WTF Music: Some Dating Rules to Live By If You Lust For Musicians

’Tis the season to be single and a chunk of my job as a nightlife journalist includes writing about ways singles can meet and pick up at the bars. This is very funny to anyone who knows me, for reasons I will leave unsaid.

But, with all of my singles writings lately, a lot of my friends have been asking me to hook them up with musician friends, and while they say they’re cool with it, I feel the need to warn them about a few things. So, this singles article is dedicated to them.

It took dating a lot of musicians to learn these lessons, and also watching a lot of my musician friends date women who just couldn’t handle it in the end. But, whether you’re into dating accountants or guitarists, it’s the same shit. If you share each other’s passions, you learn to bend. And if you’re both not willing to bend to help each other fulfil those passions, you should probably go move to the suburbs and find someone whose trauma in life is when the cable signal cuts out or they run out of MGD in the fridge.

So ladies, (and the same applies to gentlemen), if you want to date a musician who is not a douche bag, here are some things to keep in mind. I’ve narrowed the rules down to sets of three – three being the magic number in life, but also three being the reality of how many will be in your couple: you, him, and the music.  If that threesome doesn’t turn you on, consider it your first red flag.

3 things you have to be willing to sacrifice while dating a (full-time) musician:

1. He’s going to back out of a lot of special occasions.
   Your best friend’s cousin’s birthday dinner is next weekend and he said he’d be there. Suddenly, he’s asked to fill in on a couple of paying shows out of town. He’s going to ditch you and you can’t get mad. Why? Because if he threw away paying gigs for special occasions, he’d have no paying gigs. For real. Think of it as if he runs his own business. Thanksgiving? He’ll probably be gone. Long weekends at the cottage with the family? You can DEFINITELY kiss those goodbye, and all other summer weekends while we’re at it. That’s festival season.  You’ll probably wind up getting an email on your birthday and kissing your friends’ cheeks on New Year’s Eve, but thems the breaks, kids. Suck it up. If he cancelled shows for every friend’s wedding, birthday or dinner party, he’d be really broke and then you’d still be complaining.
2. He’s out all night.
   Quite often, he’s going to be out really late at the bars, usually drinking, and usually with a ton of people you don’t know and/or women you don’t know. If this makes you uncomfortable, you might as well tuck away those rock star’s wifey dreams right now.
3. He’s gone for weeks or months at a time.
   The more successful he gets, the longer he’ll be gone. Really think about this one and if you are okay supporting your partner’s success vs. your loneliness. In my observational experience, this is usually the one that becomes the deal-breaker in the end.

3 things you’ll get used to while dating a musician:

1. Doing your own thing. Imagine! Your own life, where you’re not attached at the hip to someone and relying on their every movement to predict your own! You can have hobbies! And read books! And hang out with friends alone!
2. Savouring short snippets of time: Why does there have to be a formula for what constitutes alone time or time well spent together? Some of my most precious moments in relationships have been in pyjamas at the end of long nights, or being woken up at 3 a.m. and talking in the dark, or Sunday morning walks alone.
3. Explaining to people that you do actually have a boyfriend who exists: Most of your friends will make cracks about your phantom boyfriend but don’t let it bother you. Would you rather be one of those disgusting couples that loses all sense of identity and grosses everyone out with public displays of affection, or worse, obsessive-compulsive uses of pet names like “baby.” Ugh.

3 signs your musician boyfriend is NOT a loser!

1. He still wakes up early to work. Just because he doesn’t technically have a job, it doesn’t mean he can sleep in with you and laze around the house in pyjamas with you on weekends. If he’s a full-time musician actually making a living, he’s probably insanely busy and meticulous about his schedule.
2. There are times he’ll choose you over a show. This doesn’t actually contradict what I wrote above because that’s the sign of any good relationship. Balance, balance, balance. I like to think of it as picking your battles. When you absolutely need them, you ask them to be there, and if they can, they will. But if you’re pulling that card for your cousin’s best friend’s birthday dinner, you’re going to lose that card pretty fast.
3. He introduces you as his girlfriend and other common courtesies. Any guy who plays the “but baby, it’s the business” game is a loser. Guys who think being a musician gives them the right to be a dick…. are just dicks! Plain and simple.  I’ve learned this the hard way and dated some douche bags who have said things like “If I introduce you as my girlfriend, it will ruin the sexual tension between my manager and I, and that will ruin my career.” Yep, true story. Also, guys who claim to have to pretend to be single to keep their female fans are also douche bags. They’re generally the same musicians who like to plaster their faces on anything and everything, calling themselves rock star geniuses, but there’s not much music behind that inflated sense of self.

