The Musical Schizo

You know, I’ve had quite a journey with my issues with rage in my life. Through therapy and a lot of work and introspection, I’ve conquered them. Explosions of sudden anger are no longer a part of my life.

But let me tell you, if there’s anything that drives me back down that road of rage, it’s shit not working.

I always take precautions with my gear, making sure I have extra cables, batteries, adapters, lots of redundancy. So it’s not like I set myself up for failure. But sometimes, things just don’t cooperate. In those moments, I am tested.

Windows 10 notoriously lags when you have a lot of network drives mapped. Of course, I HAVE to have them mapped for work, so I’m stuck. And I never know if it’s going to work, or it’s going to lag and make me wait to see the folder. It sometimes takes more than a minute for it to respond. In those moments, I am tested.

We use a great system for our in-ear monitoring that generally works perfectly. Except when the iPhone (or perhaps the app) decides it doesn’t know how to handle the fact that there’s a wireless network I’m attached to that doesn’t have internet access, and makes my mixer disappear right in the middle of needing to change a setting in my in-ear mix. In those moments, I am tested.

I’ve never gigged with my Les Paul because it’s always had a wonky pickup selector – it’s like if you breathe on it wrong, the pickup you’ve selected doesn’t work. I even changed it out and got precisely the same result. So now I have to run it in the middle position all the time and just adjust the volumes of the two pickups to pick what sort of tone I want out of it. But if I bump the switch, I lose a pickup. In those moments, I am tested. I’ve often thought of completely rewiring that guitar just because it seems like it might be good to start over. Of course, since it’s never been a primary gigging guitar, the priority is low, and even though I do love playing it, I’ve never been able to justify the expense.

My original and very nice guitar, a 1990 Fender HM Strat Ultra, has had a messed-up output jack for over 20 years. It’s also a guitar with a Kahler Licensed Floyd Rose trem system with a locking nut. Between the sketchiness of using a Floyd with a locking nut and merely moving an inch and losing signal if the cable shifts in the output jack wrong, the guitar has never been a major part of my gigging life. I played it in the college days because it was all I had, but the output jack worked, and the trem seemed less temperamental for some reason. Probably just my lack of tuning perception. I try to play it at home a lot now, because I do love the way it plays – it’s a total shred machine – but if you move wrong…BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. In those moments, I am tested.

One of my favorite basses is a 2003 Ibanez BTB515 with Bartolini pickups. It’s a monster with the best B string of any 5-string I’ve ever played…but it has a wonky volume knob, so if you don’t get it set just right, the pickups sound super weird, almost as if you have a high pass filter on them. Not exactly the best thing for a bass. Turn up the volume too much, and you lose all the bass’ booty. In those moments, I am tested.

I guess operating as someone that usually sets himself up for success, preparing, planning, making sure I have everything I need in case of a catastrophe, it feels unfair to me when things don’t work. And it’s so frequently little things like laggy software or a wonky pickup selector, tremolo system, volume knob, or output jack. Small things have always been the biggest triggers for my rage – in large-scale meltdowns, I’m incredibly calm. In fact, it almost makes me calmer.

So, if it’s not too much to ask, universe, can things just work, please? I really don’t enjoy seeing red, and you’re really pushing me in that direction every time you unleash some digital or analog gremlin on me when I just need to get some work done.

And before anyone mentions it – yes, I realize that I need to fix the things I described before that are broken. But the point is they never should have broken in the first place. They didn’t break after a long time or a lot of wear – they just decided to stop working all that well one day. I’m likely to fix the Ibanez and gut the Les Paul (probably convert it to FilterTrons or maybe go crazy and get some P-Rails and have lots of tonal options) – but I’m not sure how easy it is to find the right sort of output jack to use with my HM Strat Ultra (it’s one of those barrel types). And the software issues? Well, that’s probably not something I can fix, so I just have to cope better.

Perhaps you have had the same sort of frustrations – probably without the underlying rage/anger issues threatening to send you off the deep end – if so, hit me up with a comment about your technological pet peeves or some piece of gear that just manages to fail you, however inconsistently.

Thanks for reading, and peace be the journey (a mantra for this particular topic…).
TMS

Since we’re getting close to Easter, and I’ve been seeing goddamn rabbits all over the place, I’ve been thinking about ears. So let’s talk about it – in a musical way.

