"I'm never going back to Guitar Center"

I say it every time I walk out of that place... and I consistently walk out empty handed. It's always a frustrating experience, and every time I walk in I think "I know I said never again after the last time, but today I just need one simple thing, and there's no way this trip will be a waste of my time." It's always the same self-rationalization as a slink into the K-Mart of music stores against my better judgment, trying to pretend I'm not in a crappy mood just because I crossed their threshold.

Most recently, I just needed a phaser-- specifically, an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone. I walked in, walked up to the counter, and asked for a Small Stone. The clerk looks at me blankly. "Who makes it?"

I answer "Electro-Harmonix."

"You mean a Small Clone?" He responds, naming that company's chorus pedal.

I try not to rankle at his correcting me: "No, I mean the Small Stone." Anyone who doesn't play, and play through pedals, might not get why this annoys me: the EH Small Stone is probably the second most popular phaser pedal in the world, not quite as ubiquitous as the MXR Phase 90, but it's been in production non-stop since the mid 1970s. Someone working behind the effects pedals counter at a music store should at least have heard of it.

He looks up this strange and unfamiliar pedal in his computer. "Hmm... I don't have one in stock. I could order it from a warehouse and give you a call when it comes in." And this is the primary problem with Guitar Center-- if I wanted to order one, I would have done so online, without dealing with the fluorescent lights and the ambiance of someone practicing Metallica riffs on an out of tune guitar: that's what I use the internet for. I walked into the mega-chain-store because I wanted to exit the store with an extremely common pedal in hand.

I've made this mistake more than once-- I have often gone to Guitar Center because they're a big chain, and I expect them to be well stocked. I don't enjoy being in the store, I don't like shopping there, but their size always makes me assume that if I want to find something that everyone uses, something mass produced, this will be the obvious place to go... and I am always wrong: I leave empty handed, wondering why I had to describe a Big Mac to a McDonald's counter jockey (you mean Quarter Pounder? No? Maybe I can order you one from the store across town)

It's got to work on all systems

I don't know who's going to follow me through this metaphor, but...

When you're working out a mix of a song, you have to check it on different systems. This lets you make certain that the song doesn't just sound good in a studio, on nice monitors. You want to make sure it sounds good on bass boosted DJ headphones, on laptops' built in speakers, on a boom box, and on a pumping home stereo system. It's even important to check the mix in mono (there's a number of reasons to do this... but for right now let's just focus on "if you can make the mix sound good without a stereo image, the thing is pretty solid"). If it only works on one system and fails elsewhere, you've got more work to do.

And so we get to the point:

If you want to argue the quality of Avatar as a film around the argument that it can't be appreciated without 3D special effects and an IMAX screen... you may be right. It may very well be designed to show of an amazing system, but if the thing doesn't hold up in mono (so to speak), it's not really that good.

Tone

"What the hell was wrong with your guitar sounds tonight?"

A lot of people don't know this, but different rooms have different sounds... with everything set exactly the same on my bass, amp, and pedals, I can have completely different sound in one room than another. I was struggling with that at the last show: I didn't sound quite right to myself.

What's even worse: how you sound to yourself is never how you sound to an audience: the sound is different in different parts of a room. For example, on the same night, Lea from Noise-a-Tron felt that she sounded a little quiet on stage; I was in the audience, and her bass was huge (they sounded great). When we got up there, I thought I sounded really thin and anemic... but people in the audience say we sounded great that night.

It's tricky.



... and as an aside, when you do a search for "Skwisgaar and Toki" images these days, you find a lot of slashfiction images. I had to go three pages before I could just find a normal shot of the two of them.

a little past the peak

Being a pedalgeek with some small awareness of what's going on in the pedal geeky world, I was impressed when VisualSound announced their new pedal, the Vans Warped Distortion. Cash-in and fad pedals aren't new, but it takes some real balls to try and sell the sound of Warped Tour punk rock in a pedal... especially since the festival is 15 years old now. At least DOD launched the Grunge distortion in 1993, and Ibanez's Phat Hed distortion and chorus with the wack'd setting launched in 1999: sure, these companies were digging in for kids' Seattle and nu-metal obsessions, respectively. The pedals didn't sound anything like the uber-popular music they referenced... it was just a calculated cash grab, aimed at teenagers who just got their first guitar. Seriously, people: Kim Thayil doesn't play through a pedal labeled "grunge" and Munky doesn't have a pedal that says "wack'd."

