Contemplating the Frankenrig

Warning: this post is going to use a lot of language specific to musical gear. I am going to talk about amps and shit the way a lot of guys talk about cars.  It will probably be damn near as unintelligible to many of you as my last post was.

I'm pretty sure if I were a chaos marine I would be a Noise Marine.

One of these freaky fuckers.

SO. I bought a bass rig recently. This is not just any bass rig, it’s a really NICE bass rig. I’ve been playing bass for the last year or so, and have been using our drummer’s gear. First, an Ampeg SVT amp with a 6x10 “refrigerator” speaker cab (these really are the size of a refrigerator) which I managed to almost explode one day (thankfully the repairs were minor, I was really worried and pretty upset about it) and then, not wanting to take any chances with the Ampeg any more, a Gallien Kruger RB800 amp with an Eden 4x10 cab, which sounded GREAT, much more in line with the way I play which, no matter how I try to hide it, is rooted in my experience as a guitar player rather than as a bassist. The Ampeg rig is one of those things you feel more than you hear, the GK is the other way ‘round. They are both amazing pieces of equipment, but they way I play tends to work better with the GK’s more modern (to my ears at least) sound.

But having access to two world-class bass rigs wasn’t enough for me, and when I got a little bonus from work, I decided I should get my own. Mainly this was motivated by the desire to mess with and push the gear a bit and not worry about breaking something that belonged to someone else. After traveling around the area for a while trying out different gear, I narrowed it down to two main contenders –Mesa/Boogie, and this company I had never heard of before: Glockenklang. I was looking through some internet post where people had named a bunch of “boutique” amp manufacturers, and the name Glockenklang came up along with Demeter and Trickfish. I started researching the company a little and liked what I heard. One of the big problems with getting something boutique is that you almost never get a chance to try it out before you actually buy it, but here I got lucky. The amps are made in Germany and are very difficult to find in the US - there are three guys in here who act as distributors, I think one in New York and one in Nashville, and the last one of them works out of his house and happened to be about a ten minute drive from me - so I actually had a chance to go over there and try it out.  I wound up choosing the Glockenklang (amplifier and cabinet). I don’t think I have ever heard an amplifier that is so incredibly transparent before. I learned after the fact that apparently a lot of high-end bass luthiers use these as their reference point because of this transparency – you hear the true character of the bass itself without very little coloring by the amplification. For a bass with a great sound, that sound translates perfectly. It transmits the bass and the way the bass is being played, no more or less – and in some ways that makes it kind of an intimidating piece of gear because it also means there is no hiding – you can’t bury your fuckups in a bunch of low frequency gunk, whatever you play is going to come through clearly. But if you play well, conversely, that comes through too.

Also, it’s fun to say. “Glockenklang.” Go ahead. Say it. Out loud, not in your head. Don’t mind the strange looks.

Now say it with a German accent.

Fun, right?

I also got really, really lucky when I bought my bass a year or so ago. I knew I wanted a five or six string, I knew what my price range was (not huge - the bass amp and cab are the first pieces of musical gear I've spent a decent chunk of money on in my life, honestly - like, I spent more on the 28mm Reaver I have than I ever spent before on musical gear), other than that I didn’t know a hell of a lot about basses. There are two mom-and-pop music shops near me. One is really new and bright inside and it smells nice and it’s in a pretty nice area, and there are a bunch of long haired high school kids who work there. They offer lessons, and it is not unusual to see some mom or dad dropping off their little kid for a lesson. Overall it’s a pretty good shop, when I have something minor to pick up like strings or a cable or something, it’s where I go, and it’s where I would probably send someone who was brand new to playing, because the both the proprietor and the kids he hires are always ready to come out from behind the counter and help you with something or explain something.

The other shop is old, and a bit dark inside, and it smells a bit like a bar, and that may be because of the bar attached to it next door which looks like a true dive, or it may be that it actually was a bar at some point. The other businesses nearby are a pawn shop and a motel with "nap" rates. There are odd corners stacked with ancient, battered gear, most of which is covered with a fine layer of dust. It’s ambiguous if this gear is actually for sale; there are no price tags on it, and it is certainly not displayed in the way that one would expect stuff in a store window to be displayed. I think some of it probably belongs to the folks who work at the shop, but it is difficult to tell.

The proprietor, a guy named Mike, looks a little like a plump Weird Al Yankovic, has a last name like Wyczolkowski and one of the thickest south-side Chicago accents I have ever heard. The kind that’s like “Hey, ma, I’mma take my sammich ta da frunchroom so I can look out dat liddle winda in da door.” He is always hunched over behind the counter working on an instrument. I mean ALWAYS. There’s usually a literal pile of guitar cases next to him, literally he will have 50+ guitars to do set-ups or repairs on at any given time. He only very rarely will interrupt his work to come out from behind the counter and help with something. This is where experienced musicians go for repairs and tweaks to their instruments, and I think that’s what he makes most of his money on. We are both ex-guitarists who switched to bass, and we share a love of goofy old BC Rich guitars with SUPER pointy shapes. That’s actually how I met him – when I wanted to fix up my old Warlock a couple of years ago, our guitar player recommended him to me.

The Warlock, after being customized.  I bought this in 1990 and it's the only piece of gear I still have from that time period. It was cheap and pointy, which suited my pocketbook and my sense of style as a teen. The nut came off in about '98, and I tried to replace it myself and fucked that up pretty pretty pretty bad. Last year, in a labor of love, I fixed it and then some - new handmade brass locking nut, bridge, and tremolo from Glen Graff, who used to work at the BC Rich Custom Shop, all new electronics, and Seymour Duncan Nazgul pickups.  This thing fucking SHREDS now.

So I happened to be in Mike's shop picking up the Warlock after getting a setup done on it. I had just started playing bass, and had been using all borrowed gear, but I figured I was probably in it for the duration and would need to get my own stuff sooner or later. I asked him if he had any five-string basses he would recommend, and he was like “Yeah, actually I just picked up a Warwick so my old one is for sale if you want to pay cash,” and he named a price that felt a little like I would be stealing. That’s how I wound up with mine, which is a Fender five string. And it is just a fantastic bass. As our drummer remarked, it is one of those instruments that sounds good no matter what you plug it into. And when I plugged it into the Glockenklang, the sound that came out just made me really happy. The transparency of the amplifier really worked in this instrument’s favor.

Anyway! Back to the amp! When I bought this amp, the guy who sold it to me gave me a pair of “rack ears” in case I wanted to put this amp into a rack. And I was like “huh. Maybe I will.” Racks are kind of outdated now, when you can literally bring a pedalboard with a modeler on it and plug right into a house PA, but when I was a kid, a lot of the professionals I knew had rack gear, and while it’s fallen out of favor for live shows, it’s still fairly common in professional studios. But in the old days, guys would slide the amplifier in there, sure, but then there would be all these other units in the same rack: compressors, equalizers, effects units, power conditioners, tuners, exciters, limiters, all sorts of shit with cool, mysterious blinking lights on it.

