Here’s my setlist, same for Lawrence and Crete. Most of the notes are guitar-related – which pickup, which effects – with a few arrangement notes.

Gabe / Staircase / I Would is the key transition, gear-wise. Everything before Gabe is in standard tuning, with my 6th and 5th strings running to the octave down amp. I Would and after is drop D (really drop C#, we tuned a half-step down) and only the 6th string running the octave down.

Gabe is in drop D, and also has a special delay setting. So I would tune down and set up the delay for Gabe, then quickly return the delay to normal for Staircase (first old tune of the set), then switch octave down cables for I Would. (Any song from the 2nd set could have gone in the space after Staircase.)

Encore wasn’t written, but it was Berlin and Stand By Me.

Scott found the email where I first pitched resuming h&s and working on what became V for Voice. The Mars Lights EP mentioned is Only Bang Is Bang. Here’s the email exchange.

On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 9:38 AM, howie wrote:

Just checking in. How’s school / home?

I’ve been on a writing kick… picking away at demos for the next Sally M/S Ride joint and Sneaky Sneaky Snakes… had a wild hair to listen to the set of demos I’ve kind of set aside for us this morning, and they’re sounding pretty good to me. They’re mostly instrumental, a few have vocal concepts laid down but not lyrics or anything.

IDK, I guess – what’s your capacity for a full-on collaboration, with no deadline? We’d figure out arrangements and instrumentation together. I’m imagining you’d bring everything you’ve got – sax, percussion, Sleepover-style key leads and textures, your Hush/mr|ten-style key textures – I’ll bring everything I’ve ever done, and we’ll slowly pick away at a spacy, jazzy, art-rock record.

I think I’ve mentioned it in the abstract to you before, but for some reason this morning it’s all just seeming more real and possible. I’m realizing that the demos won’t be as hard to finish as I might have thought, given my success writing some other stuff and figuring out a more regular writing process. And maybe with your new job and settling in to it, you have an idea of how interested you are. And I mean, this will probably take a couple or three years, and I’m OK with that, I’m just excited about the end product. For us and the people who care, I think we have an incredibly cool record in us.

Everything’s alright here, work’s fine, CA got a new job at KU about a month ago so she’s commuting (sort of bummer) but she loves the job (awesome). Mars Lights mixes our new EP at a pro studio here in town on Sunday (we recorded at home).

-h

On Nov 5, 2014 at 9:05 PM, Scott wrote:

a RESOUNDING YES to all sentences stated above. I am super pumped about this idea, and would really enjoy the project. I look forward to more ideas/brainstorms/music etc.!!! hope to catch up soon! -SM

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Full lyrics below the fold…

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3 August 2019, Saturday – Lawrence, KS – howie&scott at Kaw Valley Public House with Wild Eye. No cover, 7:30 PM (Wild Eye) / 8:30 PM (h&s), no age restriction but someone in your party should be of age to buy drinks probably out of respect for KVPH’s hosting hospitality!

9 August 2019, Saturday – Crete, NE – howie&scott at The Brew House. No cover, two sets (7:30 & 8:30), all ages. FB event page.

Several well-written reviews and features in Pitchfork lately, including those on Rema, Freddie Gibbs & Madlib, Sigur Ros, Shellac, and Ray Charles, have me realizing that the site is on something of a hot streak.

I’ve read the site for close to twenty years, and watched it work through phases of zine-like underground discovery and critique, breathless mid-aughts NYC-centrism (remember when Cults were going to be huge?), and overly woke poptimism.

The recent standout pieces – and there are many more – evidence a willingness and secure vulnerability to take all music on its own terms and talk about what’s great, and isn’t, about it. The poptimist revolution is complete, the old hierarchies and canons have been dispersed*, and we got the good version of the poptimist future; the one that circles back and includes the best of the old favorites and finds new gems that had been overlooked in previous critical structures.

(For another blog; perhaps this is only possible after music’s cultural influence recedes, lifting the weight off of opinions about it)

* Narrowly within music criticism, I mean. Political and social hierarchies remain, and Pitchfork isn’t immune from reflecting them

Long story short I’m loving some Ray Charles this morning, because of Pitchfork.

We have re-launched MR|signal, our reverse-chronological label-plus-extras compilation, on Bandcamp.

Like the weather on the great plains, if you don’t like what you’re hearing just wait five minutes.