But that doesn't stop the corporations. Visual Sound used to be a nifty little pedal maker that got bought out by Dunlop (who has been gobbling up pedalmakers like a comic book villain). Vans was sold in 1988 and is owned by the same corporation that does Lee and Wangler jeans. They have teamed up in the name of a massive festival to create a cheap pedal to sell in 2010... you know, for "punk." Which I think lives mostly at malls.

Out of step

Though it's about three guitarists I'm not really fond of, I just saw It Might Get Loud... which bore investigating, because I love the documentary Dig even though I dislike both of the bands if focuses on and I love Comedian even though I don't find Jerry Seinfeld funny: I can like a movie without being enamored of the subject. However, It Might Get Loud is actually pretty annoying.

I get why Jimmy Page is in the movie. I've never liked Led Zepplin (sorry kids, it's me and Ben Weasel skipping merrily down this path), but if you're doing a movie about guitarists and their instruments, this guy is the 70's blues-rock lead guitarist. I don't like the stuff, but he's the king of that particular hill.

I actually hate U2, but from an interview standpoint, The Edge is an okay guy to have in the movie. He's an 80's superstar, so there's some generational contrast between him and Page's 70's thing, and he's pretty candid about his "riff" being absolutely nothing if he switches off his effects (Bill Bailey beat him to this punch, but it shows some self-awareness to have the guy actually demonstrate it).

After that, I think we should try to roll up all of the pretentious shit that falls out of Jack White's mouth over the course of this movie and beat him to death with it. I don't like the other two guys, but the whole Jack White thing is just bog-standard 70's rock... and Jimmy Page is already in this movie. Half the time I can't tell the White Stripes from any other classic rock revival band until the bassline fails to arrive. I don't think he's a bad guitar player, really, but a stunningly average one who (from what I've heard) has never done anything original and has a couple pop radio hits.

Seriously, was Jonny Greenwood not returning this movie's calls? They couldn't get anyone interesting? If it had to be an American (as opposed to the UK guys for the 70's and 80's), why not someone like Tom Morello? I know the Rage Against the Machine thing is way past its sell-by date, but at least he was innovative. Not only that, but if you'd add someone who had his push in the 90's and is still remembered, there's sort of a guarantee that you're not dealing with someone destined for the cut-out bin by next year.

Hell, I think Dean Ween and Larry LaLonde are better candidates... and they're bound to be less smug in front of a camera.

PSA: Gear is heavy

As Public Service Announcements go, this one's more of a note to self... but, as most every part of me is really, really sore today, the whole thing is burning bright neon in my frontal lobe.

ubik. is currently practicing at Crybaby Studios, and our show last night was one block away, at The Comet. One block! Hey, it's not that far! My brain whirled around bringing the van up to Capitol Hill, loading into the van from the practice space, trying to find parking by The Comet, loading into the club, and then driving around the neighborhood to find a place to park the van until the end of the show... at which time, we'd have to repeat the process (albeit, in reverse). It made perfect sense to just walk the gear over to the club.

I maintain that theoretically, it was a good idea. The whole thing got shakier when put into practice.

Gearwise, ubik.s basically pair of bass cabinets, amps, a pedalboard, basses, and a drum kit to move. Where guitarists can have a Vox or Fender combo amp (a single piece unit that has a handle on top... obviously meant to be lifted by one person), bassists like us are usually in a two-man-lift situation. The upshot is: these things come with wheels. Downside: the wheels are fine for moving across a room, or a hardwood floor-- nobody ever meant them for a long hall across cracked city sidewalks. Joel's cabinet, for example, is an Ampeg 8x10 that stands taller than Michelle: it's a large, heavy, upright rectangle with four little wheels on the bottom.

My pedalboard is its own challenge-- this thing also takes two people to carry (1 1/2" to 2" plywood, with its lid on, it looks like the world's cheapest junior-sized coffin), though I did decide to get it there on my own: I had Tyler help me lift it onto my cabinet, which is half as tall as Joel's, and then I rolled it over myself. That was actually my first trip, and I figured out it was a bad idea before I had crossed the street. Another note to self: it's easier to pull these things than to push. Luckily, two of us just grabbed a side and carried the board back for the return trip.

