Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Moba Jones and Love Is Alive

I just found out the new Bass Player magazine is hitting mailboxes now.  I guess I need to write more now that a lot more folks are going to find out about this blog.  Thanks a lot Rod!

Seriously, this has become something of an albatross for me lately.  It was quite a liberating thing to do for a while.  Almost to the point of being spiritually necessary.  Now, the commitment I made to do this is seeming like quite a challenge.  Maybe I'm just too up in my head lately.

That does make sense.  There is a sort of undercurrent of unease about things for me lately.  Which is silly because by all accounts, my life is fantastic.  I get up early every other morning to take my daughter to school and roll down to the shop, sometimes stopping for coffee at the local home town shop.  On the mornings when I don't have my daughter I take a little more time and get up to speed as I feel it.  I try to get in by nine at the latest.  Usually I do, sometimes I don't.

Once at the shop I check in with everyone and see how things are moving.  If there are any issues I'll do my best to address them.  Sometimes that will end up taking a lot of time - even the whole day.  Other times everything is running smooth as could be and I then have to figure out what my priorities are for what I want to do for the day.  Typically, I will work on bass stuff in the morning, before it gets hot.  I've really dialed back my commitment to building, so it's not the end of the world if I take a day or two away from the wood shop.

If there's no woodwork to be done for the day I'll check in on the EQ DI pedal and see where it's at.  As of this writing, my side kick Devin is doing some metal work on some prototype boxes.  Should be fun to see that come together.  I'll have a lot of circuit work to do on the pedal once we get all that dialed in.  We have to make the pedal as easy to build as possible to keep the price down.  The devil is in the details.  Always.

If there's nothing to do there I'll head for the studio to work on music.  And that's in a very general sense.  These days, I am working on starting a label.  It will be called Moba Jones Music.  Here's a concept web site splash page:


I'm also working on putting a website together for this label.  So I'm learning the software for that.  

To be honest, I'm not even sure what a label really is these days.  I know that I want to record, produce, and market great music.  Music you can feel, like it says above.  

I have the studio ready to go, I have a handful of projects that I'm working on, and I have a handful of people that I want to work with.  My sense is that at this point, I just need to start doing it.  Put the website together, record and produce the music, take the pictures and videos.  Present it all in as clean and accessible a manner as possible.  And above all, keep it all as honest as I can.  

In that spirit of getting started, yesterday I had Johnny Gomez come by to record some guitar tracks for a cover we're working on called Love Is Alive.  It's a tune from the 80's by a guy named Gary Wright.  He had a much bigger hit with Dream Weaver, but this particular track is much more fun in my opinion.  We're taking a more organic approach on it and doing almost all the synth parts with guitar.  I think it's coming together really well.  At this point I'm going to get some drums mic'd up and see if I can get my resident drummer employee Pat to pull it off.  Should be fun.  Then it's time to put the vocal on it and polish it up in the mix.

Here's a quick little sample of where we're at in the process.



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