INT. J ROLAND KELLY - NIGHT

As in my earlier, post I talked about writing a song with an Ecuadorian I met here, and I needed a guitar. I was feeling that nervous-anxious itch, after not having played for six weeks anyway.

I walked around to different guitar shops in El Centro Historico of Quito, of which there are many, and decided on a little student guitar by Rosero Nunez. It cost $45 and is totally playable.

I don’t know who this Rosero Nunez (or the company) is. I do know that there are many small guitar-making shops in Ecuador, but I couldn’t find any information online about this one.

And when I can’t find information online; I blog about it.

All I have is the inside label:

Notice the hotmail email address on it.

I’ll pass that along, in case anyone wants a custom guitar.

I hear from an Ecuadorian peace corp’er that the country has many guitar makers that are 70 years old with no children who wanted to continue the tradition. So it goes.

My new guitar is quite inexpensive (but good) and in the store I purchased it, I saw many more Rosero Nunez guitars that were of really good quality but at a higher price.

I decided on my particular guitar because it was small (in case I have to travel with it), it was cheap (in case I have to toss it), it’s not large enough to make too much noise in my hotel room, and while being a “classical” guitar, it’s made for children so the strings are almost the same distance apart as in the American tradition.

Having a classical guitar is new to me. I have never had nylon strings, I’ve never had strings don’t fan out as you go down the fret board, and if I break a string I would not know how to replace it, as the strings have no “ball” and are tied on in an elaborate way.

Still it has a unique sound, and I’m quite satisfied.

I should say that many things in Ecuador are bootlegged, and just because the label lists it as being a Rosero Nunez, that’s no guarantee that it’s not a guitar made somewhere else with an Ecuadorian label. I bought a hat that says it was made in Italy and that is obviously not true.

Even if - it’s still a playable guitar.

-J Roland Kelly

It has been one year since I had my last drag. I set this post to publish on the one-year anniversary of my last puff at 10 pm on November 15th. Last year (2007) that date fell on a Thursday night.

I had been a smoker for six and a half years, having started at the ridiculously ripe age of 21. In the place from which I come, at the time I started smoking, 25% of all adults smoked and 50% of all young people smoked, and one day I just found myself on the wrong side of the line.

In the course of those 6 and a half years I smoked cigarettes, cigars, and a corncob pipe; each exclusively and each for months at a time, all in a quest to find what my forefathers found so magical, and in the end (unbeknownst to me at the time over-commercialized spirit of connoisseurship) I found none of it magical.

In half a dozen different ways, I must have quit half a dozen different times, but as they say about the one thing that you eventually find… it’s always the last place you look.

I finally found what I was looking for in a series of three writings: Junkie by William S. Burroughs, The Tobacco Timeline, and most importantly of all (the only piece of written work that I will claim saved my life) The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allen Carr.

Before I quit, I never would have imaged that books were my way out. I had spent most of my time dealing with different forms of nicotine replacement therapy. Which I strongly do not recommend as reasons explained in Allen Carr’s book.

If you are struggling to quit, you don’t live in quiet desperation, and don’t lose hope, just read the first 20 pages of The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, you’ll know that your card has been pulled.

As it turns out, I read the very last edition of Allen Carr’s book; he was to die of lung cancer a year after publishing it, and it was just as I started reading it.

It has to be one of the cruelest twists in the world that people die of smoking related cancers 30 years after quitting.

The book is a good read even if you are a non-smoker. It contains a lot of de-commercialized truths that are censored in the American mainstream. I can never view the medical community, businessmen, or drug addicts the same way again.

To this day, I’m still impressed with the wisdom of the book.

When it comes to The Tobacco Timeline, it is just amazing; the further that we get from the days of big tobacco the more un-biased information that is revealed. This is one of the very unique stories in human history, you might think that you have heard it, but I promise you haven’t heard all of it.

William S. Burroughs and his works need no introduction.

These are three honest books about Tobacco and addiction in a world full of misinformation. My advice is to go to them first, don’t buy something you see on TV, and don’t believe everything you hear.

You can’t trust anyone, in the Jim Jarmusch film, Coffee and Cigarettes during a conversation with Iggy Pop, my hero Mr. Tom Waits says about smoking, “you know what they say… you never really quit.”

Those words have resonated with me, through all my time as a smoker, but you know what… Tom Waits is wrong. Read the books.

Plus I have an interesting story about when I actually quit—

I had spent the whole previous year cutting down, and getting really fat. As I said it was a Thursday when smoked my last smoke. I went the whole next day at the office without smoking, and my car was loaded up with camping gear and 5 $80 dollar bottles of tequila.

