As I mentioned, the concert was great. If I were to pick out one part, it would have been this lengthy untitled (as far as I know) freestyle jam he did with a simple looping beat.

I cannot think of anything worse than falling in love with a song at a concert, and not knowing the name of it.

Thankfully, a lot of people have recorded the entire show. So Friday at work, while I was beating my head against MediaWiki’s new installer (that silently fails to populate the database with stock data because they tried to import a poorly escaped text blob… sheesh), I played the entire concert in the background. When my ears finally picked up the wonderful peice I heard at our SF show, I took note of the time.

The song starts around the 29 minute mark, and its nearly 8 minutes and 40 seconds long.

Once again, the first thing is to extract the audio from YouTube with youtube-dl:

[server]-[mcarlson] 11:55am: /SafeKeg/Music/Buckethead>youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format="aac" 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_bApGe0a0U'
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] l_bApGe0a0U: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] l_bApGe0a0U: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] l_bApGe0a0U: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: l_bApGe0a0U.mp4
[download] 100.0% of 519.25M at    1.51M/s ETA 00:00
[ffmpeg] Destination: l_bApGe0a0U.aac
Time spent in user mode   (CPU seconds) : 5.831s
Time spent in kernel mode (CPU seconds) : 9.170s
Total time                              : 5:49.83s
CPU utilisation (percentage)            : 4.2%

Now I have a nice aac file to work with. That clip is almost 50 minutes long though, and I just want one song.

FFMPEG TO THE RESCUE!!

ffmpeg is an exceptional tool, and how it ties into a LOT of other codecs and filters make it really useful. You can even cut up an audio file, like I did here.

The command,

ffmpeg -i l_bApGe0a0U.aac -ss 00:29:01 -t 00:08:41 -ab 128000 -ar 44100 sweet-new-song.mp3

specifies the following:

• -i l_bApGeoaoU.aac : This is the input file, out audio that youtube-dl extracted for us
• -ss 00:29:01 : Seek to 29 minutes a 1 second
• -t 00:08:41 : The total “time”, or duration, of this file will be 8 minutes and 41 seconds
• -ab 128000 : The bitrate to use
• -ar 44100 : Sets the audio sampling rate to 44.1K hz
• sweet-new-song.mp3 is the final output name

[server]-[mcarlson] 10:03pm: /SafeKeg/Music/Buckethead>ffmpeg -i l_bApGe0a0U.aac -ss 00:29:01 -t 00:08:41 -ab 128000 -ar 44100 sweet-new-song.mp3
FFmpeg version 0.6.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Apr  2 2011 08:09:07 with gcc 4.2.1 20070719  [FreeBSD]
[aac @ 0x803c22010]max_analyze_duration reached
[aac @ 0x803c22010]Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate
Input #0, aac, from 'l_bApGe0a0U.aac':
  Duration: 00:53:04.07, bitrate: 126 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 126 kb/s
Output #0, mp3, to 'sweet-new-song.mp3':
  Metadata:
    TSSE            : Lavf52.64.2
    Stream #0.0: Audio: libmp3lame, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
size=    8144kB time=521.22 bitrate= 128.0kbits/s    ts/s
video:0kB audio:8144kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.000396%
Time spent in user mode   (CPU seconds) : 27.280s
Time spent in kernel mode (CPU seconds) : 0.340s
Total time                              : 0:27.74s
CPU utilisation (percentage)            : 99.5%

And if anyone wants to listen to the final product, here you go:
sweet-new-song

The whole thing is a work of art, and to me, the second half (around 4:30) is the absolute best. So beautiful.

Outside the GAMH

Since I say this after almost every concert I go to, I’ll not forget to repeat it again:

This was the BEST show I’ve ever seen.

There are many aspects why: smaller venue, and our seats were on the balcony. This gave us a great view of the show, and we were pretty darn close to everything. Oh, and you know, it is one of my favorite artist doing what he does best. Not to mentioned good food and beverages at a incredible price. The sound was great as well, not too loud, but enough to rumble you chest.

Even more triumphant, was the fact that Michele not only liked it, she LOVED it and requested that I load up her music devices with his music. His loud and insanely complex music, not the sweet stuff. There was only two mellow songs in that set, the rest were hair raising shred-fests. This is such an accomplishment, because leading up to this, she would ask me to play it in the car just so she could bitterly acclimate to it. Like it was cough medicine, she would sort of grimace, and roll her eyes, or take a jab at me and play the air guitar with a goofy face like “this is what you two look like!”

In the end, great music conquers all, and there is something powerful about live music. Living, breathing music in the air that you can almost taste.

Before I dive into that, lets get to the opening two man band, Wolff. A drummer and a tuba, and that tuba is a multi-purpose device. The musician uses it as a percussion instrument, a mic, and a sample device all at once. The sheer amount of skill he displayed creating and mixing samples of the sounds he made from it was incredible. He was mixing and looping effects on the fly for the entire set.

I also like watching drummers play. I told Michele that every time I see an opening band, I always like the drums. It makes me want to take lessons, or live vicariously though my kids and make one (or both!) of them pick up the drums. I think I’m also envious because I struggle with timing and rhythm. Total white-boy stereotype shining through.

So Wolff was cool, even though when they announced that there were only two more songs until Buckethead came out, I literally screamed inside my own head, “YAY!!!”

There is something about his music that resonates with me on a very deep level, more than any other artists. Despite what is observed by most, I do enjoy a lot of different music, but from the the ~140 artists currently on my “shuffle all” selection, not a one comes close.

Think about that, for yourself. Think of all the music you have heard, and narrow down the artists that give you goosebumps, or make your heart race, and make you smile really big.

I dunno, it seems to map well with my brain and how I see music. So I sat very still and very focused the entire set, except during Jordan, when I had to use the restroom.

That was funny because there was a line outside, and the guy behind me peeked in the Ladies room, looked back at me and said “What? *laughs* There are no ladies here, its all guys…”

Totally true. There were maybe 5 or 6 women there, and I would have guessed that most of them were like Michele (dates or spouses). Guitar players attract guys, period.

Anyway, the point is, I was mesmerized. A few times I would just shake my head in awe. Michele laughed because during the song Siege Engine, there is a part where Buckethead goes from the low E open note, hammers on the 3rd fret (G), hammers on the 8th fret (C). Then does the reverse ( pulls off the 8th fret, to the 3rd, and pulls off the 3rd back to open). This is all done in one very smooth rhythm, and if you have never laid your fingers across a guitar fret board, that is a LOOONG stretch. It always puts a smile on my face, I’ve worked at it many times, and it is demanding.

As far as his guitar work and accuracy, my goodness… the command he has over that instrument is ridiculous. I’m also amazed that he plays along with a MP3 player. That means he doesn’t get to take a break, or improvise a bit longer, he has to know his set inside and out without missing the next song. Sprinkle in the sweet robot dance moves, dispensing toys to the crowd (and getting a few back from his fans), and he wears a MASK. I actually don’t know how he can see much of anything with that on. It was so impressive that the both of us reminisced on the drive home. Michele even mentioned not only looking forward to seeing him again, but joked that we should go the next night. I would have, except it was sold out :)

The venue staff asked that no photographs (especially flash) or videos be taken, so I compromised… I took one photo without the flash:

The lighting just happened to be perfect for this shot. My phone isn't the best at taking low-light pictures

Otherwise, it was me scrunched up against the balcony so I could get as close as possible.

To finally wrap this up, I enjoyed it. I even heard a few new songs (Final Wars, pretty flippin’ awesome), so mre music to enjoy! Also the minimum age at GAMH is 6, guess who I’ll be taking in the future?

Oh don’t be so judgmental! My first concert was the Highwaymen, a “country super-group”, on the grassy field at the Concord Pavilion. It was terrible, this couldn’t be any worse and I’m pretty sure there was less pot smoked at the Buckethead show than at The Highwaymen’s show.

For an artist who doesn’t use any words, he knows how to say a lot. To me at least.

I’m excited. The best part will be going into work on the Friday saying “WHAT?!”

• The ability to play the same music from my phone, my computer at work, my computer at home is pretty cool
• Everyone gets 5GB of space for free, and you can pay for more
• When you purchase (DRM free)  mp3′s from Amazon, it does not count against your Cloud Drive storage
• The player is web based, and the tools to download purchased music are usable on Windows, OS X and Linux

So, I uploaded some music, bought two songs from the comfort of my phone to play around with it.

What I liked immediately is it plays your music in its full original bit rate glory, however, this means streaming it over a cellular network requires more bandwidth, which also may require paying your cell carrier more money. You can set your smart phones Amazon app to either only stream music when you are connected to a 802.11 wireless network, or, you do not have to stream from your cloud drive, but you can download it directory to your phone. I think this is a good compromise.

The web player is pretty good, and it isn’t cluttered with Ads or some corporate propaganda to make you buy more stuff.

