The Song is from Greg Vail's Smooth Jazz Classics CD - Innervision 2010
Title - Biggest Part of Me (Originally from Ambrosia)
Features Greg Vail on the Alto Saxophone and full 5 piece sax section on the vocal backgrounds -
2 Alto Saxes, 2 Tenor Saxes and Baritone Saxophone make up the section parts.
I love this track and finally found the right video footage to set it to.
Filmed in Sioux Falls South Dakota - The Falls.
I knew it was called Sioux Falls for a reason and finally made it out to see (and film) the beautiful falls!
Thanks to Celebrate Church of Sioux Falls for bringing me out there and showing me around!
ENJOY.................
You're the Biggest Part of Me features David Pack of Ambrosia on Guitar solos!
Local So Cal friends - This weekend is Labor Day and Sunday is the Greg Vail Pro Jam in Coto de Caza, CA. This is a free show with 10 dollar buffet available. We will have special fun with some raffles and fun for the end of summer party! See you there!!!!
Gentiles in Coto de Caza - 4-8pm - Sunday September 5th, 2010.
Blessings to all. Prayers to all the kids heading BACK TO SCHOOL and that have just started!
You Tube views are cranking - averaging 2400 a day! We should see the over a MILLION mark before years end and I am excited!!
Check back for the latest news and crazy life of an LA Musician. Did another session today which makes 3 for the week already. So glad the recording stuff is coming in the cover the club and show loses on the live side. Yesterday's session was another internet session, recorded in my studio and shipped out late last night. I love the email sessions!! I have recorded on projects from all over the world and don't have to cost you thousands just to get there!!!!
Sunday's Coming - Sunday Morning - Video Spoof - parody
I think it is time for a thought or 2 - maybe even an angry poster or 2. Let me post this clip first and then a thought or two. It is called -
Sunday's Coming / Sunday Morning
A Worship band, Church Music video that is a spoof, parody, joke - but that silently asks important questions.....
The video looks at "How we do Church" - the formula - the transitions - the music - the welcome and message................
First off - I loved this when it was first shared with me - musicians - all church guys - at a gig - laughing our RAFL-LOL off as we saw someone do the unthinkable - Give a mindlessly repeating formula out to the masses.
The question is - WHAT IS THE STATEMENT?????
I think it is funny and I think it is not.......
More thoughts coming after I get a few of yours....
re: Church Music, Spoof, Parody, Sunday's Coming, Sunday Mornings, worship band joke, How we DO Church.....
Crazy week - lots of work - lots of things blowing up!
A Day In A Life - That was the idea when I started the BLOG - to capture what an LA Musician has going on in any given week. Well, this one has been killing me!
In the last 2 posts you can see the ongoing tech dilemma with my iPod and Netbook for track gigs. I ended up having to bail on the iPod I just bought and reloaded all the tracks from an external drive back up. It has been taking way too much time to restructure the files into playlists I can actually use in a live show, so I broke down and set up an appointment at the Apple Store for help before I realized I had a track gig tonight and Saturday day!! I had a false sense of distraction and no worry until the realities hit me. I had taken off Friday night and thought - no worries - I have until NEXT WEEK to have this working.
Last night I realized the dang gig today is a track gig and the last minute gig I just booked for Saturday is too!! I had that appointment scheduled for early this morning but the stress of the issue had me awake much earlier than that. I just started moving the important files into the TRACK folder so I could work and by 9am I was more than half done so I bailed on the appointment. It is 11 am and I have all the track gig stuff in the TRACK folder - I will be able to do the gig now!!!
Of course, none of the other files are straight so I have many more hours of work to do; and I have no idea what iTunes will do when I get it all done and sync the iPod, but I think it will update the iPod to the iTunes! I sure hope so!!
You gotta be saying at this point - What a procrastinator!! Thinks he has a week off from tracks and goes to the beach!! WELL.....
I have been in another hell the past few days. GregVail.com has issues and went offline for most the day yesterday! I have been freaking and driving a dear friend nuts the past few days!
I got an email informing me that the ever lame XO Host for GregVail.com was finally discontinuing the Site Builder program that Greg Vail was originally started on. This is not good news! It has been an overwhelming job concern since I tried and a friend tried to take the site down and fix the HTML to work as static HTML 2 times over the past few years just because of the cost issues.
You see, the service was soooooo old that it was costing me 75 to 100 dollars a month to host on that plan. As web hosting became more affordable, XO never restructured any of those plans and in the old days, 5 gigs of monthly transfer seemed really high! Over the years I started doing more and more traffic and the charged 1 dollar for every 100 megs over! That has averaged over 80+ dollars a month for years now.
