TGaucho
New member
- Joined
- May 25, 2012
- Messages
- 3
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Hullo, hullo! My name is Tony, and i play the ukulele.
[Hi Tony!!]
I'm a born-and-raised Northern Californian, currently living in our beautiful state capitol of Sacramento, center of the gold rush, junction of the Sacramento and American rivers, home of The Kings, and The Rivercats, and future proud home of an MLS franchise (fingerscrossed), situated where I-5 meets I-80, roughly halfway betwixt San Francisco and Lake Tahoe, and the world's second-most forested major city (the first being Paris), which is why our fine metropolis has long been nicknamed The City of Trees.
I've always been a little obsessed with music, the making of it, the theory of it, the structure of it, why people like what they like and dislike what they dislike, the special magics of live performance, the sheer indescribable joy of turning the radio up REALLY SUPER-LOUD, etc.
In grade school i picked up the tenor sax, which i played in various symphonic and jazz bands and combos from the 4th to the 12 grades. For those last five years, i was lucky enough to be a part of a string of truly top-notch jazz ensembles, and we won the 1st Place prizes at every festival we entered, including the historic Monterey Jazz Fest, the Santa Cruz Jazz Fest, and the Reno International Jazz Fest, year after year. In that final year, our high school AM jazz ensemble (of which i was a member) was awarded The Best High School Band prize (1998) by Downbeat magazine.
Along the way i took lessons, and i participated in honor bands, and i attended summer music camps of various sorts, and i was schooled by a handful of incredible music teachers, and i had the fortune to play-with and befriend a plethora of ridiculously-talented musicians, some of which have since gone on to earn music degrees from top institutions (Northridge, UPS, Berklee, New School, whathaveyou), and even become pros (lucky bastards). Along the way i learned a fair bit of theory, and i was exposed to a silly range of different musics and styles and all that, and -ultimately, more than anything else- i was inspired.
I ought to mention at this point that i am not a particularly good musician, nor have i ever been. I'm that guy who was juuuuuust good enough to play second-tenor, or first-bari; the guy who was often the rustiest cog in the gearbox, and who never felt or sounded quite adequate in the midst of the stellar talent that surrounded me. And so it was that when i turned 18 i decided that i just wasn't good enough, nor passionate enough to keep-on with jazz into college, so i sold my sax (for a pathetically-small return), and bought a cheapo no-name classical nylon-string guitar at a big tent sale for $20, and resolved to never put a reed in my mouth-hole ever (EVER) again, a promise that, blessedly, i've upheld. For all the camps and school days and private lessons and rehearsals and festival performances and recitals, i'd reached a point where i just couldn't see myself continuing on as i was; my tone wasn't getting any better, my scales had become stale, theory wasn't coming to life for me, and -after all- how can you sing (badly) and play pop/rock&roll with a sax in your mouth? So i started teaching myself and taking myself in a new direction on that dirt-cheap guitar.
And it went surprisingly well! All those years of theory and practice started to make some sense after all, and it wasn't long before i was stealing my mom's intro-model Yamaha (believe me, she wasn't using it anyway) and taking group lessons at my university, UC Santa Barbara. And of course all of a sudden whole new worlds of guitar-based music made so much more sense to me! Where once they'd lay somewhat dormant and flat in the background of my musicverse, they started popping out in technicolor-3D and absorbing every spare inch of my imagination. Hendrix! Clapton! Django! Floyd! College was a fun time.
Skip forward a decade or so and i was loving it more than ever, buying a nice new Seagull for myself, and snagging my first electric + 15w amp at christmas, and a Blue Snowball USB mic, plugging-in and fiddling around with Audacity and learning how to record, and playing at holidays and camping trips and every other day of the year, and trying to write songs, and spending nights messing about with a good friend (we called ourselves Salacious Crumb), and going to as many shows as i could afford every summer, and generally loving still having living music in my life. Goodtimes.
Then, a little over a year ago, i'd built-up some extra guitar center monies from left-over gift cards, and i decided it was time to get myself a uke. Bob's Burgers and Jake Shimabukuro were in the air, and it seemed like well-past time. So i looked at the GC website and scouted-out what they had on offer, and then proceeded to scour the internets for info about the ones that looked like my style. A shortlist was crafted, a fair bit of info was acquired and digested, i discovered UU and perused its many "What Uke Do I Buy" threads, a chord chart was downloaded and printed, and -armed with all of this- i went down to GC to see what there was to see, fully intending on walking out with my first ukulele.
As i'm sure some of you can attest, what i found when i got to the actual brick-and-mortar was, well . . disappointing, to say the least. Not surprising, i suppose, but disappointing all the same. I sat there by their display with my tuner and my chord sheet, fiddling with this uke and that, plucking and strumming and examining, digging boxes out from under the display that they hadn't bothered to put out properly, and really not finding anything that i'd been looking for. And of course the sales staff was as uninformed and helpless as usual; same-ol' same-ol'.
