"Dasarap" video from 11/9/2015 jam session

  Started shooting more videos of our jam sessions. What a great way to get motivated to share my music. Something about seeing it performed makes it so much more interesting, don't you think? Anyway, this is a jam where Eric and I played as a duo. This was our first jam of the night. It is a great example of what we strive to create.  It's creative, melodic, it flows, has harmony. Anyway, we enjoyed making it.
  I'm now playing with a new KB neck from KB Saxophone Services. It has really opened up my sound. As always, I'm playing a TM Custom and Eric is playing a Novax CH8.

Been a while since I've posted...

I'll post some new music stuff soon. Got some fuzzbucket jams, just audio. I'll try to shoot some video in the near future. Until then, how many biebers can you take in a fight?


Created by Oatmeal

Face-melting guitar solo!

  So, this should be a quick post... A couple months ago a co-worker who had heard me play guitar at a talent show a few years ago asked me to record a guitar solo for a track he was producing. So, I spent about 4 hours on a hot Saturday afternoon in June and recorded several takes into my computer and emailed them to Sinba.
  The next morning I received an email from him with the subject "DUDE!".  He loved the solos.
  The cool thing about this is that it has been a very long time, almost a year, since I played guitar seriously.  I'm just too busy working on my saxophone playing.  So it was pretty special to get the guitar out and use my new isolation box for the first time with a serious project.  I plugged my Wampler SLOstortion pedal into my Vox Night Train amp and let loose.
  This song is very mellow and silky smooth.  I think it is designed to put you into a trance state but then kick you in the face with a drum fill and then attack your face with a facemelter guitar solo.  Or maybe it'll just get your adrenaline pumping.  It gave me goosebumps the first time I heard it.  Now I'm seriously babbling which means it's time to play some music! Check it out!

Fuzz Bucket Video - Thunder Fuzz April 20, 2015, and my Epic Chin

Line-up:
Dan Shimmyo - Saxophone
Eric Maurer - guitar & Novax CH7
Jamie Williams - drums

So, Fuzz Bucket is on a sort of hiatus because Jamie has moved across the country with his family.  Meanwhile Eric and I still occasionally jam but not nearly as often. Most recently Eric booked a gig with his friend of many years, Tony Fasce. I saw them perform at the Les Paul Big Sound Experience in Mawah, NJ, just a few weeks ago. I think it's the best I've ever heard Eric play and Tony is an amazing drummer. If I had thought of it I would have brought the gopros and captured the whole performance. Oh well, missed opportunity...

I have also started practicing on the Soprano Saxophone lately.  For years I've been obsessed with improving at that instrument.  It has been tough though... In my obsession I've switched from a vintage selmer metal mouthpiece to a more modern version and I've also switched reeds to a lighter gauge.  I think the current setup works the best for me at least until my technique improves.  Just for fun I started posting silly videos of my practice sessions on instagram. I'm not sure if there's a way to embed an instagram video but here's one that I liked:
https://instagram.com/p/4AzlpMq2DO/?taken-by=shimster13

Okay, so let's talk about this jam video. There are a few things that make this jam unique.
1) It starts out with Eric cranking up the feedback causing a sort of droning noise which usually prompts me and Jamie to refill our drinks. Instead Jamie and I started playing along with Eric's knob turning oscillating noise patterns.  Very cool stuff!

2) Eric then picks up the guitar and plays along with us with a pretty heavy sound which I love. The really interesting thing about this jam is the lack of bass guitar. But it still works!

3) Ultimately what made this jam successful was that we didn't sit around discussing what we were going to play. Instead we let the music and atmosphere in the room dictate what the music was going to sound like.

4) This jam just transitions all over the place and even though it leaves you scratching your head for a bit I think it comes together just enough in places reminding you that we are still listening to each other.

5) My epic chin. The most unflattering camera angle and maybe Friday donuts have conspired to give me a chin that reminds me of Jabba The Hutt.  Oh yeah, playing saxophone has a way of messing up my face a lot. Especially those low notes.

Well, here it is! The video of my chin. Hope you like it!

