Southeast Alaska State Fair

Southeast Alaska State Fair Poster

For as long as I have been apart of Fire On Mcginnis, they have talked about one day playing the Southeast Alaska State Fair in Haines. This year the band was invited over to play and everyone has been pretty excited about it. It has taken some hard work to get this all lined up and ready to go by some of the more active members of the band. They had to figure out how to transport not only our music equipment, but also our PA system on the Alaska state ferry as well as where and when we would be playing.

So, what I know of Haines is not much. It has a population of around 1,800 people and is home to the surviving set pieces from Walt Disney‘s White Fang picture, which was filmed there in 1990. From Haines you can drive up to Anchorage, but you do have to go through Canada to get there.

Packing up our gear

Armed with that little knowledge, I packed my bags, drum gear, some food because of my Slow Carb Diet, and waited for my bass player, Matt to show up with his wife to take me to the ferry Dock. At just before 7AM we arrived at the ferry dock and got our tickets and boarded the ship we would be on for the next four and half hours to Haines.

The ferry itself is filled with all kinds of nooks, crannies and corners that people can tuck themselves away in. My band and I found one such place with windows so we could see the scenery float by. During the trip we were able to review some of the songs. An acoustic guitar fiddle will pulled out at one point as music was rehearsed. The rest of the trip was filled with reading and napping.

Fogcutter Bar
The Fogcutter Bar

When we docked in Haines and exited the vessel we drove straight to the Fogcutter Bar to unload and set up our gear.The Southeast Alaska State Fair was in full swing, so we would not start performing till after the fairgrounds closed for the night around 11PM. We took a couple of hours and staged all of our musical equipment and then decided to get some food.

After eating we all headed back up to the Fogcutter and finished our setup. A quick two song sound check later, the five of us piled into three vehicles and headed to our respective lodgings for this trip to take a nap. Around this time I realised that Haines only had the Edge network available to smartphone users. So updating Google+ was impossible and getting so much as a text message out most of the time was either hit or miss.

When 10:30 rolled around Mat (bass player), Mark (guitar player) and myself (drummer) packed ourselves into Mark’s car and headed back to the Fogcutter bar. It was still light out and it would have been sunny if not for the clouds in the sky. At least it was warm(ish).

In the bar, I asked the barkeeper (I have been wanting to say that this whole post) to fill up my aluminium canteen with ice water which I carried back to behind my drum set. A few minutes of checking cables and our sound and we were off playing music moving through our song list one by one.

The Haines crowd loved the music and was very enthusiastic for us to play our brand of Celtic rock music. Dancing and cheers went on all night long. The people of Haines could not have been more welcoming and wonderful to us.

For this bar gig I switched to using baseball gloves over my normal golfing gloves. This is mostly because I could not find a store in Juneau that sold left and right handed golfing gloves and I just should bite-the-bullet and order them online already. The thing I did not like about using the baseball gloves is that they were to padded. So my hands could not articulate themselves as well. I opted to keep them on my hands over having my hands all bloody and blistered by the end of the night.

I think it was close to 4AM when we wrapped up at the fogcutter. To celebrate we all went outside to smoke a cigar and talk about how the show went. The sun was coming back up already. While we talked people from the bar came out to compliment us and eventually Mike (guitar and bagpipes) and Marth (Guitar, Fiddle and Vocals) grabbed their bagpipes and fiddle and played a couple of songs outside for those of us enjoying the cool night air. It was a wonderful night.

The next morning I was sore and slow to move. My back just felt like one bit knotted up mess. I stretched out a little bit and drank a lot of water and started to feel better. I think it was close to 2pm before we left for the fair grounds. There we found food and entertainment with several food booths and two musical stages.

With food quickly filling the void in our guts we started to work out the plan of getting our musical gear onto the main stage for our 6PM performance. A lot of which was a blur for me. Maybe because I have slight stage fright and maybe because there was just so much to get done between getting on stage, playing music, and getting all our gear back off again. There was a lot to do in a short amount of time.

When it was time for us to get everything setup we all worked together and worked quickly to setup ourselves on the stage. We were introduced as “Fire On McGinnis from Juneau Alaska”. With that we started playing. Two songs in I broke a drum stuck and flung it out into the crowd.