If none of the above things happen and he doesn’t have a day job, you’re actually in more trouble than you thought.

3 reasons your musician boyfriend doesn’t have a day job but doesn’t play much music either:

1. He’s a trust fund baby: There are lots of silver-spoon fed, swaddled, singer-songwriter trust fund babies floating around the stages in this city. (Mostly the open stages, might I add.) They’re generally very deep individuals with lots of inner turmoil, crazy expensive gear, and very good looking guitars. And, they probably get a daily feel-good e-mail from their mom telling them how much of a genius they are, and how it’s but a matter of time before some record exec falls out of a rainbow-coloured cloud, lands on their doorstep with a large cheque and a contract full of creative license, and takes them on the road to make a million dollars. Oh yeah, and they probably play one show a month, if that.
2. More likely, he’s just a loser: Sorry to break it to you but if he spends most of his days lying around on a couch in front of his Playstation and can’t support himself as a musician, and still doesn’t feel the need to get some sort of job, he’d probably be doing the same thing if he were aspiring to be a painter, a chef, a police officer, an accountant or a professional ass-wiper. Seriously. It’s a problem with his work ethic, nothing else. Loser!
3. He could also be a drug dealer: Last year I met a guy at The Gladstone who I thought was cute and charming – until he told me was a full-time musician supporting his young son, but didn’t play in any bands. He also carried a very large backpack with him everywhere he went, which included washrooms with strangers, and strange dark corners with very sketchy looking individuals who had come to meet him. Hmmm….

To end on a kind note, he could also be totally legit. Maybe he’s insanely rich from ghostwriting a hit song for Michael Buble or Britney or something, but is so humble he just can’t bring himself to tell you. Ya, that’s it…..

Women More Ravenous for Music Sites | Nielsen Wire

Women More Ravenous for Music Sites | Nielsen Wire.

Music To My Ears – Advertising Amplifies Sales | Nielsen Wire

Music To My Ears – Advertising Amplifies Sales | Nielsen Wire.

Clash of the Cover Songs: The ‘Hallelujah’ Edition – Spinner Canada

Please, nobody ever cover this song again. K?

Clash of the Cover Songs: The ‘Hallelujah’ Edition – Spinner Canada.

DIY Music: A wicked tour promo from a publicist

I get a MILLION emails from publicists every day, asking me to cover their band’s upcoming Toronto show, interview them, blah blah blah. Usually I ignore them (unless it’s something I’d cover anyway) and usually they’re just emails or phone messages.

But, I just got this from a publicist in the states and it totally worked. It helps that he’s also a smokin’ hot Canadian actor… but truly, great idea.

Busy Busy Busy Little Bees

Phil and I are… Our CD release is November 13 so I am to busy to blog right now, but will again soon.

xo

p.s. and apparently too busy to proofread my own posts. TOO! I meant too, not to! What kind of effing journalist am I?!

DIY MUSIC: A toilet bowl mandolin… now I’ve seen everything!! (And I’m totally going to make one.)

This is probably the coolest DIY instrument site I know of, even though it’s actually an Argentina comedy musical troupe’s website and has few instructions on how to build these wacky instruments.

But, browse through the instruments on the Les Luthiers website at  http://www.lesluthiers.com/frame_instrumentos.htm (navigation is all in Spanish but it’s on the left side.)

My favourite project-to-be is the toilet bowl mandolin.

Les Luthiers toilet bowl mandolin

I don’t understand Spanish at all so I put it through the Google translator and this is what it sketchily returned:

The instrument can easily guess the kind of object that formed the basis for its construction. Indeed, this is a common table “toilet” that you stick a peg on mandolin, a bridge with microafinadores and 8 metal strings which cover an area of one octave. Lacking tastiera strings can be struck only “air” which limits their tessitura of those 8 only notes. It has been used in two books: Introduction to the Martial Arts and Loas to the bathroom. His interpreter is Carlos Lopez Puccio.

