Ryan Alford – Guitarist

Last Friday I picked up my first Telecaster. Favoring the clean guitar sound, I’ve been interested in Teles for a while, but have really wanted one after seeing Redd Volkaert‘s band perform in Austin. After hearing about Squier’s Classic Vibe 50′s Telecaster from several friends and reading some seriously good reviews, I was convinced this was a great guitar that wouldn’t break my wallet. (Seeing Redd demonstrate it for this years TDPRI giveaway didn’t help the addiction.)

In the reviews, a few readers commented on the guitar having a thin neck, but this is a personal preference. Of the two colors, the neck on the Vintage Blonde felt thin to me (then again, this could have been me subconsciously wanting a guitar that looked like a Tele from the 50′s). Other reviews suggested that there were better pick-ups suited for the guitar, while the other end of the pick-up spectrum had folks who swore by the factory pick-ups.

A week into it and I’ve kept the original 9s on, with plans to change update them to 10s later tonight. With that said, 9s are a bit strange when you’ve been playing 10s as far back as you can remember – any excess string pressure or slight bend stands out. But, so far, the instrument feels solid and plays well.

If you are considering adding this to your collection, I will share with you a fault you might not encounter during a test run. After 40 minutes of test driving the Butterscotch and Vintage Blonde models, I brought it home and cranked up my Ampeg J-12T. Only then did I rake an open “E” chord down at the bridge… The vibration on the open high “E” string caused by a heavy dig with the pick will repeatedly pop the string out of the nut. This guitar has no string retainer on the headstock! Pretty strange if you ask me, but not a big deal, as one can easily be installed.

Aside from the missing string retainer, I haven’t uncovered any true mysterious quirks on it during my first week. This is a solid blues, jazz, or country guitar, and in no way lives up to Squier’s low-end reputation (except for the “do not throw away” sticker on the back – what is up with that??).

Hint for parents or beginners: If you’re looking for good quality gear that you can use for years down the road, $800 will buy you a Squier Classic Vibe 50′s Telecaster, Ampeg J-12T tube amp (with reverb & trem), overdrive pedal, two chords, and a gig bag. Just sayin’!

It’s hard to believe that Black Coffee has been cranking for only a year.  To celebrate, we played our anniversary show last night at Club Cafe in Pittsburgh.  I like hanging with the band and friends after the show, but an occasional late night drive home is always nice to reflect.

It was a pleasure to share the evening with Aabaraki, a band that’s been in my funk/soul rotation for a few months now, who dubs their style as reduction-stutterfunk.  Earlier in the year, a few of us went to see the Tedeschi Trucks Band in New York and winded up catching these fellas at Rockwood Music Hall.  Definitely check them out.

We also had the opportunity to talk with the sound engineer, Denny, who – as it turns out – used to run sound regularly for Queen Bee and the Blue Hornet Band.  He has been running sound for years, and it was great to have him behind the knobs last night.

Pittsburgh shows are always special to us.  There are some nice venues down there, great people, and folks just seem to genuinely enjoy seeing live music.  As usual, there were a ton of familiar faces, but it was especially good catch up with the Touch Faster crew and our friends Joe and Monica.  Joe was always among the performers at the Phryst open mic nights we’d hit when we were starting out as a trio.  (Great times, but I don’t miss carrying my Barker through the crowd on our way out.  Though, my Ampeg would fare well in that environment…)

So we shall see what the year brings.  We’ve played over 65 shows in the last year including a pile of festivals, shared the stage with Lubriphonic and Bettye LaVette in Pittsburgh (not to mention a pile of touring acts at Johnstown’s Flood City Music Festival), met some really great folks along the way, and to say the least:  we are chomping at the bit to hit it hard again this time around.  We have a pile of new tunes in the works, and are truly branching out regionally with shows on the calendar in WV, PA, and NY and others in the works in MD and VA.

That’s all for now. Be on the lookout for our friend Jay’s recording of last night’s show.  And if you’d like, sign up for our email list in the meantime.

I’ve been using the same Gmail account for about eight years now. I’ve had webpages come and go, and the emails at their domains have disappeared with them. In the past, I rarely used email accounts with my domains because sending around a mass “here is my new email” message to my contacts would seemingly result in folks not updating their address books. (At least, this is what I’m guilty of).

