, mine's smaller. And no, that's not what all the girls say, it's because mine is the guitar version of the iGig bag.

I can fit a pair of Rode NT1a's with a Sound Devices recorder as well as an amp switcher and whatever other pedals I want. All that in addition to a Les Paul.

Which is good because today Tyrannosaurus Mouse actually got too loud. I could tell because my -15dB earplugs were not enough protection. I'll need to get the -25dB inserts if we keep this up.

And no it's not because I was playing with three amplifiers. (A Peavey Classic 50 and a Traynor as the rhythm amps with a Marshall JCM 900 as the "lead" amp. I'm not switching back-and-forth, I'm just adding the Marshall when I need to play a solo. ) No. It's not my fault.

I don't think.

Anyway, the iGig is the best bag. Not as much protection as my other bag but it'll fit in a subway turnstile and I can put more stuff in it.

Look At This Amp

Just look at this amp. It has Heyboer transformers, SoZo caps. KT66 output tubes. A switch that lets you select between "sweet" and "bitchy".

It's Scott Fitzpatrick's take on a fully loaded Marshall JTM 45 (which was itself a take on the Fender Bassman of the late 50's).


What more could you possibly want with your life? You plug a Les Paul into this, jumper the inputs while on the back you're feeding it to a 12" Celestion Alnico Blue.

Instant rock. No waiting. I mean, of course, once the tubes warm up.

Today's List

1. Theatresource is under siege by fruit flies. I bought fly strips to see if we could break out of this mess. Wish us luck.

2. I bought a 1TB Firewire 800 hard drive to record Tyrannosaurus Mouse with when we go into the studio.

3. Cox Amps makes a JTM-45 clone for a thousand bucks.

4. The Celtic Amps Edana is another JTM-45 for $1100 (or $1200 with the cherry enclosure.)

You know these guys can't possibly be making any money selling these amplifiers.

5. I think this bizarre organ and shout should be the ring-tone of every cell phone in the country.
6. DV3 is a film/commercial production outfit in Wilmington, NC.

Guitar Friday Obnoxioustude

I'm really hands down the most obnoxious guitarist ever. And it's not just because I set up two amps on either side of the drum kit. Shockingly, no. It's because I reached over and turned up the volume on Ethan's bass rig in the middle of a song.

It turns out it was way the wrong volume knob on the GK amp, so I got yelled at "Nooooo!!! That's the "fart" knob!" he shouted as the bass sound went "pfblahtt".

Egads! Just as I was about to buy a Metroamp JTM-45 (that I can't afford), George Metropoulos has gone and closed the store! Presumably they'll open again in a couple weeks.

Arie Uyterlinde is playing keys with us now!

Hope the Methane Bubble Doesn't Get Us

The problem with this blog is that I'm simply incapable of staying on-topic.

If I wrote a blog about "how to be a filmmaker full-time" and wrote posts about the "10 things you should be doing right now". I'd get a lot of traffic. I'd spew a lot of BS too. But instead:

My sister has an alligator problem out where she lives.

QOTD: "Dogs have owners, cats have staff."

Two days 'till we begin shooting Earthkiller.

Today is about contracts, makeup tests*, fight choreography, and getting the camera and such to set. I can't (as of right this minute) make it to all these things.

Oh, and our schedule is still a mess. We have to stretch this picture out more than I want to -- over more months than I want to -- in order to do a 19-day shoot. Maybe I should just say "feh" and do a 12-day schedule?

And then? And then I'm back to looking at gig bags. The iGig Cases are just fantastic. And at a decent price too. They have lots and lots of room.

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*Not tests which were given earlier but you couldn't make it to. It... er... nevermind.

One By Three; Swedes

My friend Ed McNamee, who has a lot of set-building experience, is talking me into building our sets from 1x3 "ferring" (sp?) strips. We'll need to use triangles of masonite to put the frames together and it seems that the pneumatic staplegun at Theatresource is, at best, in pieces, but that's the way my mind is headed. We have exactly 10 days to start actually having some sets in place and ready-to-go for Earthkiller.
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Amazon is selling Hagstrom Swedes for less than $430 (including shipping.) That's less than you can get 'em off of eBay. My birthday is coming up you know... Of course, what I should get is a Trinity 15 kit with chokes and tubes.


