ryan's road service

Getting Back into WordPress!

Ryan — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:02:23 +0000

Well, it’s been a long time, but I have a chance to show my good friend Chapman how this dang thang works!

Oh, Ruby

Ryan — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:05:07 +0000

It has been so long since I have tried to learn a whole new computer language, but today, my friend, is the day I will start (well, I really started last week). This whole Ruby thing has got me really interested in furthering my geeked-out, grammar and syntax skills. Apparently, Ruby is a good language to get in to, especially for someone who hasn’t typed the words ‘Hello, World’ since learning Perl in mid 90s. We shall see–I am quite rusty.

SO WHAT?!

Ryan — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:55:34 +0000

So I never write in this thing… or it is rare that I do. So what!

The End of Baseball

Ryan — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 04:20:40 +0000

Well, Baseball is over for the year. There’s no more. While I was not in any way rooting for the Boston Red Sox, I must say it has left quite a smile on my face knowing there are millions of displeased Yankee fans in the world tonight. I was hoping the Indians could have pulled it out from those rich, money grubbing bastards that make up that no good New England team, but I’ll let it slide knowing that the other cheap excuse for a New York team has been dishonored. Eat me. It costs so much money for a kid to watch a damn baseball game these days. You (read: any one associated in any way with professional baseball, Major League Baseball or any company supporting such self interested endeavors) should all be ashamed of yourselves. Screw you until Spring training.

Bus Ride

Ryan — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:32:09 +0000

Never ever, ever, ever, ever…I’m serious, never ever ride the metro at 2:15 in the afternoon. Especially never ride a bus leaving the university district going north or south (likely). It is high school kid hell. I wanted to die on the bus. I almost got off and sat in a coffee shop. I mistakenly thought, “it won’t be that bad.” Trust me: it was that bad. I did get off two stops early. The slightly longer walk home was worth it. Those little jelly faced, shit-talking, uncovered-mouth-coughing good for nothing kids! I know, I know I used to be one too. I’m just not into that many, all at once, all up in my sphere as if I’m not even there. So remember, don’t ride the bus at 2:15. And I was thinking, “what good timing I have coming out of this here bookstore and the bus rolls right up…” Shame, shame, SHAME on me.

Guitar Blogs That Rock

Ryan — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:54:55 +0000

I found two guitar blogs that are by far the two coolest guitar sites on the internet (that I have found thus far ). Most of the guitar sites out there in the abyss are crap. Do any Google search for Guitar related sites and you get mostly crap: bad tabs, horrible rock-a-longs, sites trying to sell you “online lessons”, etc. When I found these it made complete sense. If little ‘ol me is blogging, there must be some other people that have 1) been blogging longer than me and more importantly 2) be much better guitar players than I am. So I started searching Blogger and WordPress and discovered two excellent blogs that everyone playing guitar should know about. These are great places to expand your ideas on practice and exercises. I love the supplemental nature of these online resources. Just looking at my guitar books, scale dictionaries and chord encyclopedias makes the thought of practice stale. The dynamic nature of these sites puts them on the top of my guitar sites list!

ig blog

This is the first one I discovered. IG has put up a load of guitar related content. Whether it’s about specific bands and musicians or the excellent series on the CAGED method and theory, every post is interesting and there are a ton of links and exploratory informations. One of my favorite parts of his blog is the very down-to-earth tone the language and the posts take. IG is obviously your average individual who LOVES guitar and wants to share that with the guitar community. In addition to some of the cool lessons, IG has a Sound Click site where you can download jam tracks and examples to further clarify some of the topics covered in lessons and exercises. This blog will not disappoint!

http://igblog.wordpress.com

Intellectual Musician

I must credit the ig blog for this site. This is a guitar blog with a community approach. Musician Tyler Oakleaf is the founder of this community site that offers lots of articles, exercises, and tips for guitar. This site covers much more than guitar to boot! They look at signing, bass, piano, horns (!!!), general advice, practice techniques, and even music business. There are a number of download-able lessons and online jams as well. This is a place to subscribe to! It looks like they frequently add new articles and posts. The approach at Intellectual Musicians seems to be a little more “professional” than the ig blog, but it also seems to be generally a friendly place. There is definitely a tone of instruction which is really cool and motivating.

http://intellectualmusician.com

I Like WordPress

Ryan — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 04:51:35 +0000

It’s over Google Blogger. It’s just not working out. Your not giving me what I need. Goodbye.

Internal Candidates are Like Internal Elephant Organs

Ryan — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 06:13:00 +0000

So the NPR job didn’t work out. The sad part is that it most definitely would have had it not been for an internal candidate. They even took the time to call and tell me that they wanted to hire me, but the politics of established personnel ultimately won out. Do doctors move one organ to become another? Does the pancreas get promoted to liver? The intestine to stomach? No. I don’t think so. Internal elephant organs are large, overworked and already have a general disdain for their current place in the elephant existence. Trust me the grass is not greener. It may smell better, but it is most definitely the same shade of pea-ass green.

JamCenter: Web Rock-a-Long

Ryan — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:47:00 +0000

JamCenter.com has put together a cool, albeit cheesy, website with play-a-long tracks for practicing guitar licks, scales, soloing and rocking out in general! As you can imagine, some of the tracks are a little midi sounding and sometimes oh so typical. The cool thing is the variety of delivery and the way the technology works. JamCenter has setup a Flash web component for each musical key. The application is really simple and easy to use. You pick your genre or style and away the player goes with a full jam track. While its playing it gives you suggested scales to use and tells you the chords being employed by the rhythm. They really offer a lot of variety jazz; rock; blues; punk; metal; cool, which seems to be a fusion of sorts; and major, which are pop-ish sounding progressions. Each key has a different selection as well, so you won’t be playing to the exact same blues, transposed into a different key. It sounds like the creators actually made a different track for the styles in each key. Right now they have a Jam player for A, D, E and C. Their site says they are working on B, F and G next. Cool!

See for yourself at http://www.jamcenter.com

Rilo Kiley – The Showbox – 9/8/2007

Ryan — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 20:08:00 +0000

Rilo Kiley rocked the Showbox real good on Saturday. Not only did I get good and d-runk, but this band threw down a most memorable musical explosion. The tones melted into the Showbox air with their tasty, almost-always Fender Telecaster guitar tones. One thing that really impressed was Jenny Lewis, the multi instrumentalist, playing guitar, then bass, and moving through keyboards and percussion. Now don’t take me be impressed the wrong way. It simply took me by surprise. I think what really got me was the bass. It’s typical of any show to see someone switch from guitar/keyboard/other stringed instrument/horn/vocal/percussion or any combination of these and probably a plethora of other instruments and noise making devices. I suppose its my impression of bass players: very static, groove oriented, focused on giving the band soul-in-time. So this was really cool seeing Jenny grab the bass and own it.

Now back to sporting that killer guitar tone. Yow! It was milky and sweet, just the way I like it. I would love to see the expanse of tone gear, but the only clue I have thus far is this picture found on the brooklynvegan blog and the little info posted on Guitar Player. Clearly he is playing through a ’65 twin reverb and Guitar Player mentions a Robert Keeley Compressor and Katana Preamp, Menatone King of the Britains, Flip TD-X Tube Echo and VT-X Vintage Tremolo, Line 6 DL4 Delay Modeler, DigiTech Whammy.

Whatever the tools the delivery was on target. All of the parts were well delivered. It was in no way virtuosoic in terms of balls out guitar rock, but it was perfect and flawless from the listeners stand point. I’m really hoping for another record and/or tour from The Elected! In the mean time, go see Rilo Kiley!