I was blessed with a fairly good ear for pitch and timbre. I could tell instruments apart by their individual sound, and once I learned how to operate musical instruments, I started to be able to pick out melodies. This definitely made teaching myself to play a lot easier, since I could just try and emulate the things in music that I liked, but having a good ear early can be a bit of a curse for a few reasons.

First, it makes it too easy to get around learning to properly sight-read music, since if you have a good ear and decent musical memory, you memorize the music rather quickly and you’re not actually sight-reading anymore. When you’re a kid and you just want to be able to do the thing (play the music), having to concentrate and read isn’t exactly all that fun and it’s not as quick. And if you’re a little lazy, well, you’re going to do the easiest-to-you thing. It’s definitely part of the reason I’m so bad at reading rhythms in sheet music – once we went through the piece a few times, I’d memorize the note durations, rests, and rhythms and the parts where I was supposed to come in, so I wasn’t following it.

Second, when you are blessed with a good ear at an early age it’s kind of like being intellectually precocious – I was very smart very young, and thus didn’t learn good study habits because studying wasn’t actually necessary for me. Of course everyone caught up and most passed me because I sucked at studying. I’m still not great at it, though I definitely try harder to have discipline about things than I did. The early sense of being able to pick things out well is made worse when you’re not around a lot of people who have that same skill – you come to think your ability is actually greater than it is. I fell victim to this mentality for a long time, and then I got over myself when I met someone with excellent relative pitch and I about lost my mind. It showed me everything that was lacking from my understanding of pitch perception – especially being able to hear chords and harmony. I knew I needed work, and I then knew how much I needed to learn. Which is a wonderful thing once you get past how soul- and ego-crushing it can be at first. I’m happy that I now have a better sense of my limitations, because it has enabled me to work past them and improve.

I spend an inappropriate amount of time watching YouTube these days, and I have some specific favorite music YouTubers – most of whom have amazing relative pitch. Rick Beato has forgotten more about music than I can ever learn, and his ear is amazing – I’m so impressed with his teaching and techniques. Charles Cornell is fun to watch as he figures out songs as he’s hearing them for the first time – he’s so quick, it’s really quite impressive!

So that’s my aspiration. Getting to the point where I can just hear something and know where it is on whatever instrument I’m playing. It’s going to take work on my musical memory, my pitch perception, especially to identify chords/harmonies, and devoting the time to break it down and start from the basics with ear training to build it up to what I want.

The most important thing you can do as a musician is improve your ear. So I’m going to. And I encourage you to as well.

There are tons of free apps for you to download that can teach certain ear training concepts, but a truly great course to get started is available for purchase at beatoeartraining.com.

Take care, get your shots, and stay safe out there.
TMS

Practically-speaking, I am a guitarist because my little brother Rob got a guitar for Christmas in 1988.

And practically-speaking, I am a bassist because my little brother Rob got a bass in 1991 (after I stole his guitar) and a little over a year later I borrowed it to play with a band at my college, paying him half of my take for each show.

Practically-speaking, I play drums because my little brother Patrick and I bought a drum set in 1993 so we could jam in our basement.

And practically-speaking, I play keyboards because my friend Ty had a Casio MT-100 and I got my parents to buy me one for Christmas of 1986.

I started singing in earnest largely because me and my friend Joel would walk around campus and harmonize Queen and Yes songs. I had tried to sing before that, but my friendship with Joel led to me taking a voice class in college and getting the affirmation that I had a nice voice by actual trained singers (the professor even asked me at my audition how many years I’d sang in choir…which was zero).

It’s pretty clear that the functional aspects of me becoming a musician had more to do with proximity, and me always wanting to fiddle with any musical instruments that were present and figure out how to make them make sounds than any sort of specific, active pursuit on a given instrument. I think that’s why I’m more of a “jack-of-all-trades, master of none” kind of guy. It keeps it all more interesting to me.

Sticking with certain ones over others has a lot more to do with the specific things I love about how each one fits into the ensemble and what I can bring to the table. It also usually follows whether I’d been able to play with others on that particular instrument. That’s why I’m still a shite drummer and keyboardist, but I’m a pretty damn good singer, bassist, and guitarist.

And the inspirations that have kept me on track on the “favored” instruments have been largely people who either share a sensibility or a sort of inherent “sound” that is part of my character on a given instrument, or are people I could never imagine emulating.