I think I get the gist of it…

ILYT ADVENTURES: When the S and the P wanna kick with me in the recording studio… or at least the S is kickin’ it with my gap teeth. Did Salt N Pepa have this problem?

Did you know that people with a gap between their two front teeth — like me and, ahem, Madonna – have a bit of a disability when recording vocals? Neither did I!

I guess it makes sense, but I just never thought about it and I guess other engineers I’ve worked with just haven’t been ballsy enough to say “Stacey… there’s no foam shield in the world that can stop the hissing from between them buck teeth of yours.”

But, there IS a quick fix! While recording in the studio at 6 Nassau in Kensington a little while ago, our producer Sandro pulled a MacGyver and sent Phil on a convenience store mission for some plain ol’ chewing gum.

While many people dread the P’s and the popping sounds they tend to make, it’s the S’s that get me all riled up. The problem is simple: there’s air sucking and blowing through that little space and it creates a little whistle. While it’s not always noticeable in person (except when saying she sells sea shells by the sea shore), it is very noticeable on recordings.

Sssso, if you’re sssick of ssswitching microphones and filters and foam pieces in sssearch of a hissslesss sssound, here’s an awesome quick fix!

DIRECTIONS:

1. Take one stick of chewing gum.
2. Rip off a tiny piece, about a quarter of the stick.
3. Chew it.
4. With your fingers, stick the little chewed piece right in the slot between your teeth.
5. Mould it right against your teeth so it doesn’t get in the way of your lips in the front, or your tongue in the back.
6. Try singing a little tune and see if it’s too hard to sing with it, it slips out of place, or you can still hear the hissing.  Add more gum, or less, depending on what you need.
7. Once you’ve got that perfect combo, roll tape and start singing! I made it through about 6 takes of songs with one piece, so it can last a while before it disintegrates between your teeth. And yes, that did happen. Yum.

Gap-toothed singers of the world unite!

Phil recording in the studio

SM

DIY Music: More Musical Sawbservations: Two Shows, Two Saw Sounds, One Night.

Last week I played two very different saw shows in the same night and it led to some interesting sawbservations.

The first show was with Calamity Royale at one of Toronto’s most magical music venues, The Music Gallery. It’s actually a working church that can be booked for shows and it’s really quite stunning. We played with the amazing Willow Rutherford and Montreal’s Music for Money (whose lead singer is actually a human drum machine and it’s mind-blowing).

Anyway, our band consisted of a cello, double bass, horns, Calamity on piano and my saw. Without drums, and with the obvious acoustics in the church, we just used a condenser instrument microphone clipped onto the saw — which should have been completely enough. However, I learned that as much as a saw sound is meant to carry in a space (which is why it doesn’t work well with contact mics… you to pick up the sound from the air and not just the vibrations of the object) it still could have used the duo setup with vocal mic. Some people mentioned it was a bit quiet.

Then, I rushed to The Tranzac for a late-night set with The Lipliners, which is where I usually have the hardest time amping the saw. The Lipliners is basically a mini-orchestra with tons of people on stage and lots of loud instruments in a small room.

As I’ve mentioned before, amplifying the musical saw in a large/loud band setting is a real challenge because: Having to crank the sensitivity of the mic(s) allows for a lot of bleed-in from louder and neighbouring instruments, especially the drums (sit behind the drums if you can) and, it’s always a challenge to hear yourself in the monitors.

But, The Lipliners’ super sound man Colin had an idea for the second set. He suggested we plug the clup-on mic directly into a bass amp (still no vocal mic) and then he sacrificed a good chunk of the sound in the monitor for room sound. (It’s also important to note that just because your band can’t hear you, it doesn’t mean the crowd can’t hear you. Get the sound man or a friend to go back and give you a subtle hand signal if you’re getting self-conscious.)

The result was wicked. The saw could REALLY be heard, so much so that I actually got a bit self-conscious and started worrying about overplaying or being obnoxious (mostly because knowing I was missing a lot of monitor sound made me have to be extra careful with how loud I was giving ‘er.) But, everyone commented that it sounded awesome and Ronley said she could finally actually hear it.

So, who would have thought — surprised by a night of sawbservations again! I love this instrument. It definitely keeps you on your toes!!

And, speaking of really bad yet awesome rap…

Check out these guys.