When I called XO and asked for told me to get off Site Builder and the rates where much better on newer plans, but that they couldn't do anything about the ridiculous charges. They referred me to there web guys and I was quoted 7500-9000 dollars to have them transfer the site to HTML!!
YES - I LAUGHED.
When I got that dreaded email I was given until September 30 and GregVail.com will die. I made some calls, hooked up a brilliant friend to look into it and he found a program that lifted the entire site and created HTML for every page!!
DONE IN 2 DAYS!!
Pretty dang excited!! Mark is amazing and I was good to go! Then came the second round of issues.
It appears that the Site Builder weirdness and lame navigation required a Java Redirect at the front of every page to accommodate that vast number of internal page links I have created over the years and others have linked to. All seemed fine until I posted a page on FB and say no information show on the post. I realized that it was only seeing the redirect page and I got worried!
My site has a lot of inbound links and is crawled very often. I pulled up the stats and found Bing and Yahoo had crawled so I di a Greg Vail Search and went to the Cache page to see what they crawled. ARRRRGGGGG!!!!
I saw a frame with NO CONTENT AT ALL!! So I have all the in bound links with weird URLS covered so people can get in the site, and now the search engine rank I have worked on for 11 years is blowing up!
On the phone and plan B is started - Get the redirect on the server side to add the .HTML as a server command and pull the Java redirect pages off the server! Sounded GREAT!!
BUT it blew the file structure, changed all the HTML fixed URLS to not work and the site was a giant 404 message by mid day. As we sorted the problems and Mark hit the new and old host companies a few times, we ended up having to just restore the site so it would work right if you get to it, BUT, now the search engines will all be indexing nothing and dropping the site off into the garbage in the next few days.
The options appear to be - have a site that functions and losses 11 years of search work - or - maintain the search engine work, restructure the whole site, possibly redesign at that point, and start the search mess from scratch.
I am killing the search results right now by leaving it functional since every page will have no words on it according to the search engines. You can see them, but that redirect is killing the site placement.
GregVail.com has been top 10 and number 1 in GOOGLE Search for years! Lets add the newest issue to the mix! If GregVail.com is the highest rank site linking to ALL MY OTHER SITES and the value is reduced to nothing because the search engines think I took all the words off my pages, than all my other sites will loose rank in relationship to the main site destruction.
YES, I can rebuild, but dang this week has been kicking my butt. When I decided to take a mental break from all of it and started producing a Vanessa Birthday Video last night on my main computer - we had worked on a clip for 3 hours without saving!! 3 hours!! It was nearly done and CRASH!!!! I looked at my baby and said, I think daddy has to cry now! She hugged me so sweet that it kept the tear back!
THANK GOD FOR WELL WRITTEN PROGRAMS! I looked up as the program reloaded and it asked - to you want to restore your last file - I HIT YES 10 times and all but the last few commands where back in front of me!
SO - RIGHT NOW - Greg Vail dotcom is live but dieing in the Search Engines. The iTunes on my track gig computer seems fully functional and sorted enough to play the gig today. I have a new iPod that has the old files there for back up today if needed. I have a very busy weekend and it looks like I will survive it now!
GIGs THIS WEEK
Today is Thursday - Aug 26 - Private Function - Grand Opening for a new Medical School.
Friday - Saturday 9pm to 1am - Fantasy Springs Casino lounge with Dean Grech and Hanz Z.
Also Saturday - 11-3 - Long Beach Mercedes Benz Greg Vail and sales Guys public jam.
Sunday - Aug 29 - Saddleback Church - 1 night service at 5PM
Session alert!
Did a Christmas Track with Dean Grech Tuesday! Have a Las Vegas commercial music session Friday am, a big name Christian session (vocal artist) to track Monday day and 2 other sessions calling yesterday and today.
Add to that - this week is the best paying week all year and last week, this week and next week take the cake for a 3 week run too!! Feeling blessed! EVEN IF everything else is blowing up!
I have not been having fun with the world of Tech Music. The last post covered the issue I was having with iTunes and my iPod and Netbook. I have a track gig that I use my Netbook Computer with iTunes playing tracks to play my sax along with - it's called a sax single.
My MP3's started messing up so I bought a new iPod to move everything over to and back up the tracks I need for work. I thought the iPod would allow me to play the tracks off of it like my old iPod had - the tracks worked great when playing them in iTunes and then I could access tracks much easier since the iPod sucks for bouncing from track to track thru hundreds of songs. It didn't work like that.