As of today I’ve gone about halfway back to the start of all this music; the other half is coming later this summer, and I’ll throw on some of the really old h&s and Shacker pre-MFR stuff in the spirit of those extras (I’m enjoying having “Be Still” and Five Star Crush represented in this version of the comp).

Because people ask, what I’ve contributed to each song is below the fold:

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I impulse-bought a drum machine (far left in the picture) and set up a new synth recording rig to do some rhythm-focused pieces. It’s an Arturia DrumBrute Impact and I’m very happy with it, especially with the unquantized sequencing and randomization features.

Some of the ideas I’ll be working on are little polyrhythms I’ve written down over the years from tapping on my knees and whatnot. Others will be exploring the extremes of the settings of the DrumBrute, or whatever patch ideas occur to me. The MS-20 is there and patched up to just add a bit of pitched sound, mostly blips and bloops and sweeps more than Western scale-type stuff.

This will end up being the next-but-6th or something Night Mode record. We have a wild amount of stuff stacked up. Roughly:

• Trio record “Load Exceedance” out this fall, with 2 alternate takes
• Drew’s 2nd solo effort “Gentleman Scientist” out this fall
• My 2nd solo effort “Your Pain Matters” with the Come In Alone / Stuck On You single, aiming for February 2020
• Three collaboration records exploring the different possible duos among our trio; Howie-Damon (90% done, very drone-y), Damon-Drew (various options here, Damon’s sent Drew a couple different things to overdub on I think), Drew-Howie (double LP recorded live over the past couple months)
• Who knows what the other guys will have ready by this point – likely 2021 – but I have two more *already* 90% in the can, “Working Bears or Barely Working” and “Only Mostly Dead”
• Yikes! Making synth records is super fun

V for Voice out 8/3 on Bandcamp and major streaming platforms

howie&scott performing:

8/3 – Lawrence, KS – Kaw Valley Public House

8/9 – Crete, NE – The Brew House

More details to follow. -h&s

Get in touch, I’m designing one and will build a run later in the summer/fall!

It’s based on the fOXX Tone Machine, but I have a few twists in mind. Haven’t tried them yet – I’m just getting pretty much a straight clone up on the breadboard for now – so more details after I’ve done the exploration.

Scott was down yesterday to put his on the record. Show announcements & release date coming, as soon as later this week. No later than August!

I made tone stack boxes for the effects loops of the VHT Special 6 Ultra amps Drew and I have.

I love these little amps but the tone-shaping controls unusual and don’t work great with my main guitar (Epi 345). The amp just can’t get bright enough, and it’s a bit thick / congested in the mids with no way to dial that out.

It has a completely fixed FMV (AKA TMB) tone stack (the sort most amps, including classic Fenders and Marshalls, have), with a guitar-style Tone control, a “Depth” which adjusts the frequencies amplified by the power stage from full-range to emphasizing treble, and a “Texture” which offers two levels of something like presence reduction (or no reduction) (it’s not a normal presence circuit, it’s just a capacitor dropping high treble to ground post power transformer).

This box, which gets inserted into the amp’s effects loop, is a low pass filter (bass) and high pass filter (treble) with variable cutoff frequencies in parallel, and a balance/blend control. (So, a super tricked-out Muff tone stack in pedal nerd terms.) The intended use case is dropping a mid notch wherever you want it, plus offering additional bass/treble balancing flexibility, and it does that. But it also does some cool bandpassy/mid-bumped things when you cross the filter cutoffs over each other.

I anticipate mostly using this amp+box for overdubs; record a main guitar part, then dial this in for a complimentary tone to record the overdub. But just by adjusting the box the amp can do a decent Fender-y clean, Marshall-y crunch, Vox-y treble thing, etc., so it could definitely see duty as the main amp on songs that call for those types of sounds.

The general principles in the box should have wide applicability to other amps and pedal designs, but the particular component values I used have been optimized for these specific amps. I don’t have any other amps with loops to test on, but I’m curious how it will sound with other amps.

Bonus: it’s the rare tone stack that is actually designed to sound neutral with “all knobs at noon”  It’s not completely flat; there’s a bit less mid/low mid, addressing exactly what I like least about the VHT and presenting its basic tone in a slightly more flattering light to my… ears. Eyes. Whatever. (Leave the mixed metaphors to the professionals, kids.)