Shortly after I bought the bass amp, I happened to see a dusty-ass Alesis Quadraverb at Mike’s shop. Perhaps the best bassist I ever had the pleasure of working with, this guy James who sadly passed away in the late 90’s, had a Quadraverb, and he used to use it both for his live rig and for home recording. I loved the way the reverb and delay effects sounded and seeing one in the corner of stuff that might or might not actually be for sale got me thinking. I asked about it, and if it was for sale, and he laughed and said “I don’t even know if that thing works.” I told him that when he found out, to let me know, I was interested. He shrugged and was like, “Tell ya what, if you want to take it home and test it, you can. Then just let me know. Thing is, it doesn’t have a power source.” I have a piece of gear that is a power source with a bunch of adapters for different connections – it even has a nine volt battery connector. So I was like, I bet I have something that will work, and off I went with the Alesis tucked under my arm.

Well it turned out I didn’t have the right power source. It was this bizarre thing with a four pin connection. But they do still make them – they are called 4 Pin DIN connectors for what it is worth – and it turned out that one of the things they powered was a multi-effects unit that I know our guitar player used to have. I called him up and he actually still had the whole unit. I borrowed it from him, and plugged the Quadraverb in, and lo and behold it worked! I scrolled through the presets – most of the original factory presets were still there, though some anonymous former user had modified preset number 97 and called it “I LOVE PUSSY” while #98 was “FELLATIO” and #99 was “THE HUMPER.” I plugged in a latching footswitch I have and even THAT worked. So I called Mike and asked him what he wanted for it, and he was like “it’s yours man.”

I probably should not have gotten so excited. The damn thing was made in 1987 – it’s almost as old as I am, and I barely function, so I should not have been surprised when, a couple of days later, the LCD screen suddenly went dark and the clipping ladder lit all the way up and stayed there. All I could get out of it were these kind of strangled, decimated little noises that sounded like someone had bitcrushed them nearly into nonexistence. I opened the unit up, hoping it might be just dust and stuff causing a short – the midi through jack in the back was missing, leaving a hole a small animal could crawl into, and I half figured I would see a bunch of cobwebs or something. But it was surprisingly clean inside, nearly no dust at all. I’m pretty sure one or more of the capacitors finally went bad, but I don’t know enough about that stuff to tell for sure, or even how to discharge a capacitor safely, so I backed off. I may get it repaired at some point – I’m guessing it’ll probably cost me something like 75 bucks at a place not far from me that does amplifier and other electronics repair.

The Alesis - you can see the clipping ladder on the left, all lit up :(

The thing is, the Quadraverb and the rack ears got me thinking about the Frankenrig. I started poking around and researching rack equipment and it turns out that used rack equipment, because it’s a bit dated at this stage, is insanely cheap compared to when it was new. There are still a few holy grail pieces out there that are thousands of dollars, but you can get a lot of top-notch units for next to nothing. A lot of guys are like “oh man racks are really heavy, that’s too much to lug around, and they are too complicated, and miniaturization should be embraced.” But you can get a shallow 4 or 6 unit rack and it really is NOT that heavy and I like being able to case everything up and protect it when it’s moving so the potentiometer settings don’t get accidentally changed, and honestly, to me, it feels much more organized to have everything in a rack than it would to have a massive pedalboard with a rat’s nest of cables going every fuckin which way, and if one of those cables dies you can spend an hour trying to figure out what went wrong and why your gear isn’t working. So I wound up getting a rack and sticking the amp in it along with a power conditioner and a tuner. The tuner is WILD, crazy red and blue and purple lights zinging all over the place, I think I might leave it on even when I don’t need it just for folks on LSD to have something to watch. I kept an eye on reverb.com for a bit and wound up finding a really nice and fairly modern effects unit, this Digitech from the late 200's early 2010's, and the foot controller that goes with it for probably 20% of what it originally cost, and that went into the rack as well. I have come to think of my bass setup as “The Frankenrig,” - this stitched together thing made from too much technology and derangement. The Frankenrig has been born from this combination of a really nice standard bass amplifier and cabinet married to a few more modern utility rack pieces and a couple of crazy old effects units. The one I have in there currently isn’t THAT old, I guess, probably 2010ish – one thing I have to say about musical gear is that it is actually still made to last, unlike washers and dryers and TVs and EVERY GODDAMN THING UNDER THE SUN that seems to work for between 8 and 12 years and then breaks and winds up being more expensive to fix than to simply buy new. For some reason it REALLY pisses me off that they make stuff like this. We have two refrigerators. One looks like it is from about 1981 and the other looks much nicer, steel doors, and I think it’s probably from about 2015. I would be willing to bet green American dollars that the newer fridge shits the bed before the older one. But musical gear is still made to be repaired rather than replaced, and I actually like the reverb and delay on the Alesis unit a lot. It’s lush, ambient; it feels wide in a way that the reverbs on the Digitech don’t. But the Digitech has the single best pitch shifter I have ever used (outside of like six thousand dollar Eventide modules anyway), and I really like a lot of their other effects. I’m still in the process of menu diving and getting everything dialed in the way I like it – after that (and when my bank account recovers a little) I will probably look at either repairing the Quadraverb and slotting it into the rig or getting something like a 31-band EQ.

The Frankenrig Mark I.  I can't get over how much it looks like an like an altar to the gods of volume.  Kneel, dog!  Kneel in supplication to the LORD OF LOUD!

It was seeing a dual equalizer that got me thinking about the Frankenrig Mark II. I was browsing through EQ units (as one does) and saw that a lot of them were stereo. I started wondering why you would want two different 15 band equalizers if you weren’t playing a keyboard, and then I recalled seeing I think Stanley Clarke back in the 1990’s and realizing he had two output jacks on his bass, and wondering at the time what the heck that would be used for, but knowing that whatever the hell he was doing it sounded fucking GREAT. He was using a form of bi-amping. It turned out he had each pickup running to its own jack so that he could equalize them differently. Bi-amping in general involves using a device called a crossover to create a split in a signal at a chosen frequency so you can send the signals to different places, often to different amplifiers which would then be equalized differently. You can, for example, send everything 1500hz and below to one amplifier and everything 1501hz and above to another amp. It was kind of a holy grail of bass tone back in the day, because it allowed you to do things like run overdrive on the mids and highs of a bass signal but keep the bottom end clean, so you kept the clarity and punch of the low tones but still got the growl, grit, and dirt of an overdriven signal.

Then I thought a bad, bad thought. And that thought was: “Well, you’ve got a pretty nice guitar amp just sitting at the practice spot with no one using it.”

So I started looking into crossovers and splitters, and somewhere in there I started thinking about not just sending the upper frequencies of my bass signal to the guitar amp, but maybe sending a signal with a raised pitch to my guitar amp so I could play guitar and bass at the same time. I realized that I could probably do what I wanted to do with an Octavizer as long as it had two outputs one for the signal with the effect on it, and one that is a “dry” out, without the effect even when it is turned on. This would allow me to run the bass into the pedal and then split the signal and run the “dry” out to the bass amp and the effected out to my guitar amp. There are couple of units that have this, Boss makes one and so does Electro-Harmonix. And I would still have space in the rack for the Quadraverb (if I ever get it over to Deltronics to get repaired) or I could probably take my Orange combo guitar amp, remove the amplifier from the chassis and slot it in somehow, and then use a cab for speakers instead of a combo.  That would take some doing.  Removing the head from the combo is easy enough, and there is a standard quarter-inch speaker connection in the amp, typically used for the speaker in the combo unit (but it's not hardwired in, which many combos are).  The big problem would be finding a casing to replace the wooden panel on the top and cover the interior of the amp.  Though I may be making it too complex - it's possible that the orange panel wouldn't interfere as much as I think and I could just screw a pair of rack ears on the thing and call it done.

