April continues to ROCK

The Carnival Band gigs are coming thick and fast. This weekend we play the Port Moody Arts Festival on Sunday. The last few weeks have been busy, we played benefit gigs for Edmonds Community school and played the Fools Parade at April 1st [in the rain].

The motto of the Carnival Band should be "the community band that can be found playing in all weathers, in all places and for all kinds of good causes." We have played in snow at the North Van Mardi Gras, pouring raining at the Fools Parade; this summer is sure to see extreme weather also and all kinds of good causes.

Guitar wise I have invested in a Boss GT-3 muli fx box. This is certainly an advancement over my Zoom 505 pedal, however the principle is basically the same. I was much impressed with the GT-5 FX built in to the Boss BR 1600 recording unit. I gave it a try for the first time last night and already I can see it expanding the sounds I use and which songs it will work on with the band.

I've also expanded on the web on to myspace.com, apparently 68 million others seem to think this is the place to be. I've already added "Shakira" as my friend and that can't be bad :-) I like the way the music automatically plays on the music section, good idea. See links to the pages.

My playing continues to improve, I've benefited greatly from the guitar lessons of Eric Chuang. Eric's Berklee trained and plays in various jazz outfits around town. Thanks to Eric I now know my way around the fret board much better than I did 3 months ago.

This summer promises more fun with the Carnival Band. My end of summer recording sessions will probably compromise of some of the jazz standards I play with the band plus some of my own material, I have to include the song "Afro Blue" for some reason it does "it" for me.