SO - I ended up reformating the whole Netbook and found the Netbook worked fine again. Gotta love Microsoft with 2 days of updates - they release software that has a million bugs or people would not have to run updates a hundred times to FIX all the problems!! So, I then started the process of trying to reload iTunes and get the music from the new iPod into the newly reloaded iTunes on the reformatted Netbook.
Guess what? It doesn't work that way. It appears that iTunes loads iPods and iPods don't load to iTunes - They dump all the music from the iPod! After reading this I began looking for helps to get that job done. I have ben all over forums, the Apple site, searched the internet, found directions, followed them, had nothing work like I was told it would; now started plan B.
I had the brilliance to also back up to a hard drive from the iTunes Music folder. Well, I got all the tracks to upload back onto the Netbook, but no file structure was followed. I went thru everything again and read all I could find on it, yet nothing will change. I have 1000 tracks in 1 music folder and have to go thru every song and attempt to rebuild the file structure.
I have already lost soooooo many days to this issue and had toooooo many lame gigs as tracks would mess up in front of people in clubs! I spent all day starting the process yesterday and got 2 files filled back in. Then I talk to my son and he says I need to schedule a in store at the MAC Store and bring both into the store and ask a person what to do. Great idea, but now I am part way into the retarded fix and I don't know what to do from here.
So - What I have learned - iPods are lame. iTunes does everything for you as long as you need what it wants to do done for you. MAC Service is complicated to get set up and get to. MAC has worked hard to get stuff into our hands that implies we NEED to get a MAC computer too. MANY people have had nightmares with these things and lost thousands of songs. Yet Apple love for iPhones, iPods and iTunes continue and APPLE LUST seems untouched. YES - I want a MAC TOO! It is not an option today and unfortunately would not fix the problem due to issues with iPod formatting to either MAC or PC. BUT - the MAC site does say it works much better with a MAC formatted iPod to go either way - guess MAC is just better all the time - that would be the message I have read a thousand times on the Apple site over the past 2 weeks........
He BLOG peeps - Greg Vail checking in for a quick post in the middle of a late but hot California Summer!
It finally got hot in So Cal! WOW - We humans will complain about the overcast, the cold, the lack of beach days and then the heat, the humidity and the lack of air-conditioning! What is it about our propensity to complain?? <Am I complaining about it??>
Well, I have been in full summer mode as musician, single dad, web guy, and sax player. What does that mean?
Been trying to stay way up on the messages and phone to keep the work coming in. Been trying to follow up on the good gigs with thanks messages. Been calling and hanging as much as possible with musician friends and talking about new projects. Been running my daughter around and calling parents for kid hang time. Been working on sites, coordinating a major GregVail.com relocation, been updating where I can, been outlining new updates and a new Christmas Site for 2010 and been reading as much as I can to improve those web skills. Been practicing sax and EWI for my butt kicking "B" project that is way over my head - and kinda loving the challenge. Been trying to get gear fixed, rearranged and working better for shows. OH YEA, Also been working as a sax playing fool as much as possible, even going out free and recording free to keep the chops alive and well!
So - 13 days since the last post - Does not surprise me. The amount of activity needed to keep the phone ringing in 2010 is absurd!
The TECH wars are on and I am loosing. I have a track gig I put together years ago to keep off night work coming in. The latest version has moved to a netbook using iTunes and that has been awesome until this past few weeks. The MP4's are playing with errors and making my band sound like they went out on the break and got totally wasted! Dragging, double hits, glitches, and sticking machine guns have made many gigs a living hell.
A new iPod was purchased last week and seemed to be a quick fix but the iPod will not let me access audio files from the iPod song files, which means nothing was fixed and 170 bucks just backed up the files but I can't get around on the dang iPod with any real ability to get from song to song and not be fumbling around on a little piece of poop that weighs nothing.
Not happy - had a horrible week last week going into the weekend of HARD gigs! Now I am finally ready to attempt to deal with it again and the track gig is tonight! Gives me about 5 hours from now to figure out why the files wont access from iTunes or reformat the dang Netbook and attempt to go the wrong way adding files off the iPod back into iTunes once it is all reformated.
Before I started, I had to let the rest the odd files Sync and it just finished - so I have to get back to this mess so I can go make lame money on a lame job to pay for the gear to get paid garbage. Yes - Music in 2010 has opportunities never before available and headaches that would kill an Ape. Not sure if I am missing the good old days again or not - BUT I will know for sure in about 5 hours!
GIGS THIS WEEK - AUGUST 20, 21, 22 - 2010 - Reverb Nation Schedule down a post or to on the main BLOG page!
Friday Gentiles in Coto - 7-11PM
Saturday the Greg Vail Band is at the Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach 6-8PM - last FOA gig of the Summer for us!!!!
Sunday is some Hotel Summer series in LA proper - The Ritz in LA 6-10PM I believe.
I will attempt to update the calendar for concerts while I am on another - computer is working on it - moment. Really need to get this stupid track gig thing worked out so I can get back to GregVail.com going offline next month, taxes filled for last year, looking for more work, or the all important truck and classic car sales need to survive at all in 2010!
I have a couple of public shows this weekend - Saturday night is at Antonucci's in Mission Viejo CA 7-10pm. - Sunday is at Gentiles in Coto de Caza and is open to the public by mentioning the club name at the gate - Greg Vail Pro Jam BJBS - 4-8pm.
Remember live music is a great way to get out and be apart of something fun!
When ever you want to check concert dates for Greg Vail - go to the Calendar at Greg Vail dotcom. Everything is updated and posted on 2 different schedule systems!
I have been working hard on media this week - the new Channel on YouTube is www.youtube.com/user/SAXBOYvid and many new clips were added this week! My old channel is still cranking - getting ready to hit 900,000 video views on 49 clips - www.youtube.com/user/gvsaxboy and the video web site is always screaming - www.saxvideo.tv
NEW YOU TUBE PLAYER - Vintage 1995 Show - Greg Vail and 947 the Wave
I get so many funny notes from friends after I post the old shows that I decided to finish pulling the video clips I had from this OLD show and arranged it in a music player on You Tube!
There are 5 video clips I found from this fateful day in 1995 - Greg Vail had a solo CD out - Greg had an ALL STAR Band around him - the world looked like it was going to cave quickly to the power of Smooth Jazz and I - Greg Vail had a really big head - sure it was all to be mine!!!
This show marked the first of the bigger shows as the solo artist and I went all out and got a friend to video it too! That was a lot more complicated in 15 years ago. I had Product and Merchandise - a Record Label and loved my hair.....
It was an era - and it was a not very healthy time in my life, but it is pretty dang funny to look back on....
SO - here is the PLAYER - 1995 WAVE STAGE GREG VAIL BAND
Been very busy, some good - some lame - but that is life!
NEW PICS POSTED AGAIN on FLICKr - The Huntington Beach Pier at Sunset - Here is a teaser - The Slide Show is here.
Beautiful and cold night in July on the beach in Huntington! Very strange July 2010!! We have had a very cool summer so far and too many times beach days or pool days have been canceled in July! This is very unusual and ongoing proof the climate has been changing in very strange ways.
On a side note - I had to be an adult last night and was really bummed about it. It is going to cost me a 500 dollar deductible! I was playing at the Festival of Arts last night in Laguna Beach and had to get over to Dana Point after the gig to play at Hennesseys. I was near the beach and Dana Point is just down the road so I decided to take PCH and enjoy the coast with all its beach fun vibe.
The road way is very tight in places and I ended up hitting a parked car, much to my surprise. My passengers side mirror hit a parked SUV's driver's side mirror wasting both of them! Freaked me out because it was totally not expected and was really loud. It broke my mirror and the other cars too. I had to be a grown up and stop. So sucks but what are the options?? Being a person of NO Character has bigger costs down the line...
I left me info, talked to the guy because he saw me out there, called the insurance this morning and am heading off to get an estimate for my truck now. Pretty bummed about that. Money is so tight and that is really going to hurt. My deductible is too much today, was fine yesterday....
Gigs went great! The Festival in Laguna was jam packed last night and was all night long! I had a friend come late and she was thinking someone would get up and leave so she could grab a seat - never happened. Full house - all night long! Then the Hennesseys gig was Martin G's 25th anniversary of being in the US and a huge benefit for the Gulf Region so it was jammed out the door and ran way over with 25 musicians contributing thru the night! I was surprised how late it was when I finally saw the time!! It was really fun and the crowd was awesome again! Kinda reminds me of the old days when people showed up and had a great time and even let you know about it!! (They shot video all night and I hope to have some fun clips to share from the night!)
Calendar is below - Gentile's tonight - public show - Private show tomorrow - sorry....
Spent Wednesday at a Innervision Records release party for a friend and sat in too! Jack P did a great job and hanging with all the label guys was awesome. I will be starting those pics today and hope to post some of them maybe Saturday!
Gotta get to the auto body place -
Be safe out there!
Ben Vail keeps updating his blog - My son Ben is in Africa and you can read about his travels at Ben Vail Dotcom
(They shot video all night and I hope to have some fun clips to share from the night!)