Crybaby provides a shopping cart just for the "let's wheel our gear over to The Comet" types of nights (that actually introduced the idea in my fertile subconscious), so we used it to load up all the cymbal stands and other small, heavy pieces. I wasn't part of the shopping cart experience, though I know it pulls to one side, but I did carry the kick drum over to the venue; while I have loaded that thing in and out of a show more than once, it does get heavier after half a block or so.

The whole thing was manageable, and it really wasn't the world's biggest hassle, but... I am definitely sore today. All in all, it wasn't my best idea... and yes, it was my idea. Next time, we're taking the van. A block is a lot longer when you're carrying one end of my pedalboard than it is when you're just walking around.

everyone's got their distractions

me, I'm an unrepentant pedalgeek. When the night drags on, I tend to click around (bandwidth permitting), and can spend a bit of time checking out video demos of pedals... which is a decent way of figuring out not just which pedals you're interested in (a good service) but also which gear you're just not interested in (absolutely invaluable). ToneFactor provides a lot of these videos and they sell a lot of these pedals, so their site can offer a lot of perspective on the kind of gear you can't find and test out at the local shops.

For example-- I got one of my favorite pedals from them:



That box is both the synth break in disrepair and the grinding dissonant lead in cyclocosmia (which will be online soon... it's being mixed). Neat, eh?

quality cheap instruments

I took my tenor home with me last week, so I could work out a few arrangements and practice a bit at home. This instrument, my stage bass for ubik, is a cheap piece of gear bought specifically for me to ruin it-- a luthier has routed the body, another has redesigned a nut, almost half the hardware on it is additional... I'd never buy a good bass and perform this kind of surgery on a beautiful instrument, so I am (for all intents and purposes) using a piece of crap gear.

There's a bit of mythos, however, about the player sweating mojo into an instrument after years of use, and... honestly, I have really come to love this instrument. It's still not a great instrument, but it's got a lot of personality, and it's been with me for so long... hell, I've done more than half the frankenstein modifications on it myself. For a cheap bass that I've all but destroyed, I enjoy playing this disheveled machine as much as I enjoy playing beautiful, tasteful instruments.

(and, for the record, I've played one of Mike Watt's basses, and he treats those things with the kind of reckless abandon that my poor monster of a bass receives)

been dead a long time

The foreword of the book I'm reading (which is an excellent diary of the making of a record in the major lables... very compelling, very funny) ends with this:

Music of conviction and personality will always go on, but in this artistic end of days, where Jimi Hendrix is sold as nostalgia rather than art, and rock and roll, once rebellious, is so establishment that there's a Les Paul in every doctor and lawyer's closet; the music that a lot of us grew up on has been so mollified we can barely recognize it.

Rock and roll is dead. Consider this its autopsy.

Strange thing that came of this-- it made me think of a friend's declaration: "The Beatles killed rock and roll," and my response "I never really liked rock and roll, anyway." Both statements could be provably true, as long as we define our terms.

Mainly the term "Rock and Roll."

As far as I'm aware, Rock and Roll is the thing that came up with Bo Diddley, took off with Chuck Berry, and was sold to suburban America by Elvis: rhythm and blues based, obsessed with I/IV/V, backbeat, and a hooky chorus. So, the thing that is Rock and Roll was gunned down by the Beatles around the Revolver/Rubber Soul era (when they started doing away with a lot of that formalism)... though it managed to crawl to LA, to slowly bleed to death.

By the year of my birth (1974), Rock and Roll only had the barest relation to its R&B origins... if the Rolling Stones worship Robert Johnson, so be it, but the music that was subversive in my grandparents' era was the mainstream in my parents' day. By the 8os, not only was rock dead, but its reanimated corpse was wearing a lot of make-up, teasing its hair, and donning spandex.

