Ignored By Dinosaurs 🦕

It occurred to me over cooking lunch for my boys just a minute ago that, a week before my 33rd birthday, I've been in the music business for half of my life. I'd like to share a couple of things that I've come up with.

First of all, to get anywhere in this business, to get anywhere sustainably that is, takes a really long time. There is no short circuiting this process, short of selling your soul to the devil. Even bands like the Black Eyed Peas who are on top of the world right now in 2011 have been doing this since I was just getting started. Acts like Ke$ha stand out in my mind as pure product, and this post isn't addressed to acts like her. This is addressed to bands like the Dusters or Yarn or any of the other top-notch acts out there busting their asses in a van every day of the year.

There is a sustainable livelihood to be made in this corner of the music business. What it takes more than anything is time and hard work. I've seen and worked with other musicians who acted as if their success were a God given right, that their talent would ensure them a livelihood whenever the proper magic hit-maker type came along and granted them the keys. These musicians are generally bitter, bad drunks and best avoided. You may be able to shave a certain percentage of time off your ascent by being smarter and by putting forethought into your career path, but by and large it's game of patience and being pleasant to work with. “If you sit at the table long enough, you will get fed.”

Second, and this primarily applies to sidemen, it's good to cultivate an aspect of your playing that is considered mainstream. That is to say, if you are a bluegrass bass player with a penchant for Airto-era Return To Forever, it's okay to slip those leading samba-type Stanley grace notes into your 1-5-1-5. Just make sure that you don't do it all the time and if the very well respected banjo player that is sitting in with your band looks at you funny, that's a clue. If you are a classically trained musician turned bluegrass player, by all means slip as much of that style in there as you want, but know how to chop that thing, too. Keeping this in mind as you make your rounds will render you much more hirable for your next gig. You are thinking about your next gig, aren't you?

Fin for now.

#music #bluegrass #business

Regarding Pandolfi's recent pot stirrer:

It's pretty much all been said out there, but I'll tell you what gets me going to the point that I have to write about it. It's when I read comments like this one -

Bands like Railroad Earth, Green Sky, Yonder Mountain, Infamous Stringdusters, etc. are going to be labeled bluegrass and I think that's fine....as long as they understand where the roots of the music came from and they have an understanding and respect for that.

Get stuffed. We're all out here working as hard as we can to live doing what we love. You are the armchair quarterbacking internet dweller. For us to care about whether or not you approve of our reverence for tradition or the lack thereof would render us unable to do our jobs.

Same dude, same comment -

The only thing I wish is that these newer grassy bands stop all playing solely through pickups and get some high quality mics, like the Punch Brothers or the Jaybirds. I went to a Yonder Mountain show 2 weeks ago and I cringed every time I heard Jeff Austin solo with his pickup-burdened Nugget. He might of well had a Michael Kelly or something as it would have sounded the same. Sorry if that's harsh...just not a big fan of his style or sound, I guess.

We've already established our freedom to an opinion, but had you ever done any touring you'd probably have realized the technical and acoustical limitations of playing with live microphones on loud stages. They don't make the sound better. Period. Ever. I've never heard of the Jaybirds, but I'm guessing the crowd that the Punch Brothers primarily plays to is a very quiet crowd. Good for them. Obviously some of us prefer a different setting.

By the way, Andy Hall came to the Nashville show last night and helped us destroy the place.

#bluegrass

I've recently begun a new contract for a rather large Drupal site. I was very excited to land this contract as it shall be my first bona fide “enterprise” contract and there's already a large amount of content on the site despite the company being rather young. There are a lot of forms on this site with leads being transferred to a backend system that I'll probably never have anything to do with. Anyway, I was excited to get a look in the back end of the Drupal portion of the site to see what the previous developers had been cooking up.

Imagine my intense surprise when it quickly became apparent that the previous developers weren't very learned in the Drupal way. Specifically, they committed some major Drupal rookie sins that a novice Drupal developer must know about.

