Blog as Writing Course: Lessons Learned
After stepping down from my position as Writing Center Director in 2010, I have been teaching full time in the English Department for almost two years. Before I became a Writing Center Director, I had made my living teaching Freshman Composition, and over the years I probably taught more than a hundred sections. However, when I stepped down from my administrative position it had been years since I had actually taught a writing course. I was surprised to find that I felt that I did not know how to teach writing, or even what it was to teach writing. The traditional course with assigned readings, a handbook, four or five essay assignments in response to the readings, maybe a researched paper, some class discussions, drafts submitted for feedback, final drafts submitted for a grade, all that seemed less than adequate and not to the point. That sort of course is just going through the motions. The writing is just an exercise designed to prepare students for real writing. The audience is a fiction, the purpose a pretense, the genre–the college essay–a pedagogical artifact. I didn’t want to teach that course anymore.
However, the department wanted me to teach English 303 “Advanced Expository Writing.” It is a core course. Every English major has to take it. Somebody has to teach it. I am a writing specialist. There was no way to say no. I had to design a course that I could teach, that would avoid the problems noted above. I wanted a course in real, not pretend, writing. I thought about this Guitarsophist blog, and my own blogging experience.
I get about five hits a day on this blog, mostly from search engines looking for information on the “Roland Ready Stratocaster” guitar or, more recently, the “Tama Silverstar Metro Jam” drum kit. Those are review/opinion pieces on musical gear that is not well-covered in traditional sources, and readers seem to find those articles useful. Five hits a day is nothing. My daughter has a simple crochet pattern up on her blog that sometimes gets thousands of hits a day. However, even five hits a day means that I have readers, and having actual readers means that I have to think of my audience, a real audience, when I write. Even the potential for readers who may not actually show up influences my writing. Students in a traditional writing course, no matter how much we talk about audience analysis and do read-arounds, peer editing, and all of those audience-building tricks, know that they only have one important reader, the instructor, and that the instructor reads it to grade it, not to use it for any actual purpose. If student writing were posted to a blog, there would be a potential outside audience for it, and that potential might make the writing task more real.
Student blogs, therefore, might be a good pedagogical tool. However, that means that part of the course has to be about creating, designing, and managing a blog. I had been blogging for a while. If I did this, I would have to figure out how to teach students these skills. As it turned out, this was a problem for some students, especially since I did not have a smart classroom equipped with a computer and a projector.
If a public audience is going to access the writing, the writing has to serve some purpose for that audience. It has to inform, or entertain, or comfort, or inspire, or do something for that audience that makes them want to read it. That meant that the assignments had to be something other than college essays. I would also have to design assignments that would live comfortably on the web, that would make sense as blog posts. That required some thought.
I also considered the fact that most writing these days is published on the web rather than in print, and that email has become the primary mode of business correspondence. Electronic texts are real writing!
I created six assignments:
- Reflective piece: How I became the Writer I Am Today
- Business Letter, Plus How to Write a Business Letter
- Informative piece: A Review of Something
- A Rhetorical Analysis
- A Research Report for a Decision Maker
- An Op-Ed piece
- Revisiting the Reflective Piece: How I Have Changed as a Writer
They also had to do weekly posts to a “commonplace page” which were quotations from things that they were reading for this class or other purposes to which they would respond. Posting a business letter to a blog didn’t make sense, so I had them do some web searches on “How to write a business letter,” choose the two best sources and the one worst that they found, write some explanatory material, and then post their own efforts as examples. This was a bit awkward, but they reported that they learned lot from doing it. The assignment that was most awkward in the context of the blog was probably the rhetorical analysis. Here is how one student began:
Welcome, welcome masses of the Internet! Today I decided to try and mix something old with something a little new and by old I mean rhetorical analysis (and for those thinking “hey I learned that in school, I know all about that” quiet, daddy’s talking) and by new I mean I’m going to apply it (or more specifically the Aristotelian appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos) to something found in today’s world. –K. Deushane
Talk about creating an ethos!
I decided that for this course most of the texts we read would also be online, but I found two books that I thought would be useful:
- Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2006.
- Holcomb, Chris and M. Jimmie Killingsworth. Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.
The premise of the Harris book is that all academic writing is essentially rewriting other texts for new purposes. I’ll let one of the students describe the approach:
The terms were: forwarding, countering, taking an approach, and revising. I felt that I learned the most from the forwarding and countering parts of the book as Harris presents a way for writers to use other writer’s writings in their own words. That is, Harris outlines how to use other writers to back up my own writing without merely regurgitating their words. The part on countering was also helpful as it describes how to rebuke other author’s writings without simply disagreeing or showing research or evidence that contradicts them. Some terms that Harris uses in describing countering are: arguing the other sides, uncovering values, and dissenting. I found these terms and explanations to be especially useful because they taught me how to effectively counter claims by other authors. I did this by highlighting the strengths of other writers and then showing how they do not go far enough in their claims and assertions. Additionally, I highlighted ideas that other writers had argued and countered by showing problems from those ideas; I wrote about concepts that writers had not effectively defined, and I wrote about the limits of ideas of other writers. All of the concepts from Rewriting were addressed and discussed in class and this was instrumental in helping me develop as a writer. –D.J. Hernandez
That is a lot to learn from one book. The Holcomb and Killingsworth book also elicited positive comments:
Performing Prose was the one of the two that really stuck to me. The content of this book is golden. I always wondered what a college level writing textbook would be like, and this basically met all of my expectations. It’s easy to read, makes loads of sense, leans toward the technical side which I like, and doesn’t sound overly preachy and boring. –A. Heng
However, the books did not get rave reviews from every student, and I think that I could have integrated them better with the course.