Down but not defeated, and with a stack of GC gift cards still burning a hole in my proverbial pocket, i vowed to do further research and come back, possibly to order the exact model that i wanted (which model that was now escapes me). A day or so later i was having a chat with my mom, and it came up that i was about to buy a uke, and in fact that i'd have bought one already if GC hadn't been so poor at everything they do (SO POOR). Her reaction was unexpected:
"Oh! No, no, no, no, no! I'm so glad you said that! Don't do that! Umm, errr, there's . . something in the works in that department that i can't really talk about yet, but . . yeah. Don't go back. Spend that money on strings or whatever else, instead. Ok?"
"Uh, ok. Sure, mom. I . . sure? If you say so?"
In the coming weeks i would come to understand that she'd already been taking steps to buy me a uke through another source, you see. Some mysterious, amorphous source, guaranteed to be of a higher caliber than GC, and i wasn't to spoil it under any circumstance. Fair enough! An early birthday present, it seemed. Gift horse's mouths, and such.
When i finally got her to leak some more information on the subject (the mystery and anticipation was killing me by this point), it turned out that we knew someone, some family friend, that had a uke hook-up of some sort, but -still- it was all very hush-hush. Did they own their own store? Did they work in some instrument warehouse? Truly a befuddling situation. At one point in late-May we were all set to go to "this place" and meet up with "this person" and get "this party started", but it turned out to be a false alarm; he was out of town, apparently. Quiet, impatient, polite curses ran though my head.
Some time around mid-June the day arrived when i was finally to find out what the deal was, exactly. I got into my mom's car and she drove me only a few blocks down the street before turning onto a little sidestreet in the neighborhood. Who did we know that lived so close to my parents? What does this quiet, pleasant, suburban neighborhood have to do with a music store? I still couldn't figure it out. Utterly baffled, i got out of the car and saw the house in front of me, and began to comprehend what was afoot.
"Wait, isn't this The Wixom's? Does . . so . . he builds them?"
[my mother has a massive, goofy, ear-to-ear grin at this point]
"Yeah! Willie! He builds them in his garage!! Supposedly he's The Best! He sells them all over! Wait until you see the pictures of the ones he's built! How cool is this! Surprise!!"
[Hi Tony!!]
I'm a born-and-raised Northern Californian, currently living in our beautiful state capitol of Sacramento, center of the gold rush, junction of the Sacramento and American rivers, home of The Kings, and The Rivercats, and future proud home of an MLS franchise (fingerscrossed), situated where I-5 meets I-80, roughly halfway betwixt San Francisco and Lake Tahoe, and the world's second-most forested major city (the first being Paris), which is why our fine metropolis has long been nicknamed The City of Trees.
I've always been a little obsessed with music, the making of it, the theory of it, the structure of it, why people like what they like and dislike what they dislike, the special magics of live performance, the sheer indescribable joy of turning the radio up REALLY SUPER-LOUD, etc.
In grade school i picked up the tenor sax, which i played in various symphonic and jazz bands and combos from the 4th to the 12 grades. For those last five years, i was lucky enough to be a part of a string of truly top-notch jazz ensembles, and we won the 1st Place prizes at every festival we entered, including the historic Monterey Jazz Fest, the Santa Cruz Jazz Fest, and the Reno International Jazz Fest, year after year. In that final year, our high school AM jazz ensemble (of which i was a member) was awarded The Best High School Band prize (1998) by Downbeat magazine.
Along the way i took lessons, and i participated in honor bands, and i attended summer music camps of various sorts, and i was schooled by a handful of incredible music teachers, and i had the fortune to play-with and befriend a plethora of ridiculously-talented musicians, some of which have since gone on to earn music degrees from top institutions (Northridge, UPS, Berklee, New School, whathaveyou), and even become pros (lucky bastards). Along the way i learned a fair bit of theory, and i was exposed to a silly range of different musics and styles and all that, and -ultimately, more than anything else- i was inspired.
I ought to mention at this point that i am not a particularly good musician, nor have i ever been. I'm that guy who was juuuuuust good enough to play second-tenor, or first-bari; the guy who was often the rustiest cog in the gearbox, and who never felt or sounded quite adequate in the midst of the stellar talent that surrounded me. And so it was that when i turned 18 i decided that i just wasn't good enough, nor passionate enough to keep-on with jazz into college, so i sold my sax (for a pathetically-small return), and bought a cheapo no-name classical nylon-string guitar at a big tent sale for $20, and resolved to never put a reed in my mouth-hole ever (EVER) again, a promise that, blessedly, i've upheld. For all the camps and school days and private lessons and rehearsals and festival performances and recitals, i'd reached a point where i just couldn't see myself continuing on as i was; my tone wasn't getting any better, my scales had become stale, theory wasn't coming to life for me, and -after all- how can you sing (badly) and play pop/rock&roll with a sax in your mouth? So i started teaching myself and taking myself in a new direction on that dirt-cheap guitar.