Generally, the term Rock is applied to just about anything that has an electric guitar involved... which is fine, so long as we all agree that we aren't actually talking about "Rock and Roll" when we're using the term. The great "rock" bands today (the ones that I think are great) have nothing to do with the 40's and 50's-- even those godawful retro rock acts that had a groundswell a few years back are dedicating their lives to unartistically copying the 1970s arena stuff (from Zepplin to AC/DC: the kind of thing I just don't like. Sorry: I don't like it). Seriously, though-- even the stuff they're aiming to emulate has got nothing to do with Little Richard.

Currently "Rock and Roll" tends to be either a nostalgia act or modern corporate programming: crap like Nickleback-- a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy... ad nauseum. Either way, I'm on board with Rock and Roll being dead... though I'm quite thankful that there's plenty of other music out there for the rest of us, the "music of conviction and personality" mentioned in the opening quote. I have no idea what to call any of it (though new, arbitrary names for anything we're listening to will be coined weekly by local, free papers), but it's everywhere, if you look for it.



P.S. "Pop" is not a genre. It is an abbreviation of "popular." It's only musical connotation is that it sounds like what most people are willing to buy.

theirspace

Before I dig too deep, I've got to say I appreciate that MySpace has been a boon for independent musicians-- it's still the default to find smaller bands, hear what the lineup for a show on any given night sounds like, etc. Even now, ubik.s booking is done as much through MySpace messaging as it is through email or phone. Yes, all the music on the MySpace players sound terrible, and yes it is an amazingly ugly system, but it's the default-- the first place people look when they want to find a band.

But... as they take their role as music disseminators to heart, the MySpace music front is actually the antithesis of a grass-roots, independent music system. Down here on the ground floor, we all use it the same way, but MySpace has big plans for itself, and it falls more along the lines of the corporate starfucking of mTv and Clear Channel radio.

Any time you sign in, someone's being promoted in the box on the left: "Today on MySpace," which, when it comes to music, is always used to promote people who don't need promoting: Disney sponsored, non threatening, emo bands... millionaire diva-tastic gangsta guys (seriously: extravagant furs and flamboyant jewelry? Elizabeth Taylor'd tell these dudes to take it down a notch). My last login displayed an invitation to Paris Hilton's birthday bash ("If you're in Vegas this weekend..."), which would be an awesome way to get the Stupid Spoiled Whore Playset autographed.

Similarly, the new MySpace music player allows MP3 sales through Amazon.com, which is fine for what it is... but that only works if you're in bed with the Corporations. For example, our digital aggregator has our album on Amazon.com (I prefer physical manifestations of albums, cover art and whatnot, but that's just me), but you will not find the Amazon "sale" button popping up on our MySpace music player... it's just not something they're giving us.

I find these things slightly frustrating because I know that the record industry is a vile, incestuous, corrupt system... but the internet has given musicians of all stripes a competitive edge and a DIY tool for personal success. That MySpace is acting more like the former than the latter is disappointing.

But I say "slightly frustrating," because after all: it's MySpace. All the little bands like us still use it not because of its quality, but because it'd be idiotic not use it. You can't be too frustrated by the site that was whoreish years ago becoming more whoreish over time, just sort of disappointed, and hopeful that, like Geocities before it, a change in standards will make it obsolete.

echoes, effects, and U2

Sadly, every echo enthusiast gets compared to The Edge (who did not invent the dotted quarter note delay. Honestly, people), for better or worse. To wit, Bill Bailey:

Thank You, Portland!

Well, the shows were excellent, but we learned a few things: Touring will be kind of tough, especially if you make a big party of it every night (and have to play again the following night). Also-- don't sleep at the party house. Or try to sleep there. Because you won't.

That aside, Portland crowds seem to stay out later, and are really receptive and responsive... which is awesome. They also paid us pretty well: if every night pays like these nights (merch and CD sales included) the tour will pay for itself completely, and that's a DIY touring wet dream.

The van survived yet another trip. All love to the van.

self-described

we're a long way from cassette trading, dual-deck dubbed demos, and mixtapes... for better and worse, a band doesn't self-launch on the tape underground just by being available and free, anymore-- every band is available online now, and you can listen to pretty much everyone for free. The downside of this is that there is so much Noise in the line, it can be hard to discern a Signal (the upside, of course, is: hey, new music!).

The trick, now, is to get people listening, and that generally means describing a band engagingly enough to warrant a listen... which I thought was going to be easy, because ubik. is a pretty unique band, and the songs tend to be fairly different from anything I've stumbled upon.

