The Mob Rules

For those of you who think I have abandoned my metal roots, fear not, as I had the priviledge of witnessing a killer show with Heaven and Hell (Dio reuinted with Black Sabbath) and Megadeth as the opener. Dio's voice is perhaps just slightly less forceful than it used to be, but is still in in fine form and emotionally charged as ever. The guitar playing and tone were spot-on (heavy!!), and Geezer's bass playing was extraordinary. Vinny Appice's drumming, while lacking finesse, had the force of cannon shots going off. Standout songs included "Children of the Sea", "Die Young", and my favorite off of the excellent Dehumanizer album, a song simply entitled "I". (I love the lyrics to that one!!)

Megadeth had the large Forum crowd really pumped up, ripping through the classics with relentless force and precision. Dave Mustaine was in good shape physically as well as musically, and the band really delivered.

I must mention one more aspect...namely the crowd. The arena setting with the open floor was like the old days and really triggered some good memories. One noteable exception was that with this older crowd, there was a lot less pushing and shoving going on, and people were really open and cool. Of course, the air was thick with "smoke" as well.

I need to do this more often...

Theme from "A Summer Place"

I have not created any new music lately, but I did put together an arrangement of Theme from A Summer Place for a friend's wedding. They used it during the cake cutting, and it was quite a smash (in a good way). I have sent a copy out to most of you, so please enjoy. The entire song was cut with the PRS guitar with custom pickups. Of course, I had to rock it out a bit at the end, but I managed to keep it civilized. Amazingly, the arrangement appealed to the older and younger crowd equally!

On the equipment front, I ordered a couple of 1x12 cabinets from Lopoline.com. I'll try to post some pics soon. The idea is to be able have a good jammin' rig that can still fit into one of my li'l sports cars. I am using a Crate Powerblock as a power amp. Since the cabs are loaded with Celestions (Vintage 30's), the GT-5 patches that use Fender amp/cabinet emulations needed quite a bit of tweaking to get to a decent sound. I'm still not quite happy with some of the tones, but I'm mostly a recording musician anyway. The Marshall based tones rock though!! The Crate is powerful, but I had to work around a design idiosyncracy in that the CD inputs must be used to bypass the cabinet emulator when using it as a power amp.

The PRS has enabled my picking technique to move forward. Somehow, the Strat that I was playing for a number of years was giving me wrist problems, and I could never quite adapt to the bridge/string/body geometry. I still have some wrist problems, but not nearly as bad. Also, I just bought a new bike (Novara Strada) with greatly improved ergonomics over my last one, so I'm hoping that will benefit as well.

Hopefully, this new recording will get me to produce some new originals...wow, I actually remembered how to use Cakewalk Sonar after a layoff of several months ;)

Stay tuned, take care, and keep on rockin'