I created a WordPress blog called “Writing in the Web World. ” I made it private, so students had to request permission to read it. I posted all of the assignments there, and I put links to all of the student blogs in the blogroll, so my blog was a portal to all of the other course blogs. It took a while to sort all of this out. Most of the students made their blogs public to the whole world. A few made theirs private, so we had to request access.
Several students reported that submitting papers as blog posts made them somewhat casual about deadlines. Here are comments from a couple of students:
One issue I had with the blog however was that it doesn’t provide much of a sense of urgency. This phenomena might be limited to just me, but something about having to post up my work online as opposed to turning in a solid copy of work fill me with less of desire to work than turning in a hard copy. –A. Heng
Some issues I had with the writing assignments being posted on a blog, was keeping track of what I had to do and when assignments were due. Since I was not turning in hard copies of my work, I was often confused of what I have turned in and what I have not. I fell behind on my assignments quickly, and it was much more difficult to catch up. I also admit that I did not comment much on other people’s posts and I fell behind on my commonplace. –A. Morales
I must admit this was true for me as well. It was harder to determine what I had read and what I hadn’t, and if I didn’t read right at the deadline, it was harder to determine when something had been completed. It was also harder to respond. I was using the WordPress comment feature, so if I wanted to refer to a particular sentence I had to copy and paste it into the comment window. I usually made general comments first and then created a section of the response called “picky stuff” in which I suggested sentence-level changes.
Even with these problems, I will do something similar when I teach 303 again in the spring. This student pretty much summarizes what I was trying to accomplish:
What I’ve learned from creating this blog is that there is an entire new audience out there for me to write for. No longer is writing in class just for the professor or the occasional student, but for someone completely new to my writing. There is feedback from not just one person, but feedback from the entire world, or just anyone who is able to access my blog. Before I would write what I had to just to get an A on my paper, which meant writing something I know the professor would like. In previous writing classes, I would sit in class to learn what kind of person the professor was, and through that, I was able to write something in an essay they wanted; I would write something that would catch their attention, something they would like that would get me on their good side, which meant getting a higher grade. Honestly, I was manipulating them, I did not put all my effort into the writing assignments because I knew the right thing to say that would make them happy or make them laugh just so I could get a good grade. Now, writing on a blog, I’m not just writing for one person, I’m writing for the world and because of that, I am able to give my honest opinion on something. I am now able to write whatever I feel like I want to write because I don’t know the world personally. Here, I can be my real self, not having to worry about getting graded by people who read my blog. –I. Chu
A couple of student posts attracted comments from outsiders:
From my own blog, my review of the Zeiss 50mm lens garnered attention from a blogger from Florida. It was a definite eye opener for me. There were people out there reading that I had never seen or heard of, that review put one of them at my electronic doorstep. –J. Colwell
When the other students heard about this, they were both inspired and a bit fearful. Their writing really was out there for people to read.
Teaching the course this way was a lot more work than the traditional way, and there were numerous glitches and problems. All things considered, however, I think university writing courses need to go in this direction. Students at this level need to learn to do real writing for real people, not just academic exercises. Even though it was more work, it felt like it was more productive work. I will do it again.
Rehearsal with Craig Saxon
Craig and I got together to play today. It was the first time I had played the Tama kit, or any acoustic drums, with another musician. I also added a new cymbal, a Sabian Raw Bell Dry Ride, to the mix. More on the cymbal later.
This track is the first we recorded. There are two cheap knockoff SM-57s: one in a boom stand as an overhead and one on a table. This did not lead to the best recording quality. Craig is playing my white strat through the Fender Super Champ XD. I am playing the Tama kit with the Tama 12″ snare, with Vic Firth AJ6 sticks. The drumming is definitely amateur, but Craig’s guitar playing is always worth a listen.
This next track is with the Kent snare.
Finally, here is a long track, almost fifteen minutes, that begins with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” morphs into “Third Stone from the Sun,” and then wanders into “I Feel Fine.” There are some moments here where we are pretty locked in. This has the 1971 Ludwig snare and I am playing with Pro Mark Hot Rods, which are designed to give less volume. They sound different, especially on the toms.
strawberryfields3rdstone-newdrums
A good day of making music, and I am starting to feel like I will be a drummer when I grow up. I wish we had a recording of the version of “Gloria” that we did. It brought me back to playing someplace like Rosemead High School in about 1969, except I was behind the drum kit instead of playing rhythm guitar. Those were the days!
Three Snares and Some New Hi-hats
I have had the Tama Silverstar Metro Jam kit for almost a month now. My touch is getting better, and I can pretty much do on the Tamas everything I could do on the TD-4. I like them!