My plan was to spend the first three days camping.

After work, I drove 40 miles to Henry Coe State Park just South of San Jose. Parked the car. Got trashed. Really meant to put up the tent but slept in the car.

The next day hiked (staggered?) two miles away from the ranger station to a walk in campsite. Around 7:30pm, about 45 minutes after it got dark, and after a day alone with five bottles of expensive tequila, I felt like I was being watched.

It wasn’t the alcohol, I really was. I found two eyes reflected in my little AA battery flashlight, and they where maybe 100 yards away. I had drunk with coyote that had lost its fear of people and ventured into the campground the previous night, I thought it was something like that.

That coyote was real attentive.

So, I walk towards the eyes with the flashlight up above my head (like a cop), bottle of Patron still in my other hand, when I’m maybe 25 feet away I realize what I’m looking at…

And while I didn’t freak out, or move, inside I was filled with real terror, almost a panic attack. I was looking at a mountain lion.

The mountain lion was broadside to me, looked at me for a moment and then on silent pads ran towards the tree line where I couldn’t see it.

I felt like I almost had a heart attack, and briefly thought I should take better care of myself.

Very focused, I got my backpack out of the tent, stuffed in my sleeping bag (and a few bottles) and walked back to the ranger station in the dark.

Mountain lions are supposed to be the most elusive animals on the planet. They are not supposed to let a human walk up to them. They are not supposed to be 2 miles from a campground. This was BULLSHIT!

The next part of the story I would entitle: Through a Dark, Drunkly…

…because I still had to walk two miles back to the ranger station. And it seems like the walk back in the dark, not knowing if you are being hunted would be scary. Here’s what I thought about…

When I was a much younger camper, I heard a story that’s meant to get under your skin. Roughly, it’s a kind of a ghost story evolving a kid, maybe 10 years old, maybe two miles away from home playing out in the country, when he sees a ghoul, who smiles at him and them disappears into the ground, and the kid has to walk back home at sun down, alone, wondering if this ghoul will get him.

I always wondered what if I was that kid. When I was 20 or so I was taking a bus out of Mexico City, when I looked down from a highway upon one of their infamous shantytowns. I had never seen anything like it at the time and I thought, shit, if I suddenly found myself down there, I would rather just be dead, then to have to find my way out.

Anyway, the walk back to the ranger station made me feel like I now know what it’s like to be that kid or what it’s like to find yourself in one of the rough Mexico City Shantytowns, basically after the initial moments of terror, and near panic attack heart attack it’s all focused adrenaline precision from there.

Nothing can be as bad as the first fright, so it’s all down hill from there.

When I got to the ranger station I told them the story and they said I was full of sh!t, that mountain lions don’t get that close to people, unless they are hunting and then you won’t see them until you are being attacked.

But I know what I saw. I spent the next week reading about them. They most actively hunt just after sundown, and the fact that I saw one’s broadside means it wasn’t hunting me, as they stalk, hunkered down the same way as a housecat.

For the last year the mountain lion has been my anti-smoking totem. I couldn’t start smoking again because then I would have to quit, and to quit would mean going back to where the mountain lion lived.

- J Roland Kelly

I had an awesome thrill recently; I found out two young filmmakers that I don’t even know (yet?) included a song (The World’s Warm Womb) from my first album in their short film entitled Cool.

It was a surprise to me, I found the video on youtube after searching for my name.

The film was created by F. Chiaverini and stars Matthew Branham.

And, I must say they nailed it. They knew what the song was about and independently created an image for the song that elevated it to newer and higher levels of “cool.”

F. Chiaverini´s ability to astutely pick out emotion from a series of shots is not something that just anyone can do, and having Matthew Branham with the expressive face of a great actor complemented that in the film.

They entire thing works well together.

F. Chiaverini and Matthew Branham both seem like nice young artists, won’t you help them out when you can. You can start by leaving feedback for their super short film Cool on youtube.

-J Roland Kelly

And as always my two albums: J Roland Kelly, Stop Your Nursing Unless You’re Rendering Fun and J Roland Kelly Taunts the Process …into Attacking are available at ITunes and Amazon.com, as well as where ever else fine music is downloaded.