For example, in the first camp, I’ve always felt a kinship with bassists that play melodically but hold down the groove. People like Peter Cetera in the early Chicago days, Mel Schacher from Grand Funk Railroad, Rob DeLeo from Stone Temple Pilots, Matt Freeman (McCall) from Rancid and Operation Ivy, Mike Dirnt from Green Day, Bernard Edwards from Chic, Jack Bruce from Cream, Paul McCartney, John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin, Tommy Shannon from Double Trouble, Boz Burrell from Bad Company, John Deacon from Queen, Tom Hamilton from Aerosmith, and John Taylor from Duran Duran. There are elements of all of these people’s playing that form kind of the fundament on which my playing is based – most of their stuff just makes sense to my music brain, and I just have to make my hands catch up. The aspirational ones, that I couldn’t imagine emulating as a “baby bassist” are the virtuosos, mostly – people like Geddy Lee, Chris Squire, Billy Sheehan, Les Claypool, Jaco Pastorius, Victor Wooten, Flea, Louis Johnson, Stuart Hamm, James Jamerson, Muzz Skillings from Living Colour, and so many more. All these bassists gave me something to reach for that was WAY out of my comfort zone. They taught me ways of approaching the instrument that felt fundamentally foreign to me. I’ve since worked my way closer to understanding their approaches, and incorporated a lot of stuff I’ve learned from them, expanding my playing to the broader palette that allows me to employ the techniques to succeed as a cover band musician, and give me some cool ideas to incorporate when recording my own songs.

On guitar, the players that “just made sense” were a lot of blues-based guys. Eric Clapton was an early inspiration, especially his Cream stuff. Weirdly enough, Eric Schenkman from Spin Doctors always played things that mixed the sort of southern rock/blues/jam vibe that just made sense to me – I’m not sure why, but I think he’s terribly overlooked. He always had great tone, fun rhythm playing, and a real strong sense of melody in his solos. Alex Lifeson from Rush, Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Gales, etc. Basically a lot of guys who were good with pentatonics. The aspirational players were people like Eddie Van Halen, Nuno Bettencourt from Extreme, Ty Tabor from King’s X, Vernon Reid from Living Colour, Steve Vai, Brian Setzer from The Stray Cats, Paul Gilbert from Mr. Big. I still haven’t found my way to emulating most of these guys, because I have a life. But little bits of all of them reside in what I do on guitar…though I find the bluesy jam thing seems to be more my specialty than anything else. I find that to be the easiest way for me to communicate what I want to say on guitar. Not saying it’s easy, or that I’m some sort of blues man, but I know that language well.

I can’t really even go into drums or keys because I never really “got there” as a musician. That’s why I never call myself a drummer or keyboardist. I “play drums” and I “play keys” because I can execute some ideas on those instruments, but I have no capacity to play them in a band context. I do have major inspirations with both, though.

So where am I headed with all this? It seems like just a list post. Well, it kind of is. These listed musicians’ styles are the inspirations that helped me find my style. Being able to embrace the fact that we’re all just products of the things we love in music is a great thing.

And acknowledging the practical nature of how we even started is good, too, because it allows us to thank the people who nudged us along and made us love what we do. So thanks to my little brothers Rob and Patrick, my friend Joel, my friend Ty, my parents, and all the wonderful musicians/bandmates who took a chance on me at various stages of my development: Tammy (as Dave), Jason G., Lote, Marco, Scott, Gary, Shawn, Chuck W., Rick, Mike L., Bill B., Jason J., Mike Circo, Jason H., Merle, John N., Josie, Caleb, Domonic, my brother Bill, Emerson, Brent, Rob K., Jon, Mike Craig, Dennis, Chris C., John P., T.J., Smitty, the C5 boys, Ed, Bobby, Rob H., Lee, Ned, Casey, Patrick B., Mike J., Rob Wade, Luis, Rachel, Greg, Paul, Mark C., Mandy, Marc, Billy A., Stuart, Kevin F., Dennis C., Mike B., Chris M., Chris Johnston, Ernie, Shawn, Ryan K., Brock B., Alon, Pat, Jay, and many more to come.

You’re all inspirations, and I appreciate you.

Now go find yours. But only after this coronavirus stuff goes away…maybe just find some nice people to jam with on the internets for now…

Peace be the journey!