Before I ordered the Tamas I had started talking to a guy on the Drum Forum (DFO) about some old snares that he had. Then when I set up the Tama kit, I didn’t like the 12X5 snare that came with it. To tell the truth, I didn’t really I know what a real snare should sound like, but I thought it was too bright, with not much sustain, and that the sound didn’t really fit with the rest of the drums. It turned out that my first impressions were mostly wrong, but I went ahead and bought a couple of old snares, a 1971 Ludwig Standard that had had the paint stripped off and some hammering done to the shell, and an old 14X5.5 maple Kent. Here are the three snares that I now own:
Tama 12X5 Silverstar, 1971 Ludwig Standard, and Kent Snare Drums
During shipping a screw came loose inside the shell on the Ludwig, so I had to take the batter head off, fix the screw, and tune it up again. I am starting to get comfortable taking drums apart and tuning them. It is not rocket science. The Ludwig is very dry and very sensitive. It seems to me that it would be good for jazz and brushwork, and it is fun to play rolls on it because it is so responsive. The Kent, on the other hand, has a fatter, mellower sound. To me it sounds more like rock ‘n roll. The batter head on it is a Ludwig Weather Master tom head that looks like it has been used on hundreds of gigs.
The Kent came with an old Ludwig tom tom head on it.
The drum would probably be more focused if I changed the heads, but for now it sounds good and I like the vibe of the old head.
These two drums are very different. I have already learned a lot about snare drums from owning and playing them. The Drum Forum (DFO) is a good place to learn about drums and meet other drummers. The members there are mostly pros who have been playing for a living most of their lives. The age factor there probably skews above 40, and there are a lot of vintage enthusiasts.
Yesterday I put the little Tama snare back on the stand, and it sounded pretty terrible. However, from working with the other drums I knew that it was not tuned up right, and that the stock heads, which are still not broken in, had stretched. I tuned it up pretty high and it started sounding pretty good. It tends to ring a bit, so I put an Aquarian Studio Ring on it, which is just a ring of plastic that damps down the overtones. Now I like that snare too. It is smaller, not quite so loud, and the sound is in between the Ludwig and the Kent.
I also bought some used hi-hats. To my ear the 14″ Wuhan hi-hats sounded good open and part open, but the closed stick sound was dull and lifeless. That might just be me, or my playing, but I found some similar opinions on the web. When I play with Craig Saxon we play a wide range of stuff from classic rock to Frank Sinatra, at low volume, so I wanted hats that were versatile and not too loud or cutting. I decided I wanted a pair of 13″ Zildjian New Beats. I started looking on the Guitar Center used gear site, and I found a pair that were in the Brooklyn store for $159. New, they cost $274. They looked brand new in the photo, so I bought them online, and had them shipped to the Pasadena, CA store. That whole system worked well, and the GC employees were very helpful. Here are the hats:
Zildjian 13" New Beat Hi-Hats
According to the serial numbers these were made in 2010, and except for some fingerprints, they do indeed look brand new. They still had barcode stickers on them. They would not be cool on the DFO site, or on Cymbalholic, where old vintage cymbals and new esoteric ones are popular, and it is hip to scorn new product from Zildjian. However, to me they are crisp and expressive, and exactly what I was looking for. I may buy some more used cymbals this way.
Tama Silverstar Metro Jam
I love my Roland TD-4 electronic kit. It’s great for small gigs and for recording midi drum tracks. It made me interested in drumming and I learned a lot. However, it also made me interested in acoustic drums. I especially felt that playing exclusively on rubber cymbals was giving me bad habits. I decided that I wanted a small, portable kit that would be suitable for coffeehouse gigs, and after some research I ordered a GMS Subway SL kit from Indoor Storm. They warned me that it might take a while to ship, but I got tired of waiting after four months. In the mean time, some new possibilities opened up.
It seems that small portable drum kits are very popular right now. A number of manufacturers have small four piece “bop” kits that are designed for jazz. The Yamaha “Hipgig” and the Sonor “Jungle” kit are even smaller kits that are built around a large floor tom converted to a bass drum. These two are fairly expensive. However. Sonor recently came out with the “Safari” kit, a very reasonably-priced ($339 street) kit with basswood shells. I almost bought that. Instead, I went with the new Tama Metro Jam kit for $499 because of the birch shells. Mine is in sky blue sparkle. Here it is set up in my music room:
Tama Silverstar Metro Jam kit in the music room.
I ordered the kit from American Musical Supply. It came in two boxes:
The kit shipped in two boxes.
The smaller box contained the floor tom and the bigger box contained the rest of the kit, with the snare and small tom packed inside the bass drum shell.
The floor tom out of the box.
Inside the main box.
Everything was well packed. I had to install the bass drum heads and tune them up. There are lots of videos on YouTube about drum tuning, but they tend to contradict one another. For example, one says to tune the resonant (bottom) heads on the toms higher than the batter heads, another says to make them the same pitch. One says never tap the head with the drum key because you might damage the bearing edges, but another shows a guy tapping with the key. The toms on my set were tuned with the resonant heads higher.
Tuning drums requires a good ear and patience. It can be frustrating. I am getting better at it. I may change the heads soon. The stock heads on any set of drums are cheap because most serious players will put their favorite heads on.
Right now I am getting used to playing the kit. Acoustic drums are LOUD, especially when you are used to hitting rubber things. I really need to work on dynamics and control. I am having fun though.
Gig at Portola Elementary School Fair
Yesterday I played a gig with the Craig Saxon Band at Portola Elementary School in Ventura. It was my third gig as a drummer. I am getting better! The Roland TD-4 kit performed well, and it is certainly easy to set up and transport. Craig played guitar, guitar synth, harmonica, and sang, and Mike Timpson played bass. People are always interested in the ekit, especially former drummers who gave up their big, loud acoustic kits a while ago, and miss drumming. I still think that the weak link in ekits is the cymbals, but one can certainly make music with them.
Here is a picture from the gig:
It was a beautiful, cloudless day on a huge green lawn playing music with friends for kids and adults having a great time.
