I'm very excited for the debut performance of Jeremy and his Kazoo coming up on July 3 in Moose Jaw as part of the Moose Jaw Sidewalk Days Festival.
They say that restriction and limited resources inspires some of the best art. It's a philosophy I ascribe to and I always try to work with what I have to create my music. But occasionally, it's having too much that can be the inspiration.
Case in point: This upcoming show at Grant Hall in Moose Jaw is affording me about twice as much performance time than I had expected at this point in the project. Some of the early testing I did with the project showed me that my material is entertaining for people up to about the 25 minute mark before they start losing interest.
This could be a few things. The kazoo is admittedly, a bit abrasive. Plus I'm presenting a set of mostly new material that asks the listener to pay attention and respond to what I'm doing. It's hard to pay attention for a long time through all of that.
So being afforded 45 minutes to play is a challenge. As is the stipulation that I keep the performance PG which means that some of my favourite songs like 'F___ Fridge" will need to be left out of the set and others like "5G" and "Beef Dylan" will need to be cleaned up a bit.
Lucklily, I wrote a lot of music in February so I had a ton of material to fill out the set with. Finding 45 minutes of music isn't the challenge, keeping it interesting is.
One of the strategies I wanted to employ early on to try and "freshen up" the set around the mid point was an instrument change. I play both a semi-hollowbody Gretsch guitar as well as my acoustic Takamine. The Gretsch is very jazzy and expressive, the Takamine is great for big strumming and sing-alongs. But the stock pickup in the Takamine - yikes. Almost unuseable.
I've batted around a few ideas over the past few weeks but yesterday, I found the solution - and it was there all along. I have an old Dean Markley acoustic pickup kicking around in an old toolbox. It's the kind you can temporarily install in the soundhole. Like this:
The sound is a world better than the built-in piezo pickup on the guitar. I've spent countless hours turning tone knobs and trying filters, this sounded good the moment I plugged it in. With one exception - the buzz.
It was picking up a pretty bad 60Hz hum - which is very unusual because all of my other guitars sound great - no hum at all. But I expect this acoustic pickup is a single coil (no humbucking!) and that's part of the problem. But the problem was easily solved when I just shut off the lights in my studio. I have a very leaky lightbulb in that room it seems!
So hopefully, as long as Grant Hall has some well shielded grounding, I should be able to pull off a diverse and fun set on July 3. I hope you can make it out!
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