UPDATE: Sound Engineering & Making Music: Converting Audio to MIDI In Your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) to Perfectly Intertwine Organic and Virtual Instruments Plus a Lesson on Audio Plug-ins

After last weeks post about the new power of MIDI, I had another idea about how to incorporate my idea and hurry the future along…

The new power of MIDI rotates around the development of audio to MIDI conversion software, and I wrote last week that we would have to wait until a sound recording software maker like Apple or Adobe add this feature to their software packages like GarageBand, Adobe Audition, Logic, etc. in order for the full power of this to be seen, but it doesn’t have to be that way if some third party would create a new type of MIDI interface.

Let me explain.

A type of third party plug-in could be created that would work with every recording suite. It would work like this:

1. A microphone would record audio and convert it to MIDI in real time (this part is already done and you can download programs for free already).

2. Than a program (the program in question; not yet created) would take the MIDI newly being recorded from the audio and reconstitute it as the MIDI cable and USB pluses of a real MIDI interface such as a keyboard, thereby mimicking just another MIDI controller (again, all in real time).

The result would be that every sound recording program would just accept this as another MIDI input device and… Ta-Da the future!

More detailed advice to computer programmers:

1. Take one of the audio to MIDI conversion programs already created (lease it, buy it, or hack it at first, I suspect these are a dime a dozen and never make money) and look at the MIDI file that it creates as it converts audio to MIDI in real time. The MIDI file can’t be any different than a database.

2. Read up on USB and MIDI protocol to learn to generate MIDI signals from the file being created by the Audio to MIDI software.

3. Market the whole thing to cool young indie musicians, and feel cool and young… and rich and a music pioneer.

I just can’t get over what a good idea this is. Imagine laying down the guitar track, then you want the melody layered on top by an oboe but you don’t have an oboe or know an oboe player so you just play the melody on guitar and it gets converted to an oboe instantly… or forget the guitar for melody, you just hum it into the microphone.

I am currently reading a book on songwriting, and it mentions a few unorthodox songwriting methods; apparently Mel Brooks (who can’t play a single goddamn instrument) wrote the score for his Tony award winning Broadway show The Producers HIMSELF by humming into a tape recorder, and well paid musicians then took it from there.

And that’s the future I dream of… I want to be able to score an entire Broadway show (Tony winning) without knowing how to play a single instrument.

Of course Mel Brooks could have used the software that I propose, and his humming would have been turned instantly into a grand piano or a string section or what have you- for demo purposes.

- J Roland Kelly

Thank God.

The Church La Merced in Quito

Here’s the way I heard it: the church was built between 1700 and 1742. The tower is the highest in colonial Quito and contains the largest church bell.

After construction, every bit of the building was blessed by priests except the 47m high tower, which as the story goes was quickly taken over by everyone’s best amigo El Diablo.

Also according to legend, the only one strong enough to resist the aforementioned Diablo in the tower was an African-Ecuadorian bell-ringer named Ceferino.

After Ceferino died in 1810, no one would climb the tower, and so the clock stopped and the bell remains un-rung.

Let me just restate this: the largest church bell in Quito has remained hanging in a 47m high tower for the last 200 years without human intervention; okay continuing…

The clock stopped at 6:50. I’ve been asking around trying to see if this is a special time.

El Diablo time. 6:50. Drink a beer.

No clear answer, but that’s 6:50 Eastern Standard Time in the U.S. (not accounting for daylight savings time) if you want to have that beer.

No daylight savings time in Ecuador, by the way people, because it’s on the equator.

I  know that sometime in middle of some night, that bell will ring, the city will gather around the tower, and a large drunken gringo in a red satin devil costume holding a heavy mallet will stagger out, just purely in terms of statistics I mean.

“NO HABLA ESPANOL, POLICIA. I’M THE DEVIL!” Stumble. Vomit. Handcuffs. Ticket home.

Maybe that gringo will be you. Maybe it will be me.

I’ve not found a devil costume, but if anyone needs a pope outfit shoot me an email.

-J Roland Kelly

A couple of years ago, on my way out to a new life in California I was standing by a overloaded Geo Metro smoking a cigarette at a rest-stop somewhere along I-40, watching a guy watering his dog, and to make a long story short: I struck-up a conversation with said guy, who was going to where a circus was bedded-down for the winter and I received an official invitation… to run away with the circus.

If you roam around long enough anything will happen.

I started a conversation with a guy in my Quito hotel that turned out to be a writer David Joshua Jennings, on assignment for a travel guide. We talked about teaching English abroad, he said he was meeting people for drinks later, invited me out, and that is where I met Quito screenwriter, filmmaker & musician Carolina Arroba.