Wuhan Traditional Series Cymbals
I bought my Roland TD-4 electronic drum kit to input midi drum parts into music I was recording on my computer. Drumming turned out to be a little more complicated than I imagined, so I had to work with some instructional DVD’s and practice some fundamentals. I got better, and a couple of times when my friend Craig Saxon came over to jam, I played drums instead of guitar. This worked fairly well, so Craig invited me to come and play drums at a couple of coffeehouse gigs in Camarillo. The electronic drums are very convenient to set up and transport, and it is easy to control the volume, so they work well for small venues like these. However, I started to want to play real drums. I ordered a GMS Subway SL kit, which is a small kit designed to fit in small cars and not be too overwhelming. Unfortunately, it is backordered with no clue about when it will be available.
In the meantime, I had to buy cymbals, so I set out to learn about them. The Big Three brands are Zildjian, Sabian (which split off from Zildjian) and Paiste. Entry-level cymbals are usually made of B8 alloy, which is easy to work and can be cut out of sheets. Professional cymbals are made out of B20 alloy, with 20% tin. This is much harder to work, but sounds much better. The best cymbals are handmade, and very expensive. A ride cymbal, a crash cymbal, and a set of hi-hats could easily cost $1,000 new. Most drummers buy them used, and want to play the cymbal before they buy. Handmade cymbals all sound different.
However, I knew nothing about cymbals so I wouldn’t know a good one from a bad one. When you are learning something new, sometimes you just have to dive in. As with nearly everything, I found that there are cheaper brands made in China. I saw good reviews of Wuhan and Dream cymbals on several different forums. The Wuhans are handmade, B20 alloy, and about $200 for a set that included a 20″ medium ride, a 16″ crash and a set of 14″ hi-hats. Wuhan claims to have been making cymbals for 1,900 years, but I am sure that most of that time, they were making gongs. I decided to order a set. Here’s a picture of the whole set:
Wuhan New Traditional Cymbal Set
I don’t have cymbal stands yet (they are supposed to come with the GMS Subway SL), so when I got these, I set the ride and the crash up on the TD-4 rack. That didn’t work for the hi-hats, so I haven’t done much with the hats. I must say that after hitting the rubber pads on the electronic kit for a year or so, hitting real cymbals was quite overwhelming. I had gotten used to hitting the pads pretty hard. It took me a while to adjust to the volume of real metal.
The crash sounds very good to me. It’s loud and trashy, and has a nice bell. The ride cymbal I am a little uncertain about. With ride cymbals, there is the stick sound, the bell sound, and the wash. The wash is the overtones that are generated as you hit it. This cymbal is very washy, and the overtones are not quite in tune with each other. It is very complex. It reminds me of the huge chord at the end of “A Day in the Life.” It’s a beautiful dissonance, but would it fit in with my music? Here is a picture of the 20″ medium ride:
Wuhan 20" Ride
I wanted to see how the ride and the crash sounded with other instruments. In the following clip, I am playing the acoustic cymbals with an electronic kick and snare, thus the recording is less than ideal. The bass is my Douglas Hofner Beatle Bass clone, and the guitar is my Xavier Telecaster clone on the neck mini-humbucker. I did each instrument in one take, so there are mistakes. My aim was to hear the cymbals in context. The whole thing ended up with a sort of Doors vibe.
The cymbals were recorded with a pair of GLS ES-57′s, which are clones of the Shure SM-57. So the bass, the cymbals, and the microphones are Chinese, but the guitar is Korean. At about 1:58, I start riding the crash and hitting the bell on it. At 2:30, I switch back to riding the ride cymbal. It is interesting that the 16″ crash has a lower-pitched stick sound, but a higher pitched bell, than the 20″ ride.
Comments about the cymbal sound are welcome. Are the wash overtones musical? That is the question. (Update: After listening to this clip several times, I think the ride is a keeper. It is certainly interesting.)
Transdimensional Mogrifier
This is a first draft of a short story. Feedback welcome.
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This is a fictitious review of a product that does not exist, at least as far as I know. Last week, I was sweeping out the back, back room at Crazy Dan’s Pawn and Guitar, the room that has all of the old Les Pauls and vintage pre-CBS Fenders that he never lets anybody ever see, and in an old box of busted pedals I found something that looked brand new. Crazy Dan’s is one of those places that doesn’t quite fit in modern times. Oh, there are shiny cheap Chinese guitars out in front, and some chrome and brass covered accordions, and maybe even a shiny new drum kit, but the display cases are ancient, and some of the stuff in them might have been pawned a hundred years ago. Even the air smells old, and in the back, back room, it smells even older. Anyway, among all the junk Fuzz Faces and Uni-vibes and wires and stuff, I saw a flash of bright orange. I fished out a square box with no visible seams or openings, with a sort of protrusion on top that might be a stomp switch. It had some lettering that might have been Russian Cyrillic, but looked kind of Korean or Thai too. Whatever it was, it was a rarity. I was extremely curious about what it might sound like. I put it on the floor and stepped on the switch, and a red LED sort of thing appeared. I thought that was pretty trick, having the LED disappear when it wasn’t on, and I started to think that this must be a new pedal that somehow got in the junk box. I grabbed a Telecaster, turned on an old tweed bassman that happened to be there, and tried to plug in cables, but turning it all around, I couldn’t see any jacks. The light was pretty dim, so I guess I just didn’t see them at first because when I touched it with the plug, it just sort of went in. The jacks were really smooth, more of a squish than a click.
