Here’s the problem. I hit it and it goes “dang”, then “hummmmmmm….” I don’t want dang and hum. Who the hell wants dang and hum? Dumb-ass technology. I hate the internets!
Oh, sorry. I was just complaining to Big Green’s official instrument tech, the dude who lives in the basement. (Actually, I think he may be Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, in a pair of borrowed coveralls.) My 20-year-old keyboard is falling apart, though why I would expect it to survive more than 20 years is beyond me. I am appealing to our tech dude to do some work on it, just in case … just in case we end up playing somewhere again, sometime soon. You never know, right? Did I ever think I would play on the planet Neptune? Hell no. And yet that happened. Shit happens, right?
What’s ailing my old Roland A-90ex? Same thing that ails all similar midi controllers with expansion modules. It’s the counterweights to the keys …. they are just poorly designed and liable to crack and sometimes break right off. Especially when you play like a ham-fisted ape (my own distinctive style). That’s when you get the “dang”, though it’s really more like a “clunk” or a “thud”. It’s actually not too different from a sound we used on our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, only a little less resonant. So why am I complaining, right? Just crank up the resonance, there’s a good chap.
Right, so …. I realize this isn’t a technical blog. That’s not what you come here for. You come here for pithy observations and gripping tales of pointless adventures. For instance, I could tell you all about the festive autumnal arrangement in the hammer mill courtyard contrived by the mansized tuber in his spare time, but then this would seem like a gardening blog, and it’s anything but that. Or I could tell you about all the lawn signs that were dumped in our driveway following the mid-term elections, but then you’d think this was a political blog, and well …. sometimes it is, but … not just now!
So, I will conclude this gripping tale of my keyboard repair adventure and return to whatever it was I was doing before I started talking about this. I think it was … repairing my piano. Right, then.
Sit out here long enough and your mind starts to light on all kinds of things. Random stuff, like … why didn’t I get some handyman to fix the roof on this shed? It leaks like a sieve! Then there are thoughts of what might have been, the kind that creep around the corner when you’re sitting idle, then climb in through your ear and squat down on your brain. Why didn’t I call that handyman? Finally, you get the occasional flash of inspiration, like you’re seeing the world for the first time. Stuff like, I want to join the Space Force! or I want Marvin to join the Space Force! One or the other of those might be workable.
I’m guessing there’s a little pill we can take for stage fright. And there’s probably one we can take for 290 degrees below, too. I’m sure we’re not the only band to grapple with these types of questions. Why, I hear Mumford and Sons spent a week on Neptune waiting for a connecting flight to Proxima Centauri. Nobody said this was going to be easy, people. Look on the bright side. We have Mitch Macaphee, our own in-house mad scientist, who will no doubt contrive (or perhaps borrow from one of his fellow madmen) an appropriately appointed interstellar spacecraft. We’ve got, I don’t know … Marvin, who can … lift very heavy things. We’ve got the mansized tuber who … will not be joining us because he’s taken root in the garden. Okay, scratch that.