If you have been sending messages with an email account from your domain and have not been using a free webmail service (Gmail or Yahoo, for example), I highly suggest that you sign up for one today. A lot of folks get too preoccupied with the fact that an email from their domain looks more professional than an email coming from a free service. As a result, they overlook how they can improve their long-term email usage.

Domain Forwarding

When your 80′s hair band ‘Bangers and Mash’ breaks up and you stop renewing the domain registration, what happens to all the emails previously sent to that account? What are you going to do with all of your old messages, and the contacts buried in them that never made it to your address book? Likely, they won’t matter to you at the time, but you may have years of messages that you’ll want to get your hands on down the road.

A similar situation could occur if you don’t have a domain, but instead have an email address through a phone or cable company that you are tired of paying for. This is why it’s important that your webmail provider is free.

Save all of your domain’s emails with your new webmail provider by setting up an email forwarder with your domain’s host to forward all incoming messages. This ensures that everything hitting your domain’s inbox will be stored away safely even if you stop renewing your domain. Beyond having them stored, I guarantee your messages will be more safely stored with Google or Yahoo than with your much smaller domain provider.

Finally, if you decide to start using your new email account as your primary account, you will have fewer email accounts to log into to read messages.

“Send Email As”

A bonus feature that goes hand-in-hand with email forwarding is the “Send Email As” feature. Webmail providers often allow you to setup your account to send email as another address (at least, I know first hand that Gmail supports this). For instance, I log into Gmail with my personal address, read emails that I get from Ralford.net, and reply to them within Gmail as my Ralford.net email. Using the “Send Email As” feature means you never have to login to another account to read email.

Since you are logging into your domains’ emails less frequently, make sure to remember the passwords for these accounts. You may also want to do an occasional check to make sure your email forwarders are not broken and that you are getting all incoming messages. The easiest way to do this is to send a test email to the account under question, and see if it gets forwarded to your free account.

It’d had been a while since I’d been on a challenging hike beyond a leisurely day hike or an evening camp-out in the woods. I’d been craving a weekend trip with a loaded backpack and the burdens that come with hiking a long distance since September. A month ago, I spotted a clear weekend on my calendar, and plans were as good as made.

My pal Steve and I hiked a portion of the Loyalsock Trail this past weekend, commonly known as the Loyalsock-Link Loop. The Loyalsock Trail (the “LT”, for short – as designated by tree-markers) is a 59.3 mile trail in Pennsylvania’s Lycoming County, that runs east and west, from route 220 on its east side to route 87 at its western terminus.

We decided on the loop after some debate as to whether we’d would tackle 15 mile hike or one closer to 20 miles. Given our two day time frame, twenty miles seemed best, so the Loyalsock-Link Loop fit the bill. After obtaining maps we learned that the loop itself is 22 miles, and is formed by the Link Trail (designated by a red “X” on a circular yellow tree-marker) which connects to the LT at two junctures. The Loyalsock-Link Loop is evenly bisected by the Loyalsock Creek, which by my definition (at least during this soggy October) was a formidable raging river. The river runs east to west, and is sandwiched between two parallel ridges. Along the north ridge is the Loyalsock Trail, and along the south ridge is the Link Trail.

Our National Geographic topo maps and some hiker reviews indicated that most folks start at the west end of the loop in World’s End park (along the river), and hike clockwise, with the first half of their hike heading eastward along the northern ridge. We took an alternative route, and started at the parking lot marking the eastern terminus of the LT along route 220. This extra 1.5 mile loop access trail resulted in a 25 mile hike, which, while it was satisfying to complete, was probably biting off more than we were ready to chew in two days.

Our Hike

We hit the trail on Saturday at around 9:30am, and there was no doubt that it would be a cool weekend. Stepping out of my buddy’s truck made me laugh that I even considered my hammock over my tent, but as soon as we hit the trail, we warmed up.

