Wednesday, June 26, 2024 - CotD, Guitar Raffle, How I Write/Record, part 5

A Raffle Announced and a Love Letter to Fuzz

The Guitar Raffle

If you’re reading this, you likely know that as a promotional stunt for the release of Candy Macabre (copies still available!), I put a “golden ticket” in one of the 200 hand-numbered copies of the limited edition pressing. The ticket-finder would have won a guitar I built that had the album cover art on it.

That’s a nice lookin’ guitar!

Well, no one bought that copy while the pop-up shop was open, so…I’m going to raffle off the guitar. If you already bought the album on vinyl, you should have gotten an email from me confirming that you are in the raffle. (If you didn’t get that email, let me know!)

Every album purchased = 1 raffle entry. I’ll also sell additional entries into the raffle until the end of the day on Wednesday, July 3rd. Then, at my gig at Baby Rabiez (on the afternoon of July 6th), I’ll do the raffle drawing live (in-person and streaming on Instagram).

Here’s how to enter, if you haven’t already:

• Head over to IndoorCondor.com

• Scroll down to the black button that says, “Condor Wing Tips”

• For every $5, you’ll get an entry into the drawing

Ben, can I buy more than one entry, or can I buy additional entries if I already bought the album? Of course you can. If I buy the album before July 6th, will I be in the raffle? Sure.

The show:

moving on…

How I Write/Record Songs, part 5

Some time ago, in an era before I was briefly a mall shopkeep, I left off this exercise of recounting how I write/record songs by mentioning my love of fuzz. The following love letter to fuzz and mostly accurate-ish musicological musing is an aside in the song-writing/recording-process narration, but an absolutely necessary one.

To put things in context, “fuzz” is a term for an audio effect you can apply to any signal. It is, strictly speaking, the sound of something going wrong, which is, as I’ll explain the next paragraph or two, what rock music is based on—something going horribly wrong, or to be more specific, a technological failure/malfunction.

Music historians debate which was the first rocknroll song, but among the first was Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88.” Most of us know Ike because of his well-deserved reputation as a terrible guy for the way he treated Tina and many others. In addition to being, by all accounts, an awful person, he was part of the creation of rock music. The specifics of the story vary based on who’s telling it, but the gist of it is that a guitar amp was damaged on the way to the recording session for “Rocket 88.” Rather than finding a replacement amp, they used the distorted guitar sound that was the result of playing through the damaged speaker. Now it’s not the distortion alone that makes this song a candidate for the title of “first-ever rocknroll song,” but it is an important part of the shift (musically/stylistically) that’s happening here, where R&B is becoming something else. [continued beyond the paywall!]

Collage of the Day: Drag Me to Hell

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