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lsamuel3

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Posts posted by lsamuel3

  2. blogTO's Best Concerts of 2010

    in Soundboard

    Posted · Edited by Guest

    It's so funny that the impression of our music team at blogTO is that it's just a group of hipsters. I've hung out with the team on a couple of occasions and let me tell you, these people are far from hipsters. There's no tight jeans, fake glasses, and ironically awful haircuts to be had in our group. It's a really down to earth group of people who just like going to see live music. Most of us just happen to dig indie rock. I try and see and cover as much stuff from the jam scene as much as possible (see The Barr Brothers/Marco Benevento Trio), but let's be honest, Phish and Further ain't heading to Toronto any time soon...

    I took one of the guys from the team who is more into indie and electro to the Wood Brothers show and he was blown away. He said he was having a really awful day and their music just made him feel a million times better. TWB make some soul soothing shit forsure!

  3. blogTO's Best Concerts of 2010

    in Soundboard

    Posted · Edited by Guest

    Some of our reader's can't wrap their head around the fact that it's our personal opinions on music....i think they think we do blogTO full time and attend every show in toronto and should be writing on behalf of every toronto music-goer hahaha. the comments crack me up.

  5. You know what really grinds my gears at Christmas?

    in Soundboard

    Posted

    hahaha very well done booche. i don't celebrate xmas but i still don't like how happy holidays has taken over merry xmas. i celebrate channukah and although it's a holiday, we don't get time off work. so would i want people saying happy holidays to me? F no. It's not a happy holiday unless you get to spend it with your family and friends, and I don't mean post-work when you're wiped and the last thing you want to do is put up with a family that's just as tired as you are. put me down for a handful of merry xmases to all of you fine folks. here's to time off for xmas.

  6. Lauryn Hill - Toronto show

    in Soundboard

    Posted

    she hasn't toured in quite some time...reviews from her recent NYC shows from this tour have been pretty bad. she showed up like 2 hours late for a recent show (with no opener). her backing band is big, too big, and drowns her out from what i've heard. hill is known for her drama and as interested as i am in seeing her, i think it might be best to skip this one...especially since it's at Sound Academy.

  7. The Wooden Sky Live at the Music Gallery Show Review

    in Soundboard

    Posted · Edited by Guest

    Yea I first heard them in September on AUXTV. I saw their Bedrooms and Backstreets tour documentary. They're now one of my favourite bands right now, everyone in the group is a multi-instrumentalist and they just play with so much excitement. Between the Lee's Palace show which ended with a sing a long on Bloor and this show in a super small church, they're proving to be the best and most interesting concerts I've seen in some time.

  9. Recent interview with Brad Barr

    in Soundboard

    Posted

    Just stumbled upon this. It's a great read from the super humble Brad Barr. Also nice to hear some plans about The Slip/SMMD/Barr Bros straight from the source!

    Brad Barr is one of those truly amazing guitarists on the scene today. He has the ability to mix, fuse, and transcend styles that range from jazz, folk, rock, experimental, indie, improvisation, flamenco, and more, which really helps to give him a unique sound that’s all his own.

    Barr has been establishing his name over the past decade as the guitarist, primary song writer, and creative force behind his long time rock band, The Slip, which also features his brother Andrew Barr (drums) and Marc Friedman (bass). The Slip got their start while they were still in High School, and the trio eventually enrolled at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

    The Slip can’t be put neatly into any category, on their early recording Does (2000) the band sounds like a straight ahead jazz trio with ripping guitar lines and killer grooves. Within their catalog you can also hear experimental instrumental music like that on Alivelectric (2003), acoustic folk on Aliveacoustic (2003), song writing skills that are ever evolving, and on their album Eisenhower (2006) they achieve an indie rock type of sound.

    Barr is an incredibly versatile guitarist that’s able to play in almost any style he chooses. He pulls of complicated jazz lines with ease, his groove is incredible, a soulful feel, nasty pentatonic playing, creative sounds, finger style, but he isn’t only a guitarist of the highest caliber, he also sings, composes, and has really grown as a song writer.

    Barr seems to be working hard to outdo himself, and there’s no doubt that he will be on the scene creating incredibly beautiful music and whaling on his guitar for a long time to come.

    ******

    Brad Conroy: Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to pick up the guitar?