Pics to help clarify what the hell I am talking about. This is what my guitar amp currently looks like.  It's what is called a combo, where the amplifier and speakers are all in the same chassis.

Someone removed this amplifier from the combo chassis.  The thick orange bit on top is what I would probably need to replace if I wanted to actually put it into my rack, but I have never seen this done, and have no idea how to go about fabricating the piece myself.

Splitting the signal also allows me to run different effects to each “instrument” on its specific line so if I want to, I can, for example, run an envelope filter/auto-wah on the bass signal to get some funk there and run a digital whammy on the guitar signal so I can control the pitch real time with it while not changing my bass signal. Or there are a bunch of pedals that will mute an instrument. I could run one of those on either my bass line or my guitar line to turn the different “instruments” on and off at will and thus do things like play accents with the “guitar” while playing a constant bass line. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. And I talked to my drummer, asking him if he was interested in a two piece dancepunk thing were I did the guitar and bass and he did drums and vocals. I’ve been contemplating a couple of side projects – one was a one man thing, bleak industrial shit, no guitar at all, just me using a massively overdriven and downtuned bass, a drum machine, and doing my best to sing. And that’s the thing, I absolutely suck at playing and singing at the same time, all I can really manage is this kind of ghostly, one word tenor stuff, but with enough delay on it, it works. It was really heavy, but I also kind of wanted to do something fun. Hence the dancepunk thing, atomic energy and inappropriate innuendo filled semi-adolescent (and only semi-sung) lyrics. I figured my drummer would say no way, but surprisingly, he’s open to the idea.  He's got a great voice and has the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time, unlike me.

I’m not the first guy to come up with this idea. In the recent past, Mike Kerr from Royal Blood is probably the most well known example of someone doing this. But man, it really sounds like it would be a blast, and I’m eager to get it going. I am absolutely tapped out at the moment – buying any more gear right now would probably cause a serious rift in my marriage – but once I regenerate a bit I’m going to grab the octave pedal – the one thing I’m missing that would allow this foolish idea to work – and get things going. And when I do, I’ll cackle madly and call out to the sky:

“It’s alive…..It’s ALIVE!!!!!”

at the foot of my bed EP

Instant Kafka · at the foot of my bed EP

So this little EP/demo is finally out!  I'm really happy with it overall.

My favorite song on this is At the Foot of My Bed.  It's a really old song.  The singer wrote it back in the nineties but at the time I wasn't interested in playing anything that wasn't pretty fast and/or aggressive, and we played it a handful of times but it never caught on.  The drummer recalled it fondly, however, and with the passage of time, it "clicked" for me this time around.  It's still quite different from what we typically do - almost Beatles-y?  Not quite a ballad but somewhat softer than our typical fare.

I mentioned this in my last post, but I think people who are familiar with this blog might enjoy the song called Viaticum. Our singer wrote the lyrics after reading a short story of the same title here.  I wrote that after making a city state from the generator at Grand Commodore.  I love the way inspiration can spin out like that.

The other songs are just little ditties - a faster (170 bpm), almost punk rock thing (MI13) and a pair of songs about ashtrays (Ashduck and Ashduck Too which are about as far apart in musical character as you can get).

If anyone wants MP3s of these, just drop me a line.  They will also be available streaming (Spotify etc)  in the next couple of weeks.

Next up, we are going to start playing out as much as we can.  There's a fairly small theater here called the Cabaret Metro (it might just be the Metro nowadays) that we all really want to play.  To the four of us in the band, it is a kind of holy place.  It's the kind of club where it's not out of the question for a local band to play, but which has also hosted lots of amazing bands over the years, especially in the more underground / alternative circles.  Nirvana played there, as did the Smashing Pumpkins, Mudhoney, Ministry, Naked Raygun (not well known outside of Chicago, but extremely well known in the city - I really miss Naked Raygun shows!), Mr. Bungle, Prince did an after-party show there, shit Metallica played there in 1983, the list just goes on and on.  But I've also have friends who had smaller DIY local bands play there.  So that's the next goal - we want to play the Metro!

This release is digital only, but I still wound up putting together a few graphics that emulate a CD or record sleeve.  Here they are:

Front Cover - Instant Kafka at the foot of my bed EP

Rear Cover - Instant Kafka at the foot of my bed EP

Liner Notes Page 1 - Instant Kafka at the foot of my bed EP

Liner Notes Page 2 - Instant Kafka at the foot of my bed EP

I hope you listen to this and that you enjoy it.  I hate asking for likes because I detest social media in general (I miss antisocial media) but I'd be much obliged if you would stop by the SoundCloud and maybe hit like on a couple of things - from what I understand, the way the world currently works, that stuff apparently helps bands get gigs, so as much as I feel like a spotted whore for asking, I'm asking.  Once again, here's our SoundCloud link.

Rock and Roll and RPGs

I feel like I’ve neglected this blog a bit. A few things started to take up more of my time, energy and attention and I wound up letting months and months slip by without an update. But I guess that’s ok; the main thing from my point of view is that I didn’t stop trying to channel creative energy. The vast majority of my efforts have been in the realm of music, so that’s what this post is about, mostly. That and a really harebrained idea I have for a game.

I can’t recall exactly when this happened, but sometime early in 2024 I switched from playing guitar to playing bass. I played a borrowed four string bass for a few months and then picked up a five string for myself. I like having that extra low range. I have really been enjoying it – it’s very different from guitar in terms of the approach and I’ve learned a lot as a result, and it has helped me hear new things in music, even in very familiar pieces. It helps that our drummer also has extensive experience with bass and has coached me some on how to change stylistically. You can really feel a difference in the music when the bass and drums, the kick especially, are locked in together. I am pretty sure that this is what makes a band sound “tight.”

The bass has a much larger scale than a guitar does, and as a result, it is physically more demanding to play. My fingers hurt for a while as I got used to the thicker strings. Also, when I finally picked up the guitar again after a couple of months, it felt almost childishly small to me. All of a sudden I was able to make four or five fret stretches pretty easily. And I’ve noticed during our less active periods that I have to stay in practice or I loose my chops much, much faster than I did for guitar – more endurance in the musculature is required, and if I don’t play for a few weeks, I wind up feeling like my arm or fingers are almost, like, paralyzed with exhaustion after playing something with a lot of fast downpicking.

About three months ago, we decided to record a few songs, essentially an EP. Our drummer has done music professionally since he was in his early twenties, and he has a pretty nice home studio so we did the actual recording there to save money that we are now using for post-production. We wrapped up the recording part itself a couple of weeks ago and it’s been sent to someone who really knows what they are doing for mixing and mastering and general post-production.