I tried a few blues licks and the sound was just awesome. It was exactly the sound I hear in my head when I think about playing the blues. It was like B.B. King and Albert King rolled into one, and I was getting it out of a Telecaster! Very cool. I really wanted to take this to the gig I had that night, so after I finished sweeping the room, I asked Dan if I could borrow one of the pedals from the junk box. Dan is timeless like the shop, but he looks middle-aged, with long grayish hair, bald on top and black glasses. He also has a parrot, an African gray named POTUS (for President of the United States), that says more than Dan does, and seems to participate in whatever conversation happens to be going on. I’ve known Dan since I was a kid, and he has always looked the same. Like I said, he doesn’t say much, but he has a lot of gravitas, I think they call it. He seems spiritual and important, and kind of intimidating, but I have known him so long, I am used to it.
“You found that where?”
“In the junk pedal box. The stuff you were going to fix, but haven’t gotten around to. “
He gave me a long look, and said, “Maybe it found you. Well, ok, be careful, and don’t take it to a gig.”
As I left, POTUS said “No gig!”
When I got home I fed Ziggy the cat and started some laundry. I defrosted a tamale for an early dinner, and then I fired up my Deluxe Reverb. I wanted to test drive the mystery pedal some more. When I took it out of my backpack, Zig gave a yowl and went upstairs. That cat is a little weird, but it was odd for him to be afraid of a guitar pedal. Anyway, I plugged in and cranked up the volume a bit. This time, when I stepped on the switch, the LED emitted a flash that hit me right in the eyes. Ouch! That was weird. No damage though.
I realized that I could read the script on the pedal in better light. It said “Transdimensional Mogrifier.” The address of the company was weird though. It said, “Pocket Universe 93012, Portal 42, Array 4, Plane of Being 39.” It also said, “Transdimensional, You Like, You Get!” Well, some pedal companies have a strange sense of humor.
I started working through the setlist for the gig later that night. I realized that the Mogrifier didn’t have any controls, but I was still getting pretty much the tone I wanted, whatever the song. It nailed the lead guitar on everything from Foxtail Music to George Ford. I don’t know how it did it. Maybe there was a chip in it that recognized the song from the notes? But even on originals, it did what I wanted. It was spooky.
I had to shut down and pack up or I’d be late to the gig. I packed up my pedal board, but I was thinking that if I used the Mogrifier, I wouldn’t need it. The Mogrifier would put pedal manufacturers out of business, unless it cost thousands of dollars. I was beginning to think that maybe it did. I was going to hate having to give it back to Dan. Maybe he would forget. But no, he wouldn’t. Not Dan. He knew where every little thing in the whole dusty shop was. That means that he must know where he got this thing, and what it is. I’d ask him tomorrow. But in the mean time I had to get to the gig. Somehow, I forgot that Dan told me not to bring it.
We were playing every Thursday at a pub called the “Blotto.” It was sort of funky-trendy. When micro-brewed Belgian beer was a big fad, they had had 12 different rotating taps. Now that the big thing was local Japanese sake, they were doing that. They had barrels of the stuff. But the atmosphere remained friendly and low key. My band, the Sweet Raptors of Illusion, or just “The Raptors” for short, fit right in. We played, blues, jangly folk rock, funk, and even some J-pop. We were versatile. We had some originals. We even took requests.
When I opened the back door of the club, instead of the stale beer smell that used to be in the air, I was hit with the rice alcohol smell of sake. As I brought my stuff in from the back, Jeff, the bartender was saying that he thought there would be a good crowd because the Nemui Inc. employees down the street had gotten bonuses, and somebody was having a birthday. The house drum kit was all set up. Mickey just brought his cymbals and his kick pedal. The club had a bass amp too, a Mesa Boogie. Christine usually plugged into it. Jake, the singer, just showed up. It was a pretty sweet setup. I set up my pedal board and my Deluxe. I kept the Mogrifier to the side, with a piece of carpet over it. I wasn’t supposed to play it, but I really wanted to surprise my bandmates with my awesome tone. It was real tempting.
Christine was the first of my bandmates to show up. She is Japanese-American, tall and pretty, black jeans, black T-shirt, black Fender Jazz Bass and long black hair. I went out with her a couple of times before she joined the band, but since then, it has been strictly business. She is a very good player, and never makes a mistake. I guess she has an eye for detail too because she got right to the point.
“Hey, Chad, what’s under the carpet?”
“What? Oh that. It’s a new pedal. See?”
“Wow, it’s really orange!”
She looked at it without much interest. She usually doesn’t have anything between her guitar and her amp. I put the carpet over it again. Then Mickey came in and started setting up. Jake was always last. In fact, sometimes we started without him. We sometimes got on him for it, saying he shouldn’t get paid for the time he wasn’t there, but he was good. He had a good range, and could sing pear-shaped tones like a trained singer, but he could also sound like rock ‘n roll. Lots of people think they can sing, but Jake really could. We didn’t want to lose him. Like most every band, we liked playing, but we also wanted some success.
Jake showed up on time that night. We were set up and ready to go. Jenny, a mousy little waitress I’d had my eye on for a while, brought us each a bottle of water. Jenny was very efficient, remembered every drink order no matter how large the party, smiled a lot, but was quiet most of the time. When she did speak, she had an accent I could not quite place. Maybe Canadian or Australian, but not quite either. She’d been working there about six months. I’d been meaning to ask her out, but somehow never had the chance.