    Brad Barr: There was always the one lying around the house, because our dad had one although he didn’t play very much, he knew a few Elvis tunes. I was playing piano from the age of six and by the age of eleven I was becoming curious about the stringed instruments. Funny thing is that my parents gave my brother Andrew the guitar first because they thought I had my hands full with the piano, and they gave me a drum set.

    Andrew took lessons on the guitar for about a year and I don’t know what it was, but everything he was learning in his lessons I was able to play without trying too hard, and was having a lot of fun with it too. Andrew of course jumped on the drums and was having the time of his life, and it quickly became clear that I was the guitar player and he was the drummer.

    The early guitar music that inspired me was all of the rock stuff that we would hear on MTV, notably Bryan Adams. Chuck Berry and the scene from Back to the Future; you know when Marty was playing at the Under the Sea Dance? It all trickled down through cultural coolness; this is what made the guitar so appealing to me in the early days.

    At first I actually wanted to play the bass. I was totally mystified by it. I saw the guitar around the house, but the bass was a total mystery to me in the beginning. That first feeling of response from the strings was addictive. Just feeling them really resonate under my fingers and the sensation of it all, this was my first taste of guitar addiction.

    Conroy: Did you take lessons?

    Barr: I took one lesson from a guy where he showed me the pentatonic blues scale, and by the end of the lesson he was showing me how to the play the same scale in multiple positions on the neck. I remember spending the next year just really working on that scale and being able to transpose it to every key and moving it all over the fretboard. That one lesson was enough to sort of set my wheels in motion.

    In high school I began studying with a jazz player who introduced me to Wes Montgomery and John Coltrane, which really set me off on a whole other path. From there I studied a bunch of different guys, ranging from guitar players, tenor sax players, trombone players, and pianists, but it all started with that one blues lesson when I was 11 or 12 years old.

    I think that learning the piano first really helped me in understanding the guitar. It’s really a confusing instrument, and the piano helped me to understand how notes and chords worked. The alphabet is right in front of you on a piano, and for some reason I was able transfer this to the guitar and make sense out of the grid of frets and strings.

    Conroy: What was it like studying at Berklee? Were you in attendance with any other names?

    Barr: I was there in 1995 which was the same year that my brother and Marc Friedman (the bass player) graduated from high school. The three of us went to Berklee together, and by that point Marc and Andrew had been playing a lot together the last two years of high school, after I had already graduated. I started going down and playing with them in the high school jam space, so the three of us were already pretty solid as a trio.

    We didn’t live on campus, but the three of us moved into a house and we were kind of removed from the day to day life at Berklee. I did make friends with a few guys that have gone on to be doing some great things, like Andy Hall, who tours with Dolly Parton. Another guy we became friends with right off the bat was Marco Benevento, who is like a brother to us now.

    Marco was in The Slip for about three gigs, and he comes out and does stuff with us on occasion, and now he’s in Surprise Me Mr. Davis. He’s still doing his Marco Benevento trio and other stuff as well as playing with us. He’s one of the best friends that we made there at Berklee.

    There is a lot of competition at Berklee, but I went there with Andrew and Marc and we had our own thing going, so I didn’t have that intense feeling of competition with other students. I mean, there were those moments when I would kind of freak out when I would see some kid four years younger than me just tearing it up.

    Feelings like wow, what does that guy study, and how did he learn that? I’ve always felt pretty confident in my ability and secure in direction I wanted to take, so the competition was never overwhelming and self-defeating.

    Click to Buy Eisenhower from Amazon.com

    Conroy: How did the Band’s name come about?

    Barr: It went back to the high school that we all went to. It was a band that we were in, which always consisted of a bunch of different members. I believe it was my friend John Buckley who made a very cool drawing and wrote the name The Slip in the drawing, and it’s funny because I wasn’t even around when he made this drawing, and I’m not sure actually how it even became our name.

    It’s always seemed to work though, through all of our different phases of the band, from the beginnings where we were covering The Doors and the Grateful Dead, and into our experimental jazz phase, The Slip has always seemed to work well for us. We tried to change it a few times because another band was using it, or this and that, but we finally decided to keep the name so that our fans would know when and where we were playing, all 75 of them. [Laughs]

    Conroy: Almost all of your albums have such a unique and different kind of sound, how do you explain such diversity?

