Jaco Pastorius has been a big influence on my playing over the years, and I've been wanting to do more Jaco-related videos for you guys to reflect that. In this video we'll learn a cool two-bar riff that Jaco played at live concerts all the time.

The One Hour Mix Part 4: Compression

The One Hour Mix Part 5: Reverb and Delay

Here's a brand new video if me performing, 'Caught in a Moment'. This is my favorite from the new album, and I always psych myself out to finally make videos for those great songs! If you've been waiting for your Patreon Shoutout, check out the end of the video to see if this is your lucky day! 

Thank you for being my patrons and helping me do my job, share my art and pay my bills! 

I have lots of upcoming shows: http://www.danielleatethsandwich.com/shows
I make dance club music that you can download for free: https://danielleatethesandwich.bandcamp.com/album/dance-club-thursday-2015

I'm letting one of my "secret" techniques out of the bag… Something simple you can incorporate into almost any funky bass line to give it more groove - right hand percussion.

So THANKS to Dave Retan (one of my patrons) for recommending that I cover a Kelly Clarkson tune! I took some liberties with this one. Hope you enjoy. And I'm still keeping all y'all's recommendations in mind for future covers, while I work on the new album :D

Thanks so much for your feedback on last week's post. Josh Woodward put it this way: 

"Nobody has it all. The best you can do is to use your strengths to muscle your way around the weaknesses."

That's something that it's hard to remember. The other aspect of that equation is that you have to find people to collaborate with who have the strengths that you lack. Finding collaborators like that can be hard. There's a lot of obstacles. For one thing, everyone has their own stuff going on. I'm happy to spend a certain amount of time giving my expertise to friends and colleagues, but ultimately their thing is THEIR thing and my thing is MY thing. Casual collaboration only goes so far. I think all parties have to have skin in the game in order for collaboration to really take off.

I'm trying to get better at this, and find folks to work with who have the time and interest in throwing their lots in with me on a variety of projects. One of those projects is a Song A Day Navigator. The first step on my end was putting together the spreadsheet of every single song (which I had) with every single YouTube link (which I hadn't done before, duh). This gives us a very basic song a day data set that he can work with. Future data points in that spreadsheet would be: lyrics, links to buy, # of views, etc. But the next step for me is to figure out some interesting ways to NAVIGATE that data. I've come up with three so far. One of them is the image above: The Pick A Number system. I'm also attaching images for how I image a "Timehopper" version would look and one that's based on words.

My question to you: Are any of these three ways of looking at Song A Day particularly interesting to you? Can you think of other ways that would be more interesting to interact with this massive catalog of songs?

The person I'm working with is working on his own project that I don't TOTALLY understand, but it has to do with APIs. I think he's trying to make a thing that makes it super easy for anyone to make an API to go with a data set. The idea being, in the case of Song A Day, that he's going to create this API for interacting with all 2400+++ songs that other people can just take and run with. So if you had an idea of how you'd like to organize my catalog, and you just wanted to do it, you could. 

I'm really excited about it.

I was a good kid. I followed the rules and I got good grades. I took standardized tests seriously. So seriously that I’d get anxiety attacks beforehand.

But I remember a moment, some random day on my long, harsh road from little-kid-ness through puberty, I was maybe 11 years old. I was sitting in the back of the school bus having this revelation that, like, I didn’t have to follow the rules. Before that exact moment, it had seemed like all the things adults were telling me to do were somehow the only way. Their words were bedrock truth. And suddenly I realized that it was all bullshit. It was a weird, frightening and exciting moment.

I started to get into trouble. Nothing too horrible, but enough for me to be able to mark that moment as “before trouble” and “after trouble”.

Here’s the story of the “Worst Thing” I ever did as a kid. It’s actually not that bad, especially compared to stories I’ve been told by friends over the years of their worst things. But it’s pretty awful. For a pre-teen living in the backwoods of Vermont who’d never been in “serious” trouble before, this was top of the line, I think.

It was a slow weekend day, I was probably 12 years old. I have no idea where my parents were. Maybe they were working? Anyway, I had a group of 3 or 4 friends over. We were bored out of our minds. We decided to go for a walk. The town where I grew up is all dirt roads and forest. We used to just walk around for hours.

On this particular day, our first stop was a construction site - a house that was being built not far down the road from where I lived. The frame of the house was complete. It was all just concrete and two by fours. We trashed the place. We knocked stuff over. We broke some wood. We etched things into a metal tool chest. We spread nails out everywhere.

We left the construction site in search of something else to vandalize. At some point we got off the road and just started wandering through the woods. We came upon a sugar shack. This is where you turn maple sap into syrup. We broke all the windows. There were these little glass jars of syrup samples, grade A through D. We took turns throwing them at the side of the shack, syrup splattering everywhere. We broke some of the equipment.

Having gotten our pre-teen, testosterone boredom fueled jollies, we headed back to my house. Not long after, a police car rolled into my driveway. We freaked out. The cop rang the doorbell. We all hid, in closest and under beds. Still just little kids.

The cop came back that night when my parents were home. He said it was easy to figure out who was responsible because there were footprints leading all the way from where we had exited the woods straight back to my house. Dirt roads, after all. We were such idiots.

In my memory, I was being admonished by the cop and my parents for least two hours. I can’t imagine he actually stayed for more than 15 minutes. But my parents were predictably livid.

My friends and I had to collectively pay for the repairs and all the samples we destroyed. I don’t remember how much it was per person, but it was a lot for a 12 year old.All my weekly allowance went towards it for at least half a year. Finally, I saved enough money to pay, and I walked the few miles down to the house of the guy who owned the sugar shack. He wasn’t home, but his wife invited me in and gave me a brownie. She was so sweet. She said we were lucky we didn’t hang out much longer around the shack because her husband had heard us breaking stuff and had gone out to investigate with his hunting rifle. She sent me on my way with a little baggie full of baked goods.

This incident stands out so strongly in my mind partly because it felt so dramatic, but also partly because as I’ve gotten older and older, I find it harder and harder to understand why we acted the way we did. When you’re a teenager like that, you feel like no one understands you. And that’s actually true. I’m at the point now, near 2 decades later, where I’m just completely baffled.

You may recognize Carlos Cabrera from our Superman's Song collaboration or if you've seen Pomplamoose play live. He's a great drummer, and one of my best friends. He also works at Patreon now as their head data analyst (such a smart kiddo...) Anyhow, he's one of my favorite people in the world, and I'm so so glad we got to drive around Sonoma, Marin and San Francisco filming these random objects. Such a great great day :)