There are two trails that leave the parking lot at 220, both of which provide quick access to the RX-7 connector trail which is the path we took to the loop. These are the LT and another trail called the Haystack trail. Leaving the lot, both trails head down the ridge and cross the RX-7 trail (marked like the Link Trail, with a red “X” on a yellow circular yellow tree marker). The RX-7 trail follows a railroad grade westward and is certainly the most level and direct way to access the loop. Optionally, from the grade, you could continue down the LT or the Haystacks Trail to an area called the Haystacks, where the trails run together along the river, and eventually climb back up the ridge and meet again with the railroad grade. Our hope was to complete more than half of the hike our first day, so we avoided the hike near the Haystacks and took the (very wet, but waterfall ridden) railroad grade until the LT returned from the Haystacks to join with it. At this point, we followed the two trails (now joined) down the valley which connected us to the Eastern-most point of the loop.

As the LT meets the river, there is a large bridge, which was closed to motorized traffic – likely due to the recent hurricane flooding. You can continue along the south shore of the Loyalsock Creek, along the Link Trail (“X”), or follow the LT across the bridge, and along the northern ridge. While our map and hiker reviews showed most hikers tackling the loop in a clockwise fashion, it seemed most logical for us to cross the river and follow the LT, taking us around the loop counter-clockwise. This proved to be the absolute best decision we could have made, as the entire northern ridge was soggy and littered with rocks that prevented tent camping in most areas (with the most notable exception being in the area of Soans Pond near the east of end of the ridge, which had a gorgeous forest, with a soft bed of pine needles and plenty of room for camping).

With our goal of completing more than half of the trail the first day, we knew early on we had to hike to the second river crossing (near World’s End’s park office), and up the southern ridge before we could setup camp. Fallen leaves forced us to poke at the trail with trek poles, which became necessity to negotiate any hidden puddles of water and mud. Knowing the distance we had left to hike kept our pace in check. By around 5pm, we made it to the west side of the ridge. By this point we had crossed about five streams, a few of which made slipping very probable. We were fortunate to not have any injuries or falls at the stream crossings, though after a careless step on a wet log early in the day, I had a good tumble down a hill, and am thankful to have landed on my pack without getting a scratch.

Hiking down the northern ridge to the river was treacherous. The trail was steep with many wet boulders and one challenging stream crossing. We descended the ridge with about 12 miles under our belts, so rubbery legs undoubtedly contributed to the complexity of the task at hand. We were thankful to reach the river, where there was significant flood damage (again from the hurricane floods), but we knew nightfall was approaching and it that would be four miles until we reached our destination. We hiked onward, with one more stream crossing (a bridge was washed out), and shortly later junctioned with the Link Trail, which would take us back east along the southern ridge. The cloud cover over the forest cover made darkness settle in quickly, and seeing trail markings on the trees became more difficult with every step. The Link Trail led us up along a slick narrow ledge just along the edge of another raging stream, the first we hiked along all day. Some of the falls would have been a beautiful sight during the day, but we were running low on steam, and needed to get up the ridge and call it a day. The trail climbed up and away from the stream, and after a bit of hiking with our headlamps, we found a good place to tent and call it a night. We were about 16 miles into the hike.

Our hike Eastward along the rest of the ridge on Sunday was no competition with the previous day on the soggy northern ridge: The trail was dry, with fewer rocks, and the weather was also teasing us with some sunlight.

Final Words

Given the week of rain prior to our hike, we were in disbelief that the Link Trail along the southern ridge was as dry as we encountered it. I would encourage any backpacker tackling the Loyalsock Loop to camp on the southern ridge and avoid staying the night on the north side of the river, with the exception of the area around Soans Pond.

Wildlife during our hike was limited, except for a doe we spooked and an orange salamander we found during a stop for a slug of water. However, there were many different landscapes which include waterfalls, streams, Hemlock forests, Soans Pond, numerous vistas, caves and rock overhangs, and unforgettably, the Loyalsock Creek (river!).

All in all, I would recommend this hike to any hiker with some experience under their belt. I recommend taking a pair of hiking sticks or trek poles to help negotiate wet sections of the trail and use them to keep balance while crossing streams.

Hello friends! It has been a very busy and exciting year, and though I’ve not made a weblog post in some time, the time has a come. My friend Gina Riggio has recently invited the members of Dirty Superb (Jacob Haqq-Misra, Micky New, and myself) to join her in recording her latest single, “No Guarantee”.

The song is hot of the press, released very early this morning after a late night of mixing at Marc Frigo’s studio: No Guarantee. Enjoy!