    Barr: It’s hard to explain, but maybe the lack of a decisive focus for the band, the fact that we all listen to so much The Slip just became our outlet for experimentation. We were musicians and aspiring song writers and this was our way to explore and try new things in the comfort of friends. We never really gravitated and committed toward one sound or style of music. It never even occurred to us that we shouldn’t throw our audiences for so many loops, back then it seemed like kind of a virtue to be able create so many different sounds and dabble into so many different genres.

    I guess for me it always seemed so available, and it was easy to get sucked into writing a jazz song, or folk songs, a rock song, or then maybe make one of these long abstract instrumental pieces we’ve been known to do. I just never focused on one particular style. I like it all, and have been influenced by so much that it all just comes out in my music.

    Conroy: Being involved in so many bands, how do you find time to keep up with it all?

    Barr: Well it certainly can get away from me sometimes. When I zoom out and look at it, I do realize that there is enough time here. Like anyone else I waste time on the computer, or drinking coffee, but there’s a lot of time in a day, in the week, and in the month.

    I usually divide myself up a few weeks at a time. I’ll focus on The Slip for a bit, then ten days on Surprise Me Mr. Davis, and then the rest of the month with the Barr Brothers. It’s not like any of the bands I’m in have really taken off where it’ll require me to spend all of my time on one thing.

    That would be really nice, if Surprise Me Mr. Davis was on a world tour with Wilco, but it hasn’t happened yet. So I’m able to divide my time between a few different projects and still get a lot out of each one of them.

    Brad Barr

    Conroy: Can you give us a run down of your rig?

    Barr: Sure. My favorite guitar right now that I’m playing is a 1967 Guild Starfire five, which I can only compare to the Gibson 335 from the same year, but this Guild is so different and unique, it’s really a special instrument. My 1954 ES175 is still getting a lot of playing in the studio. I also have been using a 1964 Danelectro Convertible, it’s the guitar you see Jimmy Page playing on a few songs on The Song Remains the Same.

    I have a J45 from 1951 that is just the sweetest sounding acoustic. It has a great mid rang and a real growl which I also use a Fishman pick-up on it. I have a Martin Ns10 nylon string guitar which is perfect for me because it isn’t so precious and is a bit clunky, but you can hear it on “Poor Boy†on the Live Acoustic album, and it really has kind of a piano type sound to it.

    The amp I have been using the most is a Fender deluxe reissue which I think is a 1956 and it is a truly amazing sounding amp. Sometimes I’ll combine it with a Gibson amp that I have called the Super Medalist, which is just two twelve speakers stacked and it has crazy reverb. This is just a great combination of sound.

    My pedals are basically the usual suspects like a volume pedal, Wah, boss tuner, tremolo pedal, distortion, DOD digital delay, HBE ufo pedal, holy grail reverb, and the boomerang loop pedal.

    Conroy: Do you still practice?

    Barr: I do. I have days where I practice scales, and I tend to get into new techniques that can open doors for me as an improviser. I’ve been getting back into pentatonic concepts, some simple approaches.

    I’ve been trying to work more in terms of intervals rather than scales, something I like to think of as a little cell of notes, a cluster of notes. For example: a group of three notes which creates two intervals, like a 2nd and then a fifth, C-D and then D-A, now that is a cell, and I have been using things like that as a guide toward improvising as opposed to a scale.

    Finding the sonority in ideas like that is a concept I picked up on from a guy that I studied with who really kind of challenged my ideas of improvising. He helped me get away from the formula of licks, scales, arpeggios, and he really pushed my idea of what improvising is and what it can be.

    Conroy: What kind of advice can you give for the aspiring guitarist as to what it takes to make music a career?

    Barr: My expectations are totally different now then what they were ten years ago, in terms of making a living with music. I’m trying to focus on enjoying this opportunity that I’ve been given. I think it’s important to find a lot of players you can play with and connect with, and it’s so important to be able to work well with others and to be able to speak the language of music with other people.

    You never know which connection you make is going to get you a gig or a session in the future. It’s important to know your craft and have plenty of tools to draw from, that way when you’re playing with your friends you can try to make their eyes pop out with the new and cool things that you’re playing. You can learn everything you need to know about life through music, meditation, concentration, humility, it just trains the brain, and I guess that’s the spirit in it for me.

    Conroy: What’s next for The Slip and Brad Barr?