Unfortunately, every band in the world describes themselves as "unique." The writeup from the emo band that sounds like they belong on a mid-90's teen sex romp soundtrack call themselves unique, the white-blues lead guy playing nothing but pentatonic minor scales over I-IV-Vs calls himself unique, the heavy rock band that really wants to be Tool call themselves unique. These bands bore me to tears simply because they really do sound like every other mediocre entry in their genre, are nowhere near unique... but I don't think anyone wants to describe themselves as sounding like everyone else.

So we've given up on self description, mostly-- it seems to be a futile effort. People have compared us to everyone from King Crimson to Rage Against the Machine. Michelle gets comparisons ranging from Karen Crisis to Bjork (though she sounds nothing like Bjork, she has black hair and a small nose, and that seems to be enough similarity for a lot of people... music be damned).

We've taken up our own genre: psy-prog drift core. We actually asked people to name our genre, and the most intelligent response we got was someone telling us that we are, in fact, a rock band... which is pretty much true, but telling a would-be listener that we're a rock band doesn't tell that listener anything: it could mean anything from The Beatles to Soul Coughing.

How people describe us is a whole other phenomenon. Everything from funk to metal gets thrown at us (seriously? funk?), though psychedelic and progressive get thrown in there often enough. A recent show billed us as Am-Rep inspired prog-metal... and though prog-metal always makes me think of Fate's Warning and Dream Theater, so be it-- but I don't even know what Am-Rep is. What does that even mean?

everett mkII

Strangely, though our Everett gigs are plenty successful (2 for 2)... man, these are difficult shows to like. I wished I'd had taken a video of stepping into that place, panning from the stage to the body of the bar (crowded with video poker and pool tables) as Sweet Home Alabama played on the overheads. It was sort of like playing the Blue Moon, but where the Blue Moon is Harley Davidson, this place was Nike (and really brightly lit).

I have to go back to the thought that this particular "girls rock" showcase was the ultimate venue to play Let's Hunt and Kill Gwen Stefani, but it was a very weird version of the Girls Rock motif (a theme that, so Michelle tells me, was irritating enough to her that she would have turned down the show had the booker told her that's the bill she was agreeing to play)-- the first band lost a member and played a short acoustic set. The other band's singer was too sick to play, so there was no Girl there to Rock... neither being any band's fault, really, but it's a good way to hamstring a show.

just say no

So here's a first... we just said No to a show, just because we didn't want to play it. It wasn't pay-to-play, or a night one of us couldn't make it because of work or whatever Whatever was in the way: we just didn't wanna.

That was kind of cool.

It's not like it was frivolous, or we didn't have a reason: it was sort of a dingy sports bar sort of atmosphere, which never works for ubik. as a band. It just doesn't work. We've done sort of poorly at The Blue Moon and Goofy's, and there's just a certain "feel" of venue where we don't fit-- we're not comfortable there, the video light show never works very well, and the dug-in crowd just doesn't get us.

Also, it was in a location where we probably couldn't get anyone to show up, so we wouldn't be doing the bar any favors, anyway.

the new ubik. CD is on sale now (both online and in stores)

CD IN STORES NOW!

ubik.s album The World Is A Glorious Biomechanical Nightmare is available now both online and at record stores around seattle. Buy it online here, or stop by Cellophane Square (U-Dist) or Silver Platters (Queen Anne and Northgate).

Pretty keen, eh? We're all pretty excited to be getting these out into the world.

production

When we took the album to be mastered by the talented and very helpful Steve Turnidge, mastering engineer extraordinaire, he asked us if we were able to do this stuff live. I think the actual phrasing was "can you guys pull this off live?"

I think Joel was the first to respond: the question should be inverted. We do this stuff live so often, we weren't sure if we could translate it to a studio recording (my worry was always that it would end up one of those flat, lifeless records that never lets any of the band's live energy come through).

But the more I think about the question (and the more I listen to a few albums and compare them to their live counterparts), the more I realize how valid it really is. ubik. actually took the songs, as we play them live (which includes timing changes, large dynamic shifts, effected vocals, big flourishes of reverb and echo, one-beat gaps of silence, sound-design style screeches, etc), and just taped it. The sonic identity of our songs was not done in post-production: we didn't really add much after we finished taping the instruments live in the room.