One of the things that I feel like I really grasped during this particular recording experience is the role of preproduction and how incredibly important it actually is. Typically I have always thought of preproduction as just rehearsing the songs into the ground and making sure that everyone knows where they need to be at all times, knows the pieces backwards and forwards. And that has actually been sufficient in the past, when all we were looking to do was capture what we do live. But it’s also the time to ensure that everyone is on the same page, and in a band like the one we are in now where we are doing some somewhat more complex arrangements than we could easily reproduce live, this really matters. The thing about working in the studio is that if there are differences of creative vision, they come right to the fore and can no longer be ignored during the recording process. That can be a real test of a band’s communication and interpersonal skills, since you often have multiple creatives with strong personalities and opinions who are involved in the disagreement. We did have some differences in our creative visions for some of the material this time around. Mostly with us it involved the keyboardist / singer wanting to add a LOT of instruments that are not normally part of our performance. He has a much different sense of dynamics than the other three of us, and we were sort of constantly having to restrain and reel him in. We worked through it, but there were some moments when I could tell it was stressful for various members of the band. It’s never fun to be told “Hey that idea you had? Yeah, we don’t like it,” you know? And for myself personally, I don't enjoy delivering this kind of news either, and would expect most people do not. In the future, I am going to do my best to make sure that this kind of thing gets hashed out during preproduction. I’m also going to make sure that during the recording process, if there are differences of opinion anyway, that the band has a “lead” we have agreed can make the final decision on something if we cannot otherwise reach consensus. A “ref” if you will. The drummer has also acted as a producer for a lot of other bands during his career, and he filled the same role for us. If he’s going to do that again, I’m going to make sure he has buy in from the entire band so that he can make the final decision on a dispute and once he does, we cease discussion and move on.

I don’t want to make it sound too dramatic, it really was not bad compared to some of the disputes I’ve been in with fellow band members. I will say though, that it takes a special kind of person to be a singer; they almost have to have a little ego. I used to have kind of a hate-on for singers and spent about 10 years playing in bands that were instrumental only as a result. It stemmed from several experiences I had at live shows I played where the band minus the singer humped in all the gear – our drummer at the time had a massive heavy metal kit with two bass drums and like 6 rack toms and probably as many cymbals and just a ton of hardware to rig it all up. This was also in the days where you had to have a decently powerful amp to play a live show, so those also weighed like eighty pounds – most house sound systems were much more primitive than they are now. So the band gets all this gear in, and set up, and we’re waiting for the singer. And he’s not there….and he’s not there…and it’s fifteen minutes to go live and he’s not there….and it’s ten minutes to go live and he’s not there….and it’s five minutes to go live and he shows up doped to the gills carrying a microphone. This happened more than once. Thankfully the guy we are working with these days is not like that at all.

Anyway, I think the recording should be ready within the next couple of months. It’s just a little thing, hardly even an EP, two songs at about five minutes, two that are around a minute and a half, and one that is about twenty seconds. The singer wanted to do thirty songs, and given that we ran into some of this stuff, I am really, really glad we didn’t try to do that! We got mixes on the first few short pieces back earlier this week, and I am hugely impressed with the guy doing that work. He’s really managed to get the best out of the recordings. Of course, I am of the (admittedly biased) opinion that he had really solid material to begin with, but still – given that these were just little throwaway things, I am really pleased with how they sound and am eager to hear what he does with the longer, more complex, more serious stuff. There is probably not much call for it, but I will post links when the stuff is ready. One tune in particular might be of interest to people familiar with this blog; the lyrics were written by the singer after he read a short story of mine posted here, and then we co-wrote the music. My original inspiration for the story was a sort of amalgam of real world stuff that has kind of haunted me for years and ideas from the Starling and Shrike world that Dave (aka Her Christmas Knight, who runs the Grand Commodore blog) created. It’s been really interesting to watch how one idea can spin out and serve as inspiration for multiple projects, even cross-genre. The same kind of thing happened a long while ago working with this particular singer where I wrote a short story and he wound up writing lyrics based on the story. That tune musically quoted Lovely Rita Meter Maid and Sympathy for the Devil (at the same time, no less!) and then went into a dirgelike metal thing. The overall effect was a little Helter Skelter, like the acid trips of the Summer of Love gone very, very bad indeed and devolved into the Tate-LaBianca murders. I’m really quite fond of it.

Aside from the main band, I’ve started fooling around with some ideas for a two-piece side project with the guitarist. Heavy, super bleak industrial stuff reminiscent of Streetcleaner-era Godflesh. It gives me an excuse to tune the 5th string on the bass even lower and allow all the nasty feedback I generate when I use distortion to bleed through ungated. That side project is in its infancy right now and it may discontinue before much happens with it, but we will see. At the very least it’s forcing me to learn a lot more about drum machines and MIDI programming than I have ever bothered with in the past.

SO: There are some really interesting parallels between playing RPGs and being in a band. The most obvious one is that you’re all trying to imagine and create something together, and it’s very easy to think of a band as a bunch of PCs. There are also both roles and rules. The role parallel is pretty easy to envision I think – drummer: maybe the fighter, bass player: cleric, guitar player: rogue, singer: magic user. Of course these could be interpreted differently, and there is overlap, and multi-classing, and you might wind up with like an electronic digeridoo sub-class, but I think most people would agree that these parallels make sense. Like a party of PCs, a band must often cooperate if they are to achieve the best result; when that result is achieved, whether it is in an RPG or a band, there is a sense not just of getting to a flow state, but of arriving at a group flow state, which is just an amazing feeling, exponentially better for every additional person who gets there together. There’s also the potential for PvP, particularly if the singer shows up late and so fucked-up they can’t function. I’ll admit I’m holding on to a bit of resentment there.

There are also rules. Even in the most avant-garde bands, and those most dedicated to improvisation, there is usually some structure. One project I was a part of (which was actually a very very long running thing) there was one rule, which was: if you know how to play it, you’re not allowed to touch it. A lot of people would call what that project did noise rather than music, but I have a very loose definition of music – “sounds arranged for the purpose of listening to.” And by that definition what we were doing was certainly music, as well as just a lot of fun. There were some absolutely beautiful, happy accidents during improv sessions with that group where things came together even though no one knew how to play whatever instrument they were holding, if it even was an instrument – sessions with that band used to begin with someone emptying a box full of toys that made weird noises into a central area in the middle of the room. This pile consisted of everything from a kid’s laser gun that made zap sounds to an old 8 track machine to an out of tune harpsicord, to a child’s xylophone. Once we used the spring from a garage door to make absolutely heinous crashing sounds. Probably we are lucky it didn’t snap and take someone’s head off as it unwound.

But in what most folks think of as music, there are more and more rules - typically you need to play in the same key for example, and stay in time, and you usually don’t want the bass to be louder than the vocals. And there are quite obvious skill checks when it comes to playing the music, but not so obvious ones as well: I’ve watched more than one person fail a wisdom check by putting a beer on top of their amplifier which then vibrated until it tipped over and spilled the contents into their gear. To continue the D&D metaphor, one could think of different bands as different parties. And I guess the city or area in which a band plays is the campaign world, whether that’s the local suburban VFW, clubs in the city, or, at the superstardom level, the world.

Because of all these parallels between being in a band and playing RPG’s I have had this recurring idea to write an RPG where the characters are musicians and their enemy is possibly the crowd itself. I was initially thinking the enemy would be other bands, but I like the idea of the crowd being the foe. Somewhat related, buried in the root for the word “monster” is “monstrare” – which among other things, means “to show.” I kind of like that.