Jeff had been right. As Mickey started hitting his sticks together to start the first song, there was already a good crowd. It was going to be a good night.
The first set was great. The crowd was with us. People were dancing, and everybody was having a great time. I wanted something different though. I wanted to take it to the next level in the second set. I unplugged from my pedal board. I plugged into the Mogrifier.
The first song of the set was a new hit by the Firewine Dogs. The guitar part was complex, and normally I would use chorus, delay, and some distortion and boost on the lead part. I was the only guitar player, and we didn’t have a keyboard, so I had to juggle rhythm guitar and lead, and play a little of both. The Mogrifier nailed the tone, but it was also weirdly keeping the rhythm going while I was going for the lead, like I was using a looper. It was playing stuff I wasn’t playing. Mickey and Jake were not paying attention, but Christine was looking puzzled. I suppose I was too.
At the end of the song, the Mogrifier did its light flash thing. As near as I could tell, it hit every bandmember in the eyes. We were all stunned, but Mickey started hitting his sticks together, and we roared into the next song in the set. We were tighter than we had ever been. We were playing like we were mind readers. We were one. But I was in charge, and I understood the music like I never had before. I could see the harmonies, I could layer scales on top of scales and build towering overtone structures. We played complex counter rhythms that stretched into infinity. The audience stood aghast in incomprehension. It was like music for the gods.
Then the Mogrifier hit everyone in the audience with red beams. It looked like a disco ball display with red light. Now they were with us. The music pulsed and throbbed. The crowd moved in time. They adored us. They worshiped us. In front of Jake, a crowd of women danced in various stages of undress. Another group threw panties at Mickey. Men were on their knees in front of Christine, offering promises of unconditional love and everlasting devotion. I had a crowd in front of me watching every move on my fretboard. I guess we all had what we wanted.
Then I felt a ripple of disharmony. I turned and saw that Christine was kneeling next to me, trying to plug into the Mogrifier. I couldn’t have that! I stopped playing and struggled to push her away. As we struggled, my guitar came unplugged. Someone, I think it was Jenny, threw the carpet back over the Mogrifier and the red beams went out. Then the room went dark, and I must have passed out.
When I came to, Jenny was shaking me, and scolding me. The club was closed, and everyone was gone. Jenny was really angry.
“What were you thinking, bringing that to a gig! Those are illegal in most universes. This place is so backward and hard to get to that there aren’t any laws, but that was idiotic! What were you thinking?”
I looked at her blankly. I had no response.
“You don’t know what it is, do you? That means someone else is an idiot.”
“Well, Crazy Dan is hardly an idiot. He did tell me not to bring it to a gig. I sort of forgot that.”
“Bring it back to him. Don’t bring it here, and don’t keep it. And forget we had this conversation.”
“Where did everybody go? Are they ok?”
“They are ok. They will forget. So will you.”
She helped me gather up my stuff. She took the Mogrifier from under the carpet and put it in the backpack. She wouldn’t let me touch it.
“Give it back to Dan. Don’t plug into it. Don’t play it.”
“What is it really?”
“It doesn’t belong here. There are places where it is just a facilitator for greater accomplishments, a tweaker, a channeler, maybe a bit like a stomp box for mighty deeds. It’s not a guitar pedal, if that is what you mean, but if you want it to be, it will become one. Crazy Dan must have thought you were smarter, or wiser, or more reliable than you are.”
“Or maybe he doesn’t know.”
“He knows.”
“He told me maybe it found me.”
“Maybe it did. That is a deeper game than I can consider. But tonight you were an idiot. Using it will attract powers that this backwater place has never met, and doesn’t want to. You were just projecting your own fantasies on innocents, using it like an evil toy.”
“Who are you really?”
“Just an illegal immigrant. You don’t want to know.”
“Will I see you again?”
“I haven’t decided.”
She let me out the back and stayed inside. I wanted to kiss her, but it seemed like the wrong moment. She was still pretty mad. When I got home, Ziggy was under the bed and wouldn’t come out. I fell asleep in my clothes.
The next morning when I walked into Pawn and Guitar, POTUS squawked and said “Bad Boy!” Dan was behind the counter polishing an old cymbal. He looked at me and said, “Well?”
“It didn’t work right. It don’t think it’s even a guitar pedal.”
“Is that so?”
“You should send it back.”
“Well, the shipping to where it came from is pretty steep.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
I took the Mogrifier out of the backpack and put it on the counter. It didn’t have any jacks, or LEDs. It wasn’t even orange anymore. Dan casually opened a drawer and dropped it in. He smiled. ”Anything else?” he asked.
“No thanks. I’ll be seeing ya.”
As I left, POTUS said “Bad boy gets the girl.”
I was hoping that POTUS was right. Next Thursday night, The Sweet Raptors of Illusion didn’t seem to remember much, if anything, of the previous week’s gig, and I wouldn’t have either except that I wrote it all down. I did seem to have a deeper understanding of the music than before my encounter with the Mogrifier, and some of the same people were already at the club, anxious to hear us. I hoped they wouldn’t be disappointed with the un-Mogrified Raptors. I was a little worried about that, and the fact that Christine didn’t seem to be speaking to me. And then, as we were about to start the first set, Jenny the waitress showed up with a bottle of water for each of us. I guess she had decided to stay.
