David Freeman Music

So it was.  After a nice day at the pool (and tuning up my lawnmower and leaf blower), I headed out to a pretty reasonable Platinum gig.  The crowd came to party.  About the only thing I could say bad about it was that the sound in the room is pretty terrible due to the acoustics.  Looks nice, sounds bad.  A night for ear plugs. I played alto tonight for something different.  Mainly it was because we opened with a David Sanborn tune ( Chicago Song ).  Maybe it's because I almost always play tenor on that gig, but alto sounded weird on some tunes like Respect .  It wasn't as difficult to shift gears to a fifth away like I thought it would be.  

Yesterday was pretty rough, evidently.  I worked in the yard yesterday (along with the usual phone calls and emails and a random saxophone lesson) for a good chunk of the day.  After that I edited and uploaded a piccolo sample to my website (go to davidfreemanmusic.net  and check the "instruments" page--click on "piccolo", or just click here ).  A funny thing about recording...I recorded four passes of piccolo, and the first one was the best one!  First one was pretty good;  second one was a little worse, third one was a little worse;  fourth one, I really tried to nail it because I had a student walking in the door--technically it was good, but my face was starting to tire.  The first take ended up being the keeper. I read stories to Jack and put him to bed around 8:30.  Thinking I would watch to see if he got up and wandered around, I laid down for a couple of minutes...and woke up at 7 this morning!

I added some baritone saxophone samples to my website ( davidfreemanmusic.net ).  They're not meant to be anything mind boggling, just some quick stuff I recorded in between lessons yesterday. The funkier one is four tracks of bari sax.  I laid down the bass line first (Chameleon?), and then I got the jones to stack some more stuff on top of it.  Just me screwing around. The classical thing is the high school All-State etudes.  I downloaded them, played through them, and recorded them.  Perhaps they could use more polish, but I really doubt anybody will be hunting me down for a classical bari sax gig anyway! That's Doc Kupka from Tower of Power in the picture.  Bad dude.

My Powerbook started acting funny last Thursday night at Yacht Rock.  I figured it was just the heat on stage was making it hang up in weird ways.  Friday night, I played a gig in a cold room, with my Mac right near an air conditioning vent.  Same problem!  That got me thinking that maybe I'd added stuff along the way, and I needed to bump up my RAM.   I checked my RAM in the "About this Mac" menu, and it said I only had 512, but I remember buying an extra GB when I purchased the computer.  So...I figured out by swapping the 512 and the GB sticks in and out that my GB had gone bad.  Bummer.  Luckily, I had purchased it from Small Dog Electronics , and the RAM had a 10 year warranty.  I'm swapping that one out! I was hoping to buy some RAM locally so I could be sure everything worked before Thursday, so I called Onyx Consulting yesterday morning and asked about purchasing the RAM.  Yes, they had it.  Great, I'm on the way.  I drove all the way to Spaghetti Junction...

I ordered bought some sunglasses from these guys: http://wildfree.com Hope they get here soon! In music news, I just found a really slick Brecker diminished lick on a bootleg.  One I'd never heard before!  Ahh, sweet bliss!

My friend Nick married Elliott yesterday. Congratulations! I played flute for the wedding ceremony in a sextet of trumpet, violin, flute, acoustic guitar, harpsichord (keyboard), and vibraphone. Nick wrote arrangements of several Y.O.U. songs, a Beatles song, a few classical things, and a Monty Python tune. It was some pretty intricate stuff, but we made it through ok.  The performance fried my brain.   I was also invited to play on a few songs at the reception. We did a few Yacht Rock songs, as well as some Y.O.U. stuff. That went pretty well, considering the swapping of instruments and singers from song to song. More than anything, it was a nice chance to hang out with my friends (away from a gig for a change) and show off my wife.  Surrounded by a bunch of other musicians, I felt almost normal! Highlands, NC is a beautiful little town in the mountains. Beth and I had a wonderful time.  I am tempted show a picture of Beth after sampling the wine, or a picture of me feeding Mark...

Last night (Friday), I played a wedding.  Sunday night I am attending a wedding.  Due to my attendance, I am unable to play someone else's wedding.  However, I have no gig tonight (Saturday)!  Everybody's getting married on off nights to save money!  Weird, weird, weird! Steve Cunningham filled in for our regular guitarist, Dave MacDougal.  I've probably known Steve around twelve years--we used to teach at the same music store.  The last gig we played together was probably one of mine at Sambuca about nine or ten years ago.  He's even better than I remember.  If you get a chance, you should check him out!  Wow!