Thom Barker Band: No Forever

The second TBB demo is a song that also made it on to Twice the Usual, though with a quite different feel.

No Forever

I'll post the version off 2x as well, for comparison.

No Forever (off Twice the Usual)

The most obvious difference is the tempo. The TBB version sits just under 150 bpm. The 2x version is 180! I like the faster tempo better, but I think the slower version would have worked if we had performed it more relaxed. As it is, it sounds like we're all fighting to hold it back.

To me the second most obvious difference is how warm the TBB recording sounds. That's the difference between a real recording studio and some schlub with a home studio. The 2x version sounds very harsh by comparison. The mix on the TBB version is better too. The bass sits in the lows and doesn't stray. The electric owns the mids, and the drums find the gaps. On the 2x version, everything is fighting for the mids.

Apart from that, I think we can all agree on what the recording really needs: more cowbell!

Thom Barker Band: All The Same To Me

The first of the two 1996 Thom Barker Band demos was All The Same To Me.

All The Same To Me

This song has all the elements of a classic Thom Barker song: happy-catchy music, despondent lyrics, hooky Chénier guitar themes, sloppy overplayed bass and horrible backing vocals.

The first thing that jumps out at me is how over-compressed the drums are. Sure, it makes them sound nice and punchy. And it was the '90s. But man, that's a lot of compression.

Second thing is Chris' electric theme. He has this knack for coming up with a hook that's completely original, but ends up defining the song. Underneath, the acoustic and bass just repeat I-vi-IV-V (the Heart and Soul chords... and a million other pop songs). Chris' hook gives it its own character.

The bridge (at 2:03) is a departure for a Thom Barker song. I can't think of another one like it. I'm pretty sure Thom had the idea of breaking down to a half-tempo version of the chorus. I think it was also his idea to switch to 6/8 time. I do remember working it out on my SY77 sequencer to show the band how to get in and out of it. We never quite got it right, though. We got into it ok, but tended to rush the half time a little. And the band was never really comfortable coming back out. You can hear in the recording that the outro chorus is a little slower than the beginning of the song. It's maybe 8-10 bpm (about 5%) slower. The highlight of the bridge for me is Chris' harmonic embellishments. Any time he accuses me of playing too many chord extensions I can point him here. Who's the jazz-head now, eh?

Thom Barker Band: The Recording

The Thom Barker Band recordings were done at the new Sound of One Hand Studios at their location on Liverpool Court (off Innes Road) in south Ottawa. It was after they moved but before they renamed to Liverpool Court Studios. We recorded in the big room and Marty Jones was the engineer. The photo clearly shows their new (used) Neve console.

Marty Jones at the Neve

Both songs were straight guitars-bass-drums. Thom used his blue Yamaha acoustic and his yellow hair.

Thom at Sound of One Hand

I had recently upgraded to the John Pattitucci signature Yamaha six string bass (the TRB-JP). It's still my all-time favorite instrument with a single-digit number of strings. We recorded it direct through the good-old Sans Amp Bass Driver DI.

Ken at Sound of One Hand

Chris was still using his old Ibanez electric at the time. This was obviously before he developed full-on GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). He tracked his parts from the control room, but the sound was mic'd off an amp in the big room. I remember us fooling with different amps (including the big Marshall in the picture and the smaller combo that Marty is messing with). I don't remember what amp we went with.

Chris at Sound of One Hand

Scott was playing his basic Tama kit (with one anonymous rototom).

Scott at Sound of One Hand

Thom Barker Band Promo Photos

In the Fall of 1995 when Thom was getting serious about promoting the band, he put together a "promo package" which included press clippings, the Forest cd, bios and promo photos. We had done up a couple of photos specifically for the promo package. I don't know what happened to the negatives or any of the prints. I assume they're probably lost forever.

Thom Barker Band, Fall 1995, Regent St., Ottawa

But this was 1995 and there was a new craze sweeping Computer Science Departments. It was called the World Wide Web. It made it easy to publish text and pictures online in a way that was presentable for reading (as opposed to just searching and downloading). Not being immune to the draw of a bandwagon, I started scanning photos and putting them on web pages in my Unix account at the University of Ottawa.

Unfortunately, sometime in the late '90s I accidentally deleted all photos in my musicpix directory whose filename began with the letter 't'. Don't ask me why. So the scanned versions of the Thom Barker Band promo photos (tbb-promo1.gif and tbb-promo2.gif) and a bunch of others were gone.

Fast forward 14 years to April, 2009. Thanks to the magic of the Wayback Machine, I found the deleted photos. Sometime between 1995 and the date I deleted the pictures, the Wayback Machine archived them. I'm sure I've checked the archive before, but if you've ever tried to find old stuff there, you know it's kind of hit-or-miss. Today I got lucky.

Thom Barker Band, Fall 1995, Regent St., Ottawa

The Thom Barker Band

Hold on to your hat, blogreader... you're in for a surprise. I have uncovered the long-lost Thom Barker Band recordings! And I've digitized them and cleaned them up for posting. But first, a little background.

