Seeping Matter

Yes, Florida State, It's Unfair - Deal With It

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

So another great regular season of college football has come and gone, and with that comes the annual event where some team complains very loudly that they’ve been treated unfairly by the CFP. This year, Florida State is not the only one with a case but they are certainly the most vocal about it.

And believe me, I get why they are so upset. Their case is that never in the history of the CFP has an undefeated Power-5 conference champion been excluded from the playoff until now, especially when a one-loss Power-5 conference champion (or two, in this case) were included at their expense. They won every game on their schedule and won their conference. Texas did not do that, nor did Alabama. They are loudly crying that they have been treated unfairly, and I totally get it.

The problem is they are acting like this is something new, and it isn’t. Let me remind you of a few:

2014 - Both TCU and Baylor were ranked higher than Ohio State, yet Ohio State was included in the CFP at the expense of both TCU and Baylor presumably because the BIG-XII did not have a conference championship back then.
2015 - PAC-12 champion Stanford was excluded from the CFP despite having the same win-loss record as both Michigan State and Oklahoma who were included.
2016 - Ohio State was included in the CFP at the expense of Penn State despite Penn State being ranked higher the week before, winning the BIG-10 championship, AND having beaten Ohio State earlier in the year.
2017 - Auburn beat Alabama in the Iron Bowl and was ranked #2 going into championship week, but then lost to Georgia in the SEC championship and got excluded from the CFP in favor of Alabama who they’d beaten just a couple of weeks before.

It wasn’t any better before either. During the poll era, the pollster-proclaimed champion was often controversial with non-winners claiming the system was unfair to their disadvantage. We replaced that with the BCS which was only marginally better, and likewise was rife with controversy:

2001 - Nebraska was chosen to play in the BCS National Championship game over higher-ranked Oregon and Colorado, despite having not won their conference.
2003 - Disagreement between computer and human polls resulted in a real BCS champ (LSU) and a pseudo-champ (USC) both claiming to have won the title.
2004 - Five teams finished the regular season undefeated, leaving three teams feeling left out of the BCS championship game. This also happened in 2009.
2010 - TCU was left out of the national championship despite going undefeated.
2011 - Alabama was chosen to play LSU in the BCS championship game, excluding teams from any other conference and allowing Alabama in despite having lost to LSU earlier in the year.

When the CFP was introduced for the 2014 season, we had 5 power conferences. The CFP was introduced with only 4 spots in the tournament. It was unfair from the beginning.

Let me state that again: It was unfair from the beginning. By definition.

From the beginning of the CFP, by definition at least one Power-5 conference champion was going to be snubbed every year despite winning their conference title. Every year at least one team was going to feel like they had earned the right to play in the CFP and was being excluded. We may have never had an undefeated conference champion get excluded before, but the possibility for that existed from the very beginning and nothing was ever done to preclude it happening. It was completely possible that each conference champion could go undefeated in one year; the fact that it hadn’t happened before isn’t all that relevant.

The point is, the system was never designed to be fair. It was never designed to take only conference champions, or only teams with the best strength of schedule compared to their record, or to prefer undefeated teams. It was never designed to take into account, or to explicitly not take into account, the health of starters, for example, or other factors.

The system was designed from the beginning to pit the “best four teams” against each other in a tournament, based on the decisions of a committee that would determine who the best four teams were. That’s what it was from day one.

It was never fair and never meant to be fair. For Florida State to claim it’s unfair this year, or for any of the others in past years to do the same for that matter, is like complaining because it is dark at night.

Duh. Obviously, it’s unfair. We all know.

What you really ought to be asking yourself is: Do you really think the CFP doesn’t know it’s unfair? That they did not know this from the beginning?

Get real.

Introducing the Vybe Sapphire

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’d been wanting to build my own electric guitar (well, several of them, actually), so for Christmas my wife gave me a JEM-clone guitar kit from BYOGuitar.

When the box arrives this is basically what you see:

The basic intent, I think, is for it to look like an Ibanez JEM7V, although since all the provided hardware is not gold but chrome it would actually end up looking more like an Ibanez JEMJR. The kit guitar has a mahogany body, like the JEMJR but unlike the JEM7V which has an alder body. I prefer mahogany anyway so I am fine with this.

It does feature the monkey grip handle and lion’s claw rout behind the tremolo, key characteristics that identify a JEM guitar and distinguish it from an Ibanez RG-series (otherwise they are pretty similar). You can see this clearly in this early fit test I did at the beginning of the build:

Another key characteristic of many JEM models is the Tree of Life inlay on the neck, and this guitar also features that.

The fretboard is rosewood, which I like fine and is pretty standard for many JEMs, although I prefer the look and sound of ebony a little more. The neck itself is a similar profile to Ibanez Wizard style necks, like on the JEMs. This is a great, thin neck profile, really fast and easy to play. On this kit the neck is a 5-piece maple neck with two walnut stripes running the length of the neck, which looks great.

One of the first problems I had with this body was that there is no routing cutout in the back for the plate that covers the tremolo springs. You can see it in this picture. That big cutout spot in the middle of the body is where the tremolo springs go. On a JEM guitar, there’s a plastic plate that covers that, and it sits inside a routed-out border so the plate is flush with the rest of the body. You can see what I mean in the other cutout toward the top left, which does have this routed-out-border for it’s cover plate.