TMS

I’m going to start being a regular content creator. I’ll write my “Museday Mumblings” here on the blog every Tuesday, and “The Friday Flush” over on the YouTubes. I’ll probably have more stuff coming soon, too. Just starting off slow…

What is a “Friday Flush”? Well, regular readers of this blog and followers of my goofy creative endeavors will know that years ago I stole an idea from Barenaked Ladies’ Bathroom Sessions, and I post songs performed while in the bathroom as “The Bathroom Schizo”. To one-up BNL, I take it to the next level and actually sit on the toilet while doing it. In the past, the song choices have always been songs where it sounds on some level like the singer is straining to push one out, but over time it grew to just whatever I felt like recording.

Episode one of “The Friday Flush” is a cover of The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer”, written by John Stewart from The Kingston Trio (not the former host of The Daily Show). It is one of Erin (my wife)’s favorite songs, so I came up with an arrangement just to sing for her, and liked it so much I used to use it in my solo acoustic performances. This was recorded around that time, when she was just my girlfriend, but I’m thinking this adorable little version probably will remind her of how cute I used to be before she married me.

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel to keep an eye out for my brand-new weekly series, The Friday Flush. Ring the bell and you’ll be notified when I post new videos.

And as always…peace be the journey!

TMS

Apparently I don’t share things widely enough. This goofy little bit lived in a comment on a Facebook post. So let me share this here, in hopes that people might get a kick out of it.

A certain Ska-Punk band’s classic, reimagined.

Peace be the journey!

TMS

I WROTE A NEW SONG!

Here it is in super rough demo format, complete with bad drumming, etc. 

It’s a tribute to one of my favorite songwriters and musicians, ever. Adam Schlesinger was very important to my development as a musician and songwriter, and his sense of melody and lyricism and endless hooks were a bottomless well of inspiration to me. He passed away earlier this year from complications from COVID-19, one of the first people of note (to me, at least) to fall victim to this horrible disease.

I hope you enjoy it and it makes you smile. It’s my first song written since December 2015. Hopefully this inspires me to get more stuff written and recorded. I mean, my friend Dennis C. Miller just released his second album, so I lost his challenge (I was to release my first before he released his second).

I’m tired. I need to sleep. I thank you for reading and hopefully giving it a listen. Rest in peace, Adam. Good night!

I don’t know why it always seems to take me three or four months to post, but I guess it is what it is. I mean, the only real reason I came here to post is to upload more live audio of the band. This is a more “board” recording, so there’s less of the “in the room” vibe, in my opinion, but it’s still pretty fun. One of these days (hopefully soon – almost certainly early next year) we’ll get a proper multi-tracked recording of the band so we can have well-recorded versions of our unique covers to share on Spotify and stuff like that. But we’ll see.

The life of Le Schizo is good in general. Got a promotion at the day job, a new van, moving to a new house soon with a proper room for my musical stuff, which likely means that I will be RECORDING SONGS SOON! Which is pretty damn cool, if you ask me. I also have a DistroKid account and published one of the original tunes to streaming networks. I can’t remember if I blogged about that here, but it’s all over the place. Just search for The Musical Schizo and you’ll find the one song (“Way Too Long Of A While”).

Now for the Chandler and The Bings audio…recorded live off the board at our show this past Saturday. We love Picks Bar in San Antonio so much – just the best crowds and such an awesome place to be.

Here it is, warts and all…

Set One:

Set Two:

Set Three:

Thanks for giving this a read, the audio files a listen, and if you happen to be on whatever streaming service, go check out Way Too Long Of A While on there. I remastered it before I posted it to the sites, so it might sound a little different than what you heard before.

Peace be the journey…

TMS

Hello, reader(s) of this lovely blog. It’s been quite some time since I last posted here. I’m actually kind of embarrassed. The thing is, for some reason, I just haven’t had much to say. I’m so distracted by responsibilities and merely making it through each day, that there just isn’t room for contemplation or verbal diarrhea. But there have been a few things on my mind.

I don’t listen to the radio much anymore, except on the PA at work. And what I hear really makes me sort of twitch. So much of what constitutes pop music that I hear is just WEAK. It leaves no imprint, it’s soft. There’s no real aggression there – or at least nothing believable. It’s weird – hip hop has kind of taken over pop music, but it’s this weird, lyrically-spare-or-simply-repetitive, gentle version with the same trap beat style over and over. There are exceptions, of course, and I’m oversimplifying the textures heard, but so much of it is just…meh.