Fuzz Bucket Video - Burped Up! April 27, 2015

 

Line-up:
Dan Shimmyo - drums
Jamie Williams - Novax CH7

In this jam session, Eric stopped to take a break.  I put down the sax to play drums and Jamie and I just started playing. It began as a bit of a Charlie Hunter rip-off which is pretty tough for me to play but I managed better than usual.  Then I changed the beat because my arms couldn't handle playing at that speed without derailing very soon. I know it doesn't sound that fast but something about that tempo is hard to keep up, especially since I don't practice drums very often. This video picks up right before the tempo change.

So I transitioned to a moderate rock beat which Jamie followed seamlessly with a pretty cool indy groove (indy? My musical lexicon is pretty limited). I suppose it's difficult to hear the bass behind the kit which is one excuse I make for looking so serious and making strange faces.
One thing I've learned from making videos of our jams is how funny we look.  I hope we are conveying the amount of concentration it takes to improvise musical sounding jams without any preparation.

Anyway, here's our latest "fuzz duo" jam warts-and-all which is how we like it!

Fuzz Bucket Video - Descension April 20, 2015

(This photo is from a previous jam session that I haven't posted yet. I was having fun pulling frames out of the video. Apologies to Jamie for the grimace photo but it was too funny!)

Musicians:
Dan Shimmyo - Tenor Sax
Jamie Williams - drums
Eric Maurer - Novax CH7

Last Monday night after generating CG fur on animated characters all day I drove over to Eric's house with my Tenor Sax and 4 GoPro cameras. Eric's basement is already set up with microphones and recording gear. He handles the audio recording and I handle the video recording.

GoPro cameras setup:
3 X Hero 3+ Black Edition cameras:
I'm pretty sure this is the first time I tried recording 24fps instead of the standard 29.97fps. I'm doing this because I believe it shoots a sharper image and still gets the same low light sensitivity and same battery life, although strangely it uses up more disc space. They're all set to shoot in SuperView (ultra wide) mode.

1 X HD Hero Original
I set this camera up to record in PAL. I'm hoping by recording at 25fps I'm decreasing the shutter speed and allowing more light sensitivity. But the footage doesn't look too hot so maybe the resolution is still too high (720). I mounted this camera on Eric's guitar but fortunately in this video he's not playing it.

Descension
Out of the 90 minutes or so jam session I chose this clip for the video after Eric and I both independently chose this clip to post on soundcloud. I think we liked it because it was a reasonable length, feels like it has a beginning, middle, and end. Usually we like to end on single note concisely but instead we kind of let it trail off. Well, we make this stuff up on the fly so we don't always communicate our intentions clearly...
One of the things I like about this video is that you can tell that we're having fun. Yeah, there are some rough parts where we're all stumbling a little but overall we found a few cool grooves and transitioned into other cool parts.
I chose not to use split screen effects because it seemed like too much work. Actually, I think it's a lot cleaner without splitting the screen. I also like to be able to split time from one musician to the other to hilight what they are playing. When I thought my sax playing was a little too sloppy I even switched to one of the other cameras to take your mind off the sax.

Well, if I haven't scared you off, please check out this video of 3 CG Animation nerds playing improvised music in the basement.



And here's a teaser from our next jam from this Monday the 4/27. I was looking for funny faces and I found a bunch in the drumcam footage. Enjoy!

Fuzz Bucket Video - Headache In My Eye

Can't believe a month has gone by since my last post. Well, it was worth the wait. I taught myself how to edit video and I have something to show for it. Here's the first video I ever produced (not counting the "outtake" video below. This jam from 3/12/2015 was so good and the video footage looked pretty cool that I had to make this fancy edit and post it as soon as possible. I'm kind of blown away by seeing us play in this form instead of just in an audio file. You can almost see us reacting to each other and wondering where the next note will lead us. My favorite thing is seeing spit shoot out of the valves on the saxophone except I don't think it's visible in this edit. I might have to make an alternate "spit take" haha! I'll talk more about the making-of the video in the next post.



Here's a video of us recording a saxophone loop to get a jam started. We end up arguing a little and there are a couple funny moments: It's on facebook via this link