And it went surprisingly well! All those years of theory and practice started to make some sense after all, and it wasn't long before i was stealing my mom's intro-model Yamaha (believe me, she wasn't using it anyway) and taking group lessons at my university, UC Santa Barbara. And of course all of a sudden whole new worlds of guitar-based music made so much more sense to me! Where once they'd lay somewhat dormant and flat in the background of my musicverse, they started popping out in technicolor-3D and absorbing every spare inch of my imagination. Hendrix! Clapton! Django! Floyd! College was a fun time.
Skip forward a decade or so and i was loving it more than ever, buying a nice new Seagull for myself, and snagging my first electric + 15w amp at christmas, and a Blue Snowball USB mic, plugging-in and fiddling around with Audacity and learning how to record, and playing at holidays and camping trips and every other day of the year, and trying to write songs, and spending nights messing about with a good friend (we called ourselves Salacious Crumb), and going to as many shows as i could afford every summer, and generally loving still having living music in my life. Goodtimes.
Then, a little over a year ago, i'd built-up some extra guitar center monies from left-over gift cards, and i decided it was time to get myself a uke. Bob's Burgers and Jake Shimabukuro were in the air, and it seemed like well-past time. So i looked at the GC website and scouted-out what they had on offer, and then proceeded to scour the internets for info about the ones that looked like my style. A shortlist was crafted, a fair bit of info was acquired and digested, i discovered UU and perused its many "What Uke Do I Buy" threads, a chord chart was downloaded and printed, and -armed with all of this- i went down to GC to see what there was to see, fully intending on walking out with my first ukulele.
As i'm sure some of you can attest, what i found when i got to the actual brick-and-mortar was, well . . disappointing, to say the least. Not surprising, i suppose, but disappointing all the same. I sat there by their display with my tuner and my chord sheet, fiddling with this uke and that, plucking and strumming and examining, digging boxes out from under the display that they hadn't bothered to put out properly, and really not finding anything that i'd been looking for. And of course the sales staff was as uninformed and helpless as usual; same-ol' same-ol'.
Down but not defeated, and with a stack of GC gift cards still burning a hole in my proverbial pocket, i vowed to do further research and come back, possibly to order the exact model that i wanted (which model that was now escapes me). A day or so later i was having a chat with my mom, and it came up that i was about to buy a uke, and in fact that i'd have bought one already if GC hadn't been so poor at everything they do (SO POOR). Her reaction was unexpected:
"Oh! No, no, no, no, no! I'm so glad you said that! Don't do that! Umm, errr, there's . . something in the works in that department that i can't really talk about yet, but . . yeah. Don't go back. Spend that money on strings or whatever else, instead. Ok?"
"Uh, ok. Sure, mom. I . . sure? If you say so?"
In the coming weeks i would come to understand that she'd already been taking steps to buy me a uke through another source, you see. Some mysterious, amorphous source, guaranteed to be of a higher caliber than GC, and i wasn't to spoil it under any circumstance. Fair enough! An early birthday present, it seemed. Gift horse's mouths, and such.
When i finally got her to leak some more information on the subject (the mystery and anticipation was killing me by this point), it turned out that we knew someone, some family friend, that had a uke hook-up of some sort, but -still- it was all very hush-hush. Did they own their own store? Did they work in some instrument warehouse? Truly a befuddling situation. At one point in late-May we were all set to go to "this place" and meet up with "this person" and get "this party started", but it turned out to be a false alarm; he was out of town, apparently. Quiet, impatient, polite curses ran though my head.
Some time around mid-June the day arrived when i was finally to find out what the deal was, exactly. I got into my mom's car and she drove me only a few blocks down the street before turning onto a little sidestreet in the neighborhood. Who did we know that lived so close to my parents? What does this quiet, pleasant, suburban neighborhood have to do with a music store? I still couldn't figure it out. Utterly baffled, i got out of the car and saw the house in front of me, and began to comprehend what was afoot.
"Wait, isn't this The Wixom's? Does . . so . . he builds them?"
[my mother has a massive, goofy, ear-to-ear grin at this point]
"Yeah! Willie! He builds them in his garage!! Supposedly he's The Best! He sells them all over! Wait until you see the pictures of the ones he's built! How cool is this! Surprise!!"