How Pick-y Are You?

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Mojo

My favorite guitar pick is one I grabbed for free at a trade show booth. Had I known at the time, I probably would have kept walking…

When I started learning guitar a few years ago, I collected picks wherever I went: club shows, trade shows, guitar stores. At first I didn’t know how different they were, and once I did I wanted to try them all!

At some point early on I found myself using a pick I had grabbed at MacWorld from the RiffWorks booth, a white Dunlop-style pick that just felt right to me. I’ve used one now on nearly every one of my recordings. I got a couple of them that first day, and then made sure to visit that booth the following year at MacWorld to grab a few more. After that, they no longer had a booth there and since I had several picks in my possession I didn’t think about it any more. Till recently.

Realizing that they wouldn’t last forever, I went on a hunt for a similar pick. It’s right between the Dunlop Tortex yellow & green, and nothing I found felt like it. I even did a full-flight test of a series of different picks at my local music shop, Marin Music Center, with the assistance of the the owner, the ever-helpful Jesse Harms, but without finding one quite like it.

Turns out that though it feels like Tortex, it’s actually a similar plastic called Delrin, and though it’s .05 thicker than the yellow Dunlop it’s slightly more flexible. Nothing else will do for me at the moment, which is kind of a problem!

I decided to go back to the source and order a bag of them from Riffworks to last me as long as possible. Luckily they still had some in stock, so now I have what I hope is a lifetime supply! For the bass I use the green Dunlop Tortex or a nylon Fender Heavy but for my Black Betty nothing else will do!

Are you this picky about your picks?

Sharing is caring!

New Song! “Lost in the Fog”

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Mojo

Hey rockers! I had a brainstorm for my latest song “Lost in the Fog”. I’ve been thinking of redoing one or more of my older songs in an acoustic style just to mix things up. So when I wrote a new song a few weeks ago, I decided while working on it that I would make two versions to begin with: an acoustic version, which you can hear now, and an electric fuzz version, coming soon!

The original vision of the song was for it to be a Sabbath-style stoner rock fuzz opus, but the acoustic version stands on its own as a trippy meditation in a different head space. This is the first full version, with an improvised solo.

Lost in the Fog is the 6th new song for 2011 from Mojo’s Army, and the year’s not over yet!

Lost in the Fog Lyrics:

Twisting forward through the fog
Moving forward constantly
The shrouded shapes that appear before me
All become clear eventually

…eventually

The road ahead is lost in the fog
But I press on anyway
I trust the road, trust myself as well
and trust that time will show me the way

…show me the way

Where has the summer gone?
Seasons changing, moving on
Where has the summer gone?
Summer sun becomes icy fog

The truth is out there in the fog
Reveals itself only slowly
Under a streetlight a ghost walks a dog
As the road appears beneath his feet

…beneath his feet

Moving forward constantly
Moving forward constantly
Moving forward constantly

Original words & music by Mojo & Mojo’s Army
© Ragged Birds Music. All rights reserved. Contains royalty-free samples from Apple and Beta Monkey Music.

Sharing is caring!

Speaking of MySpace

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Mojo

Call me crazy, but I just went on a little trip sideways in time through my estranged MySpace friends, fans and bands of note.

Let’s backtrack a bit, and don’t stop me if this sounds familiar — for a few years there, I spent an unexpected amount of time chatting up strangers, future friends and fans and listening to music I never would have heard of if not for MySpace. I posted my first ever recording there, made my first fans there. And was pleasantly surprised when a few of these connections became real flesh and blood friends — friends I’ve gone to shows with, hung out with, collaborated musically with. A few more have become solid ‘internet friends’ and we connect daily on Twitter, Facebook, and now the gangly Google+, which is having its backlash-y growing pains period start right about… now.

What did I find on my trip through the not-so-distant past? Partly what I expected — some bands have broken up, some have become quite successful. Some pages are mere cobwebs or placeholders for other more active sites. Sadly, at least one of my regular connections has died when I wasn’t looking. And that… that was a bit of a jolt. An unexpected emotional moment from a much-maligned internet site that has become a punching bag lately, yet no one argues that it was a real touchstone for the changing music industry. I did of course happily reconnect with a lot of music that I really enjoy but have lost touch with because it’s not on the radio or played on Pandora.

There are so many sites now that do so many individual things better than MySpace tried to do all at once, but there aren’t ANY sites now that have that unique combination of near-realtime ‘hey I like your stuff, what are you listening to, let me check that out, here’s my stuff…’ all in one sloppy crazy wonderful free-love kind of spot. Kind of like a free online music swap meet where everyone trades their mixtapes and shows their stuff off, trading comments and chatting daily like we do on Twitter now but with the music right there. I have come to love Twitter but I miss the music.

I went through my whole friends list and made a list of the bands I want to reconnect with, bands whose stuff I really enjoyed listening to and whose members I felt I connected with, if just for a moment in time. Here are a few, give them a listen and a shout if you see them around: