Radiate: Tristan Mason’s blog

If you’re going to get stuck in traffic for a while, you might as well find someone with a DVD player in their SUV and hang out behind them. I saw the first half-hour of Sleeping Beauty today. Oh, and if you were watching Sleeping Beauty in your SUV between Naperville and Oswego today, and you’re reading this… for the love of Pete, would you please skip the previews next time?

...I want to get this guitar:

It’s a Godin Solidac. Godin is the parent company of several big names in guitars, including Seagull acoustics. The Solidac rocks for a number of reasons, but the most important one as far as I’m concerned is that it is a two-voice guitar. It has electric pickups (two humbuckers and a single coil), but it also boasts an LR Baggs X-bridge pickup that provides about the closest thing to acoustic sound that I’ve ever heard from a solid-body guitar. What makes this so great is that it would enable me to switch seamlessly between acoustic and electric on any song—or play both simultaneously. I could play the intro and verses of a song with an acoustic sound, and then switch to electric for the chorus.
After the guitar will come the effects unit, which will hopefully be either a POD XT Live or the Boss GT-8:

If you’re a decent guitarist and patient enough to spend time tweaking this thing, you can achieve almost any sound you want with one of these. Multieffects processors used to sound pretty ugly (remember that ancient DOD we used ten years ago, Aaron?), but they’ve been steadily getting better and better. Two things I would find quite useful about the GT-8 are its superb amp modeling and the customizability of its effects.

When you’re playing in a worship area that holds about 500 people and reverberates like crazy, you simply can’t crank up your amp to achieve the sound you want. In fact, when you have a stage the size of ours, you might have trouble finding a place to put your amp. So it’s nice to be able to run direct (plug right into the sound system without an amp), especially considering that I use in-ear monitors anyway and would only be able to hear an amp through my phones to begin with.

The ability to customize effects is useful because if I hear a sound on a recording that I really like, and I want to try to duplicate it, I can tweak this thing until I get close enough that I’m satisfied. For example: With a normal amp, I get a gain knob and several tone control knobs (generally low, mid, and high) that I can use to craft my distortion sound. With this, I get 30 different overdrive/distortion models and 46 amp models, each with other settings to tweak.  Oh, and by the way, those 30 distortion models are one category of the 44 types of effects on the processor, any 13 of which can be employed simultaneously.  And everything is programmable, so if in between songs I want to change the types of effects I’m using, the order in which they are applied, the individual settings on each effect, the amp, and the volume, I press one button.  Yeah, it’s cool.
So I’m saving. I’m over half way to the guitar! :)

If this catches on, my profession could be in trouble…

Like I said in the last post, I don’t know if this counts as “art” or not, but my recent artistic pursuit has been chiseling rocks. I suppose I’m returning to my roots in some way, since my last name is Mason.

Our creative arts team at church was searching for an interesting way to highlight this message series. We decided to make a rock garden that would remind people of the attributes & characteristics of God we have been discussing and add visual interest to the garden area outside the church entrance. Each week a new rock appears with that week’s word engraved on it.

My friend Connie and I have been chiseling words into the rocks. The first step is to pencil a word on the rock. Second, we use a thin chisel to form the grooves of the letters:

Third, we use one corner of a wide flat chisel (sitting on the table in the pictures) to widen the letters and make them more uniform. After chiseling, the rock looks like this:

Finally, Connie seals the rock, stains the inside of the letters to make them darker, applies a faux finish to add some color, and protects the rock with a special varnish. Each finished rock’s color is different.

When the garden is done and we’ve arranged the rocks, I’ll post a picture.

A unique conjunction of the planets or something gives me the opportunity to show you the progress Aaron and I have made as artists in the past 11 years. After the comments on the previous post, Aaron was inspired to create an “artistic rendering of the plight of you midwesterners.” You’ll see that later in the post.

I, on the other hand, was inspired to ask my parents for photos of the mural that decorates the outer walls of the studio we built in our barn. Thanks to the fact that we signed and dated our masterpiece, I can tell you that we painted this mural when we were about 14 years old. Lest you think that we were “good kids who painted murals in their spare time,” I confess that we also concocted explosives and torched aeresol cans. Andd now, if any of you were wondering what my mom was referring to when she commented about carrots with machine guns and rabid rabbits, here are close-ups of two sections of the mural. The media were (I think) oil on fiberboard and oil on particle board, respectively:

....

Aaron was responsible for the carrots and anything that looks remotely good. I was responsible for the rabbits and the ”(un)happy trees”. Notice especially the tongue-in-cheek references to the ubiquitous consumerism of our society when we made the clouds say “Eat at Joe’s” and the 1970’s John Doe sun advertise a bottle of Coke.

So that you can see how far we have come since then, here is Aaron’s artistic representation of a stingray of doom (the “plight of the midwest” that I mentioned above):

As you can see, this giant land ray is busy wreaking havoc on what appears to be a tanker truck in what appears to be a grassy field. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but I’m sure that’s because the level of the work outpaced my knowledge. I don’t know why our art has the tendency to center around enormous animals/vegetables destroying things. There’s probably some psychological explanation.

As for the example of my most recent artistic pursuit, you’ll have to wait until the next post. Actually, I’m not sure you could call what I’m currently doing art, but then, if rabid rabbits and gargantuan stingrays crushing things are the standards by which we’re judging art… maybe I’m an artist after all. ;)