I emailed BYOGuitar about this, thinking that they must have forgotten to do that part on this body, but they said that is standard (despite, as I pointed out to them, the pictures on page 12 of their instruction manual - they told me those pictures are out of date). BYOGuitar told me that now the idea is you just attach that plate on the back of the guitar to the surface. I know some guitars (I’m looking at you, Fender Stratocaster) do this, but that is not good enough for me. So I set out to enlist my friend Michael to help me rout that out of the back of the guitar.

We built a fence to run the router inside. The idea is that the edge of the router would follow the edge of the fence. We had to meticulously measure the size of the back plate, center that in the body over the hole, measure again, build the fence, measure again, adjust the fence, measure again, attach the fence to the body, measure again, etc. You get the idea. This little endeavor was about 2 hours of constructing and placing the fence, and about 5 minutes of actually using the router, but the results were perfect.

Next came body prep. This step requires a great deal of patience and determination. I sanded the body with increasing grit levels of sandpaper (120, 180, 220, 400). Once it was pretty smooth I got some wood filler and scraped that across all the primary surfaces. There are small gaps in the wood grain that you almost don’t notice but which showed up especially during the first forays into painting the body. Fill these spots, let the wood filler dry, then sand and sand again.

In the process of sanding I dropped the body once or twice and that unfortunately made some dents in the wood which I had to sand out. Try not to do this.

Finally we got down to a really smooth surface, and we were ready for paint.

I’ve always especially loved the hydro-dipped JEM models, like the JEM2K. I decided I wanted to hydro-dip my guitar too, though I’d never done this before. I wanted to go for more of a pastel palette, so I decided on a white base with royal blue, navy blue, purple, green, and pink.

The easy part of this color scheme was the pickups. I always knew from the very beginning that I would not keep the pickups that came in this kit but instead would special order some, since good pickups are one of the keys to a great electric guitar. I usually buy Seymour Duncan pickups and am a big fan of Seymour Duncan. But Steve Vai uses DiMarzio pickups. JEM pickups are generally from one of a number of families of DiMarzio pickups, all co-designed by Steve Vai: Evolution, Breed, Evo 2, Dark Matter, Blaze, and Gravity Storm. Reviews I read online seemed to indicate that I’d like the Gravity Storms the best. I was pleasantly surprised to find that DiMarzio was more than happy to let me order custom DP252FSP and DP253SP Gravity Storm humbuckers in the colors I wanted, so I ordered the bridge pickup in blue and white and the neck pickup in pink and white. For the middle pickup I chose a DP181 Fast Track in green.

This kind of treatment is how you earn customer loyalty. I expect I’ll be ordering DiMarzio pickups again (although I am still a Seymour Duncan fan).

Next came painting the body. I’d do a handful of coats, then lightly sand to smooth out the finish, then paint again. The body probably had at least 30 light coats of gloss white paint.

Then it was time to hydro-dip. I admit I put this off for quite a while because I was afraid of making a mistake. Finally I decided to buy some regular boards I could use to experiment. I found a lot of websites and YouTube videos that claimed you could hydro-dip with spray paint. So I bought a bunch of spray paint in the selected colors. I carefully prepared the container of water to match the desired temperature, added the Borax bleach, and followed all the instructions as well as I could. Then I sprayed the spray paint on the top and dipped my practice board.

Disaster. It looked pretty terrible. Even following all the instructions exactly I did not get very satisfying results at all.

This is a good lesson in trying to “save” money by taking the cheaper option. I spent a lot of money on spray paint because those paints were cheaper than the hydro-dipping paint, but it was just wasted money.

So I gave in and ordered hydro-dipping paint from Magic Marble. Five different colors of paint was a pretty penny to pay, but this worked much better. I had great success with the first practice board, and then when I did the body it turned out even better.

That paint job alone probably cost me between $200 and $300, but the results were worth it in my opinion. It looks fabulous.

After letting the paint dry for a good while, there was some very careful touchup work I had to do - carefully sanding down places where the paint had dripped or bubbled up, etc. Once I got that done it was time to finish the body. I chose a basic polyurethane spray lacquer to protect the paint. Most luthier-oriented websites recommend nitrocellulose-based lacquers instead - the general feeling is that they don’t inhibit the sound quite so much as polyurethane. But those lacquers do turn yellow over time, and refinishing this guitar body is not really an option considering the unique paint job. I wanted a finish that will last. And I have other guitars with polyurethane lacquers, so I don’t know what I’m missing anyway.

The general strategy for lacquer was:

Apply 5-6 coats of lacquer in one day, each coat about 30-60 minutes apart.
Let the lacquer dry for a few days or more.
Sand down with increasing levels of sandpaper, starting at 600, then 800, then 1500, then 2000.
Repeat.

I really struggled though to get the glass finish I was hoping for. The mistake I made was applying too many coats of lacquer after sanding it down with too fine of a sandpaper. I ended up with some dried layers that did not stick and ended up peeling off. It took a lot of sanding work to smooth the body out after that, and I was worried I’d go all the way through and ruin the paint. Luckily that didn’t happen.

Next time I’d sand with 600 and 800, then just buff and wax it after the 3rd set of lacquer coats after 800.

So the end result is: Awesome paint job, lacquer is not quite as glossy as I’d like but I still think it looks great.