Vox Mini 3 Battery-Powered Guitar Amp
I have been looking a mini-amps for a while. The two main contenders were the Roland Micro-Cube and the Vox DA-5, but by the time I got around to ordering one, the DA-5 had been replaced with this one, the Mini3. It comes in black, ivory, and green. Mine is ivory.
Ivory Vox Mini3 with Fender SCXD behind
I didn’t have high expectations, but this thing sounds great! It is easy to dial in cool sounds in seconds. It has ten amp models that increase in gain as you go around the dial: Boutique Clean, Blackface Twin, Tweed Bassman, Vox AC 15, AC-30 Top Boost, three Marshalls from ’70′s, ’80′s, and ’90′s, a “CaliMetal” and a “US Higain.” It has compression, chorus, flanger, and tremelo on one knob, and two delays and two reverbs on another, allowing you to combine two effects, one on each knob. As you rotate the knob, it goes from the minimum to the highest level of one effect, and then switches to the next. This works well.
Vox Mini3 Control Panel
It also has a mic input, which unfortunately is high impedance so you can’t use an SM-58 or anything that needs phantom power. I tried it out with an old Audio Technica AT 812, and it worked fine. You can send the mic signal through the delay/reverb effect. This would definitely work for street corner busking.
The amp is surprisingly loud for 3 watts and a 5-inch speaker. The cabinet is very sturdy. Very nice for the $99 street price.
Some discussion board posts about this amp complain about noise. The circuit seems to have a limiter that clamps down on noise when you aren’t playing. I don’t detect much noise coming from the amp itself, but somehow typical single coil buzz seems more prominent than usual, perhaps because the amp is normally played at low volume. I tend to favor my humbucking-equipped guitars with this amp, but as always, once you get into playing, single coil buzz tends to recede into the background.
The main thing, of course, is that it sounds good. It is very musical, and just a lot of fun. I like to use it with my Boss DD-7 delay functioning as a looper. I set up an interesting soundscape, lay down a groove (up to 40 seconds), and start riffing over it. To do a loop with the DD-7, set it to “hold” mode, hit the pedal on the “one” count, play your chords, and hit the pedal again on the “one” count. With a little practice you can record a smooth loop that will track until you stop it. You can even lay down other parts by repeating the process above with the loop running. Sometimes I use a mild distortion pedal, like a Danelectro Transparent Overdrive, ahead of the delay so that the lead has more contrast from the rhythm track. This setup makes a great practicing or songwriting tool. Of course, I could do something similar going into my computer, but this setup is easy to just turn on and start playing.
The Vox Mini3 is so much fun that it makes you want to keep playing for a long time.
Grading Papers
I just finished grading 24 papers and 24 finals for Composition Theory, 40 papers and 40 finals for my Science Fiction course, and 28 portfolios for my professional Writing course. This took four full days, Friday through Monday, to grade. It still amazes me how long this takes, even though these are final drafts, and no extensive commentary is necessary. Most of the work was pretty good too. Actually, it takes longer to evaluate pretty good stuff than than it does excellent or poor work. The pretty good stuff has strengths and weaknesses that must be weighed and balanced.
The Composition Theory students are graduate students working to become writing teachers. Some are currently teaching high school. They are learning about the history, the goals, and practices of composition as a discipline, and learning to apply rhetorical theory to teaching reading and writing. The course was designed to problematize traditional methods, and we worked through postmodern, Marxist, psychoanalytic, rhetorical, and philosophical approaches until nearly every possible approach had been questioned, and then they had to put some kind of pedagogy back together out of all of it. In a course like this, the coming together doesn’t always happen during the course, so I have to look for growth, potential, and half-baked insight in their final products rather than complete understanding. It sometimes takes time and patience to see through the false starts and misconceptions to the growing understanding.
The science fiction course is General Education, so it is a menagerie of engineers, scientists, psychologists, pre-med students, philosophers, math majors, business majors, historians, and even a few English majors. They all add something to the discussion and we have a great time. The tests are pretty straightforward. If they have read the material, they will do fine, but they do take a while to read because the questions are short answer, and a lot are a little open-ended to leave room for individual interpretation. For the final paper they can do a critical essay, a book review, or a short story, and most of them choose to write a story. Some have written science fiction before, but for many, it is their first attempt to write any kind of story. Although some are clumsy with exposition, and some are a bit too derivative of other popular culture, many of these are surprisingly good. Sometimes I even begin to care about the characters and get engaged with what is happening. Again, the best and the weakest are easy to evaluate. The uneven ones are tough.
The professional writing course was new to me. I ended up re-designing it on the fly. They wrote a resume, an application letter, and numerous memos and emails, many of them for a company I invented called “Rent-A-Genius.” They also did a research report that facilitated some kind of a decision, what car to buy, what test preparation company to use, what internship to seek, etc. they also presented this material in a Powerpoint. They designed a flyer, and created graphs and charts to present information. They actually learned a lot, but since I was re-designing the course as I went along, things were not always quite coordinated. At the end I had them revise everything and put it into a portfolio with a cover letter explaining all they had done and learned. At the beginning I had had them fill out a questionnaire about their experiences with workplace writing. Most had never done a resume. Only two had been taught to write a simple business letter. Only one had been taught any kind of time management system. The portfolios showed that they had done a lot of new things. I have no doubt that they are all much more employable after this course. But then I had to figure out how to evaluate the portfolios.
I don’t think that there is any way to use multiple choice questions or scantrons to evaluate this learning. I think this is the way it has to be. It sure takes a lot of time though.