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Clay Shirky cracks me up. From an interview here.

On optimism: "If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you'd wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you'd still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since."
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From.

Extra Crazy Cheese

The Big News is that my Les Paul is being a pain in the tuchus. It's at 30th Street Guitars right now and they're doing a fret-crowning-and-polishing job on it to make the frets more better. OK, I'll admit, I don't really understand what they're doing. But it should make the high F# on the E1 string better and also the first four or five frets on the E6 string better and maybe better other places too.

Problem with Gibson is that they cut a LOT of corners when making their guitars. But a few hundred dollars later with a good luthier and you've got a decent guitar.

Ahem.

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Day 2
Now 'tis time to prepare ye for the DM&E's. This is, as far as I know, the thing which most filmmakers* hate the most. I have a scene where Tom Rowen is shaking paint cans to see if there are any worth huffing, while delivering dialog. So of course there's a can shake over a bit of his actual dialog.

Rather than ridding ourselves of the original dialog and having him ADR the take so that the dialog is clean, I've gone and found another of his can shakes -- from elsewhere in the take -- which has no dialog o'er it (neither his, anybody else, or the idiot director yelling while he shakes it.) So I'll just add this clean sound to his production dialog and then when we mute his dialog there's still the sound of the can being shook.

That's been the way I've preferred to deal with scrapes, scuffs, and such, during dialog. Anytime we shoot in my dad's shop (what has greasy and grimy concrete floors) I have a world of those kinds of sounds to deal with. Any my typical response is to make 'em louder.

And for some reason the pacing on this movie is easier than any of our previous pictures. For some reason I was able to get through my first swipe at dialog, music, and effects on (ten-minute long) reel 2 in only two and a half days.

There will be future cleanups and notes and such but that's pretty good.

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I had dinner the other night with Maduka, Greg Bodine, Nat Cassidy, and the Queen of Mars. All the sexiest people at Theatresource (plus me). Nat's all kingly in Hank 6 Part 3. And he's in a podcast 'bout it. Maduka just did a reading at 59 E 59th, which I totally missed. And Greg is collecting a lot of guns. A lot of guns. I don't know why...

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*Those that get distribution, at least.

Guitar... Monday

You'll recall this blog essentially acts as my notebook on the Internet. Sort of an advanced, yet not-quite-as-useful "bookmarks".

Is there some rule about not blogging when you're drunk? But Vinnie gave me some limoncello and... well you know how it goes.

Because this post will otherwise bore my friend Ed McNamee I've included a picture of a naked girl on a lion with the explicit intent of amusing Ed.

Now, onto the boring part of this post.

Trinity amps makes an AC15 clone head for $1250.
Vox makes a very flexible head of their AC30 for $1300. The trouble with Vox is apparently their quality control is pretty miserable.
For $500 Vox also makes the 15-watt "Night Train" which will switch between pentode and triode modes. Fargen makes a mod kit for the Night Train for the low, low price of... infinity dollars. Actually, I have no idea how much the mod kit is because I don't see anyone selling it.
Fargen also makes the AC Duo-Tone for $1500.
Trinity makes their TC15 which even comes in a kit form for $380 without tubes or transformers.

No One Flies Around the Sun

I'm all about stealing content from other blogs but I lost my notes on which blogs which things came from so I could just lie and say I discovered all this stuff by myself but really I'm just procrastinating about finishing a screenplay polish. Ooh! Maybe I could have a cookie.

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Like an attention deficit squirrel on PCP.
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50 Most Challenging words. Actually, I still have trouble with "the".
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This image is presumably from a Pink Floyd series of dates at the UFO club. I don't really see it but maybe that's the point.

Hey, Brian Schiavo! I don't post these things for anyone other than you. You're the only one I know who cares. How to build a vacuum former using a toaster oven.

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The only good fights this blog generates are about Batman and guitar players.