For the neck, I decided I wanted to just go with raw wood look for the head. The back of the neck I always knew I would not finish. This is a personal preference thing, but I don’t like a finished neck. My fingers don’t slide along the neck the way I’d like if it is finished. But I thought the head would look good with a finish on it.

I created a logo with my “brand” name (“Vybe”) and my “model” name (“Sapphire”). I chose the name Sapphire because a) it is similar to the Ibanez JEM (sapphire => gem => JEM), and b) because the sapphire is the birthstone of my most favorite person of all, my lovely wife Amber. So in a way it is named for her.

I had clear stickers made with the logo on them. I attached one to the head to display the logo. Here’s the finished head, lacquered with the same clear gloss polyurethane lacquer used on the body, and with D’Addario Auto-Trim Locking Tuning Machines mounted. These are my favorite locking tuning machines.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for the back of the neck, so I did another experiment. With one of the practice pieces of wood I had left over from the hydro-dipping experiments, I sanded it down with 400 grit sandpaper and then divided it into three sections. In one section, I tried a matte finish polyurethane lacquer. In another section, I finished it with two coats of tung oil. And the third I left as just raw wood. After everything was dry, I liked the tung oil finish best, so that’s how I finished the back of the neck. It turned out really smooth and fast.

After waiting for a month for the lacquer on the body to completely dry, we finally arrived at the big day when I could start putting the guitar together. The neck was a snug fit and required a lot of work to get it sunk all the way down in the pocket, but I got it in there. Attaching the fretboard was pretty easy, as was mounting and soldering the rest of the wiring. The Floyd Rose was harder. I had Amber order this kit without all the holes pre-drilled on the body, thinking that I could just handle it and save a few bucks. Having done this, I would now advise against it. In particular, the two screws that hold the tremolo spring claw underneath the body are really difficult to drill properly without the right tools. I had to buy a special tool to make this work but still had to compromise a bit here.

When the rough assembly was finally done, I took it downtown to a music shop and had their guitar tech set it up.

It looks awesome. It sounds awesome. It is awesome. The Vybe Sapphire.

Basic Kit: BYOGuitar JEM Style Kit
Modifications:
- DiMarzio Gravity Storm pickups (neck, bridge)
- DiMarzio Fast Track middle pickup
- D’Addario Auto-Trim Locking Tuning Machines
- Original Floyd Rose Tremolo (not the “licensed Floyd Rose” tremolo in the kit)

Thirty Other Great Rock Bands

Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

March was Hair Metal March. April was Classic Rock April. For May I featured 30 other great rock bands - awesome bands that didn’t fit well into the other two categories.

Here are the 30 other great rock bands for May:

Alice In Chains Album: “Dirt” Song: “Rooster”
Alter Bridge Album: “Blackbird” Song: “Blackbird” Bonus Song: “When I’m Gone”
Collective Soul Album: “Collective Soul (Blue)” Song: “Shine” Bonus Song: “Tremble for My Beloved”
The Cult Album: “Sonic Temple” Song: “Sweet Soul Sister”
Dream Theater Album: “Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory” Song: “Octavarium” Bonus Song: “The Count of Tuscany” Bonus Song 2: “The Looking Glass”
Fates Warning Album: “Parallels” Song: “Eye To Eye”
Foo Fighters Album: “The Color and the Shape” Song: “Everlong”
Guns N’ Roses Album: “Use Your Illusion” Song: “November Rain” Bonus Song: “Sweet Child of Mine”
INXS Album: “Listen Like Thieves” Song: “What You Need”
Iron Maiden Album: “Somewhere In Time” Song: “Wasted Years”
Joe Satriani Album: “Surfing with the Alien” Song: “Time Machine”
Judas Priest Album: “Turbo” Song: “Turbo Lover”
Kamelot Album: “The Black Halo” Song: “The Haunting”
The Killers Album: “Hot Fuss” Best Song: “All These Things That I’ve Done”
Living Colour Song: “Cult of Personality”
Mammoth WVH Album: “Mammoth WVH” Song: “Don’t Back Down”
Megadeth Album: “So Far, So Good … So What?” Song: “A Tout Le Monde”
Metallica Album: “Master of Puppets” Song: “Disposable Heroes”
Nirvana Album: “Nevermind” Song: “Come As You Are”
Queensrÿche Album: “Operation: Mindcrime” Song: “Eyes of a Stranger” Bonus Song: “Take Hold of the Flame” Bonus Song 2: “Silent Lucidity”
Savatage Album: “Edge of Thorns” Song: “Edge of Thorns”
Scorpions Album: “Blackout” Song: “Blackout”
Slash Album: “World on Fire” Song: “Back from Cali”
Soundgarden Album: “Superunknown” Song: “Black Hole Sun”
Steve Vai Album: “Passion and Warfare” Song: “Building the Church” Bonus Song: “Teeth of the Hydra”
Symphony X Album: “V: The New Mythology Suite” Song: “Paradise Lost” Bonus Song: “Church of the Machine”
Tool Album: “Lateralus” Song: “The Grudge”
U2 Album: “The Joshua Tree” Song: “Where the Streets Have No Name”
Y&T Album: “In Rock We Trust” Song: “This Time”
Yngwie Malmsteen Album: “Trilogy” Song: “You Don’t Remember, I’ll Never Forget”

Thirty Great Classic Rock Bands

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Last month was Hair Metal March. This month was Classic Rock April. These are the people who brought us great music and paved the way for all the good music that has come since. These are the people who are certainly a bit miffed at what’s happened with modern music. These are the people to whom we owe the responsibility of bringing the good stuff back.