Chad Becks raises the dilemma that many genres of guitar including the jazz and classical varieties are experiencing a lack of growth in comparison to other more popular genres. Though I’ve not observed an actual decline of interest in classical or jazz guitar within the musical community, I can certainly relate his observation to the acceptance and support of musical creativity. Becks’ observation between pop music and jazz or classical guitar differentiates between two vastly different levels of creative complexity within written music, and is analogous to the continually growing popularity of cover-bands versus lesser-supported original music at the local level.

Having lived in Centre County now for eight years, I can certainly say that musical interest among the general public favors popular music over original music – or at least the typical downtown band line-ups selected by our venues make it appear this way.

With State College holding a large population of the county, it’s common to hear local musicians blame the venues and their student patrons for this lack of variety. True or not, many naturally relate the demand for sing-along bands to the thirsty student patrons that stimulate the borough’s night life economy. On the contrary, bluegrass – an example far from sing-along pop music – has much local support not only from musicians but more importantly the community. So it is not truly fair to say that State College night life only caters to popular music. Though bluegrass’ local popularity may be largely attributed to its American roots, other roots genres such as blues and jazz do not share the same steady niche that bluegrass holds in and around State College.

Again using bluegrass as our example – there is another reason for why it is a more successful contender than jazz in a community where pop seems to flourish. Centre County already has numerous popularized gathering circles for bluegrass music. They are hosted on a regular basis by local churches and cafes and offer a free open-to-any-skill-level environment to learn how to play bluegrass music. The circles provide a unique opportunity for musicians to collaborate and meet each other, and it’s my belief that these circles have created an unintended movement over time. The result is a stronger community foundation for bluegrass to thrive in the county. American root genres or not, the same cannot be said for jazz, blues, jamband, and funk, though, some intimate downtown atmospheres such as Zeno’s Pub (and occasionally Bar Bleu) show that there is a consistent interest in such creative music styles.

For whatever reason, there are not many gatherings in Centre County to bring attention to jazz guitar and much more generally, original music. I too agree with Becks, and generally speaking, I believe that it is up to our musical community to establish localized “cells” of musicians to hold playing circles that encourage growth of original music in the community. Numerous local organizations and venues already exist to thrive on the music and musical relationships generated at such creative music circles. Though, much like the circles that assist the interest in bluegrass among the public and local musicians alike, I believe the original music circles must occur regularly and encourage participation at every skill level to successfully increase awareness that original music is indeed a community interest.

Part I of the Ralford.net overhaul really happened when I transitioned to WordPress, so consider this post ‘Part II’. If you haven’t noticed, I made the decision way back then to keep my home-brewed PHP weblog at the root of Ralford.net, and I installed WordPress to its own dedicated subfolder that would be free from all of the unorganized files that live on my domain.

Though this was a good organizational move, the original reasoning for this was to keep any bookmarked URLs to my site from breaking. If I replaced the home-brewed weblog at the root with the new WordPress weblog, the old URLs wouldn’t work. I moved forward with the decision to place WordPress in a subfolder, and dealt with the fact that any new visitors would need to be sent to “http://www.ralford.net/wordpress/”. I updated all of my social webpages to tell the world that my webpage was now at the subfolder, and crossed my fingers that no new vistors would go directly to the root of Ralford.net and see old posts I wrote back in 2004.

Today, I updated the .htaccess file at the root to redirect all old home-brewed weblog URLs to an archive subfolder – and the attempt was a success!

The first great thing this accomplishes is that it preserves a link to the content bookmarked by any of my home-brewed weblog visitors. If they bookmarked my old wiki entry on guitar maintenance (notice the link doesn’t have an ‘archive’ subfolder), they will now gracefully get redirected to the new location!

Secondly, if our search engine friends take ages to update URLs of my old posts to their new ‘archive’ location, a non-updated search engine result will redirect the user to the new location instead of it sending them to a dead link with an ugly 404 error message (I know I know, after 5+ years I still haven’t created a custom 404 page).

And finally, archiving the old content allows me to update content of the root. That will happen soon, but is still in progress (heck it took me nearly a year to take care of the archive redirects). My game plan is to turn it into a page for myself as a musician, and display a dynamically-updated list of dates for events my music projects are scheduled to play (you can see some of this code in action over at the Dirty Superb homepage, where our dates are pulled automagically from our MySpace page).