Four songs into our set at the fair and I broke my throne. How does that even happen? But I did it. I was able to stay balanced through to the end of the song we were on. Luckily there was a spare throne at the back of the stage.

I remember the show going really well and getting lots of applause after each song we played. We ended out set with cheers from the crowd. Together as a group we got all of our gear off the stage so the next band could setup quickly. We got all our gear packed up in our vehicles and then spent the rest of the night enjoying all that the fair had to offer.

The part of the fair I enjoyed the most was that it was right next to the White Fang set. I spent a lot of time walking up and down the boarded sidewalks and smoking a cigar in the cool night air.

We got back to Juneau early Sunday afternoon, unloaded all our gear. What a weekend!

 

On Downloading

I think it’s a good idea because it’s people trading music. It has nothing to do with industry or finance, it’s just people that want music and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the same as someone turning on the fucking radio, it’s the same as someone putting a cassette in a cassette deck when the BBC plays a special radio session. I don’t think it’s a crime, it’s been going on for years. It’s the same as people making tapes for each other. The industry is more threatened by it because it’s the worldwide web and it’s a broader scope of trading, but I don’t think it’s such a fucking horrible thing. The first thing we should do is get all the fucking millionaires to shut their mouths, and stop bitching about the 25 cents a time they’re losing. – Dave Grohl

Lossless Audio

I really love music. All of my life music has played a big part in it. I remember at a very young age listening to vinyl records on my father’s Sony turntable home stereo system. I would listening to records for hours and hours. When CDs first came out I started buying them. To this day I still buy CDs and have a pretty large collection.

When MP3s started to make an appearance in the 90s they had one large advantage for the causal listener and one large disadvantage. The advantage being that file size of an MP3 file was is very small. You could store hundreds of MP3 encoded songs on one CD. This was huge and lead the way for music players like the Apple iPod.

The big disadvantage to MP3s for people like me was that since the audio was compressed to be a smaller file size you could hear the compression or the missing audio data when listening to an MP3. This drove me nuts!

I have friends that to this day swear up and down they can not tell the difference when listening to a song on a CD or when listening to the same exact song from an MP3 file. To me the differences have always stuck out like a sore thumb. Which at times I can’t even believe since I have been a rock drummer for so many years and I have to be experiencing some form of hearing loss by now.

So, because I can tell the difference between the lower quality audio as a result of an MP3 file and a CD I have just always bought CDs.

Very recently I have been educating myself on the virtues of the Free Lossless Audio Codec, or FLAC for short. Because FLAC is a lossless audio format it sounds just like my CDs sound. I can not tell the difference when I am listening to a FLAC audio file verses listening to the same song on CD. Everything I have educated myself about FLAC says that there really is no audio difference between the CD audio file and the FLAC audio file. The lossless audio codec was specifically designed for audio and the resulting file will drop down to at least 50% if not more of the original audio file from the CD.

So, why do I care about all this? Why don’t I just continue to listen to my CDs? Well, I do still listen to my CDs at home, but we now live in a world with lots of portable devices that were made for our connivance. I would like to take full advantage of my devices.

When Apple announced the iPhone 4S, I ordered one right away. At the same time I started researching FLAC audio files as a solution for my portable music listening pleasure. I found the following FLAC audio encoding guide and FLAC audio player ‘Golden Ear‘ for my iPhone. I also ordered a pair of really great headphones that I can’t say enough good things about right now. Sony Dynamic Stereo Headphones MDR-7506 Professional.

Based on the audio guide I found I started encoding my CDs right away. I received my headphones a few days later and then my iPhone 4S arrived. I purchased and loaded a copy of ‘Golden Ear’ on to my phone and transferred over a few songs to test out the application and my head phones. I was amazed! Every song sounded wonderful and crystal clear. The ‘Golden Ear’ audio player works a lot like iTunes for the iPhone. You have the quick access controls from the home screen as well as a play list of music to scroll through and choose from.

If you are really into audio quality like me, I can tell you I am so happy that I found this solution. I wish I had found it sooner. It would have saved me years of frustration.