Starting in April, I tried also picking a “best album” although I admit sometimes I skipped it.

Here are the 30 great classic rock bands for April:

AC/DC Album: “Back in Black” Song: “Back in Black”
Aerosmith Album: “Rocks” Song: “Sweet Emotion”
Bad Company Album: “Bad Company” Song: “Can’t Get Enough”
Blue Oyster Cult Song: “Don’t Fear the Reaper”
Boston Album: “Boston” Song: “More Than A Feeling” Bonus Song: “Hollyann”
The Cars Album: “Candy-O” Song: “Magic”
Cheap Trick Song: “Tonight It’s You”
Creedence Clearwater Revival Song: “Lodi”
Deep Purple Album: “In Rock” Song: “Child In Time”
ELO Album: “Discovery” Song: “Don’t Bring Me Down”
Foreigner Album: “4” Song: “Juke Box Hero”
Genesis Song: “Misunderstanding”
Golden Earring Song: “Twilight Zone”
Heart Album: “Bad Animals” Fake Best Song: “Dog & Butterfly” Actual Best Song: “Who Will You Run To”
Journey Album: “Frontiers” Song: “Escape”
Kansas Album: “Leftoverture” Song: “Carry On Wayward Son”
Kiss Album: “Destroyer” Song: “God Gave Rock and Roll To You”
Led Zeppelin Album: “IV” Song: “Stairway to Heaven” Bonus Song: “Rock and Roll”
Montrose Song: “Rock Candy”
Night Ranger Album: “Dawn Patrol” Song: “Sister Christian”
Pink Floyd Album: “The Wall” Song: “Comfortably Numb”
The Police Album: “Synchronicity” Song: “Wrapped Around Your Finger”
Queen Song: “Bohemian Rhapsody”
REO Speedwagon Album: “Hi Infidelity” Song: “Keep On Loving You”
Rush Album: “Moving Pictures” Song: “Tom Sawyer”
Sammy Hagar Album: “Voa” Song: “I Can’t Drive 55”
Styx Album: “The Grand Illusion” Song: “Renegade”
Van Halen Album: “OU812” Song: “A.F.U (Naturally Wired)” Bonus Song: “Jump”
The Who Album: “Who’s Next” Song: “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
ZZ Top Album: “Eliminator” Song: “Rough Boy”

Thirty Great Hair Metal Bands

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This month on Facebook I declared March “Hair Metal Month” and throughout the month we celebrated hair metal by spotlighting 30 different hair metal bands.

In the world today there sure is a lot of conflict. We had this in the 80s also, but then hair metal was born, and within a few years the Berlin Wall came down, the USSR dissolved, and things got a lot better. Maybe we should ditch all this modern garbage on the radio - and country, in particular - and go back to the really good stuff.

Anyway, here are the 30 bands, and my vote for their “best” song:

Britny Fox - “Long Way to Love”
Bon Jovi - “Wanted Dead or Alive”
Cinderella - “Don’t Know What You Got (‘Til It’s Gone)”
Def Leppard - “Rock of Ages”
Dokken - “Alone Again”
E’nuff Z’nuff - “Fly High Michelel”
Europe - “Rock the Night”
Firehouse - “When I Look Into Your Eyes”
Great White - “House of Broken Love”
Hurricane - “Over the Edge”
Kix - “Tear Down the Walls”
Lillian Axe - “The Day I Met You”
Mötley Crüe - “Wild Side”
MSG - “Gimme Your Love”
Ozzy Osbourne - “Flying High Again”
Poison - “Cry Tough”
Quiet Riot - “Come On Feel the Noise”
Ratt - “You’re In Love”
Roxy Blue - “Times Are Changin’”
Saints & Sinners - “We Belong”
Skid Row - “18 and Life”
Steel Dragon - “We All Die Young”
Steelheart - “I’ll Never Let You Go”
Stryper - “Calling On You”
Telsa - “Love Song”
Twisted Sister - “I Wanna Rock”
Warrant - “I Saw Red”
White Lion - “Wait”
Whitesnake - “Crying in the Rain”
Winger - “Madalaine”

Remembering Edward Van Halen

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We lost Eddie Van Halen last week, on Tuesday, October 6, 2020.

I’m not wallowing in the depths of despair or anything like that. I never even met the guy, although I wish I had. But I admit this has been a lot harder for me than I originally thought it would be.

I didn’t really grow up listening to Van Halen, ironically. The first Van Halen song I knew of was Jump. I would have been about 12 or 13 at the time. I heard it from time to time on the radio. I knew of the album 1984, but didn’t ever buy it - something about an angel baby smoking a cigarette on the cover made me think it would end up in the garbage if my parents ever saw it, so I never owned it in junior high or high school.

Thus, for me, 5150 was the first real exposure I had to Van Halen, followed by OU812. I was on a mission in Spain for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge came out, so I didn’t listen to that until after I got back from my mission and went to college.

So, since I didn’t really follow the band much before my college years, and since we didn’t really have the Internet back then, it wasn’t until I was in my 20s when I learned that Sammy Hagar had not always been the lead singer of Van Halen, that David Lee Roth had previously been with the band for many years, that they’d released not just 1984 but several albums with David Lee Roth as lead vocalist, and that a lot of people had been pretty upset about this change.