No rhythmically interesting beats, no really good lyrics, no real passion. It’s been produced and written to death. There will be tons of writers on each song, and unlike the past, it won’t be because they sampled some old song where they have to credit a bunch of other writers. Post Malone is boring. Halsey’s screechy and somehow sounds out of tune even when she’s in tune. Mind you, I don’t have any animosity toward these people – it’s just that unlike the past, I’m not understanding how ANYONE could connect with this mass mediocrity. I’m desperate for even crappy Bruno Mars retreads and Tay-Tay Swift’s “Hey look guys, I’m writing a version of Red or 1989, but in a Katy Perry sort of way”.

This mass mediocrity is what makes the fact that I’ve been unable to write for quite some time now feel even worse. These songwriters have careers for cowriting stuff that sounds completely half-assed, and I can’t even write anymore, which started as a result of heavy self-criticism, and evolved into a complete lack of belief that I can even do anything. Add the lack of time having a baby around, the way so much music I hear now from actual good songwriters (away from popular radio) sounds like something I could never do even at my best, and, well, I just feel like I don’t have anything to say anymore. Perhaps that was what drove Billy Joel into songwriter retirement. (“River Of Dreams” was kind of a shit way to go out, there, Bill – come on back and fix it.)

Anyway, enough negativity. My playing life is pretty good. Doing a lot of guitar playing, which feels fun and is shaking the rust off that part of my musicianship. Still playing good shows with my brothers in Chandler and The Bings and shredding on bass every time (because why the fuck not?) My baby is walking, which is fun.

I’m thinking of just calling up some of the venues my friends that do solo stuff play and pitching myself to them – I miss that. I also miss fronting a band. It’s weird. I got together with our old friend Ned from Roman Holiday and we played a little and it really made me think about the unrealized potential of that band. That was fun, and I kind of let it die.

So my goal in the three or four months that will surely pass until my next post here is to write and record at least one new song, and to play at least one solo acoustic show. (Let’s see if I can manage even one of the two.)

Thanks for reading, thanks for existing, and if you haven’t subscribed to my social media stuff, please do – I’m on SoundCloud, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr, all as “musicalschizo”, YouTube as “The Musical Schizo” and I have Facebook pages dedicated to my solo gigs (Brian V Sings) and my original stuff (The Musical Schizo).

Peace be the journey!
TMS

So things have been humming along for me with Chandler and The Bings. Confidence with my vocals is constantly improving thanks to more consistent IEM mixes (and the $50 KZ ZS6 quad-driver earphones have made a MASSIVE difference). The band keeps having fantastic, fun shows, and gaining new fans, and it’s all pretty amazing. I’m very grateful for all of it – my bandmates, our venues, our fans – it’s just delightful.

I never did pull the trigger on that Stingray. I figured it was kind of silly to spend that much money on an instrument when the $329 bass I’m using does everything I want, essentially. I might just snag another one of these to have on hand as a backup. I love my Carvin basses, but the Stingray sound is just much more appropriate for this band. It’s changed my playing in a good way, too, since I’ve lightened up my touch it’s a lot easier on my hands.

As for my own stuff, well, as usual, nothing is happening. Though I had planned to do it, I haven’t made any new Bathroom Schizo videos. I did get a new phone that is likely to make my videos look even more awesome once I record some.

I don’t know how to get back to a creative place where it comes to getting the ideas and concepts in my brain that I’d like to turn into songs OUT of my brain and into lyrics and melodies. It’s kind of writer’s block. I mean, really, no new songs have been written since the end of 2015. ZERO. Longest drought since I’ve become a songwriter. I’ve got a few little chord and melody ideas that end up in my voice recorder on my phone, but nothing gets fleshed out because nothing ever makes that transition. I think the sleep deprivation of having a baby under one year old isn’t helping, so I’m going to forgive myself for now. But I need to start organizing my days better for my physical and mental health, and when I do that, I need to carve out at least 30 minutes a day to devote to creativity.

Thanks for reading, and come check out the band sometime. We’re a hoot. www.chandlerandthebings.com

Peace be the journey…

TMS