Web Based Player

I really like that between the phone’s app, and the web app, you can download whatever content you have.

A shot of the upload tool:

Uploading Music.

What I think are areas that need improvement:

• The Media Player on the phone (I’m using an Andriod based phone, the Motorola Droid).
  • It does not have a shuffle or repeat toggle. It just shuffles.
  • The interface could take some cues from the Zune Media Player (people may hate on the product and Microsoft, but the Zune interface is by far the best media manager I’ve EVER used, and I’ve given pretty much everything a try. My Zune died last year and I still use the Media Player). It’s artists/album sorting is pretty simplistic
• The Media upload tool does not support Linux/BSD, and it only supports a limited set of Media
• It would be nice if it supported importing/converting/exporting your own playlists. You can create a playlist right now though
• I prefer music not to fade in for song transition, and the phone player does this (and it didn’t appear you could change this setting)
• Logging into Amazon. It would be nice if you could tie your Google account to your Amazon account, and have a seamless federated login. My amazon account credentials are a real pain to type on a phone.

Overall though, its a cool concept, and even though I have more than enough tools at my disposal to sync my media from work, home, and my phone, this is pretty handy and simple. Using the “cloud” is also a good way to keep a backup of some data. I currently have 33GB of MP3′s on my server, so 5GB isn’t a bad start.

I’m pretty diverse when it comes to where I get my digital audio from, and I doubt I will always and only by through Amazon. They have done a good job to get me to purchase at least two songs just to use this interface. Good job Amazon.

We’ve spent a good amount of time traveling in either a car or a big rig, listening to music. I remember waking up at 4am during my summer vacation so I could accompany you to help deliver lots and lots of boxes to U-Hauls around California. Or, our trips to Santa Cruz/Mission Springs, (despite the fact that you maliciously left the AC off for the entire trip just so we would really appreciate that cool Mision Springs air :) ), it was always a lot of fun and I really expanded my musical palette. I’ve learned a lot about music traveling with you, and I probably wouldn’t have as much of an appreciation for the blues and bluegrass styles if it wasn’t for all those hours on the road. Heck, I’m listening to Robert Johnson as I write this. I need a tamale now…

For a while, between the years I listened to the radio and up until very recently, I felt like there just wasn’t that kind of music out there. You know, the kind of music that doesn’t feel like it was grown in a board room meeting, and where people really know how to play their instruments. I was wrong though, there is a lot of great music out there and I’ve always wanted a way to share it with you. We don’t take long trips anymore, but the internet removes those boundaries :)

All these can be listened to by clicking on the play button, and downloaded. I hope you have speakers ready.

Gov’t Mule – By a Thread

Railroad Boy

Buckethead – Population Override

Earth Heals Herself

Buckethead – Captain EO’s Voyage

Captain EO’s Voyage

Cage The Elephant

Tiny Little Robots

Smog – A River Ain’t to Much to Love

Palimpsest
Although Smog is now just “Bill Callahan”, he has a great voice and a simple style.

I’ve always been sore that the band broke up before I ever had a chance. Seeing this live though, that really made me feel like I really got to see what it might have been like. At the end of the concert, I told Michele that I wasn’t sure it we watched a live rock concert, or a play. The visuals were so stunning and integral it was pretty amazing. Also, the band was purposefully hidden, which is really the core of the entire story. The freaking projection, and giant puppets were AMAZING!

If you have never heard the entire album, or watched the movie here is an overview:

Roger Waters has always been a bit angry, not violent, but more disappointed by our (the US really) greed driven society, and the horde mentality of “fans”. After the Dark Side of The Moon, he seemed to feel an increasing level of “boorishness” from the audience. He began to hate the audience, and this was the beginning of The Wall. He wanted to build a physical wall between him and the audience. The main character, Pink (inspired by Syd Barrett), dreams this weird and maddening transformation while he watches TV in a hotel room. The entire metaphor is about him building a wall, each brick represents his mother, authority figures, capitalism/greed, etc… until he is completely isolated. Influenced by his own narcissism and WWII footage on TV, he becomes a mock fascist. Eventually, his is so upset by this, he puts himself on trial. His final punishment from the verdict is to “tear down the wall”.

So, that is what the concert is, and for more, check out this site: The Wall Analysis

He spoke to the audience a few times, and it was very nice and warm. He said he is a lot happier, 30 years after he first toured The Wall. Even still, a “happy” Roger is still a very dissonant Roger. The imagery interwoven with the original animations was all about his contempt for war, and large corporations. Here is a good example:

One very cool part was during Mother. Roger sang on stage with himself… A projection of him from 30 years ago was played on the wall, he sang and played with it.