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A review of Love Me, a play written by Jason Grossman, directed by our Daryl Boling.

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Today I'm busy wondering if Helen in Earthkiller should have high boots or boots with shin/knee guards. Wearing knee pads as part of one's costume makes it easier to take a fall on concrete, that's for sure.

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You know what's funny? You can easily unload more money on your unloaded speaker cabinet than on the amplifier itself. Here's a 1967 - era replica Marshall cabinet. $1400. Although there's probably no real reason to blow more than a thousand bucks on a 4x12 closed-back cabinet.

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That being said, Jim from Li'l Dawg has (whether he knows it or not) pretty well convinced me to get one of his Deluxe clones. Modded slightly.

Biological Research

So, I'm watching the documentary It Might Get Loud which stars The Edge, Jimmy Page, and Jack White and... What?

It stars a rock icon whose name is spoken in the same breath as Eric Clapton and Jimmy Hendrix, some guy from an 80's/90's band that's most famous for their lead singer speaking out on social issues, and that kid who lives down the street who plays guitar really good you know and he's in that band that's playing at the middle school dance...

So wait, really?

Jimmy Page and... those other two guys? OK, OK, what if I even give you The Edge (meh). But Jack White? Why is he even in the room? How about B.B. King? He's still around. Or Jeff Beck. Or, for that matter, Eric Clapton? I mean... David Gilmour! What about him!? No, instead it's... Jack White? What? For cryin' out loud, Les muthurscratchin Paul was alive when they shot this.

And I'm sorry, even if I sit right in the demographic for U2 (generationally Jimmy Page is too old and Jack White is too young) it's just that... Jimmy Page is the only one of those three players who is culturally important at all. I mean seriously, let's compare all three of these guitar players to Paris Hilton.

Jimmy Page? Vastly more important than Paris Hilton as a cultural figure. No question. Next:

The Edge? Oh, I dunno. Maybe about the same. Or maybe more. Maybe I'm being too mean because I'm irritated. OK. The Edge is more important than Paris Hilton but not even in the top 20 electric guitar players who are alive.

But Jack White? C'mon. There's no way to deny it. Jack White: actually culturally less important than Paris Hilton.

But the thing is, more than that -- Jimmy Page is the only one of the three of them who can actually play the guitar. Now I realize that's an obnoxious and elitist thing to say, but, well, I'm obnoxious and Jimmy Page is the elite. I mean, maybe I'm being too hard on The Edge. He did develop that whole 80's digital delay sound. So OK. That's one for The Edge. But Jimmy Page can actually play the guitar.

You and I know plenty o' guys who play just as well as The Edge and Jack White. They play in the local bars all weekend. We don't know a guy who's as good as Jimmy Page (unless we know Jimmy Page.)

Also: bonus material. Jimmy Page played on Goldfinger. Yes, that Goldfinger.

Queen of the Early Afternoon

PFC (Plug Fire Cartrige) guns. Prop weapons where you screw "caps" into real-sized cartridges. So if you need the blast and the blowback, but don't want the power of a full load (and you have a lot of money to pay for the guns), this might be the way to go for realistic prop weapons. The only seeming downside (outside the price) is that they eject the entire bullet rather than just the shell. Not that many people would notice. But you could even use them in theater as they aren't as loud as regular automatics.

Here's a video of an M4A1 with grenade launcher(!)



My man Greg Bodine turned me onto these.

Moby Dick guitar video lesson (DADGBE)from Bob's Guitar Lessons:


Comfortably Numb guitar solo:


As it turns out there are a lot of on-line lessons for both these songs:


For whatever reason, half of the rhythm section of Tyrannosaurus Mouse has an extreme prejudice against Mozart opera so we're not allowed to do the Queen of the Night aria no matter how much I want to.

Today I had to reacquaint myself with the use of multiple tracking points in AfterEffects. Luckily, Video Copilot shows you how to track when your tracking points go off the screen.

