Recently in Music Category

When we got married, Margo and I didn't want to have all the same music you hear at every other wedding. We had a full Catholic Mass in a big stone cathedral style church with a big pipe organ. The setting limited us a bit in what we could do but I think it worked out pretty well.

I'm not going to post our wedding videos here, but I did find other performances of the music we had online and I thought others might enjoy a look.

Handel - Fugue in F Major

This was the processional for the 24-person wedding party. We didn't want anyone to get left out, so lots of friends and family here.

Charpentier - Te Deum
Te Deum was the processional for when Margo walked down the aisle with her mother and grandfather. The organist, Bob Bright really let it rip on this one and in the space it sounded huge!




Bach - Praise to the Lord Almighty King of Creation
This was the communion hymn. I really dig the main theme for this piece. It'sone of those things that reminds me of something but I can't remember what it is.




Gigout - Grand Choeur Dialogue
This was the first recessional song. Another song that can sound huge depending on the space and how it's played. It was for us that day.




Widor - Toccata from Symphony No. 5
This was the last song of the wedding. It's my favorite piece for pipe organ and I had to have it in the wedding somewhere. It's like some kind of warped carnival thing that I have a really hard time describing. Since it was after the recessional, pretty much everyone was outside when it started. That's OK. Weddings are all about the bride, but this song as just for me.

Here's another recent meme rolling through Facebook. 15 Life-Changing albums or something like that. Posting it here because I need something to post to the blog and I'm not going to tag anyone in Facebook anyway.

More than just the list, going to explain some of it too.

Queen - News of the World: (We Will Rock You)Any need to explain here with the album with We Will Rock You? One of my aunts had this on 8-track and I listened to it at my grandmother's house.......clunk.

Art of Noise - Who's Afraid of...?: (Close to the Edit)- Kind of my introduction to what I'd call electronica. Cutting edge at the time. They kinda blended my love for computers and music together. The Close tothe Edit video was a thing of beauty too.

Digital Underground - Sex Packets: (Humpty Dance on Arsenio) Kind of a funk/rap mix thing. Interesting. Kinda ahead of their time, I think. They mixed the old school funk with some of the better parts of 80s hip hop with a modern twist. Right in the face of the gangsta that was coming up at the time.

Run DMC - Raising Hell: (It's Tricky with Penn Gilette sporting a mullet and a My Sharona sample) Raising Hell was their big album. I caught it a little late. Almost blew up my speakers on it. Big beats and fun music with a rock influence.

Metaillica - The $5.98 EP Garage Days Re-Revisited: (The Small Hours) 80s hair metal was a big turn off for me which is why I was kind of a hip hop fan in the mid 80s. Then someone put this in my walkman and I was hooked. The recording sounded live, raw and unproduced...heavy and rotten. No solos, no studio tricks...just 4 guys tearing it up on covers.

Anthrax - Attack of the Killer B's: (Bring the Noise with Public Enemy)I didn't know it at the time, but now I would call Anthrax back then a nerdcore metal band. Songs about comic books, "Not" Man and covers of surf tunes (Pipeline on a 12-string on this EP). Also has a re-cover of Bring tha Noise with Chuck D and Flava Flav.

Steve Vai - Alien Love Secrets: (Bad Horsie) I loved everything about this album. So much so, I think it helped to sour me to Vai's later albums from Fire Garden on. Bad Horsie is pretty much my gold standard for a guitar-oriented song....low, deep sludgy rhythm (7-string with a slide), exciting leads that are academic, but not so academic that they bore the non-guitar player. The bass player (Billy Sheehan) is pretty badass here too.

Nine Inch Nails - Broken: (Suck at Woodstock 94) I didn't like Pretty Hate Machine when it came out because I was a guitar music kid at the time and looked down at the electronic stuff. When Broken came out, it made me a fan for life. Loud, angry, frustrated and guitar driven.

Primus - Pork Soda - (My Name is Mudd) Primus kicked off my fascination and fear of the bass and this album was the kickoff for my fascination with Primus. Lots of thoughts swinging between "that's awesome and sounds fun to play!" to "there's no way in hell I'd ever be able to play it". Lots of Les Claypool's fretless 6-string bass here.

Stabbing Westward - Wither Blister Burn + Peel: (What Do I Have to Do) Stabbing Westward tapped into a lot of how I was feeling at the time. Sad, angry, depressed, and self destructive. I miss them a lot. They made some great music and had some great live shows.

