Oddly enough, while I am doing all this work on The Beer Repository, I am also starting to venture into the world of home brewing.  Thanks to a great deal on Groupon.com, I was able to get equipment, ingredients, and a beginner class from Great Fermentations, the local home brew supply store.  Unfortunately, I won’t be able to take my class until early August, so right now I am assembling the necessary equipment while I patiently wait.  I might post up a DIY or two as I make some stuff.

If you aren’t familiar with The Beer Repository, let me bring you up to speed.  A couple of years ago when I was finally starting to feel comfortable with development and the tools I was using at the time, I started looking for a project that I could call my own.  Around that time I was starting to dig deeper into craft beer.  Craft beer, to make it simple, it mostly from smaller breweries or microbreweries and, in my opinion, is on the more flavorful side of beer.  Smaller batches means breweries are willing to try different things and so you get an amazing array of color, taste, and aroma that will make you wonder why you ever bothered with anything else.

So I had this new love for craft beer and a goal to start trying everything.  I started keeping a journal of what I was drinking because I quickly realized that I couldn’t remember what I liked.  Then I thought maybe other people were having this problem or were having a hard time discovering new beer.  I thought about creating some kind of online community that would be a collection of beer journals, that could be shared with the world.  It wasn’t a totally unique idea, but it sounded fun and seemed like a good project to pursue.  And so, The Beer Repository was born.  I set to work hammering out how it was all going to work.  I made the decision to try and incorporate Twitter; to actually make it the backbone of the whole project.  The idea was that people could post short reviews through twitter from wherever they were, and the site would grab those and add them.

I ended up spending most of my time on the project working out the interaction between the two systems and learning a lot in the process.  Unfortunately, despite the work I put in, it did not payoff.  What I thought would be easy and convenient wasn’t and the site never really got used.  I continued to post reviews, hoping people would catch on, but it never did.  So after months of hard work, I let it sit.  Eventually, Twitter made changes to their system and it now currently does not work.  You can still see the past reviews that were submitted, but no one can submit new reviews and no one has informed me as such.

While this is very disappointing, it wasn’t unexpected.  Web startups have an insane failure rate, because so many are launched everyday.  More often than not, it isn’t what your site does, but who promotes it that matters, as is the case in life.  Despite its failure, I still was able to get a lot out of the project.  I got to know jQuery better.  I learned how OAuth works and more importantly the perils of debugging it.  I learned a lot about using services.  The key is I learned something from it, it wasn’t all for nothing.

Flash forward to my discussion with Tony.  He started asking me some interesting questions and throwing out some very interesting ideas.  This got me thinking about the project in a completely different way and just like before, presented an opportunity to learn some new things and sharpen my knowledge of Rails.  I have started the very early phases of planning by just writing down every idea I could have, and using The Rspec Book, creating some stories that could potentially make up a first release.  I am determined to follow Behavior Driven Development with this project so I can really learn how to use it from the start of a project, instead of in the middle of one, which has been a disaster.

My other hope is that I won’t do it alone.  I enjoy working on a team when it comes to development, especially if that means there is someone handling design, which is not one of my strong abilities.  Working on my current project for work and The Beer Repository have been difficult and at times I just had to stop because I wasn’t making progress and just banging away at it wasn’t helping at all.  Its been nice to occasionally bounce ideas of the guys at ABQ, but it is different when someone actually has a stake in a project.  We will see what happens.

Hopefully, all of this results in a site that people want to use and more importantly want to tell their friends about.  I think I lost sight of a lot of things with the first version, including what people want out of it versus what I wanted out of it.  Also, I learned that despite how easy I think I am making it, it might not translate that way.  I think the Twitter integration was an interesting idea that in the end did not do enough to enhance the user’s experience to justify all the trouble I went through to set it up and maintain it.  This time I will focus on making a site for everyone else first, and myself second.  I still want it to be something I would want to use everyday, but it is more important that everyone else wants to use it everyday.

It has been a goal for the band to record in Nashville.  My brother-in-law went to school in Nashville for music business and is now getting himself established in the highly competitive world of recording in the most competitive city in the country.  This all means that we have the opportunity to go record for much less than it would normally cost us.  

Deciding to record, however, has been the easy part.  Now we are in the process of writing new songs and learning material so that we can record.  The problem is that just learning new songs isn’t enough.  We have enough songs that we could actually cut some and still have enough for an album.  This doesn’t mean they are cohesive or flow well together.  They don’t necessarily represent pieces of a puzzle that when put together makes sense.  I am not sure I even know how that is done.  