Each kind of musician (drummer, guitar player, etc) would have an RPG analog level and techniques they could learn as they leveled up, almost like spells or feats. The venue (the “dungeon” analog) can make a massive difference, like maybe one place is a total shithole that pays in pitchers. I played a venue (which shall remain nameless) like this once, and wound up ordering a pitcher of gin, which seemed like a very good idea at the time, but in hindsight (speaking of failed wisdom checks) was unwise. I did not have a great performance that particular night (though I managed not to fall off the stage either, which was actually kind of difficult given that it was split by a lane leading to the bathroom down the middle). But another venue might give you 10% of the door or something, which could be used like treasure.  And gear would be like, well, gear – swords and armor and stuff. I guess the lawyers might come after me if I use brand names like Fender and Gibson but maybe a Gibson 335 gives you a +2 skill check when playing rockabilly or using the chicken picking technique, where something like a BC Rich Warlock or Mockingbird gives you that kind of bonus if you’re playing death metal, or shredding – something along those lines, anyway! I’ll do my best to work out something that makes sense.

If this thing stops living entirely in my head and I start to actually put down anything solid, I’ll throw it up here. And if anyone knows of anything out there already that is like this, I’d love to hear about it – I’m aware of something out there called Deathbulge that looks kind of amusing and similar enough that I may abandon this entire idea completely, but I don’t know very much about it - if anyone has played it, I would love to hear what it was like!

In September of 2015, Motorhead kicked my ass.  I really wish I'd seen them earlier.

RIP Steve Albini 1962 - 2024

The most destructive thing a musician can do is start worrying about whether or not other people will like the music. Fuck other people. They're not in the band. Just make music that stimulates you and don't second-guess yourself. 

- Steve Albini

Instant Kafka Back Catalog Released

 SO:

I know I promised you guys to stop with the music posts but I'm kind of excited about something that happened a few days ago, so there will be one more music post before I stop for at least a little while.  I have blathered about this here before but one of the old bands I was in reunited recently.  We got picked up by a (very) small label and nearly our entire back catalog (seven albums worth with one more album on the way) is available now on just about every music platform on the internet - Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Pandora, a bunch of others - I've linked several of them (but far from all) on the sidebar and I'll include a link to our page on Spotify at the bottom of this post as well.  If you use something else like Tidal or Boomplay, just search us and we should come up.  If there's a particular platform you use that we don't seem to be on, please let me know and I will look into it.

It's been kind of a nice little boost to see the music out there and generally people seem to have enjoyed it from what I can see (though, granted, most of the folks who I have talked to about this are people I know and am friendly with, so my sample is biased). I have a hard time saying what we sound like - the closest thing I can think of is Faith No More, but we don't sound a lot like them either.

But it does seem like most folks have found something they like.  One of the albums is almost all covers, everything from Bob Dylan to Devo, the Sex Pistols to the Beatles, from David Lynch's Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead to the Stooges to Neal Diamond to Hüsker Dü.  That should hopefully give you some idea - we are all over the fucking place.

These guys have always been fun to play with.  Our first show was a Halloween gig and someone dressed up as the Baby Jesus dosed the lead singer on stage.  At another, the sound guy was having a lot of problems getting us set up (we were a pain in the ass for sound guys in part just because we had a big band - two keyboards, lead vox, two guitar players, bass, two drummers, three backup vox setups) and four songs in I started smelling something burning only to look up and see that the PA system closest to me had caught on fire (we had no pyrotechnics mind). Though our liability in this incident could have been refuted, we still packed up and absconded pretty hastily.

Good times!

Here is the link to Instant Kafka on Spotify.

Maybe This Is Not Even Earth

Distinctive Musicians III - Guitarists

OK - I have some ACTUAL useable RPG content boiling through my brain so I'm going to stop obsessing over musicians after this post (probably).   There are way too many fantastic musicians to really do this topic justice in a little pot like this, but here are a few of the folks I think are truly over the top:

Charlie Hunter (GARAGE A TROIS, SUPERBLUE, VARIOUS MUSICIANS)

Charlie Hunter plays an eight string and does basslines and guitar lead simultaneously.  He's insanely talented.  The thing below is really a wonderful example; though both the bassline and guitar work is sparse, every note is in the right place at the right time, and I find the whole incredibly relaxing - the word that comes to mind, if you could shear it of the pretentious overtones it's become associated with, is cool.  Hunter's playing isn't always this mellow - some of his work with Bobby Previte is pretty tense - but it's hard to mistake him for anyone else.  There's a playfulness there that I only ever see in the most technically accomplished musicians - guys like Hunter, Les Claypool, or Buckethead - where they are like "now I'm going to do some silly shit and it's still gonna be amazing."  This one doesn't have too much silly shit, but it makes me untense my shoulders when I didn't even realize how tight I was holding them - it just empties the body of stress in some weird alchemy.

Fine Corinthian Leather, by the way, is purely an advertising gimmick.  Ricardo Montalban called the leather used for the upholstery this in a commercial for the 1975 Chrysler Cordoba.  But if anything sounds like fine Corinthian leather should, this is it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBGvMic-ZDE

Adrian Belew (KING CRIMSON, TALKING HEADS, FRANK ZAPPA, DAVID BOWIE)

I really do not understand why Belew isn't more well known, he is so creative and plays with such joy.  

Everyone, EVERYONE on this track is fucking incredible.  Bill Bruford is a legendary drummer, Robert Fripp (the other guitar on this) could easily be featured separately on this list as well, but Adrian Belew plays lead on this and when Belew plays lead, he makes sounds with a guitar that are hard to believe aren't the sky cracking in two.  Lyrically, I think this is about as perfect a description of obsession as I have ever heard.

I do remember one thing.  It took hours and hours, and by the time I was done with it, I was so involved, I didn't know what to think.

I carried it around with me for days and days...playing little games...like, not looking it for a whole day.  And then, looking at it.  To see if I still liked it.

I DID!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc6huqPzerY

Robert Fripp (KING CRIMSON, BRIAN ENO, BLONDIE)

The other guy playing guitar on the track above is every bit as unique.  Fripp is a true innovator, cut from the same cloth as Les Paul, who first brought electricity to guitar.  His innovations are too numerous to list, really, but Frippertronics (the introduction of tape loops to his playing, which he started in the late 1970's) and New Standard Tuning deserve special mentions. Here's a lovely quote from him that I think captures his overall approach to the instrument, which, though it can sound incredibly complex, is at its roots an exercise in intentionality and simplicity:

"With a note of music, one strikes the fundamental, and, in addition to the root note, other notes are generated: these are the harmonic series.... As one fundamental note contains within it other notes in the octave, two fundamentals produce a remarkable array of harmonics, and the number of possible combinations between all the notes increases phenomenally. With a triad, affairs stand a good chance of getting severely out of hand."

There are so many things he's done - Fracture is an amazing piece of music, the guitar solo in Baby's On Fire from Here Come the Warm Jets is mesmerizing, his work on the album above with Adrian Belew - all of it is good.  I nearly chose an early piece where he's using Frippertronics, but ultimately decided on Discipline - the thematic counterpart to Indiscipline, above, and from the same album.  If Belew shines on Indiscipline, then the cerebral, beautiful stasis of Discipline is pure Fripp.  Also, King Crimson is probably the roots of math rock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en5YRCvppIA

Buckethead (PRAXIS, GUNS AND ROSES)

Buckethead is a once-in-a-generation Mozart level genius at his chosen art.  I listed bands he's been with above, but he is most prolific doing solo work.  Look at this thing - the number of albums he has put out per year since 2010.  In 2015 he put out an album every three or four days.