Splatterking the Oogledaddy*

It occurs to me that perhaps the out-of-focus shots I've been seeing during my 30 Rock marathon are the result of the editor choosing takes based on acting rather than technical merit. In other words, they did indeed shoot the shot again with better focus, but the out-of-focus shot had a better or more appropriate performance so they figured that was better than the in-focus shot.

It's really hard to get that kind of handheld work in focus. And I understand from someone who's worked on the show that they take a looooooong time shooting it and go to a lot of trouble to get the technical aspects right. That would drive me nuts. I could never do comedy, it's just so-not-fun on set.
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I think I should learn the guitar to Zeppelin's Moby Dick and the guitar solo to Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb. Those would be two very different things stylistically which are very outside what I normally do. Learning them might be good for me as a guitarist.
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Whenever I read a scene in a script that has no conflict in it, the whole screenplay just dies for me. Sure, the other thing that's annoying is characters arguing for no reason. But it's vastly better to have characters in a bad argument than no conflict at all.

Horror movies are particularly vulnerable to the no-conflict scenes. Usually it's the scene where the teenagers are in the friggin' car on their way to the remote place where the headcount will be (at a minimum) n-1, where "n" is the number of speaking roles.

And you just know that the filmmakers wanted this scene because it shows how happy and great everything is with the characters before everything goes to pot. But it never ever works. At least have them arguing about what they're wearing or music or something. Sure, it would be better if they were arguing about stuff that had to do with their characters and what they were going to need dramatically later when n=.5 but I'll take anything at this point.
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*The result of blogging after having a drink.

Bit My Rate

You can get a Roger Linn Adrenalinn for only $399. As far as I know, the Linn Drum was the only drum machine which would actively close the hi-hat when you went from open to closed hi-hat. You'd actually get that little "swish" of it closing. No other drum machines do that.
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If I had a pack-a-day cigarette habit and a pack cost five bucks, I'd be spending $1825 a year on cigarettes.

Since I don't smoke I feel I should give myself a bonus of $1825 a year in amplifiers and guitars. Or computers. Or transvestite hookers. Again.
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I don't really understand yet how to use this GH1 hack. Hopefully I will because it'll make the GH1 vastly more usable.

Zacuto's camera shoot-out includes greenscreen. I've been looking forward to this test for a while because I felt that keying was a bit harder with the GH1 than it was with the trusty HVX (although the HVX seems to have an issue with its detail seemingly always being "on" even when you turn it all the way down.) They don't talk specifically about the GH1 and its issues with color-keying but they do pull an adequate key. I wonder if the higher bit rate at acquisition with the above hack will help. I bet it will.
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Today's question involves whether I get a Bassman or JTM-45 clone. But I need to buy a new computer. Arrgh. I guess that's where this year's $1825 is going.

Amps and Amps

Playing at rehearsals studios is a terrific way to learn about amplifiers.

At tonight's Tyrannosaurus Mouse rehearsal, I played a Peavey Classic 50 and the good ol' standby Traynor YCV50 (or... YCV80? Maybe?).
The Peavey was the "clean" amp and the Traynor was the "dirty", I blended them together with my A/B/Y switch. Worked very nicely. I was freakin' loud and both Ethan and Lou complained I wasn't loud enough. Told Ethan that if I turned up he had to turn up. We're the only band in the history of mankind that has ever had that particular argument.

Anyway, I have to say that my favorite amps of the mass-produced kind are now Peavey and Trayor and, er, Blankenship. Which is funny because those three amp brands beat out not only Fender and Marshall but a LOT of boutique brands.

eBay For Sale

OK, so finally I'm selling my Mahaffay Amps Little Lanilei 1/4 - watt amplifier and my Malekko Echo 600 (well, technically my sister is selling them.) You want them. They rock. They will rock you. You want your bids in by June 13th because after that, it's all over but the crying. I mean wailing...

Guitar Friday, What? 9?

But of course the best part of this headline happenstance is the comments. My favorite is "Isn't that in Welsh?"
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Today I am working on a polish of Earthkiller whilst reading "Writing for Emotional Impact" (as recommended by Mr. Kangas.)