...but those sounds happen on a lot of albums (especially now, in the land of plug-ins and pro-tools). It's not uncommon to hear distorted vocals on one verse or an wash of echo or some strange sound effect on any random album-- it's just not that common for those things to have anything to do with how the band actually sounds when they play.

shitty music

And here's a quote...

Does anybody really listen to that shitty music they play on the radio? FM radio music... What's it called- adult contemporary? classic rock? urban R&B? You know what the official business term for that shit is: Corporate Standardized Programming. Just what an artform needs... corporate standardized programming, derived from scientific surveys, conducted by soulless businessmen.

Here's how bad it is: one nationwide chain that owns over a thousand radio stations conducts weekly telephone polls asking listeners their opinions on 25-30 song hooks they play over the phone, hooks that the radio people have already selected ("hooks" are short, repeated parts of pop songs that people remember easily). Depending on these polls, the radio chain decides which songs to place on their stations' playlists. Weeks later, they record the hooks of all the songs they're currently playing on their stations across the country, label them by title and artist, and sell that information to record companies to help create more of the same, bad music. They also sell the information to competing radio stations that want to play what the big chain is playing.

All of this is done to prevent the possibility of original thinking somehow creeping into the system.

Let me tell you something-- In the first place, listening to music someone else has picked out is not my idea of a good time. Second, and more important, the fact that a lot of people in America actually like the music automatically means it sucks... especially since the people who like it have been told in advance by businessmen what it is they're supposed to like.

Please save me from people who've been told what to like, and then like it. In my opinion, if you're over six years of age and you're still getting your music from the radio, something is desperately wrong with you.

I can only hope that somehow MP3 players and file sharing will destroy FM radio the way they're destroying record companies. Then, even though the air will probably never be safe to breathe again, maybe it will be safer to listen to.

--George Carlin

any mutantfest pics, anyone?

so... ubik. had a great time at the autonomous mutant festival, but we don't have any pics of the shows. I know, I know, if we wanted photos, we should have made arrangements, but if anyone has any ubik. at mutantfest pictures, please send them to us.

We're at ubikband@gmail.com

Everett

So, playing a ubik.show in Everett was a bit of an experience... We were preparing for a place with a limited stage and no monitors, and we ended up in a pretty nice place, fairly large, that even had a monitor for the drums (pretty awesome when you walk into a place and see that). They had a mount for our projector, a spare DVD player (because we forgot ours), power for our recording gear... class act all around. Because of a scheduling/booking snafu (dunno which, so not throwing any blame around), however, our 3-band bill became a 6-band bill: our three seattle-area bands and another three everett-area bands.

I never really thought of Everett as its own city, really; not being from the region, Everett was just the northern part of Seattle, in my mind. Having played this show, I can say without hesitation that the seattle bands and everett bands that played were from different cities. Maybe different worlds.

When I was breaking down the recording gear, a fairly boozy older woman said to me: "You guys from Seattle?"

and that sort of thing struck me as odd, because I really didn't distinguish between Seattle and Everett. "Yeah. How could you tell?"

"It was very 'new.'" The word came short of everything but finger-quotes in the air. "'New Rock,'" she dubbed us. She didn't seem terribly pleased with us... I don't think 'New' is her thing. I still choose to take that as a big compliment.

That said, she was the only negative comment I heard-- a lot of the Everett crowd really loved ubik. A lot of people coming out had never heard anything quite like us before. They mic'd Tyler's kit to the nines, so people could really hear the intricate hi-hat work on things like The Spangler and The Planet's Kerploding! Joel and I always get the two-basses thing (individually, they flip out about his slap'n'pop and my pedalboards... i.e, his playing and my gear. *sniff*) and Michelle... Michelle had a big stage, and really put on a show. She probably had more of a stand-out night than any of us.

We made a big impact on the mailing list, playing in a town we've never played before. With any luck, we can get those guys to flier for us next time we head north... maybe ubik. will have a draw in Everett now.

I can only hope that's the way it will work for us: when we start playing down the west coast, we hit cities where no one knows us, play a solid show, impress the attendees, build up the mailing list, and then the next time we hit that town...