The thing I like about Buckethead's playing is that it isn't pure shredding for its own sake - he knows how to lay back when he should (listen to Wake the Dead or Whitewash, for example), and even on this track, which is a tour de force of his talent, he takes the time to develop thematic melodies that really push the whole thing to the next level.  I think what I'm trying to say is that he plays with feeling, something I think is missing from some of the other shredders or incredible technical players.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNXwYo-w1HE

James Calvin Wilsey (The Avengers, Chris Isaak)

The King of Slow.  Chris Isaak got the credit for Wicked Game but for my money it is those first two notes from Wilsey and his lead playing that make the song.  Just perfect, haunting, beautiful, the lead floats above the tune like a lonely ghost drifting over the desert. Dude puts his soul out there when he plays like that.  We only got one solo album from this guy, below is the first track from it.  He's already gone, and that sucks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9haU5gu-Ccg

OK, that is that for now then!  Next up - A return to the World With No Extras - I think!

Distinctive Musicians II - Bassists

OK, so this is a music blog for the time being. After this, I'll probably only do one more of these on guitar players and then return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast.

There are so many really good bass players that I almost feel bad with choosing the five below.  That said, I'm trying to highlight folks that have such a distinctive approach to their instruments that you can tell within a few bars that it's them if you are familiar with them.  Still, leaving John Entwhistle, Stanley Clarke, CAROL KAYE holy moly, Tina Weymouth, CHARLIE MINGUS jesus christ, and Ron Carter out was hard!

Brian Gibson (LIGHTNING BOLT)

Lightning Bolt is a two piece - one guy singing and playing drums, and Brian Gibson. Gibson is a fucking lunatic who plays his bass tuned to cello standard (C G D A) and uses a banjo string for the high A, along with a metric shitton of distortion, a Digitech Digital Whammy pedal and god knows what else (probably a Boss Octave) to get an insanely original sound. I saw these guys for the first time at Gabe's Oasis in Iowa City (the only punk-rock dive in that town, really) and I think I went because Don Caballero was playing. I happened to be towards the back of the crowd and I noticed a bunch of musical gear sitting out on the floor back there. I just figured the drum kit and massive amps were there was because the place didn't have a green room or that it was full and that it would all eventually be moved to the stage. I think that's what everyone thought.

We were wrong.

These guys set up in BACK of the crowd, on the floor, before anyone got there, and started to play immediately when the previous band finished their set, almost no pause at all, essentially taking the entire audience on the back foot and playing with such sheer exuberance and energy that at one point I was laughing with delight and I wasn't alone. They were so loud I could feel the shockwaves hitting my chest and stomach and actually see them moving the liquid in my drink (granted, my position in the rear of the crowd had suddenly become a front row seat but still they were SO loud). It was easily one of the best live shows I've ever seen. I love the fact that they did away with the stage and essentially became one thing with the crowd.  I don't know if they still do that, but they did it at every one of the three other shows I saw them play.

This turns into one of the most ferocious things I have ever heard by a minute and a half in - this thing is seven minutes of churning, blistering, relentless, remorseless aggression and it is just beautiful. I don't even know what genre to put it in. No one else plays like these guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc6IT61FHVg

Bootsy Collins (PARLIMENT FUNKADELIC, PRAXIS, BOOTSY'S RUBBER BAND)

Bootsy, Bootzilla, Boo Man Chu, Captain P-Mo, Fuzzface, the Player, the Zillatron himself. I would not say he's underappreciated, but he's so incredibly distinctive. No one plays like this guy. You can tell when he's playing right away (or that it's someone imitating him, at the very least).

I chose this thing - nearly ten minutes long, with two bass tracks panned extreme left and right (basically one in each ear, headphones recommended). It's long but man is it good, and it really gives you a sense of his range and style. It is not totally indicative of his playing which with P-Funk for example is much more conventional (though only because Bootsy made it conventional), but I think it really showcases his talent. His use of effects here is visionary and really tasteful. He uses an envelope filter quite a lot to get automated wah sounds based on pitch, an expression pedal as a pitch-bender to get up into frequencies the instrument could never reach otherwise, a flanger, at least one kind of delay, and probably a host of other effects, to say nothing of distortion. Sometimes he sounds like the kickback from firing a particle accelerator cannon (or, well, what such a thing should sound like), sometimes he sounds like the trembling digital web of an electronic spider, and sometimes he sounds like the ocean rolling in and then... receding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FgDk5lo-Zs

Brian Ritchie (VIOLENT FEMMES)

I don't think Ritchie is on anyone's list of "greatest bass players" but he has such a unique sound I felt I had to include him.  I am unaware of any other band where the bass sounds like this - almost acoustic, almost like an upright, but not quite.

This song is so goddamn good.  I am surprised it hasn't been pinched by someone like Scorsese or Tarantino for a film.  Generally I love the scores those two directors put together, though often after a movie's success one of those tunes gets picked up by the advertising industry and played ad nauseam in commercials for burgers until the opening chords make me want to vomit red meat in the collective faces of whoever is on the board of directors.  Dick Dale's Miserlou for example was in I think every single fucking commercial for every single product you could buy between 1994 and 1996.  Now, on the one hand, that's great, because I feel like Dick Dale finally got some recognition and probably a decent payout, and I don't begrudge him that at all.  I might very well come back to him when we get to guitarists.  But on the other hand, that process of a song like Miserlou or Tomoyasu Hotei's Battle Without Honor or Humanity being co-opted by the advertising world makes me more than a little sick to my stomach.

Ahem.  I'm way off track here.  This thing will probably get stuck in your head, and it will be almost immediately apparent why it will probably never be used in a commercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLHi3wiSuWc

Jaco Pastorius (WEATHER REPORT)

Again, I would say Jaco isn't underappreciated I don't think, but it does seem like he's fading a bit in the collective memory.  What he did for music in general and particularly for the bass guitar is nothing short of monumental.  There are a ton of wonderful apocryphal stories about Jaco, but one of my favorites is that when asked about the future of jazz, he replied "Well, I'll be in Miami next week."

He modified a standard Fender jazz bass to be fretless.  He had different stories about when and how he removed the frets - one of them was that he removed the frets with a butter knife and sealed the fretboard with epoxy resin.