Xaviere “Keef” Tele
Filed under: Music and Guitar | Tags: GFS Li'l Punchers, Telecaster
Comments (17) For some reason I thought that when I started teaching full time I would have time to play guitar in my office, so I thought it would be cool to keep a guitar there. I thought an acoustic guitar would be too loud, so I was thinking about a cheapo electric that I could play through my laptop with headphones. This turned out to be a totally crazy idea. I rarely have a minute to even think when I am at school. However, I ordered the guitar.
I have ordered a Les Paul type guitar and a Beatle-style violin bass from Rondo, a company which specializes in cheap Asian-made instruments. Cheap guitars are much better than ever before because the parts are cut out by computerized machines, so that every neck and body comes out exactly the same, to very precise tolerances. I have ordered pickups and other parts from Guitar Fetish or GFS, a company that sources economy guitar parts mostly from Korea. If you buy a very cheap guitar from Rondo, usually you end up replacing tuners, pickups, electronics, and maybe even bridge parts, and the cheapest place to get better stuff is GFS.
GFS also sells guitars, under the Xaviere brand. Maybe it is better to buy the guitar from GFS, with GFS parts already on it? I decided to try.
I ordered an XV-825 “Keef” model, a Telecaster-type that is supposed to emulate Keith Richards’ “Micawber” tele. It was $248 with case.
This guitar actually has little in common with with Keith Richards’ tele. It does have an ash body with a transparent butterscotch finish and a maple fretboard. However, Keith has a full-sized humbucking pickup in the neck position, and the Xaviere has a mini-humbucker. Keith has a modern tele bridge with individual saddle adjustments, while the GFS has a traditional ash tray bridge plate with three barrel-type saddles. Also, Keith tunes his tele to open “G” and leaves off the low “E” string so he only has five strings. The Xaviere model is pretty much nothing like the tele owned and played by Keith Richards. Here’s a picture of the guitar before I modified it:
The guitar is being inspected by Boojie the cat.
When it came I had low expectations. The action was high, and it had a set of .09′s on it. Pretty skinny strings. The fretboard was very flat, and wide, almost like an acoustic guitar, like a Martin. Before I had had it an hour, I had changed the strings to D’Addario .10′s, and lowered the action quite a bit. The neck had a satin finish that took some getting used to. The guitar was also pretty heavy. Still, the mini-humbucker sounded very good. The bridge pickup was a standard single coil tele style, but it was very bright, and the tone control didn’t tame it. Overall, the guitar had a chimey, jangly sixties vibe that made it seem worthwhile working with. I decided to keep it.
The problem with the tone control was because the guitar had one humbucking pickup and one single coil. Humbuckers usually need at least a 500k tone pot or they are too muddy. Single coils usually need a 250k pot or they are too bright. On a Tele, both pickups go through the same tone pot, so if you mix pickup types, whatever the pot is, it will be wrong for one of them. I realized that I had a GFS L’l Puncher Tele bridge pickup that I had bought for another guitar and then taken out. It was a twin-blade humbucker made for the tele bridge slot, and it needed a 500k pot. I put it in. It worked beautifully. Problem solved.
However, the three position pickup switch was intermittent on the bridge position. Contact cleaner didn’t help. I complained to Jay at GFS, and he sent me another switch. However, these looked to be light duty switches, and I thought I might have the same problem, if not immediately, then down the road a bit. I was also unhappy about the intonation of the vintage-style three-barrel bridge. Each barrel can be adjusted to intonate two strings at once, but if you get one string dead on, the other one will be either sharp or flat. This means that strings are never in tune together as you play up the neck. It sounds sour. No good.
I found a set of compensated brass saddles for the vintage bridge at Stewart-MacDonald for $15. These are drilled at an angle so that the barrel is slanted just enough to compensate for the different strings. I also bought an old-fashioned pickup switch. It turned out not to be an actual Fender-style switch, but a similar design made in Japan. I installed these pieces this weekend. I am very happy with the results. The guitar is sweet, chimey, and quite versatile for country, pop, or jazz.
I have about $230 into the guitar right now, not counting the case, which I can use for my other Telecaster, or the Li’l Puncher, which I already had. It is a very good guitar for $230. Would it be better to buy a more expensive guitar and not have to swap out parts and pickups? Perhaps. But I enjoy working on guitars, and to tell the truth, even if you pay more, even a lot, you might end up swapping out parts. I changed the pickups in my $750 Roland-Ready Stratocaster, for example, because I wanted something that sounded like a 60′s Strat, not a 2007 Strat. But it is all great fun.
Update: Today I took the neck off and inserted a piece of cardboard from some video game packaging as a shim to adjust the neck angle. I wanted to lower the high “E” string just a tad, but I couldn’t because the barrel saddle piece bottomed out. The shim worked very well. The shim is a little shorter than the width of the neck pocket, and about 1/2 and inch wide. It is just a thin piece of cardboard. A little piece makes a big difference. I had to raise the bridge saddles about a full turn to get everything where I wanted it. Now it plays like a dream.
Installing a shim is no big deal. Lots of bolt-on neck guitars have them. I shimmed my 2007 Strat too. I once had a ’63 Fender Jaguar that had a big, thick factory-installed shim.
I really like this guitar now. It plays great, and the mini-humbucker and the Li’l Puncher give it a tone that is in-between Fender and Gibson. The bridge can twang, but the neck pickup is jazzy or bluesy, depending on how you play. Extremely versatile. Great for Beatlesque pop and lots of other things. It’s a keeper.