"Writing for Emotional Impact" is a pretty good book. I'd maybe even put it ahead of my favorite other non- Save The Cat screenwriting book Crafty Screenwriting by Alex Epstein (if I'm not mistaken, Crafty Screenwriting was written first in web-form and I read it many many years ago before writing my first screenplay, so it's kinda influential to me.)

But getting back to Writing for Emotional Impact (WFEI). Funny, I'm nominally prejudiced against the very idea of writing for emotional impact because usually that means writing in an emotionally on-the-nose and overwrought way. But that's not what author Karl Iglesias means -- he actually means "write well". And he gives a lot of concrete examples to help a story and characters along. Actually, the book goes nicely with Save the Cat in that where WFEI is the least specific is in the structure of the screenplay and that's where STC is (by far) the most explicit. (And, furthermore, my particular weakness as a writer is structure, so I'll admit that part of my love for STC is that it solves my problem. Every writer has different blank spots and different problems. For me, I figure that it's easy to solve on-the-nose dialog, or characters who don't have unique voices, or a lack of dramatic tension inside of scenes as long as the structure is there. Your problems might be different. Your mileage may vary.)

Of course, the WFEI is focused on writing for Hollywood readers, and we don't care about them at all. We only work on production scripts so a lot of hemming and hawing on the subject of readers is just irrelevant to me. We don't have any readers. Just me. But then again the third STC book is similarly focused on a screenwriter's career. And I don't have, or want, one of those either. ;-)

So that's my book review for only being 1/3 of the way through the book. I got it from the library, I probably ought to just go and buy it.
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And, of course, none of that is really really important right now. No. Because I need to be thinking about my next amplifier.

I have uncovered certain inalienable truths. One of these truths is that what is very important to a guitar amplifier feeling really awesome is how compressed the sound is. The best-feeling amp I've ever played is a Blankenship Fat Boy Extreme with Sour Creme. It's funny, when I first played it I would have certainly said it was the best guitar amp I'd ever heard. But I wouldn't have said that after hearing other people play it. It's not like it sounds any different hearing other people play it. And it may very well be in the top class of the best amplifiers. But there are a lot of beautiful amplifiers out there, and they sound great. But the Blankenship feels super awesome.

And I suggest that's because of how nice the compression is on the amp. The amp feels "responsive" because you can hear all the details in your playing. Sure, it's not like playing through an LA-2A, it's a guitar amplifier after all and has all kinds of gain stages and funny things like transformers and such doing strange things to the sound, making it compress in some ways and be "wide open" in others.

But there are other amps that compress well.

And the two that I'm looking at are the Fender Deluxe and the Fender Bassman/Marshall JTM-45.

Now, none of those amps are made anymore by their original manufacturers. But Jim at Li'l Dawg makes a clone of the Deluxe ($579 for the "lunchbox" version and a "Paul C" mod which makes the volume control more usable, but without any fancy-pants transformers) and of the Bassman (Jim calls it a "TopDawg" and it's $874 without any transformer upgrades.)

Metropoulos makes a clone (and a kit, and a built kit) of the JTM-45 (which is circuit-wise, a Fender Bassman made with "British" parts.) The kit alone is $950, the kit built by one of their guys is $1350, the full-blown clone is $2400.

Right now I have a Li'l Dawg Mutt. It's a brilliant amplifier (at about 5 watts). The compression is sweet and the range of sounds on it is enormous. At low volumes it is a very pretty "clean" amp with just a tinge of saturation when you lean into it. At high volumes you are instantly transformed into a Rock Gawd.

But my goal is to have two amps -- one for a "clean" sound while the other is dirtier -- with my guitar split between the amps. It would be ironic to use a JTM-45 for my "clean" sound (they are, after all, most famous as the "AC/DC" amp) but that would amuse the heck out of me.

Oh look. I just noticed this blog post is much too long. Here. I'll fix it:
You're welcome.