    Barr: The Slip has about 20 songs which are nearly tracked and we plan on releasing an album in 2011. Meanwhile, Brad Barr is going to keep playing in his bands, and his newest group The Barr Brothers. I would say to look out for that group in the near future because it is a really exciting band.

    Surprise Me Mr. Davis is going to be recording for another 2011 release, and the nice thing about that is that no one is standing over our shoulder to see what we are doing, which gives us a lot of room and freedom to make things the way we want.

    Until then I’m going to keep plugging away, keep writing, and I have a studio up here in Montreal that I’m at every day. I’m just going to try to keep one upping myself I guess.

  22. Surprise Me Mr. Davis enter the studio!

    in Soundboard

    Posted · Edited by Guest

    A recount of the studio session by Zach Miller!

    I was fucking exhausted driving home Studio House a week after Surprise Me Mr Davis arrived at our doorstep. The only things keeping me from rearing the car in front of me was a cigarette hanging loosely from my mouth and one of seven copies in the entire world of the new Surprise Me Mr. Davis full length album. Sitting next to me was Will Salwen, one of the few brave soldiers who lasted until the end of the recording session. Together we're singing along to Davis's epic "Wine & White Soda," a Who-esque jam about the pleasures of drinking in Spain. Somehow we know every lyric, every melody, every guitar solo, every little funny sound that Marco made. Perhaps it was because we spent a week living with the band, waking up every morning (well more like every afternoon) and seeing the band's smiling faces, ready to take on another 16 hour day of fucked up good recording. But it was simpler than that. We knew every nuance because we had spent a week with one of the most exciting, up and coming bands of our time.

    Davis are the perfect blend of folk, country, classic rock, and contemporary Indie rock. It's like if you took Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles, Wilco, and a whole lot of creative insanity and tortured heartache and mixed it in a musical blender. Each song had it's own special finesse that begged repeated listening. Some songs would leave you singing its ever infectious hook, while some would leave you quietly thinking (As the master of music simply put, it is what you don't, it's not what you do.) Every song had something special recorded in it. Whether it was gang wolf howling (featuring myself, Will, Max King and the band), pots and pans, a microphone placed outside recording the birds and wind, a track of power tools recorded in the garage, or a phone conversation between Nathan and his dad about drinking wine and white soda.

    Most songs were the brain child of folk singer Nathan Moore who when not singing with the band was doing magic tricks in the control room while we would all look in amazement. When recording a background vocal part that I wrote on the aforementioned song, Nathan playfully joked saying "I've been meaning to have you guys over to my place but I just haven't had the time," referring to the makeshift bedroom he had been sleeping in, in the vocal booth.

    When I first heard that Marco Benevento was coming to the studio again I knew it'd be something special. I've known Marco for about five years now and everything he's produced has been nothing short of magic. I had the chance to get some great keyboardist to keyboardist bonding in. Nothing excites us keyboard players more than a conversation about good drawbar settings and how to get delay on your Hammond B3. I also got some great stories about times on the road with the Duo involving copious amounts of liquor, none of which should be repeated here.

    For the past week I felt like I was a member of a loving family I had never met before. I felt like I was that kid in Almost Famous. In fact I was even in the band for about 5 minutes when I did a couple piano takes on Nathan's haunting ballad 'Do You Believe in Ghosts.' But it was the hang that really made us feel at home. One night we were blessed with a clear night and a meteor shower so we made a bonfire in the backyard, made s'mores, and climbed up on top our jam shed and watched the night sky as Wilco's 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot' blasted in my car nearby. And if you think that's cliche, we listened to Dark Side after. Another night Andrew, the drummer, made a pre-Thanksgiving dinner for everyone, complete with a full turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy. On the final night of recording, Marco rushed into the control room and informed us of a gigantic luminescent ring around the moon, but it had been a long week and the band just wanted to finish everything. I was the only one who followed him outside. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen...a moonbow, he called it. We started talking about the album and I told him I had this feeling that this album was going to blow up and Marco smiled and said he thought the same thing. Eventually Jesse, the band's engineer came out and gazed at the wondrous moonbow. "Dude, it's a sign!"

    It was a sign that something magical and truly spellbinding had been created.

    Thank you Marco, Nathan, Brad, Andrew, Marc, and Jesse.

    Zach Miller

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