And so, the Ralford.net saga continues…

This past weekend took me through one of my favorite local hiking destinations – Detweiler Run. I figured this may be my last chance this year getting out in reasonable hammock weather, so I saddled up for a night at Penn Roosevelt State Park.

I waited for the rain to quit on Saturday then made my way toward the parking area at Bear Meadows. On the way were clear signs that the woods weren’t done draining from the storm. I parked, and wandered down John Wert Path. A few hundred feet down the trail, a flooded valley formed a temporary pond, and the trail lead into the middle of it. It was towards 4:00pm, so I looked at my map for an alternate route.

I drove just over the ridge (with many downed bushy tree branches leading the way), and parked at the gate entrance to Detweiler Run Road. No sooner did I get out of the car and I could hear raging water. I knew today’s hike would be up the service road, but I had to check out the creek.

I reached the MST’s intersection at Greenwood Spur, and saw quite a bit of water running down the MST. Just two hundred feet up the MST and I saw the primitive campsite completely flooded by running water. The swift water rushing through the mountain laurel was gorgeous indeed! I made my way another few hundred yards up the MST, and found the trail submersed in swift water. I worked my away around through some thick mountain laurel and found more of the trail submersed. After reconsidering the time, my safety, and the goal of reaching Penn Roosevelt by nightfall, I made my way back up the hillside, and followed Detweiler Run Road up the valley. I changed my course at Shingle Path, and paused where it intersected the MST and crossed Detweiler Run. An unusual amount of water this far upstream made for an entertaining crossing, and I crested over the ridge, making my way down into Penn Roosevelt for the night.

On my way back out of the woods yesterday morning, reaching the MST at Detweiler Run was visible proof I could follow the orange blazes downstream (instead of taking the service road, as I did on my way in). The lack of roaring as I descended the ridge lead me to suspect this reasonable water level. As I made my way down the MST, clumps of fallen leaves and branches showed every turn the water had carved out. I entered the region thick with mountain laurel and found myself hopping from rock to fallen branch, using downed trees as bridges to keep me out of water but on the trail. Finally downstream, I reached the camping area that was flooded the previous day. The stone fire ring was now out of the water, and the area looked a lot closer as it had during my other hikes.

Hiking along Detweiler Run after the rainstorm proved to be an exhilarating experience. I highly recommend taking a look at the area after a large rainstorm to see some local geography in action. Though take caution to dangerous situations. If you are interested in other pictures from my hike, you can find them in my Picasa photo album.

I recently read Jacob Haqq-Misra’s Planetary Messenger, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in the philosophies behind our existence.   Here’s a review I wrote for Jacob‘s book:

Planetary Messenger, by Jacob Haqq-Misra

Planetary Messenger reminds us that it is inaccurate to view Homo Sapiens as the single most important species in the universe, and that just because we as humans walk upright in what we consider to be a technologically advanced society, that not all forms of life behave the same. Modern cultures assume that for non-human life to exist as a civilized colony, it must first appear and operate similarly to ourselves.

During Shane’s travels to The Planet Finder convention in Washington D.C., Haqq-Misra unravels the flaws behind this unlogical means of comparison, and introduces unique theories to challenge the conflicts between science and religion. Shane learns that the success of human kind is largely attributed to chance, and that the facts behind our existence – whether acquired through historical records, scientific fact, religious scripture or personal belief – will continue to evolve. Though it may not be easy, we must allow culture and religion to incorporate new and understood viewpoints if we want to comprehend the bounds of life.

Did you get the memo? Dirty Superb is staging a hostile takeover of your work weary mind. Even though the semester just started, there’s a new CEO in town: Soul Power. Come watch Dirty Superb bring their musical synergy to the stage this Friday.

Dance grooves and general merriment await you in Pleasant Gap. So make the journey and fill us in on what you did on your summer vacation. Come Monday, you’ll be sure to have some stories to share around the water cooler. But this weekend, loosen your loafers and slip into something on the funky side.

Dirty Superb will be playing at the Red Horse Tavern in Pleasant Gap this Friday, September 4th. The show is from 9 to 12pm, with no cover charge. Hope to see you there!