November Guest Receives Airplay on 30 U.S. Radio Stations

This afternoon we were delightfully surprised to receive a report containing 30 RADIO STATIONS across the US who have picked up November Guest this week. Here is the current list of radio stations you can now hear us on:

KAXE (Grand Rapids, MN)

WROQ (Greenville, SC)

KRSC (Claremore, OK)

WKPS (State College, PA)

WKWZ (Syosset, NY)

WMSR (Auburn, AL)

KCLC (St. Charles, MO)

WIZN (Burlington, VT)

WMBR (Cambridge, MA)

WMEB (Orono, ME)

WNCW (Spindale, NC)

WOAS (Ontonagon, MI)

WQAQ (Hamden, CT)

WSUP (Platteville, WI)

WUMD (Dearborn, MI)

CFMU (Hamilton, ON)

KDHX (St. Louis, MO)

KFAN (Fredericksburg, TX)

KOTO (Telluride, CO)

KPUR (Forest Grove, OR)

KSUT (Ignacio, CO)

KUMD (Duluth, MN)

MSPR (Moorehead, KY)

WBZC1 (Atco, NJ)

WJHU (Baltimore, MD)

WMLU (Farmville, VA)

WMNF (Tampa, FL)

WMPG (Portland, ME)

WPMD (Norwalk, CA)

WUTK (Knoxville, TN)

And btw, wow, there's a place called Farmville, VA? I wonder if they'll be sued out of existence by Zynga.

Where's Scott? (My Current Musical Endeavors)

As some may already be aware, my lineup of musical endeavors has changed a little over the last few months. As of November 2010, I am no longer with 80's & 90's group Shakedown (I wish them all the best!)

I have branched out into a variety of other music projects. You can catch my performances with the following groups:

PornFunk - Indie rock band from Randolph, VT

www.pornfunk.com

Longford Row - Traditional Irish Music

www.longfordrow.com

November Guest - Indie rock band from Randolph, VT

www.novemberguest.com

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you will be able to stay apprised of all of my upcoming performance dates.

To start with, I'll be performing at Ri Ra's (Burlington, VT) on New Year's Eve (12/31/2010) from 5-8pm, for First Night. If you stop by that evening, you can catch me playing upright bass with Irish band Longford Row.

Cheers!

Gear review: Fender B-Dec 30 Amplifier

Today I'm going to review my Fender B-Dec 30. This assumes you've already perused the product literature and are already familiar with the features listed. If not, you can check it out on the Fender website. It's a small bass guitar amp, designed mainly for practice, but packed with features. I bought it new for around $350. I've owned it for a little over 2 years now, and have used it quite a bit for:

My Theme is Featured on the Buzz Out Loud Podcast

You can hear my Buzz Out Loud theme remix featured at the end of Friday's (7/2/2010) show. I have been dubbed the keytar-playing, "Unicorn Of Rock" by Friday's BOL crew. They seemed to like it though.

Check it out, starting around 36:00

July 2nd, Buzz Out Loud

I told them that my computer didn't catch on fire when I played the riff - only my keytar did. Glad to have been connected via a USB hub!

The trouble with greylisting

Greylisting is one of several fairly common methods of preventing bulk spam from getting into a mail server. In short, the concept is based on the following idea: The receiving mail server is contacted by a sending server it has never seen before. Rather than accept the (possibly spam) message, it issues a message to this effect:

Dear sending mail server: I'm having a problem right now, and can't accept your message. Please try again later.

The thought is that, if it is really serious about delivering it, it will try again in a little while. Most bulk spam mail servers are not configured to retry. as they expect that most of the harvested addresses they attempt to deliver to are going to fail for one reason or another. A real mail server, however, will try back after a few minutes. At that time, the greylisting server will (in theory) recognize the retry attempt, accept the message, and make a note never to test that host with this rather rude procedure again.

There are at least a few problems with this method, that I have seen.

A look at my first live internet gig

Last Wednesday night, my band November Guest pulled off their first internet gig, on ustream.tv. I thought I'd give some of my first impressions.

I'm Making A New Podcast Theme

I'll confess, I haven't been a regular listener of CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast, but I happened to tune in about 2 weeks ago. At that time, I learned about the Buzz Out Loud Remix Contest. It's a pretty exciting opportunity for me, since I ABSOLUTELY LOVE COMPOSING PODCAST THEMES.

As a musician /composer, I have had a really hard time finding a medium that works for me, due to my quirky background and limitations. These include:

1. My partialness to the underground demoscene sound, which is lo-fi, 8-bitty, and well, sort of unique and special interest (put gently) for the ears of most radio-loving listeners.
2. A short attention span, causing me to lose interest while writing songs with lyrics...
3. " "... songs that last more than 30 seconds or so.

My brother's college buddy had a saying: "there's a butt for every seat". Well, if there's a medium for every artist, I think I've found mine. Podcast themes are short, VERY unique (a requirement, in fact), and generally instrumental.

I've tried my hand a composing/producing a handful of podcast themes, including for such podcasts as Dinosaurs: Before They Were Fuels, as well as Fresh Ubuntu (although you'll not find any credit anywhere on their site indicating so... *AHEM*, GUYS). Anyway, they've been pretty good, if I do say so myself. Without going too deeply into what values I believe a podcast theme should have (I'll save that for another post), they succeed in combining interesting elements from the podcast, personified through my background, into a well articulated, contained, and fairly polished theme song.

So I knew I needed to outdo myself. The BOL podcast has a lot of listener-ship. There will be a lot of competition. Over the course of the last week or 2, I have tweaked, scrutinized, polished, and tuned my composition. I've heard it on my studio monitors, headphones, computer speakers, in the car, in the living room... you get my drift. But now it must be "done" - it's time to present my submission to the CNET team. I'm not taking the chance that something stupid will happen, causing my submission to be screwed up or lost by the time the 5/12 deadline hits.

Whether or not mine is selected for the theme, I can say that it's a step up from anything I've done thus far. I think it represents the beginning of a whole new tier of podcast theme production for me. I'm looking forward to seeing it up on the CNET website, and I'm pretty sure it will at least hold it's own with the "heavy hitters".

May the best podcast theme win! (And let's face it, it'll be nice to have something better than the 4 track Acid loop they have been using until now. No offense, BOL team.)