It was while in college that I had a roommate who played guitar, who taught me a bit about it as well, and taught me how to listen for the guitar work in the songs I liked. It was then that I really got turned on to Van Halen. I bought every album released up until that time and listened to them all until I knew every song by heart. I came to realize what an amazing guitar player was Eddie Van Halen.

It was he who inspired me to learn to play guitar - not to become like him, which I’ve always considered a bridge too far, but to learn to appreciate the guitar. I love music, and I love the electric guitar. I think it is a fascinating instrument. And I don’t think there’s anyone, ever, who has done more with that instrument than Eddie Van Halen.

Through over 25 years of growing music appreciation I’ve come to understand even more about just how impactful Eddie was. This has taught me to appreciate him not just as a guitarist, but as a legend, a musician, an innovator, and an influencer.

Let’s take those in reverse order.

EVH The Influencer

I don’t think Eddie invented every technique he made popular, like two-handed tapping, the use of harmonics, or the use of the tremolo (whammy bar), for example. But until he came along nobody knew what to do with them or why they needed them.

A large part of music in the ’80s was hard rock and heavy metal, and Eddie Van Halen had a huge influence on ’80s hard rock and heavy metal. Every decent hard rock and heavy metal band had to have a guitar player that could shred. That sound was defined by Eddie Van Halen. Because of him, guitarists knew why they needed a Floyd Rose or when they should use two-handed tapping. And they absolutely had to be great at guitar solos. The gold standard? Eddie Van Halen. It’s said that many bands when auditioning new guitarists would require them to play Eruption or Cathedral or some other Van Halen solo as part of the audition.

Even their equipment was influenced by Eddie Van Halen. Before Eddie came along, solid-body electrics came in two basic forms: The Gibson Les Paul and the Fender Stratocaster. It was Eddie who thought, “I want something that sounds fuller and heavier, like the Les Paul, but is lighter like the Strat.” So he just combined the two together into a guitar of his own creation. This monstrosity became the most recognizable electric guitar on the planet, the guitar Eddie called Frankenstein. You can buy an official replica from Fender online today for $40,000. But if you don’t want an exact replica, or don’t have $40,000 to spend on a guitar, you can settle for one influenced by this style. They are known as “Superstrats” and basically every well known electric guitar manufacturer makes them - Ibanez, Jackson, Charvel, Schecter, Paul Reed Smith, and ESP just to name a few. They make them because Eddie Van Halen told us we needed one.

Next came the tremolo. Eddie wanted a tremolo on his guitar. However, up until this point these had mostly been used for generating a bit of vibrato. Eddie’s vision was much grander - to use this to generate massive pitch changes. Tremolos of the day weren’t designed for that, couldn’t handle it without completely going out of tune. Eddie collaborated with Floyd Rose to develop a tremolo system that could bend the pitch several steps higher, drop the pitch so low that the strings would crash onto the pickup heads, and come back into tune, every time. A Floyd Rose, or a tremolo inspired by the Floyd Rose, is almost standard equipment on a Superstrat.

Then came the pickups. Eddie was looking for a warmer, fuller sound out of the pickups available at the time. He concluded that maybe the reason the sound was too harsh and tinny from the pickups he had was because the coils were vibrating too much. To prevent this, he decided to try dipping the pickup in melted wax. Who knows how many pickups he destroyed trying this out, but eventually he managed to get a wax that didn’t also melt the pickup. And it worked. This became known as a “potted” pickup, and was key to Eddie’s trademark sound. Today, every significant manufacturer of electric guitar pickups has potted pickups, because Eddie taught us all that we wanted them.

EVH The Innovator

Eddie Van Halen was a great innovator for the electric guitar. In addition to those just mentioned, he also came up with a lot of other guitar innovations - body shapes, neck shapes, electronics, and more. I own several electric guitars, but my most favorite guitar to play is my EVH Wolfgang. It is lightweight and super easy to play. Eddie’s innovative touches are everywhere on that guitar - the neck profile, the head, the body, the pickups - all working together to make it amazing to play.

In fact, Eddie holds three patents for guitar innovations - and could probably have obtained many more.

But to me the most innovative thing he ever did was to revolutionize what we knew of as rock music.

The first time I heard Eruption I was, of course, blown away. Still am every time I hear it. But to really get the full experience, try spending a week or so listening to rock music from that time period, the mid-to-late ’70s - Led Zeppelin, early Journey, Deep Purple, Aerosmith, The Cars, even Kiss. Then listen to Van Halen’s self-titled debut album starting from the beginning. The sound is nothing like anything else that was going on at that time. It was heavier and louder and yet happier and more joyful-sounding than anything else. Eddie was doing things that none of his contemporaries were doing - and there were a lot of really great guitar players at that time. The sound was unlike anything before it, and everyone after that was trying to figure out how to get it.

EVH The Musician

I once heard or read an interview with Eddie Van Halen that stuck with me forever. Paraphrasing of course, he said something to the effect that while learning to play at his level was very difficult, it was much more difficult to learn how to write a good song. For him, a good song is one that appeals to a broad range of people, is instantly likeable and memorable, and doesn’t get old quickly. He said that writing a song like that was much harder than learning to play at a virtuoso level.

