September 24th, 2020.

My guitar’s been in the shop. Or rather the shoppe. I just picked it up and was pleasantly surprised by the experience. Catonsville has about half a dozen places to BUY musical instruments and almost as many spots that’ll work on them (and I’ve worked with most of them) – but I know that I do unholy things to my guitars and beyond that know that bringing my carbon fiber axe in to be serviced generally meets with… Opinions.

I’d encountered the people behind the repair bench at the Band Shoppe a couple of years ago when they had a booth at a festival I was playing and was happily surprised when the guy recognized my guitar and said he’d worked on them before. Finally had occasion to go in and get my OX worked on and they did a great job.

Quick notes :

This is the first time I’ve ever had my guitar worked on by someone younger than me.

This is the first time I’ve ever had someone work on my guitar that didn’t make it feel like they were kind of judging me for the type of instrument or the type of damage.

So – yay! The Band Shoppe in Catonsville, MD.

In other news, did some experimenting with multi-cam webcasting yesterday with our Live from the Lair. Me and Kristen and Sharif had a great time playing for an hour and a half ending out with Counting. I’d set up four separate cameras running through OBS rotating on a timer with some remote control action from a tablet down by my toe. There were definitely some issues to be worked out but all-in-all a worthy test.

An unexpected side effect : so, I’ve effectively been playing to ONE set of eyes (well, just an eye, really) for months now and I’ve remarked before about how that actually kind of amps up the intensity of the performance. Yesterday, with four separate cameras plus a video monitor and another remote to split my attention between, I didn’t feel that strong sense of focus and, well, LOST my focus rather rapidly. It showed in our banter and though I actually REALLY liked our sound and the looks of parts of it, it’s probably something better used differently.

A good experiment though. And getting it to work made me feel more satisfied than almost anything else has in the past several months. And just having a moment to FEEL GOOD counts for an AWFUL lot!