Sonya and Silas Music at Cat's Art MusikCircus

There are multiple raves here on the blog for the performances by Sonya Jevette and you can hear more on her Sonya Jevette Web site.  Do give a listen as she has all kinds of music and she couldn't dream of doing all of it in one set.  She's a fascinating lady and she lives the music.

All of Sonya's songs are favorites but I still have to get my gear rigged to play as there are different setup times and one of them is about thirty minutes before starting.  The details of what I do aren't important but I wrote that I was playing along with Sonya back here in Fort Worth.  She said it would be cool to play together some time, perhaps via dual stream.

The only way to dual stream with Sonya is for her as the anchor (i.e. first on the chain).  If it's the other way around then I don't know what to do as I can't hear her.  So the way to work it would be if she sends her stream out as she does but I pick it up on my computer.  I add some devilishly-clever guitar moves and in turn send that composite stream out on a different one into SL.

For me, it wouldn't work as I would really feel like I was just spraying graffiti on her work.  I need to be able to see her eyes so I know to bring it up, bring it down, shut the hell up or whatever.  Other than mental telepathy, I don't know any other way to do that and I know others do well with it but I don't see it for me.  Maybe I'm being hard case but that eyeball communication is very important.  Your eyes just touch for a millisecond but so much information comes from that. Sonya sometimes comes up this way and that might be a different way to play together.  Hopefully that's a real-world jam together sometime.


My own set was completely barbarian and I loved it.  About forty-five minutes were driven by back tracks and I haven't that in years.  What it permits is much more interesting arrangements than is possible doing what I do on a looper.

It was a good show and I've already even listened to it.  There was a high compliment from Shady Fleming when she said she wanted it on CD.  So I wanted to know for myself if that would be a good thing to do.  It surprised me as I listened to the entire show and I never ever do that.

"Ohio 2014" was borked but still worked.  The last time I did it on the looper, I played only two bars for Gm7 --> C and it was supposed to be four.  It sounded kind of cool but made it impossible to deliver the lyrics.  Even though doing that busted the lyrics, melody still comes so it worked out fairly well.  I deliberately did not rebuild the loops during the set as I didn't want to put the audience through it.  The objective for everything for the show was to deliver it fast and keep it happening.

What was cool about "Ohio 2014" is this finally got all three phrases of the RC50 into action.  There was one for only guitar and drums for Dm-F-C.  Next there was the full song with all instruments but with clean guitar.  Then another one with heavy guitar.  By switching between them, the dynamics come up to what they ought to be and make the song much more interesting.

The play felt confident and strong.  The biggest Finger Stinger on the neck is to bend a note on the 22nd fret to go up a full tone but even that went well.  My fingers are whining like washerwomen just now but that's ok as they were seriously working.

I uploaded a live tune to the Ride the Dragon podcast.  It isn't from tonight's set but I've been discovering things in my iTunes as there are hundreds of Silas Scarborough things in there.  "One Fine Day" is from about seven years ago, six at the least.

As to the recording of the set tonight, the MP3 is just under 100 MB at 160K quality.  Voodoo sells them for $5.00 in his shows but he has a rule only to sell them to people who really attended the show.  What I have in mind is to upload video to DropBox and and use PayPal to buy it.  Send me and email and I send back the link.  This has zero security except on the front-end as people can do whatever they like with it once they have it.  But that's alright.

This would also show a one-off PayPal sales point to Lotho and that could be useful to him.  It is sounding like something to try but not until the morning.

Meanwhile, here is something unrelated:  the Green Animals are back on My Duck Soup.  The people at the Green Animals Topiary Garden turn plants into animals.  It's most incredible to see and you may enjoy the picture tour.