This, I believe, is Eddie’s most underrated talent. I listen to a lot of great music, and there are a lot of great guitar players in there. Some really incredible ones are guys like Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen, Joe Satriani, and John Petrucci. But to get into this music, you have to want it. It’s an investment. Dream Theater, for example, the band Petrucci plays for, is one of my all-time favorite bands. But appreciating Dream Theater is an investment. It isn’t for everyone. Petrucci plays the guitar beautifully and he is an amazing talent, but Dream Theater’s music isn’t as approachable as Van Halen’s.

In contrast, Van Halen’s music is incredibly mainstream. There is no such thing as a fan of rock music that does not like Van Halen. Second to Eddie’s talent for writing really great songs was his talent for writing amazing, complex, unique guitar solos that fit the song and support it, rather than detract from it. For many great guitarists, the song is a means for them to play their solo. For Eddie it’s the other way around - the solo is there to make the song great.

Consider the song Jump. It is hard to imagine that there’s a person alive between the ages of 8 and 80 that hasn’t heard that song (although I’m sure there are, those poor souls). Jump is a great, great song. It ticks all the boxes - catchy, easy to hear, uplifting, relatable to non-musicians and technically interesting to aficionados, and you can listen to it again and again. I’ll be listening to that song until the day I die.

As great a guitarist as he was, Eddie was an even better songwriter and musician, which is why I rate him as the absolute best rock guitarist of all time. Not “all time so far”. I don’t think we’ll ever have another like him.

EVH The Legend

The stories about Eddie Van Halen are many and astounding. He’s the Chuck Norris of rock guitar.

Yes, he contributed the guitar solo of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”, uncredited, in about 30 minutes of studio time, much of which was rearranging the song to make it better. The rumor is he did the solo in one take. I also read somewhere, once, that he did the entire song “Big Fat Money” on the album “Balance” in one take.

Yes, they stipulated that their dressing room should have a bowl of M&Ms, brown ones excluded, just to make sure the organizers were paying attention.

Yes, he manufactured his own guitar using a $50 throwaway body - and played that same guitar for years and years, recorded multiple records with it, and used it for countless concerts.

Yes, he used to turn away from the audience while playing Eruption live, so nobody would figure out how he was doing what he was doing.

Yes, he once tried to get into Kiss and was not offered the job because Gene Simmons told Eddie he would be “too big” for Kiss.

Yes, he initially played the drums, with Alex on guitar - but switched to guitar when Alex kept playing Eddie’s drum set.

Yes, he became a very accomplished pianist at a young age, and regularly and repeatedly won many piano competitions - despite never, ever in his life learning how to read music.

We lost Eddie on October 6, 2020, but he left us with twelve albums full of music and the memory of his infectious smile he always seemed to wear while he would play the most complex guitar passages with seemingly effortless ease. The world of music is a better place because Eddie Van Halen lived, and I’ll be forever grateful for that.

RIP EVH 1955-2020

How To Listen to Good Music

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago we moved into a great new neighborhood. We love our new neighborhood and our new home, and have made lots of great friends. Many of them are a good 10-15 years younger than my wife and I. Hanging out with them makes us feel young again, so that’s a plus.

However, it occurs to me that since they are all 10-15 years younger than us, that means they were born in the 80’s and grew up in the 90’s, and as a result by the time they got into high school they were living in a time when pretty much all music sucked, and for the most part it has been that way ever since. Oh, there have been some good bands, if you look hard enough, but not all that much of anything good since grunge disappeared.

(And don’t say “What about country?” Can you think of a single supremely talented country music guitarist or drummer? How this stuff ever became popular is beyond me, but it is an indictment of the entire USA that we allowed this to happen. I mean, if you actually like country, why are you even reading this blog?)

Anyway. I realized I have an obligation to my friends to help them out.

This was made even more apparent the other night when (I’m not making this up) one of my friends texted me and said, “I have a favor to ask. Today, as we all jammed to Def Leppard in our mini van, I realized that we need more musicians that can shred a guitar and drums. But I was not indoctrinated in the culture as a young kid. I need a school of rock, you might say. But I need a teacher.”

“I’m happy to oblige,” I said.

So here goes. Here’s my help to my friend, my other friends, and all of the rest of you out there who don’t even know the difference between Van Halen with David Lee Roth and Van Halen with Sammy Hagar. Keep in mind, this is a starting off point, not a definitive list of every great artist, song, and album.

Def Leppard

Def Leppard is a great place to begin. Def Leppard is a nice mix of heavy metal, hard rock, and arena rock. My friend started with Hysteria which is a fabulous album, and their best selling - although, in my opinion not actually their best. I told my friend to get Pyromania also, if for no other reason to have Rock of Ages - in my opinion, Def Leppard’s signature song.

Other greats:

From High and Dry: “Bringin’ On the Heartbreak”

From Adrenalize: “Let’s Get Rocked”, “Heaven Is”

From Euphoria: “Paper Sun”

From Def Leppard (self titled): “Let’s Go”

Journey

My next recommendation: Journey. Journey had almost disappeared into rock legend history, when suddenly this TV show called Glee became popular, and they sang this amazing Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin’” a lot, and it became the most downloaded song on iTunes. I recommend starting your Journey journey with the albums Escape and Frontiers, both are amazing.