1. Modules don't belong in the modules directory. Themes don't belong in the themes directory.

There are many aspects of Drupal that are, politely speaking, counterintuitive to the new developer. Drupal by itself doesn't actually do a whole lot. The concept of the “lean core” means that the basic Drupal functionality is expected to be augmented to by community contributed modules. You'd be hard pressed to find a Drupal site out in the wild without at least half of those front page modules installed. I learned this on my second or third week of working with Drupal – the modules directory is reserved for Drupal core modules. All community or “contrib” modules go into a directory that doesn't even exists with a stock Drupal install – sites/all/modules. The same goes with themes – sites/all/themes.

When Drupal runs through it's “bootstrapping” process (a fancy name for when a request from someone's browser hits anywhere on a Drupal site), it looks in a number of different places to find code that may extend it's functionality or alter it's output to a request. Obviously, the modules directory is one of those places, that's why Drupal will run if you put contrib modules there. However, a big part of maintaining a Drupal site involves keeping on top of updates to those modules, not to mention updates to the Drupal core itself. Since the majority of Drupal lives in those modules, when Drupal core receives an update it becomes a much more muddlesome process to separate which files belong in which folder if they're all mixed together. More advance development tools like Drush make updating sites a total breeze, but not if the site structure is laid out wrong.

2. Use an admin theme.

Garland is a lovely theme (cough), but luckily the ecosystem has led to the evolution of some really useful admin themes that have big forms, big buttons and an intuitive layout by default. My personal favorite is Rubik, which requires also downloading Tao to function.

3. Speaking of updates, stay on top of them.

Part of the wonder of open source software is the knowledge that all over the world, thousands of developers with vastly differing skill sets and experiences are working together on one project. Such a model ensures that many sets of eyes are on the lookout for security holes (“exploits”) and that many hands are at work moving the project and it's features forward. The flipside to this rapid development pace is that updates to the software are released whenever they are ready, and this is often quite frequently on larger projects. It's a rare week when I don't have any sites that have some sort of update released on at least one module. Drupal maintenance is all about keeping on top of the Status Reports page – found under admin/reports/status and admin/reports/updates.

#drupal

Well unsurprisingly, even after several minutes of Google searching I'm unable to dig into the real article on this one, only countless verbatim reposts on countless web-scraping sites.

Anyway, here's an example. I don't hate on Jon Bon Jovi, but I do hate on the misrepresentation of facts. Steve Jobs didn't kill the music industry, the music industry killed the music industry. Here's how.

---

Some time in the early 80s record companies and stereo manufacturers (then known as HiFi) found themselves with a problem. Record sales and HiFi sales were both flat. The somewhat endless parade of new media formats, the same on that continues today with Blueray, had not found a new winner in a while. People were still buying vinyl and cassettes.

It was at an AES convention that the CD was introduced to the world for the sole purpose of reviving back catalog and HiFi sales. “But it sounds like a turd” was the general consensus among the crowd of professional audio engineers at AES. Analog to digital conversion was in it's infancy and most early CDs sounded really brittle and really thin compared to their vinyl counterparts. Sound familiar? Anyway, because marketing is often more powerful than the truth especially when aimed at teenagers, the record companies got to work. “It's a perfect copy”, “It'll never wear out” was the message and it worked like a charm. By the late 80s the CD was the dominant format and back catalog sales were humming along.

Presumably nobody in marketing foresaw an age where digital information would be so easy to transfer, or more likely they figured by then it wouldn't be their problem.

Not going to get all Lefsetz about Napster and the subsequent reaction from the industry, but suffice to say that it was all coming down anyway and Apple was the company that put together a new model for distribution of a medium that was inevitable. They didn't kill the music industry, you idiot. You really think people would still be driving to Tower records to pick up this shit”)?

#music #business

It has been a week. I've been working lately on a site for a non-prof out in California. Their mission is the spread of invasive plant species in California. I built them a system to allow the crowdsourcing of their Spring Nursery Survey, which is where they send folks out to various botanical nurseries around the state and make sure that they aren't selling any plants that they shouldn't be selling.

It's not illegal to sell invasive plant species, most of them are quite pretty. It's only when they jump the garden fence and escape into the wild that they become a problem. Being invasive means basically that they grow totally out of control, a big problem in a wildfire prone state like CA.

Anyhoo, what I've done is build them a system that allows them to work a base of volunteers across the state to go out to nurseries and send back information about those nurseries and whether or not they're selling some of this stuff that maybe they shouldn't be. It's an almost perfect use case for Drupal, so that kept me busy much of last month.