Like so many great musicians, he had serious problems with substance abuse.  I guess he could be a real asshole when he drank (as so many of us can) and he liked to drink (as so many of us do).  He was frequently homeless the last few years of his life.  His death at thirty five was a tragedy of his own making - this is from the Wikipedia entry on Jaco:

On September 11, 1987, Pastorius sneaked onstage at a Santana concert at the Sunrise Musical Theater in Sunrise, Florida. After being ejected from the premises, he made his way to the Midnight Bottle Club in Wilton Manors. After reportedly kicking in a glass door, having been refused entrance to the club, he became involved in a violent confrontation with Luc Havan, a club employee who was a martial arts expert. Pastorius was hospitalized for multiple facial fractures and injuries to his right eye and left arm, and fell into a coma. There were encouraging signs that he would come out of the coma and recover, but they soon faded. A brain hemorrhage a few days later led to brain death. He was taken off life support and died on September 21, 1987, at the age of 35.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc6IT61FHVg

Les Claypool (PRIMUS, LES CLAYPOOL'S FLYING FROG BRIGADE)

OK, once again, not someone who is underappreciated by any means, but I think perhaps the single most distinctive bassist stylistically I have ever heard.  Almost more than Bootsy, you can tell when Les is playing pretty much immediately.  People tend to either love him or hate him.  I love him, but I DO have to be in the mood and I'm not always.  This is a pretty early thing, from the first Primus album, but if you don't know Claypool's playing for some reason, this will give you a really good picture of why he is hailed far and wide as a bass monster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ufAE-skaA4

That's all for now!  There are obviously a lot of other folks who deserve their own showcase, but those are the five I chose in the moment. If there is someone whose lack of inclusion feels to you as though it is an atrocity up there with family annihilation in its stark evil, if you happen to have an opinion about any of this that you'd like to share, or if you would just like to tell me about one of your favorite bass players, please DO!

Guitarists will be next.

How Do You Know it's a Drummer at your Door?

The knock speeds up and he comes in off-time!

Ba-dum tiss?  Ba-dum tiss.

 

I’ve always wanted to do a series on musicians that I think are just fucking amazing.  My criteria for choosing a musician is somewhat fluid, but mostly has to do with how distinctive I think they are stylistically.  It also has to do with guys I think might be slightly underappreciated for what they do. But the main thing is that all of these guys have a really distinctive style – as soon as you hear them you can tell who it is.

Drummers are up first.

 

Andrew Dymond / Andre Diamant (DURACELL)

This British-French kid uses a triggered kit hooked up to a synth and becomes a one man band playing hardcore punk chiptune stuff from video games that were popular when I was a kid.  Which is cool enough, but holy fucking SHIT the energy he brings is just amazing.  This is the first thing I ever saw with him in it, and the sound quality is a little rough, but I love it for so many reasons.  First of all, you can clearly see him playing (for a given value of clearly – he’s often moving so fast that shit’s just a blur).  You also see him adjust his setup from time to time, which I find endearing.

But last and not least, even if you deleted all the triggered stuff, this would be some of the fastest and most intense drumming I think I have ever been exposed to, and I spent large parts of the 90’s at death metal shows.

Seriously, if you can’t be bothered to watch anything else, 8:00 to 8:40.  He just EXPLODES, what he does here is drumming PERFECTION.  It’s better in context and I encourage you to watch the whole fucking thing, but if you don’t listen to anything else from this post, make it that, holy fuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QfwKqy3LyY

 

Billy Cobham (MILES DAVIS, MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA)

Billy has been on too much stuff to list it all here.  He was the drummer for most of Miles Davis’ later stuff and worked with Stanley Clarke (who we might talk about a little when I get to bass players).  Hell he even worked with Peter Gabriel on the soundtrack for The Last Temptation of Christ, so he’s not exactly underappreciated, but he is absolutely worth knowing about.  Again, I’ve chosen something that is incredibly fast – but Billy has a really light touch and it sounds crisp instead of heavy (and I mean that in the best way possible).  There’s a bit at 4:19 where he starts hitting a china cymbal repeatedly and you wonder where the fuck he was keeping the extra arm.  If you like this and want to see him actually play, look up the live version of Awakening, same band – The Mahavishnu Orchestra.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boOu0L45M44

Damon Che (DON CABALLERO)

Damon’s main band is Don Caballero – these are the first guys I ever heard the term “math rock” applied to.  He’s nicknamed the Octopus and it will be easy to see why.  The first time I saw these guys live I was watching him set up.  Almost all drummers have a rug they put their bass drum or drums on, usually with a rubber bottom, to keep them from scooting away (or at least all the drummers I ever played with had something like this).  One of the guys I played with a lot used to weight down the rug with cinderblocks.  He played really hard.  Che is the first drummer I ever saw who nailed his rug to the stage. There are so so many things I could pick from for this band that showcase how insanely talented this guy is.  It is really really hard for me to pick just one.  And I'll probably come back to them when I talk about guitar players - Ian Williams, who went on to play with Battles, is almost as distinctive as Damon is. The ability of these guys to not listen to each other while they listen to each other is amazing. As with all of Che's playing, this is a moving animal, never settled, always twisting and turning and looking about itself for something to sink its teeth into, and I love that about his work. And the intro count in this thing is one of my favorite little moments in rock:

Guitarist: One!

Drummer: One!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPmkQ_heOME

OK, ok one more from Che because he’s that good.  Also the song title is fuckin great and if you get through this you’ll understand the tiss and the ting a little better than you do now, I promise.  The ride cymbal that kicks in around 3:16ish - oof.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcb8aov3zt0

 

Joe Warlord (USURPER, BONES)

Last one up for now will be Joe Schafer, also known as Joe Warlord.  I will have to admit a bias here – the guys in this band were a couple of years older than me and most of the folks I hung out with, but they are from the same general area and went to the first high school I got expelled from, and I have very fond memories of hanging out in their jam room and smoking pot at like 14 years old.  They always played an incredibly heavy brand of metal, and as a kid I was really really into aggressive music, metal and punk especially.  They went on to do a kind of semi-pro thing, a lot of touring with bands like Cradle of Filth, Christian Death, and Mercyful Fate, as well as another band that came out of the local scene, Macabre.  Anyway, Joe is a fucking beast.  You could pretty much pick anything they have done and it would be remarkable, but this thing is nuts, especially towards the end.  Even if you don’t care for metal, I encourage you to kind of bite down and listen from 6:30 on, and pay close attention to the change up around 7:20 when it goes double-time.  It is inhumanly fast.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0nTBUFIq0s

That's it for now - not sure whether it'll be bass players or guitarists next.  Probably bass players.

Last Dungeon

A while back, a couple of guys at work approached me one day and basically said “We heard you were a fun DM will you run a game for us?” They wanted to play D&D.  Two of them had played in the past, but were pretty new to it, two had never really played any RPGs.  I thought it would be fun and expected it to last a couple of months.  They wanted to us the newest rules, and I had no major objections.  I didn’t mind giving it a try, especially considering that I really didn’t expect it to last a long time.

That was over four years ago.  At this point the characters are level 15 (some other time I may do a really whiny post about high level play in 5e), and I have got them to what will be the final dungeon in this campaign.  The first adventure was a hire from a pig farmer who had been missing livestock and it turned out he had an orc problem.  Then there was a haunted manse (basically I took the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and changed it quite a bit so that it was more to my taste and fit the 5e ruleset).  A couple of custom dungeons followed that, and then a trip to the Deep Carbon Observatory.  After DCO, I ran two more custom dungeons, a weird one that was a bunch of towers and another one that was an attempt to do horror in D&D and which worked fairly well!  I got my players to buy in, and it was a lot of work, but I split them up and ran one on one sessions for a few weeks until they met up again.  I did a write up on this blog of that one, called Facility Designate 339-19, and posted a link to a google drive folder with all the material in it.  After that I took them through another custom dungeon and then I dumped them into the Maze of the Blue Medusa, which was fun to run.  Then, the dungeon I ran for them just before this was mostly procedurally generated and combat heavy.  It was ok, and I think the players had fun with it, but it was not my finest moment, and I’d like to end things with something much more substantial and memorable.  So I am back to planning and am taking the time to write up the last dungeon.