Pantera - Far Beyond Driven: (Becoming live in Chile) Fast, hard and heavy. I still think this was Pantera at its best...agressive and loud with a maniac guitar player backed by a rock solid rhythm section. I saw them several times in the 90s. In the later years of the band, they were a little hard to watch.

Prodigy - Music for the Jilted Generation: (Poison the video version not the album version) Brought me back to electronica. What grabbed me about this album was, while it was a techno thing, a lot of the elements of the songs wouldn't sound too out of place in a rock song. I practice my rhythm guitar technique to songs on this album sometimes.

Local H - As Good as Dead: (Fritz's Corner HFStival 97..I was there) I have a fascination with unusual configurations for rock bands. Local H was just a drummer and a guitar player that had bass pickups in his guitar. And they had a guy to play kazoo live. Not really deep, but just expressive of the slacker GenX mindset at the time.

Girls Against Boys - House of GvsB: (SuperFire) These guys are another band that drew me because of their odd config. This time, they had two bass players. Kinda mellow in an alt-rock kind of way.

Nirvana - Incesticide - (Aneurysm live in Argentina) I missed Nevermind and Smells Like Teen Spirit when they came out. When Incesticide came out, Nirvana finally got my attention. It was loud, raw and messy. Suicide is such a waste.

For those of you that don't know, December 9th our wedding anniversary. Typically on those nights, I unplug and we go out to one of our favorite restaurants (this year, it was Le Canard) and have a relaxing night out. This year was different, since nerdcore was rising in Vienna. Somehow I managed to talk Margo into going to see YTCracker, MC Frontalot and MC Lars play at Jammin Java and she really had a great time there.

Great show, and the guys were really great to the fans after the show at the merch table, chatting, posing for pictures, signing stuff, etc which is a good thing because I Like Signed Stuff....

And here's me with YTCracker, MC Frontalot and MC Lars after the show. On my wedding anniversary. My wife rocks.

One of the things I meant this site to be was an aggregation point for content that I put out on the net. Sometimes I succeed in that and sometimes, not so much. This post is pretty much a copy and paste of a writeup I did on another site of the Buckethead concert I went to this past weekend. It's not really a journalistic review and it's not my best writing, but I still wrote it and I'd like to have a copy here so it's somewhere else besides buried on a guitar website forum.

The URL that the post can be found is: http://www.guitarmasterclass.net/guitar_forum/index.php?showtopic=20542

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Pics are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottgentzen/sets/72157607962159633/

Opening act: That One Guy http://www.that1guy.com

It's been almost 3 days and I'm still not really sure how to describe That One Guy. The videos on his website give a little bit of an idea of what's going on. It looks like he and Buckethead have a collaboration CD coming out soon-ish.

His main "instrument" is a metal pipe that's jointed to create two different sections. There's one string along each section and an array of buttons at either end of the segments. It's wired into a pile of gear that sits next to him on the floor....a sequencer of some kind and some other stuff. Basically, he plays the pipe through effects with his hands, a drumstick and a bow and triggers backing sequences and samples with the buttons.

The music was sometimes tribal, sometimes techno, sometimes metal, sometimes jazz. Very strange. One of the song titles I caught was called "Butt Machine."

I knew I wasn't going to describe it well. I got one OK picture:

Buckethead:

I didn't expect the minimalism of the show. There was no band. Buckethead basically played over backing tracks that were being played from a green iPod mini through the house PA. Same amp rig that we're used to seeing...two Mesa Triple Rec's, one angled Marshall 4x12, one Harry Kolbe 4x12 cabinet. There was a case next to the amps that had other stuff that he fiddled with, but I didn't really notice any sound change when he did. It looks like he's playing a different Les Paul than he normally does, but I've mentioned that elsewhere.

The venue was pretty full. The crowd was a mix guitar players (standing still and staring), Guitar Hero nuts (the ones moshing during Jordan) and bored girlfriends and wives for the most part.

The sound was pretty good. I was up against the barrier, so I got the sound from the cabinets and the house PA. Wasn't too horribly loud until the end of the show when he was making more noise than playing.

I'd never seen Buckethead before, so I didn't have much of an idea of what goes on in his shows other than the sub 10-minute clips on Youtube. He came with a bag of toys and partway through the show, he started handing them out to the crowd. Most of them were Star Wars toys. He started playing what sounded like the tapping part of Eruption with the finger of a rubber severed hand, and I almost caught it when he threw it into the crowd. He did the nunchuk and robot dance routine for a while as well, which I've seen online before but didn't think he still did it. Also, at one point, while playing he kicked one of the busts off the top of his amps.