I don’t know if it is the pressure of recording in a city known as the “Recording Capital of the World,” or this being my first real experience recording, but I am really hung up on it.  I want this album to be good.  No, I want it to be great.  I want to be able to look back on it and be proud that we really did a solid job.  The real problem is that I am a bass player.  I am a bass player and the newest member to this band.  I feel like I overstep my bounds enough with some of the feedback and comments I make.  I have been in the band for a little more than six months, but I still want to be respectful.  

So right now I am trying to do everything I can within reason.  The first thing is taking charge of my own bass lines, refining them, crafting some runs, building some depth.  I have a lot of work to take care of, so I am just going to do what I can and hope that everyone else is doing the same. 

I have been able to keep my G.A.S. under control for the past couple of years, but once I started playing more at church and now playing gigs with Tyler Bender, I needed a change.  Previously I was playing through a Carvin R1000 powering a Carvin RL410 and a Carvin RL115.  The head provided a lot of power, but lacked any distinctiveness in its tone.  I wanted something with some character.  The 4X10 and 15 did basically the same thing, high power handling but no personality.  They could be any ol’ cabinet.  

I sold the rig to my brother-in-law and set out to find some new gear.  I am not at a point where I can start going after some of “dream” quality gear, such as a 70′s Ampeg SVT head or an Orange head, because I just don’t have that kind of money.  I wanted to find something that would add something to the sound but be somewhat affordable (i.e. Used) and also be lighter than my previous setup, which I couldn’t even fit into my car.

I ended up with a GK 700 RB II powering an Avatar B210 Neo.  Even though it was a small rig, it had a lot to offer.  It sounded fantastic but was still light and easy to move around.  It worked really well for playing at church giving me a much better reference to go off of compared to the monitoring from the Avioms we use.  However, as soon as I got asked to play a show with Tyler Bender, I knew it wouldn’t be enough to cut through the drums and a Vox AC30 on stage.  I ended up borrowing the previously sold 4X10 from my brother-in-law and it served it’s purpose but still wasn’t what I was looking for.

It took several months for me to finally find the cabinet I wanted to complete the rig.  I picked up an Avatar Delta 212.  Ideally, I wanted a Neo 212 but the price on the cabinet made it worth it and the option to go the Neo route later is still there.  The cabinet provides some incredible bottom end that really fills out my sound.  Where the 210 and 410 provided a lot of punch, there was nothing to really support the E and B string.  The 212 is fantastic in the low range.  During the first outing with the cabinet, I could finally feel my sound through my feet as it resonated throughout the stage.  It was fantastic and really helped improve my playing during the show.  

I now am very happy with the head and cabinet combination I have.  Sadly, G.A.S. has no permanent cure and I can already feel a bout of it coming on.  I have no effects, not even a good tuner, so might be time to pick up a rack and some nice effects to compliment the current rig.

I have already had the opportunity to start crafting my own lines, which is really exciting, yet challenging for me. If you made it out to the Birdy’s show you got to hear the two new songs which featured those lines. If you didn’t, check out the videos.

The band is made up of some quality players and some great guys. Jon, on lead guitar, has been a good friend of mine since I was in high school and was the reason I got to play with Tyler in the first place. Tyler is a gifted song writer and a great singer and has some killer stage presence. Brian is a bass players dream when it comes to drummers. He has great time and doesn’t overplay but grooves which makes writing bass parts even easier. Andy is like the swiss army knife of the band, playing rhythm guitar, keys, and singing backup vocals. There is a great vibe throughout the group both musically and off-stage.

I encourage everyone to check out the MySpace page and listen to some of the music, and keep an eye out here for upcoming shows.

If you are interested in getting a copy of the recently released “Chicago Sessions” leave a comment or shoot me an email and I will get one to you.

First things first, I am finished with college. After a long sting, spanning two schools and three different majors, I finally wrapped it up and I now have a nice diploma from Indiana University sitting on my next. For me, college has been a struggle.I went to the wrong school for the wrong reasons initially and it ended up costing me a lot. When I was first deciding what I was going to do with my life, I had my heart set on being a music engineer. I thought it would be great to record different musicians while still indulging my desire for all things technical. There were a couple of programs here in Indiana that were solid programs.

