Video of the Day 9 May 2013: the Ford Brothers Band, 2006

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A blast from my past, courtesy of Randy Singer

Randy Singer is one of the best-known harmonica players in Miami and thereabouts, and we’ve known each other since roughly 1980. Randy just unearthed the clip below and sent it to me, and I was glad to get it. It’s a solo I played on a live recording of a performance of Phil Gentile’s song “Hey Brother (Come On In)”, an uptempo tune in a gospel-ish style. The harmonica performance is flat-out all the way; nobody likes athleticism better than a young musician, and I was in my mid-twenties when I recorded this.
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Video of the Day 26 March 2013: Eugene Ryan and Liz Davis Maxwell, “The Kerfunken Jig”

The Kerfunken Jig is a traditional Irish piece, performed here by my Dublin harmonica buddy Eugene Ryan and Liz Davis Maxwell on cello. The instrumentation of chromatic harmonica (very nicely rendered by Eugene) and cello is fresh, and the performance is smooth and flowing. I’m looking forward to more from this duo.

Video of the Day 12 March 2013: Steve Baker Talks Tone

Steve Baker’s got buckets full of tone. Want to know how he does it? Check this out. Dig the Fabulous Thunderbirds “Girls Go Wild” (my favorite T-birds record) poster in the background.

Tone matters. As Steve pointed out to me once, if you’ve got good tone, you’re going to sound good pretty much no matter what amp you play through; if you don’t, you’re going to sound weak and whiny (albeit louder) no matter what the amp does.

While you’re at it, check out this discussion of tone by classical harmonica virtuoso Robert Bonfiglio and our piece on breathing for a big sound.

And just to make it utterly clear that our man Steve ain’t just blowin’ smoke when he talks tone, here’s a vid he made in September 2012 live at Kulturbastion with Steve Goodman on guitar and vocals. Listen to the first 4 bars of “Who Do You Love” and tell me true: is that a modern blues master, or what?

Videos of the Day 25 Jan 2013: Andi Martin’s Youtube Channel

Andi Martin is a strong blues harp player based in Madrid who’s using a Digitech RP355 loaded with my patch set in his live performances. We like it. You can hear one of his performances in the video below. Check out Andi’s Youtube Channel (canal de andimartinbluesharp) for more.

Alan Lomax’s Archives Online

Just click here. Need we say more?

If you don’t know who Alan Lomax is or how he documented and thus changed the culture of the 20th (and 21st) century, take a look at this.

Looping with the RP: “The Road Out of Here”

I’ve been working lately on using my JamMan Stereo looper to put complete band arrangements together on the fly, using the Digitech RP355 to orchestrate. This piece, “The Road Out of Here” (copyright 2012 Richard Hunter/Turtle Hill Productions, all rights reserved) has been evolving, starting with the lyrics (which came out of ideas I developed in my book “World Without Secrets” in 2001), for a few years. I recently began to play it with a new groove, fast and urgent, which you hear on this recording.

The piece begins with a drum loop–I don’t remember where I got it, but it may be one of the drum grooves built into the RP355. On top of that I layer, in order:

You add all those sounds up, and it makes a pretty big roar, as you can hear on the recording. The JamMan Stereo lets me remove the latest layer added to the loop, so I can make it all big and then drop it down instantly, all of which is very nice for arranging on the fly. The vocals are processed through the TC-Helicon Voicelive Play, using a patch called “Benny and the Jets.”

In case there’s any doubt, this recording was made live, with no overdubbing (except live overdubbing on the JamMan Stereo looper, of course). I parked my Zoom H4 a few inches from the grill of my Peavey KB2 keyboard amp and hit record. I mastered the live recording (meaning I compressed it, EQ’d it, and made it a little louder) in Sonar X1, which is what I use for mixing and mastering.

Enjoy.

“The Road Out of Here” Copyright 2012 by Richard Hunter/Turtle Hill Productions, all rights reserved

Rob Paparozzi with Digitech RP and Huntersounds patches: “In a Mellotone”

Rob Paparozzi, New York studio harmonica ace and lead singer with bands that include the Original Blues Brothers and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, just posted this piece to Youtube: Rob playing lead (on an Anthony Dannecker customized diatonic harp in Ab) on Duke Ellington’s classic “In a Mellotone.” Rob’s Audix Fireball V mic is running to a Digitech RP with my patches installed.

He does the head choruses using an octave down patch–it’s nice and clean, so my guess is that it’s the FDI8D patch (direct amp model, octave down double). He improvises using one of the clean patches with reverb–since I put the level of the octave double under footpedal control in that and a few other patches, he might just have backed the pedal off on the same patch.

Overall, a very cool performance, and also nice to hear how much jazz a master like Rob can get out of a diatonic harp without retuning it or overblowing.

Steve Baker LIVE in Mumbai (with Digitech RP255 and Huntersounds patches) Nov. 22 2012

Steve Baker wrote the following message to the Harp-L list today:

Here’s a short video from my appearance at Mumbai’s BlueFrog club in November, performing with local musicians. I’m playing a CR element mic through a Digitech RP255 (Hunter patch Champ 2) direct into the PA.

We’ll just add that this is the first recording we’ve heard of Steve playing through his RP255 direct to the PA, and we think it sounds–like Steve Baker! Which is to say, about as good as amped harp gets. We’re delighted to be able to create gear that inspires musicians like Steve to performances like this. (And we bet Steve really liked the RP255′s portability on this trip, too. It’s a lot easier to carry an RP255 around than it is to drag a 50-pound amp with a road case through one airport after another.)

Great performance, distorted recording: “So Sweet” with Brian Maw, Nov 16 2012

The quality of the recording attached to this post is not very high, but the performance is killer. This is me playing a Special 20 C harp through my Audix Fireball mic into my Digitech RP355 running a Champ amp model patch, and from there straight to the PA. The harmonica part was improvised, and I had never played the piece in this way, with this sound and laidback feel. In my head I heard really simple lines with lots of emotion (meaning lots of attention to dynamics and vibrato), and I played it pretty much that way. (It’s easy to play what you hear when you slow things down–you can get very intentional when you’re not playing catch-up with a fast stream of ideas.) The sound is pure amped blues, and through the PA it’s big, with plenty of detail in every sound, no matter how intimate or broad. (I played the same song with a rotary speaker patch the very next night, and it didn’t sound anywhere near as emotionally intense.) The piece was recorded at a gig with The Maw Band at the Timberline, Victor, ID, on Nov. 16 2012, and of course the composition is by Brian Maw (and is copyrighted, all rights reserved).

“So Sweet” by Brian Maw LIVE 20121116 160 kbps

I posted this piece, warts and all, to make the point that the RP all by itself produces big, beautiful amped blues sounds. And this is indeed a beautiful sound, good enough for most players to consider using it all night long. (But why do that when you’ve got an RP full of great sounds?) If you want to make these sounds yourself, check out my patch set for Digitech RP.