Other greats:

From Departure: “Any Way You Want It”, “Line of Fire”

From Greatest Hits: “Only the Young”, “Ask the Lonely”

From Raised on Radio: “Be Good To Yourself”

Van Halen

Next is Van Halen. Van Halen has released a lot of really great albums with both David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar, and I don’t feel compelled to pick a preference. However, the music is different with one versus the other. Eddie says this is because Sammy’s a better singer…

Anyway, here’s a good smattering of Van Halen songs to introduce you to the world’s greatest guitar player and his band:

From Van Halen I: “Runnin’ With the Devil”, “Eruption”, “You Really Got Me”, “Ice Cream Man”
From Women and Children First: “And The Cradle Will Rock”, “Everybody Wants Some” (skip the last few seconds of this song)
From Fair Warning: “Mean Street”, “Hear About It Later”, “Unchained”
From Diver Down: “Cathedral”
From 1984: “1984”, “Jump”, “Panama”, “Drop Dead Legs”, “Hot for Teacher”
From 5150: “Good Enough”, “Why Can’t This Be Love”, “Dreams”, “Summer Nights”, “Best of Both Worlds”, “Love Walks In”, “5150”
From OU812: “When It’s Love”, “AFU”, “Cabo Wabo”, “Sucker in a Three Piece”
From For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge: “Pound Cake”, “In ‘N’ Out”, “Right Now”, “316”, “Top of the World”

Random Selections

From this point forward I’m going to kind of pick and choose some great sons from great bands. Keep in mind, all my new friends are youngsters. As such I need to protect them from adult language and mature themes. Some well known songs by some of these bands might not show up in the list.

GNR

Guns N’ Roses is one. They emerged during the height of hair metal but really brought it all back to it’s roots in rock and blues.

From Appetite for Destruction: “Paradise City”, “Sweet Child o’ Mine”
From Lies Lies Lies: “Patience”
From Use Your Illusion: “Don’t Cry” (both versions), “November Rain”, “The Garden”, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, “Estranged”

Bon Jovi

Bon Jovi also comes to mind. Bon Jovi kinda got lumped into the hair metal scene in the mid 80’s but really I’d call them more of an arena rock or hard rock band, at least up until Jon’s “creative” phase, but we aren’t gonna talk about that.

From Slippery When Wet: “Let It Rock”, “You Give Love a Bad Name”, “Wanted Dead or Alive”, “Raise Your Hands”
From New Jersey: “Lay Your Hands on Me”, “Bad Medicine”, “Homebound Train”, “Stick To Your Guns”, “99 in the Shade”
From Keep the Faith: “In These Arms”
From Crush: “It’s My Life”

Buy Their Greatest Hits

There are a handful of other bands that round out a good intro to 80’s rock. With these bands, the easiest way to go is to start with the greatest hits album and see if you like them or if you have poor taste.

Boston
The Cars
Sammy Hagar (called “Unboxed”)
Foreigner
REO Speedwagon
Styx
Rush (called “Chronicles”)

Now Where?

Where we go from here really depends. For example, if you liked Rush a lot, we could head in the Progressive Metal direction a bit and try Queensrÿche, Dream Theater, and Iron Maiden. But there’s no point if you didn’t much care for Rush. If you liked Sammy Hagar, we can head a bit more in the hair metal direction and try some selections from great bands like Poison, Tesla, Ratt, Mötley Crüe, and Dokken, not to mention so many great obscure 80’s metal bands - but again, no point if you didn’t like Sammy.

New neighborhood friends, there’s so much great music you missed out on, and I’m happy to help you out here. Let me know where we need to go next.

On Being Busy

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“Sorry I can’t - I’m too busy…”

“I wish I could, but I’m so busy…”

“I’ll try to get back to you; I’m really busy…”

We’ve all used phrases like this before. Have you ever stopped to think about what it means?

Well, don’t worry about it - I did it for you. So now all you have to do is read the blog post!

When you tell someone that you are too busy, what you actually mean is this: There is nothing in your currently planned list of activities that you consider to be lower in priority than the thing you are being asked to do.

That’s it. That’s exactly what it means.

You could just as honestly answer like this: “I’d like to help, but the thing you are asking me to do is not as important as anything else I intend to do with my time.” We don’t actually say that because it sounds hurtful, whereas saying “I’m busy” makes it sound like the problem is outside of us and beyond our control, and that makes it an easier pill to swallow.

Sometimes you actually are too busy. To stop and help might mean missing a very important prior commitment. Or to go over and watch a football game with your friend might mean not helping your child study for her math test.

However, sometimes we say “I’m too busy” when what we really mean is, “Doing this thing you are asking me to do is not as important to me as binge-watching my current favorite cupcake-bakeoff show for three hours tonight.”

I’ve come to realize this, and I don’t get offended if you tell me you are too busy for whatever I’m asking of you. It is actually completely okay with me if you tell me you are too busy, and it should be okay with anyone else. We should always be free to use this phrase to gently tell someone “This is not as important to me as what I’d planned to use my time for” by saying we are too busy.

It’s just important that we be aware of what we really mean when we say it.

Open Development and the ASF

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At Adobe we are working on adopting something we call Open Development. The idea is similar to the concept of “Inner Source” as first coined by Tim O’Reilly, a moniker for describing software projects that are internal (i.e. not open source) but within company walls and networks these projects behave like open source projects.