As a nice coincidence, my two best friends, and band mates, were going to go to Ball State, which just happened to have a good Music Engineering program that was going to only get better with a new building and more resources. However, my dream was soon crushed when I found out that you had to audition to get into the music program. I had long given up on playing alto saxophone, and was never that good to begin with, and electric bass guitar wasn’t on the list of acceptable instruments. So I ended doing a year as a Computer Science major and hated it. I hated the math. The monotony. It didn’t excite me creatively at the time and a change had to come. So I became a Political Science major, largely because I thought it looked cool on The West Wing, which I was an avid fan. I learned quickly that poli-sci was not for me either. So, with terrible grades, and no idea what I was going to do with my life, I left Ball State and transferred to Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

My roommate and drummer was transferring there and told me about their new program they had started called New Media. They had a Digital Video and Sound Production program and there was no audition requirement, so I went with the intention of picking up my dream once more, but it wasn’t to be. Instead I fell for video editing and that remained true through graduation.

One thing that did remain constant through this whole process was music. Even though I had given up on music engineering, I never gave up playing bass. There was a long stint where I wasn’t playing with anyone and would only occasionally plug in my bass but I still did. That was the best decision I have made in the past six years. Playing challenged my creatively and provided an outlet to express myself in a way nothing else could. It is truly a blessing from God that I am incredibly thankful for.

With that phase of my life complete, I get to take a breather, continuing working at the same job I have been at and get some time to focus on different creative pursuits of mine. More about that tomorrow.

Oddly enough, my return to playing out happen to occur in Muncie of all places, the home of Ball State.  I took the guys to a certain chinese buffet I frequented during my two years there.  We had a good time questioning all the food that we saw or ate.  Apparently this particular restaurant had been fined for fishing out of the White River.

After that we went to the venue which was more or less what I would expect.  Not exceptionally nice, but not a total dive.  We got our gear in, got setup, said hi to some people who had come out to support us and then we waited.  We waited for an hour for the sound guy to show up.  

It was fine for the first fifteen minutes, we just talked to people, Doc’s provided the band with free beer all night, which was nice.  Then another fifteen minutes past and we started to get annoyed.  The sound guy still hadn’t shown up.  The manager had started pulling some stuff out but had no idea how to set things up.  Then someone, who didn’t work there, volunteered to set everything up.  While it was a nice gesture, he had no idea what he was doing.  So then the lead singer and frontman for the band, Tyler, asked his roommate who is an audio technician to see if he could lend his services.  Even though his roommate, Andy,  knew what he was doing, it is almost impossible to be thrown into some else’s system and know where everything is being run, let alone know where they keep the mics.  So for another half an hour, they tried to get something going, no avail.

Finally, an hour later, when we should have been packing up and Cory Hill should have been going on, the sound guy finally showed up.  He scurried to get everything setup, fix what the other guy did, and then do a sound check.  We played through our set as best we could, but it was difficult to say the least.  They had three floor monitors, two side by side and one for the drummer.  We might as well have had no monitors.  The sound coming out was horrible and way too loud.  If you weren’t right in front of one of them then you heard nothing at all, which was my experience.  Our drummer smashed his hand early in the set and was flinging blood all over his kit the whole time.  We missed cues because we couldn’t here each other.  It was interesting.

Despite all of that though, we played pretty well and people said the music was good, but the sound was horrible.  The sound guy obviously didn’t know what he was doing and wasn’t monitoring the mix at all.  Andy had to come and give us some feedback on what we could do on stage to try and fix it, but there was only so much we could do.

We packed up our stuff and then headed home.  I get in my door at 2:00 AM that morning.  Even though the whole sound situation was really bad, the band said it was the worst they had experienced, I still had a great time and wish I could do it more often.  There is something about playing in front of people that is rewarding and desirable.  I get to moonlight with Tyler Bender and Training Wheel Fire again in May, and I look forward to it.

Finally, your Arrested Development for the day…

Also, I slacked on my Arrested Development a day, but I am back on it.  So here is Episode 2.  Just a quick note, the clip here is just a portion of the episode but you can watch the whole thing once it has finished.

Also on a different note, I will be playing with Tyler Bender at Doc’s in Muncie on April 4th so if you are around, come check it out.

I was checking out Hulu today and watching some Family Guy and making a fool out of myself by laughing because this show cracks me up. It really isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, the quality is good, they have full episodes, even full movies, which is pretty crazy. There have been about two to three commercials for a show, which isn’t bad at all. Give it a look.