I’m playing at the Indy Grand Casino today. So, for four hours, I will hear a constant drone of C major in my ears. Why? Because, it seems, all the slot machines today are tuned to the key of C. Now, I assume that casinos are sound designed to keep their investors(suckers) investing and popping credits into machines. But, I haven’t read that much on the psychoacoustics of the C chord, so I’m not really sure. It could be that that’s the easiest industry standard chord to pick. Imagine the cacophony of each machine manufacturer picking tones completely dissonant to the machine next to it. Also, keep in mind that there was a transition to the modern machine, so maybe it’s just a legacy sound so that it didn’t sound completely different from other machines.(Here’s a webpage that mentions that.)   

Music theory-wise, most of the machines play a 5th(C G) or octave (C C) and only when there is a payout do you hear the third(E) creep in. So, maybe, the third of the C chord or “E” is the most heavenly note in the western tonal system? Certainly, most guitar players would agree with that. It could be that a major tonality in any key is just soothing, which there certainly is enough proof of. I’ve often thought that on gigs that are more tip-dependent that I should play only major, happy tunes. But, then I realized, the result of this would be my unavoidable suicide or possibly the murder of an innocent bystander.

WIRED.COM has a blurb here on the design of the modern slot machine, noting that the machine is tuned to “C”. I don't know how many machines this casino has, but it's a lot of them. I’ll be playing in the middle of one for four hours. Maybe, I’ll try playing songs in dissonant keys like F#, B, or D# major. Security will probably want to have a word with me.

Welcome to the new website. It's been a long time coming. Well, actually, more of a short time, since I just thought I'd redo it on a whim last Thursday. For those of you in the internet blogging world, it's based in Weebly. I did brief experiments with other website providers and this seemed to be the cheapest and provided most of the things I thought I would use(music player, video player, etc.). Also, it's designed for people who hate coding.

Yes, I do still code. But, I hate it and to be honest, I was never really good at it. Plus, there are better things to do with my time like practicing, writing music and catching up on all those nifty television series that are on cable. So, although I had to fight the temptation to fool around with the CSS to make my Google based calendar match the color of the website, I constructed this without any hands on coding. I'll probably tweak it when I get irritated by something.

What really sold me on the whole new website thing was viewing some friend's websites from my Iphone.
Apparently, about 20% of people accessing websites today are doing it by mobile phone. Weebly had a pretty cool way of handling that. So, if your viewing this website from your phone, you can actually see and access the content fairly easily. If you ever saw my old website, you know that it was tough to look at through a normal browser. It was impossible to view with a smart phone. I'll torch the old site later this week.

I've started fairly sparse, I didn't want any huge photo or video pages. I'm of the opinion people really only look at your site to see where/when your playing and to play(and hopefully buy) your music. So, if there is anything you want me to add or think I should change to make it easier and interesting to access, let me know.