Below are a few pictures I was able to take. I filmed a few of the songs, but only the audio is of decent quality.

The teacher characature

The Wife characature

The show had an intermission, after Goodbye Cruel World, when the Wall was complete.

During the intermission, they projected a changing display of casualties of war. From both sides. This was a strong theme in the entire show.

A very colorful display during Comfortably Numb, it was really neat.

The Judge, during the harrowing Trial. The apex of the entire show is pretty intense.

The wall fallen, the band finally in the spotlight.

I’ve had my eye on a few, and of the few, and I may only be able to physically play one at a time, but I like the tonal variety that only a completely different guitar can offer.

And, I love my stratocaster, it is a wonderful instrument, which is also why no matter how much I want another one, I would never part with it.

Plus, it would be great to have a nice block of wood that also had 24 frets, two full octaves.

All of the above was to rationalize a decision I’ve already made up in my head :) I’m admitting that right now.

Here is the tough “adult” part though, something I’m not always good at, but how do I pay for an expensive and impractical luxury item? I mean, sure, I have a credit card, I could just *buy* it. Right? I mean, why bother saving on my own when I can do the reverse… let the bank tell me how to pay it back with easy minimum payments. I’m an adult with a decent credit score, what could possibly go wrong?

Probably nothing, but I would be going against what I feel is a decent stance on my own financial responsibilities.

So, I’m going to instead rely on sensational imagery. I created a little thermometer style info-graph:

Goal

I’ve got it printed out, on the fridge, red marker handy, ready to slowly fill it in.

Here is the idea. I could just buy the thing, but what I really want to do is show Caralyne that even as adults, we have to save up. This isn’t just me exercising my will power to resist an irrational purchase (I’ll save that for a sweet sports car that gets shitty gas mileage), but it is meant to be big and bombastic so it catches Caralyne’s attention.

This also sort of helps me decided, is this REALLY what I want to put my money towards. Right now, I’m going to say yes. We’ll see what I say 2 years from now (which is about how long I think it will take). Nothing like months of saving to whisk away an impulsive buy :)

I think this was the first time I went to a small venue to see a band. Most of the time its a pretty large commercial production. This was a nice change of pace, not only could you see and feel the performers and instruments; catching all their dialog and nueances. They were also in the crowd when not performing, and that is sort of a neat thing. As in, I was standing right next to “Gass” from Buke and Gass. Sweet.

All three bands had this great, and friendly personality on stage. All of them looked like they were really having a good time up there, just playing music. I liked that the most. Besides the group we went to see, both the opening act and the headliner were killer. Silian Rail had a quick set, but they set a great mood for the rest of the show. Efterklang were incredibly animated and talented. Most of them members transition back and forth to other instruments. They even used some of the buildings A/C ducting as a percussion instrument.

• The internet
• A quality *nix OS (FreeBSD in this case)
• youtube-dl, available in FreeBSD under ports/www/youtube_dl/
• ffmpeg, available in FreeBSD under ports/multimedia/ffmpeg/

First thing is first, find a really cool youtube clip. If you dont know of one already, use a Buckethead Song (Volume warning, this clip was mixed “hot”, so turn your speakers down):

Watch the drummer (Bryan Mantia) go crazy in the background, pretty intense.

Now, use ‘youtube-dl’, which is pretty simple, the main argument it accepts is a URL of the youtube clip in question, and it saves it as a Flash Video file.

[server] 3:41pm: ~>youtube-dl 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61k041I4aEo'
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] 61k041I4aEo: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] 61k041I4aEo: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: 61k041I4aEo.flv
[download] 100.0% of 8.04M at   57.33k/s ETA 00:00

Next, use ffmpeg to save the audio stream as a mp3 file:

[server] 3:45pm: ~>ffmpeg -i 61k041I4aEo.flv -ab 128000 -ar 44100 interworld_and_the_new_innocence.mp3
FFmpeg version 0.5.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  libavutil     49.15. 0 / 49.15. 0
  libavcodec    52.20. 1 / 52.20. 1
  libavformat   52.31. 0 / 52.31. 0
  libavdevice   52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
  libavfilter    0. 4. 0 /  0. 4. 0
  libswscale     0. 7. 1 /  0. 7. 1
  libpostproc   51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
  built on May  8 2010 15:43:57, gcc: 4.2.1 20070719  [FreeBSD]