I saw her little studio, listened to her new unreleased album, and read the screenplay for the film she is currently shooting. F*ck yeah. I’m not allowed to say anything about any of this, but I’m going to see if she will give me an interview, I’ll post it to this blog.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Carolina.

-J Roland Kelly

Above photo by Chris Falcony

I found this thing called the South American Explorers. Sure, I joined. I don’t know what I think about the name, and definitely their website is from another time. And that time was not a simpler time, but hey, they offer a totally worthwhile service.  

They will store your sh*t. No sh*t! Backpack. Mail. Whatever.

So, get this. If you are relocating to South America you can mail yourself a package and it will be there in South America when you arrive.

I’m going to use this service to mail myself a crate of books (screenwriting, etc.) and maybe my guitar. I don’t want any hassles on the plane, books are heavy, and I don’t want go looking for a place to stay the first night with 40 pounds of printed matter.

The basic fee to join is $50 bucks. They maintain “clubhouses” in Quito, Cusco, Lima, and Buenos Aires with the main headquarters in Ithaca, New York.

Their clubhouses have wireless Internet. Boo-yeah. Apparently members are welcome to hangout at the clubhouse all day everyday until they close.

They offer travelers information on useful topics and try to create “greater awareness of this continent through the diffusion of information and cross cultural interaction,” all that good stuff… but man, I hope they can store some sh*t.

Totally worth the fifty bucks right there.

The clubhouses look pretty cool, like old colonial. Like you might go in and someone might be smoking a sugary sweet tobacco out of a cherrywood pipe, and you might hear them say “it’s good to own land, Stevens, I tell you it’s good to own land.”

I’ll be there using the high-speed Internet, away from all the kids playing Doom 57 in the Internet cafes.

Yes, sir. And they give d*scounts to bloggers who blog about them.

-J Roland Kelly

I’m old enough to have had a real four-track. Wow, how things have changed. Now, many people out there have killer recording solutions already and they don’t even know it.

I wrote a blog post two months ago about Adobe Audition vs. GarageBand. I discovered how cool the Mac notebook recording solution is when Leopard wouldn’t work with my usb microphone.

As turns out the MacBook Pro as a quality built-in mic. I looked it up and the less expensive MacBook has the same mic. So that’s it. That’s the solution.

You need a MacBook and… ah… that’s it.

The entry level MacBook starts around a grand. It has the mic and the software (GarageBand) to get you up and going.

Now the machinery of recording is no longer the weakest link in you discovering that you were never meant to be a songwriter.

To recap, if at all you think you might want to record yourself in the future and are shopping around for a new laptop now go with a Mac.

If you are thinking of recording and you already have a Mac… click on that little guitar icon and stop putting off the inevitable.

-J Roland Kelly

I’ve been a long time fan of Adobe Audition since before Adobe purchased it and it was still known as Cool Edit Pro. I used version 1.5 to record J Roland Kelly, Stop Your Nursing Unless You’re Rendering Fun and version 2.0 to record J Roland Kelly Taunts the Process… into Attacking.

Both fu*king fantastic albums might I add.

But now that I have a MacBook Pro I’ve been playing around in GarageBand and it’s alright by me. Surprisingly good actually.  Almost unbelievable that it’s free with a Mac.

It doesn’t have all the functionality of Audition, it can’t read and write to every format out there for example but really who needs that… really you just need two formats: one that is high quality for preservation, and one made for distribution.

If you are recording everything yourself, just stick with Apple’s authoritarian formats and you’re fine.  

Adobe hasn’t released an edition of Audition for the Mac yet. That was a big part of why I finally started playing around with GarageBand.

The experiment did not come without its problems. The usb interface for the best microphone I have ever owned MXL USB .006) didn’t work with GarageBand. Bummer.

But at the time I was just interested in demo-ing some new songs anyway… and that’s when I discovered something great.

The built-in omni-directional mic in the Mac Book Pro is superb. It’s frequencies are limited a little to the high end, but it’s still quality, sweetheart. If you bought a mic this nice it would cost somewhere in the $70 dollar range.

Here’s an example of what can be done with just the built in mic and GarageBand set up. This is me playing my acoustic guitar in front of the MacBook Pro with one take. It’s a song from my second album.

Silicon Valley Must End In Fire (if it ends in ice there might be a chance some of it gets preserved)

The song is a little heavy on the “Japanese girls in black & white,” and “everything must die” themes but hey… it’s like what a famous war criminal once said “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have.”

-J Roland Kelly

So, uh, my mothers Italian…