Thom Barker Band at The Pit, December 21(ish?), 1995

Shortly after we finished recording Forest for the Trees, Thom decided he wanted to go for more of a band concept, and to ramp up our performance schedule. He was used to doing solo shows and duos (with me). We added electric guitar (Chris Chénier) and drums (Scott McCulloch).

Zaphod Beeblebrox, August 9, 1996

We rented a rehearsal studio in the basement of Irene's Pub in the Glebe (Ottawa) and booked a whole bunch of shows over the winter of 1995 and well into 1996.

The Gluepot Pub, August 10, 1996

We also booked Sound of One Hand Studio (where both previous albums were recorded) and got the whole band in there to record two songs. I thought we had lost those recordings forever, but I found a cassette at my parents' house and brought it back to my studio in Texas where I was able to get a decent quality re-recording of them.

Stay tuned!

Piano Fire

What a horrifying noun compound that is.

Gary-the-Piano-Tech was over yesterday. It's the longest I've gone between tunings since I got the piano (15 weeks!). I showed him the sticky G and he pointed out that its hammer was rubbing against the adjacent hammer. He explained that when the hammer shank wood is still young, changes in humidity can cause the shank to warp a little making the hammer go off center. All you have to do is warm up the wood and coax it back. In the shop he has a heat gun for just this task. For location jobs he keeps a torch in his kit.

Let me repeat that and let it sink in: he keeps a torch in his kit to warm hammer shanks so he can bend them.

It's a little hard to see, but the photo shows him applying flame to wood inside my piano. I implored him not to start a piano fire (and immediately regretted coining the term).


Anyway, he did three shanks and the tuning. We talked about options for voicing and some of the subtler aspects of regulation (like leveling the hammer line). I won't be getting any of that work done soon. But the voicing has already noticeably hardened up a bit.

Repertoire and the After-Work Musician (II)

Back in November I wrote about trying to build repertoire on a shoestring practice budget. At the time I was holding 13 pieces at performance level. Keeping a daily practice log allowed me to concentrate on squeaky wheels without letting the more settled pieces go too long without attention. But I was already feeling a little stretched; I wrote:

I'm curious to see how far this routine will take me. Will it continue to work with 20 pieces? 25? Or am I already at the limit for the number of hours I put in?

Here is my four-month update.

I've managed to bring up three more pieces. So I have 16 that I would feel comfortable playing from memory in public. As expected, the practice gaps for most pieces have gotten longer. I may go a week or even two without playing Puerto or Sonetto 104, etc. But they don't seem to be suffering much. When I come back to them, the memory is fine and there's even a freshness to the interpretation that I'm really enjoying. I'd probably want to work them hard for a week if I had a serious performance, but I'd have no qualms about whipping them out for something more casual.

As for new pieces... I'm working on two big ones and three little (tiny) ones. The big ones are a Rachmaninoff prelude and a Mozart concerto. I played the Mozart a hundred years ago, so the learning curve isn't too steep. It's longer than the solo pieces, so that takes time. I've never played the Rachmaninoff before (or any Rachmaninoff). It's a challenging piece and requires daily attention. But I'm definitely over the hump and it's getting close (mostly memorized, almost to speed).

The three tiny pieces are from Schumann's Scenes from Childhood. Mom sent me the music and I chose three of the more popular ones to learn. It's good to have some short, popular tunes in the bag.

My Fifteen Minutes

I'm not quite sure how to "file" this, but I thought my blog readers (all three of you) might be interested.

That great video hosting site that I love (vimeo.com) allows users to create "channels". A channel is simply a place to showcase videos that have something in common. Anybody can create a channel on vimeo and add any videos they like to the channel. Channels are organized into categories (comedy, music, nature, etc.) making them a great way to discover new videos.

The creator of the Classical Music channel on vimeo stumbled across my piano videos and added my Moza Donosa video to the channel. I think it's pretty cool to see my video somewhere that I didn't put it. (But I amuse easily).

It's not the heat...

What is the the maximum room humidity for a piano to be playable?

In general, I don't know. But right now, for my piano, it seems to be about 60%.

I used a humidifier during the winter to keep the humidity up to a level comfortable for the piano. But in the space of a week the temperature has jumped in CenTex, humidity is into the 60s and my baby is suffering. I have one hammer that's sticking pretty badly. A few dampers are a little sluggish. And in general the action just feels a little less responsive... a little less crisp. (Or maybe I'm just playing badly these days.)

Anyway, I'll break out the dehumidifier. But humidity in the low 60s shouldn't be a problem. I'm sure the action still just needs some first-year adjustments. I've heard it's pretty common to have sticky keys/dampers in the first year.

Paging Gary....

Piano Lid Pillow!

Behold my new, one-of-a-kind, Essex piano lid pillow, custom-made by my wonderful wife, Johanne:


If you're wondering what a piano lid pillow is, don't bother Googling it. The Internet doesn't know what it is either. It's a cushion that sits on the lid of a grand piano so that when you fold the front part of the lid over it doesn't rest directly on the back part of the lid and mar the finish.


I've been hunting for one for months, but nobody makes them. The only one I've ever seen is made by Estonia pianos. When you buy an Estonia piano, you get a lid pillow with it.

So Johanne made one for me from an Essex polishing cloth. I expect that this post will now be the only Google hit for "piano lid pillow".