I have some maps, and the monsters have been more or less determined, but I’d really like to put in some interesting / fun puzzles and traps and encounters that need some thought.  I’ve been scouring the internet in search of stuff like this, but if anyone out there has good resources, or just a favorite trap / encounter / puzzle from an RPG, please tell me about it, either in the comments or you can email me (dsulli42 at geemail dot com).  I’d love to hear about stuff you found particularly memorable.

One idea that I love, (not mine, but I can't recall where I saw it) but will probably not use in this particular dungeon (it’s hard to see how it would fit in) – is a dungeon where the players have the ability to change the seasons to change conditions or where the dungeon is on some sort of accelerated seasonal change (each season is six hours or something).  Changing to winter may freeze a previously uncrossable pool of water, spring may melt ice that was blocking a doorway, summer may allow the “sun’s” rays to be focused to light a fire in a place that cannot otherwise be accessed and which triggers something else to happen, or the autumn may reveal a necessary clue previously hidden by leaves or hanging ice.  I am going to use this SOMEWHERE – probably in one of the next campaigns I run, probably for lower-level characters (no higher than four or so) – but it simply doesn’t fit right now and the PCs have too many alternate ways to solve problems like these.

Anyway, I would like to give this party a memorable last dungeon and I would love love love to hear one or two of your favorite traps, tricks, puzzles, or encounters.

 

It Ain’t Alright

The band I played that gig with back in September has continued to play and it has been really rewarding and honestly a lot of fun.  We did a LOT of recording at one point, more than a hundred songs worth, and one of the guys in the band decided to remaster some of the old stuff.  It’s come out pretty nice! At some point all this stuff will be up on Spotify, but I wanted to share a track and decided on this tune, called It Ain’t Alright, which goes into a cover of Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive and has a nice period of that funky drug experience music I love so much before resolving in what, to me at least, is an incredibly satisfying way.  I had nothing to do with writing this thing – I think it was composed by the guitar player for Rights of the Accused for a band our keyboard player was in with him called Think Freud (I think – though I could be wrong, and I think the name of the original band was why we added the Interstellar Overdrive cover), and of course Interstellar Overdrive was written by Pink Floyd.  I used to LOVE playing this thing (sans the Floyd cover).  It’s really simple and even drunk it wasn’t that hard and I liked staggering all over the stage while we played this thing (a far cry from my most recent gig where I was still so out of practice all I could do was lock eyes on the fretboard to try to make sure I didn’t screw up – but if we play again, that will have changed, I'm finally starting to get back to where I was).

The beginning of this is almost like Anarchy in the UK, and I think that’s probably intentional.  A few other reasons I always liked this one - first, you can tell it was written by a guitar player.  Being that the guy who sings and plays keys wrote a lot of the material we play, it noticeably lacks things like a fucking E flat (typically I use standard tuning to E and whenever an E flat comes up I have to go up the neck when I want to go down and I often wind up restructuring what I am playing entirely to account for this). Second, you can be as aggressive or as laid back as you want with the picking.  It's hard to hear on the recording because we are using so much distortion, but once the intro walkdown is finished, Leanne (other guitarist at the time) and I are both playing a da-digadiga-da-digadiga-da da pattern that's pretty goddamn vigorous, but it sounds just fine with slower picking if you run outta gas.

Instant Kafka · It Ain't Alright - Interstellar Overdrive

https://soundcloud.com/dan-sullivan-977382186/it-aint-alright-interstellar-overdrive

I don't think I can overstate how good it has been for my overall mood and mental health to have this outlet.  We've been working up a bunch of new material, which has been really engaging and satisfying.  We're not at the point where it's worth laying anything down other than on a phone or something just to capture the ideas, but we're getting close with  few things. But if anything is gonna keep me out of the hole I usually find myself in at this time of year, it'll probably be playing stupidly loud rock n roll.

Astrology in RPGs

Has anyone heard of a system that uses astrology to determine character stats and characteristics? Wait.  Let me say first that I think astrology is basically a crock of horseshit.  But it's still kinda fun and interesting, and some systems get really really involved.  A few things converged on this topic recently - Patrick Stuart's announcement of Gackling Moon made me think about this a little, along with a discussion about Tekumel I eavesdropped on (I always think of the planets around Tekumel because the whole arrangement is so weird), and where one of the luminaries was named for Lovecraft / Clark Ashton Smith's Dreamlands reflection of Saturn, Cykranosh (and who runs the Satrap of Saturn blog). I really like the Book of Ebon Bindings, and one of my favorite things about it is the way it links demons with certain stars, and it would be interesting to incorporate that as well.  I started making a generator for heavenly bodies.  At the moment it is pretty basic, just craps out a few details about a star. I'd like to take it a step further maybe and put something together that could create a game world's solar system, major constellations and stars, and a zodiac of sorts, then combine everything into a generator that spit out a character at you, complete with ability scores and a few major personality traits (which the player could chose to lean into or ignore if they wished). Solomon VK did a nice post on star names here.

I think what I want is probably beyond the ability of the HTML template generators I'm capable of using to do - essentially generating a full Astrological system and doing a natal chart designed to give a player a character to work with as well as linking the stars to certain ultra-powerful beings, whether malevolent or benign.

But for what it is worth here's the generator as it stands so far, just a very simple thing that spits out a star, its color, and gives a little factoid about it.  More to come, I hope.

INQ 28

There's been a long lull for me in mini work while GW pulled all the Adeptus Titanicus stuff for reboxing into Legions Imperialis.  The good news there is that there is a lot more terrain to choose from all of a sudden, and some additional tiles for a gameboard that I may pick up at some point (goddamn they are pricey though, for bits of plastic).  Anyway, I haven't played 40k for several years, but I have a pretty decent collection of bits and unbuilt models from when I was playing, and I started messing with some of them one day out of boredom while sitting in yet another online meeting at work.  I've always been kind of fascinated with kitbashing and conversion of minis.  I've started with an inquisitor, built partially from Greyfax, a Skitarii Sicarian, and the Crusader model from one of the Blackstone Fortress expansions, along with some other sundry stuff.  It is an interesting process, and one that can easily get me out of myself, which is valuable in and of itself to me.

If you have not done so, the INQ 28 scene in general is worth checking out.  I have linked it before but in particular the fanzine 28 is really, really good.  If nothing else, the point-counterpoint articles in issue four on whether minis are art or not is kind of fascinating, and brings up the Chapman brothers' Hell (which apparently burned up in a warehouse fire and was replaced by a new diorama they called Fucking Hell) as an example.  It's a fascinating question.  I don't have a definitive opinion on the matter but I think I lean towards the idea, that yes, minis can be art.  For me the really good stuff happens when someone goes off-script a bit and invents their own pieces of lore (or uses the minis in a completely original way, perhaps not for gaming at all), but even seeing an incredibly well-done "textbook" army feels to me as though it might qualify.