The playing is fantastic. I was up in the front for the whole show and it was really cool for me to see someone that's that good up that close.

I don't know what the actual playlist was, but he played Soothsayer and Jordan and a Starwars instrumental. Didn't play Post Office Buddy or Frozen Brains. I couldn't tell if anything was new.

He seemed to have a pile of picks stashed next to the iPod. It looked like he was changing picks frequently, sometimes in the middle of a song. Not sure if that's normal...eifferent picks for different songs or what. That was my guess, as he tends to tweak his gear constantly as the show goes on.

Towards the end of the show, Buckethead and That One Guy did a jam session together. Looked/sounded a little improv, but I don't know.

I didn't really go to the show planning on doing a review, so this is all I have.

This is probably my last "Signed" post for a while. This is also biggest and best one so far. Back in 2006, I won a Daisy Rock Rock Candy Custom guitar when I pre ordered Otto's Daughter's album "Some Kind of Heroine."

They shot video when they were packing it up they said that they'd sign it if I wanted. Well, of course I did! On 20 Sept, the band made it to DC and I brought the guitar with me. The whole band signed it and we took a picture together before the show. At the end of the show, Jim saved the set list and gave that to me too.

I took some more pictures during the show and they're in my Flickr account in a collection called "Otto's Daughter, Mignight DC 9/20/08"

They're a kick ass band and put on a great show even in little places like Midnight. They're also a really nice group of people. It makes me miss the days when I knew lots of people in bands and went out a lot to watch them play and hang out.

Anyway, Otto's Daughter is still on tour...in the midwest at the moment, and heading east again before making their way back to the west coast. Check out their MySpace page for their schedule and check em out if they come by.

In September, Brad Sucks released his second album, titled Out of It. I've blogged about Brad in the past (too lazy to dig the links out though). I dug his first album, I Don't Know What I'm Doing, and Out of It is a great follow up album.

I really admire Brad's DIY ethic and his openness to allowing others to use his music to create their own.

I the interest in collaborative art and music, I've submitted a few video clips for use in what will become the video for "Fake It." There's still time to send in more video if you want to help

Below is my signed copy of Out of It...

I've been waiting for Brian "Head" Welch to get an album out since he found Jesus and quit Korn in 2005. The album's fantastic. Heavy Christian music is a wonderful thing. I pre ordered it direct from the Driven Music Group website and the CDs came signed. Sweet!

I hope he gets out and tours this stuff some day. He's been doing signing appearances lately, but he hasn't been over to the DC area at the moment. I'd like to meet him some day. His is quite an inspiring story of finding God, overcoming his demons and trying to find his way through his new life.

As I've written here before, I've been a fan of Brad Sucks for a few years now. I don't just like his music, I like how he's working out how to get his music out into the world.

His new album, Out of It, is due out on 8 September. I already pre-ordered my CD copy. I like CDs still, I can't help it. I haven't figured out how to get someone to autograph an MP3.

The first single from Out of It is going to be "Fake It" and Brad's making a video. Not just any video, he's trying to make the most cliche music video ever and he needs our help! The assignment is as follows:

1. Choose one or more music video clichés. (What's a music video cliché?)
2. Video yourself singing along to Fake It [mp3], including at least one or more music video clichés. Do the entire song or just a part, anything's fine.
3. Upload your video to Youtube with the tag "bradsucksfakeit".

I try not to ask people to do things that I wouldn't do myself. Last week, I uploaded a set of clips to YouTube as my contribution to the project.

I have three videos up now in my Youtube channel. All totally raw and unedited, unrehearsed and intentionally so. I might do some more and I might pay more attention to the audio next time. Here's mine, where are yours?

It's a pretty popular thing as one gets older to complain about the crap music that is "in" with the kids. I've listened to a lot of trash on XM while I was on vacation so I'm particularly sensitive right now....even when I'm trying to avoid it I still got a load of Jonas Brothers, Rihanna and "I Kissed a Girl" and I've had enough.

I'm sure when I was a kid though that my parents had similar reactions to the Run DMC, Metallica, and Steve Vai coming out of my stereo. I get a similar reaction from Margo when my iPod goes from Daath to Saul Williams to Muris Varajic now. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as they say.

Maybe things are not quite as bad as I thought though...

Here's a 16 year old girl in the Netherlands playing ...And Justice For All and doing a damn good job at it. She has a bunch of other videos in her Youtube account with with more well-done covers. The kids are gonna be alright after all. Rock on Cizzie.