When Adobe acquired Day Software in 2010, we also acquired a company with a rich and deep history in open source, particularly within the Apache Software Foundation. Open Development was introduced to help us learn how these projects function within our own walls.

I use the term “we” loosely here; at the time I was at a different company, so I wasn’t involved in any of this. When I joined a few years ago my primary assignment was to become familiar with Apache Jackrabbit Oak, a project that is foundational to the product I work on. Through my work on Oak and eventual earning of PMC membership and committer rights I’ve learned a lot more about open source projects and the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Pretty much every human on the planet has no idea just how much of what they value in their life is due to the existence and success of the ASF. You could say I’m a fan.

The ASF provides some pretty clear information on their view of the software world and how project governance should be handled, which they call “The Apache Way”. Similarly, there are guidelines for Open Development projects - but in spite of this I’ve seen a lot of variance in the levels of “open” in Open Development. To borrow a bit from “Animal Farm”, all Open Development projects are open, but some are more open than others.

My involvement with the ASF while employed at Adobe carries a bit of serendipity in another way. I’ve been having this growing feeling for at least the past ten years that commercial software development is fundamentally broken in some very serious and pervasive ways. The ASF presents a stark contrast to this, with a track record of delivering thousands of releases useful, high-quality software across hundreds of projects over the past 20 years. As I learn about Open Development, I’m starting to see what I think are key differences between how ASF projects run and how they run inside companies - not just at Adobe, but everywhere (or at least everywhere I’ve worked).

The consequence is that I’m trying to become more involved in our Open Development adoption efforts. We might unlock a key to improving software development in a meaningful way.

Curating Communities in Open Development

Fri, 14 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some of the key characteristics of an open development project have to do with things that are kind of like checkbox items, like having a code repository that everyone in the company can see, or having a project web page. Others are more nuanced and have to do with how the project behaves. But just like the checkbox items, if you don’t do them your project isn’t really open, no matter what else you might be doing that makes it appear open.

One of these is a crucial element of any open development project. Without it the project is not an “open development” project even if the code is freely visible. It’s this: There must be time built into project planning to actually curate and manage the project.

This is best described with a counter-example. Suppose you are working on Project A. Elsewhere in the company, another team is working on Project B. Project B has a dependency on Project A, and in particular there are certain capabilities Project B needs in Project A in order to deliver Project B. Any dependency poses a risk, but the members of Project B notice that your project is an open development project, meaning they can see the code, check it out, and submit pull requests. This makes the members of Project B a bit more relaxed. Their success isn’t wholly dependent on Project A - they are empowered to implement the changes they need themselves, if needed.

And, after a few weeks go by, this is what they do. They needed a new API in your project that didn’t exist, so someone from Project B implemented the new API and submitted a pull request to Project A.

And then nothing happens.

Why is this? Simple: Everyone in Project A is fully tasked with backlog items that are given higher priority. Nobody in Project B has a say in the prioritization. Everyone in Project A is so busy with their assigned work that nobody has the time to review a pull request and collaborate with this external contributor from Project B to eventually get this code into Project A.

If you work in software you can easily see how this can happen. It’s important to separate the net result from the details. The net result is that outside contributors cannot actually contribute to Project A, even though it is an open development project by the letter of the law. If a third party can’t get their quality contribution considered for inclusion, your project isn’t open - and saying it is open doesn’t change the fact.

This phenomenon is not unique to open development projects, by the way. Any true open source project can suffer the same effects if project members do not make the time available to manage their community.

So if you are a member of an open development project, I suggest there are a couple of things you should do.

First off, in order for the goals to actually be achieved you need to ensure that time is allotted in your planning for curation of the project itself - reviewing pull requests and working with outside contributors, answering questions about your project, improving the project webpage or online documentation, etc. There are many ways this could be done; here are two:

Decide as a team on some percentage of the team’s time that will be set aside for this purpose. For example, if it is 10% of your time, then if you have five engineers at 40 hours per week, for a total of 200 available hours, you know that 20 of those hours cannot be used in project planning because they are accepted overhead for managing the project.
Assign someone each iteration to take on this task - it can be a rotating assignment. That person would then have fewer assignments for the iteration with time set aside (one day per week?) to manage the project.

Second, you need to quantify your responsiveness window. Decide how long is acceptable for a pull request to remain unaddressed or a question on a mailing list unanswered. Make sure you operate within your guidelines.

Finally, you need to make it part of your definition of success. For example, if you operate in two week sprints with a sprint review at the end, one part of the sprint review should be reviewing the requests made of your project from the outside - pull requests, questions on a mailing list, etc. If you have external requests that have exceeded your responsiveness window or, even worse, are still unaddressed at sprint review, you should call that a failed sprint. If you aren’t willing to do that, it isn’t actually important to you to be open, no matter what else you say.

One final thought: Beware the anti-pattern of simply making your project open so anyone can contribute to the codebase directly. It may be tempting to say “Well, let’s just allow anyone to commit changes.” But that’s not how open source projects work, and it shouldn’t be how open development projects work either. Requiring simple gates to maintain control of your project’s quality, purpose, and vision is a good thing. Besides, you aren’t saving yourself any time doing this, anyway. You might save a bit today, but when your project becomes unmaintainable due to all the uninformed changes you’ll spend eons trying to sort it out. Just build project curation into your plan and it will make a huge positive difference.