This month is two brand new clients from Austin, TX. One was already built and launched in a big old Wordpress sprint, and the other is my first legit “enterprise” client – a large Drupal setup on which I am now the sole developer.

I'm ready to play some music, but it's kind of a good thing for the bottom line that I can't this month. The end of this month ushers in festival season for me. To say I'm excited is nowhere near enough.

I really need to work up a new design. Later...

#random

I might as well ditch this blog. I have no idea where to start another post. Is this a technology blog? Is this a blog about life as a musician? Is this still my rallying cry against the music industry? So much has gone on the last month/year/decade I don't even know where to begin.

I've joined a band. I didn't think I'd be doing that ever again. I actually thought my career as a professional player was over. I thought I'd seen the top of the mountain and that was that and it was time to move on into the next phase of my life, whatever that would be. I sort of had to jump out of the last phase of my life so quickly and so definitely that I didn't have nearly the prep time I'd have liked to have had for that kind of thing. The result? Last year was one of the roughest of my entire life. The roughest.

Then last year's November surprise ended up being another bass player in a band that I fit into pretty neatly.

So here I am, back from the musical dead. I just had the most righteously good time in Big Sky MT at a bluegrass festival called Big Grass, and I'll tell you what feels the best of all – feeling like part of a musical community. It's no secret that I'm a born-again Stringdusters fan, so I was actually nervous when half of them were standing stageside while we were getting out set going last night. It was more an acute awareness that people were there and were listening, which is how nervousness tastes to me. But then we got some of them up, and a few more of them up, and a KILLER time was had by all.

Afterward we went back to the main lodge where everyone was staying and there was a giant picking session going on in front of the giant fireplace until about 4:15 or so when it broke up to take care of other duties. Right about then Vince and Chad and the rest of Great American Taxi showed up. It was just so cool to me, because the last time I saw those dudes was my last gig in CO with RRE. It's cool to be in a band where I already know everybody, so I can relax about all that. It's cool to be in a band where we take days off to go skiing with the lift passes that are thrown in with the gig. It's cool to be in a band where load-in and setup takes all of 15 minutes and there are only a dozen inputs to check. It's cool to already be up toward the top of the bill at a bunch of the festivals for which we're booked this summer. It's cool to play bluegrass.

#life #bluegrass

I suppose there's a few ways a post with this title could go. I'm flying back from my first run with the new band, and there were a few themes bouncing around the last couple weeks. This band is a lot lower overhead. There's no bus call. There's no soundguy (although I personally hope that's remedied this year). Load in and setup take about 15 minutes. Billy and Drew managed to work out lift passes for us to all get out on the mountain 3 times in the last two weeks. I grew up skiing a lot in the Rockies with my folks, but had basically taken a 13 year hiatus. The last time I'd been on a mountain was about 5 years ago on the Honkytonk/Railroad tour in 2006, so I had forgotten how much I love skiing until about 100 yards into our first run at Jackson Hole (an amazing mountain).

I miss my family quite a lot. We'd all gotten used to my being home and a cell phone is a poor substitute for a hug. I can already see where that's going to be a problem again, but I'm hoping that this gig remains a nice, steady, part-time thing because I really like the music. The guys are very nice guys and I'm meeting all manner of the CO scene. I'm already collecting some funny stories about the things you'd expect there'd be funny stories about and yes, the RRE thing bestows a lot of street cred out there.

It feels so good to have a bass in my hands. I'm really thankful.

#life

This is a little collection of books that I've found helpful over the past few years, ranging from design to development to business to fiction.