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 1000.00 (1000/1) -> 29.92 (359/12)
Input #0, flv, from '61k041I4aEo.flv':
  Duration: 00:03:38.24, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 306 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Video: flv, yuv420p, 320x218, 242 kb/s, 29.92 tbr, 1k tbn, 1k tbc
    Stream #0.1: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, mono, s16, 64 kb/s
Output #0, mp3, to 'interworld_and_the_new_innocence.mp3':
    Stream #0.0: Audio: libmp3lame, 44100 Hz, mono, s16, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
size=    3411kB time=218.31 bitrate= 128.0kbits/s
video:0kB audio:3411kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.000916%

Verify the file with file(1), or listen to the newly saved mp3 file over and over and over and over and over and over again.

[server] 3:45pm: ~>file interworld_and_the_new_innocence.mp3
interworld_and_the_new_innocence.mp3: Audio file with ID3 version 2.4.0, contains: MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1, 128 kbps, 44.1 kHz, Monaural

The guitar’s neck was broken at the body, and thankfully someone who knew what they were doing successfully glued it back on. Glenn put some heavy .11 gauge strings on it to keep a good amount of tension to help maintain structural integrity. I normally play with .10′s, so its really fun playing with the heavy strings and then switching back to my strat. I’ve decided to keep the heavy strings, and even down tune to D and C# just for fun. Keeping that in mind, I went ahead and picked up two Dimarzio X2N humbuckers, and since most of the brass parts on the SG went through some heavy usage, I also picked up a new tail-piece, bridge, and a new all black faceplate.

Replacing pickups is pretty easy, it required a little (de)soldering but that is the hardest part. What probably took me the most time was figuring out HOW I was supposed to re-wire the new 4 wire X2N pickups in a setup that only had 1 wire…

It seems modern humbuckers are REALLY fancy, and if you have a 5-way selector you can activate them in different combinations. Whereas the SG pickups had only 1 loop for the humbucker, the DiMarzio’s had a north loop and a south loop, and you could either wire them in series or parallel. There is no right way, its a matter of preference I guess, but since I’ve never hear either one, I chose a guide I found on Semour Duncan’s site.

I should point this out, even though I bought DiMarzio Pickups, I actually found more useful documentation on Seymour Duncan’s site. Not only did they have a really nice support section (http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/wiring-diagrams/), they also have color-code diagrams for each pickup vendor. So a big kudo’s for SD, maybe I’ll get those next time.

Okay, onto the work, let’s take a look at what we are working with:

It is hard to see, but there is a good amount of corrosion on the pickup and the frets

The saddles look very fragile from all the wear and tear

A faded tail piece

This is where the neck was broken, but I won't tackle that here. Or ever really :)

Here are the new parts:

Two black/black DiMarzio X2N's

Old and New tail piece

Old and new bridge, which turned out to be a problem

The real work begins:

Original wiring, two Humbuckers, Two Volumes and Two Tones...

Old faceplate and pickups de-soldered and removed

Front...

Since I only have one contact point, the ground and bottom south loop are wired together, as well as the top south and bottom north. That spot-light you see is my kick ass hiking head-lamp. I haven't used mine hiking yet, but it helped me out a LOT during all of this.

The Neck pickup finished...

... and the bridge pickup

Faceplate is installed with the pickups attached.

Let me just say, getting the pickups screwed on to the face plate was HARD. There are two tension springs that keep the pickup stationary, and getting those compressed so the screw could reach the faceplate took a lot of effort. I almost lost two of the four twice since they would shoot off while I was struggling to screw the pickup on.

New bridge and tail piece

I had a problem with the two screws that are used to adjust the bridge, the were slightly bigger than the old screws. I actually had to re-drill the holes for them, and this makes me a little uncomfortable. If it ever needs to be replaced, there is now a good chance the holes will have to be filled and re-drilled. Oh well.

Another shot

After cleaning the neck with mineral oil (finally found a use for that stuff), I re-strung it with a new set of .11's

All done, AND it works, two sometimes mutually exclusive outcomes :)

This was a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon, working on a guitar while listening to a Buckethead/Praxis playlist on Pandora. I spent most of the evening playing the guitar, those new pickups are very hot! They are going to require special attention so they don’t overload the amp. The sound is killer though, nice and low, a stark contrast to the Stratocaster’s sound.

Reference Material:
2h_2v_2t_3w
color_codes