Amps, Otters, and Deliverables

I think we made all our deliverables today on Clonehunter. There's a lot of t's to cross and i's to dot so my experience tells me that I've likely missed something. And who knows what sort of mistakes could still be in the audio and video files for the North American version? Yeah, that's fairly harrowing. But I went to the Notary to get the paperwork which needed a Notary, and I signed the papers which needed signing and so hopefully we're off to the races.
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Anthony Litton is back and blogging again. Go ahead, ask him detailed questions about editing audio for picture. Or about audio in videogames (he's worked on some of the biggest). Or about, say, otters. He knows many things. I'm just guessing about the otter thing.
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This coming weekend the New York Amp Show is happening in... Piscataway, NJ. Um. OK. It's $20 at the door. But Metropoulos Amplification isn't listed on their vendor list. I've writ to them to make sure they'll be there. UPDATE: George Metropoulos wrote me back. They aren't doing this show. Well I can understand, these things can be expensive.
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The "graphic sequencer" in eurorack format from STG Soundlabs. It's $300. I wish it had a prettier knob. But that can be replaced. Analog sequences are pretty darn expensive. They're typically upwards of five hundred bucks and you need to stick them in a rack with a power supply. Almost makes you want to just give up and get a MIDI-to-CV converter and use a computer, doesn't it?
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My Lil Dawg Mutt is, at 5 watts, really freakin' loud. I mean it's really loud. Even with the cabinet inside my Whisperroom. If there's anyone else at the theater and I want to play through the amp... well let's just say I'll be playing it cleanly then. What would I do with a 50-watt amp? I guess I'll have to do all my recording at 8am.

An Educational Trip

Yesterday went with Sebastian to Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island. Learnt a few things. One is that cheap Martins don't sound very good compared to, say, Guilds in the sub-$1000 price range. Also learned that the more expensive ($2000 to $5000) Martin guitars don't seem more expensive than the boutique guitars at any given price. So you're paying for the Martin name for the cheap guitars but not for the expensive ones.

Also -- Mandolin Brothers has an interesting way of hanging their guitars. They use these leather straps which hook over the tuning pegs and then they hang them on simple 25-pound picture hangars. This keeps the finish from being eaten away by the regular guitar hangars which the guitar neck usually sits on. I have two guitars with their finish eaten away because of one Summer on regular guitar hooks.

So I bought a couple guitar hanging straps. Three bucks each.
I'm also obsessively reading through the entire Lee Child oeuvre. But that's a story for another time.

The Internet is at the Door

Here's a tip from Jim of Li'l Dawg Amps about his Mutt --

"The 12AY7 will give you a warmer overdrive but because of it's current draw you'll still be getting a lot of gain. If you want headroom then the 12AT7 would do that as well as brighten the amp up. You might even want to try the 12AU7 as it'll give just clean headroom for the most part."


Sometimes I really like modern pop music. Breathe by Anna Nalick.

Hammer Party in the Sinuses

Man, I'm getting hammered with allergies this year. If I were in a videogame my health would be at -1. I need to find one of those potions to get my health points up. Maybe a bubble tea...
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From the Hollywood Juicer, Fox president Kevin Reilly talks about (among other things) firing actors at table reads.

Normally I have a lot of sympathy for producers. But in this particular case I don't. Sure, typically the executives are blamed for everything -- somehow the creatives knew exactly what to do but these damn "suits" came in and wrecked it. Never do the executives have ideas that were any good, or make the movie/TV show marketable. No way. And to all that baloney I say "feh". The creatives make a lot of mistakes too. And they don't have to sell the thing to the actual customers (which are not the consumers.)

But firing actors after a table read? Gimme a break. That's not a problem with the actors. That's an issue with the director.

Well, now it's true that in TV there really aren't any directors. The "director" is more of a "camera direction caller".* Heck, in a lot of feature film that's true too. Which just goes to show you that as an actor you really are going to end up having to direct yourself in most film/TV situations.

Li'l Dawg Mutt test 7. This is with the Weber 10" 10A100 speaker. Open back cabinet. Compressed a we bit at the Apogee converter but otherwise left alone. Les Paul with both pickups wide open.

*The show runner is frequently the closest thing there is to a director on a TV show.