Ruby/Rails

* The Well-Grounded Rubyist: David A. Black: Books”) – Great second programming book. * Agile Web Development with Rails: Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson: Books”) * Metaprogramming Ruby: Paolo Perrotta: Books”) * Learn to Program (9781934356364): Chris Pine: Books”) – Great first programming book. * Design Patterns in Ruby: Russ Olsen: Books”)

Drupal

* Using Drupal: Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, Jeff Eaton, James Walker, Jeff Robbins: Books”) – Great first Drupal book. * Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization: Benjamin Finklea: Books”) – Great general SEO book with heavy Drupal focus. * Pro Drupal Development: John K. VanDyk: Books”)

General Front End Development / Design / Usability

* CSS: the Missing Manual: David Sawyer McFarland: Books”) * Jquery Cookbook (9780596159771): Cody Lindley: Books”) * Don't Make Me Think!: Steve Krug: Books”) * Web Design for ROI: Lance Loveday, Sandra Niehaus: Books”) * The Design of Everyday Things: Donald A. Norman: Books”)

General Back End Development / Databases

* Learning SQL: Alan Beaulieu: Books”) * Beginning Database Design: Clare Churcher: Books”)

iPhone / Cocoa

* Cocoa Programming for OS X Programming for Mac® OS X (3rd Edition) (9780321503619): Aaron Pablo Hillegass: Books”) * iPhone SDK Development (9781934356258): Bill Dudney, Christopher Adamson: Books”)

General Business / Startup Culture

* Founders At Work (9781430210788): Jessica Livingston: Books”) * Tribes: Seth Godin: Books”) * Linchpin: Seth Godin: Books”) * Blink: Malcolm Gladwell: Books”)

#generaldevelopment

As business models go, there are currently two dominant ones: either people like your product enough to purchase it or they don't care enough to buy it but will overlook its deficiencies if it's “free” in exchange for their personal browsing and purchasing info sold to advertisers. The former model is Apple's, the latter is Google's.

Apple sells emotional experiences. The price is what users pay to be delighted by Apple's stream of innovations and to be free of the lowest common denominator burdens and the pervasive harvesting of their personal info.

Google sells eyeballs. To be more precise, the clickstream attached to those eyeballs. Thus scale, indeed dominance, is absolutely crucial to Google's model.

~ via counternotions

#business

#3 Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

I've never listened to these guys before. I'd been getting my indie rock fix from Death Cab and the Decemberists for the last couple of years and had never felt the urge to get any of their previous albums, but when their web video for “We Used To Wait” came out I couldn't stop watching it. It's one of the most amazing things I've seen done with the internet so far, and the tune behind the video was really good, too.

After a couple of weeks I bought the whole album, listened to it a few times and put it away. It's only been over the last 6 weeks or so that I put it on repeat, and this is a fantastic record. It's got the right mix of tunes that get you immediately and tunes that take a while to realize that you love (like every great album). The Month of May in particular is custom made for setting record times on your jog...

#2 Infamous Stringdusters – Things That Fly

After I quit my last gig, I was feeling a little burned out on acoustic music. I didn't listen to much besides hip hop and dance music for the first several months of this year, but then a strange thing started happening. Larry Keel would end up on repeat for several listens through his whole catalog. I started going through Tony Rice's records, Bill Monroe's records.. I was having an urge I'd never felt before – an urge to listen to and (gasp) play bluegrass.

I'd gotten the Stringduster's latest record and listened to it a few times while planting the garden, but at the time it was too produced for me. It occurs to me now that maybe they're just too good and that's what I didn't really like at the time.

I've had this record on repeat for the last 4 months straight, and haven't gotten even close to burned out on it.

It'll Be Alright from the Beachland Ballroom. I love how these guys stalk the stage when somebody's soloing. That'd be so fun, but I'll never get to do it. sigh...

#1 Big Boi – Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

Going back and listening to some old Outkast I've think I've figured out that this is some sort of alter ego that he has in his tunes. I never really got into Outkast except for a few tunes here and there, the big ones. Hell, I probably only buy a hip hop record about once a year or so, so this is this year's entry.

I first heard about this album on the NPR show “Sound Opinions”. I don't have much regard for music journalists in general (I don't mean you Tyler), but these guys have a really great show. This record was featured on their show sometime over the summer and I liked what I heard, so I bought it. It got it's hooks in immediately. The first half of the album was the part that's immediately catchy on first listen, so I put it on repeat and rarely made it to the back nine.

The back half is where I spend much of my time lately. This whole album is fantastic from front to back, maybe the best hip hop record for me since Kanye's Graduation. The beats are awesome, the lyrics are hilarious, dirty, intelligible.

Hustle Blood. I had no idea that was Jamie Foxx on there singing the other part...

#music