Two weeks from tomorrow I’m running a 5k race called “Ellie’s Run”. The money raised from the race benefits a school in Africa. Specifically, each $25 provides books, uniforms and shoes to a child who will then be allowed to attend. Here is a video showing some of what’s going on in the area, and what the money is going to support.

CLICK HERE to donate. (And please enter “Andrew Osenga” under the entry: Hero’s Name)

CLICK HERE to see the area update Barrett mentions at the beginning of the video.

CLICK HERE for the email you can personalize and send out to folks you think might want to get involved.

For the record, we’ve raised about $700 from this site, and my goal is $1000. But really my goal is to make $1000 look silly, and put more kids in school than would seem possible from a guitar playing songwriter’s website. Thanks for getting involved.

And tonight I’m going to try to run 3 miles, in training. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks to Jay, Nathan and Chad, who hooked me up with the Normals covers. Much appreciated. And problem solved. (God bless the internets.)

My parents were in town for a couple days this week. I’m the second most clumsy person I know and I have very few skills related to home repair, so when my dad, who has very strong handyman tendencies, comes to town, I put him to work. Actually, sometimes he puts me to work, but whatever.

I’ve lived in this house a week shy of five years, and yesterday, for the first time ever, I went on my roof. We had to fix a couple shingles. It was pretty cool. I felt very manly. Everything looked different, which was to be expected, and I didn’t fall off, which was not.

It’s getting very close to new website time. And this leads me to ask a fairly ridiculous question:

Does anybody have a good jpg of the covers of the Normals albums?

Cause I don’t. And that’s absurd, but hey. But if you DO, or if you could scan them and send them to me, I’d be very grateful. Thanky!!

Full band show. Nashville. Monday night. With Emily Deloach (Todd and I are playing with her) and David Condos. Love to have you join us. Much rock will be had. See earlier post.

I’ve threatened, you’ve asked, and today my girls got up so early that I have more than enough time this morning to write it all down. That’s right, it’s pedalboard time.

First off, thanks to everybody who came to my show this past Saturday night. It was a good time, Nick and Owen were great, and I got to play my new blue Tele.

Ok, now onto the geekiness. Here’s a photo of my big board to begin with…

This board is fundamentally different from anything I’ve ever used before. Everything revolves around the thin silver strip at the bottom. It’s a true bypass strip, with ins and outs for every pedal on the board. The guitar signal goes into the volume pedal, then to the true bypass strip, then out to the amp selector (above the volume).

With the strip, at least the way I use it, you leave all your pedals on all the time. When you click the button assigned to that pedal, the strip opens the path to and from that pedal, otherwise it bypasses it completely. This way, if you’re only using one pedal your signal just goes from the volume to the strip to the one pedal to the output. Much, much, much cleaner than if you went through everything turned off.

My output from this board is almost double what it was before, just because the signal isn’t getting degraded with each little cable and pedal. And it makes it much easier to change sounds, since everything is right there, you don’t have to do weird yoga to get to that switch way over there.

All the pedals that require more than just on/off are in the front row, so I can still turn on the Full Drive’s boost, change delay patches, etc… This is easily the most in control I’ve ever been, and I feel like it’s freed me up to lean more on the guitar than the board, in a way that doesn’t really make sense.

On to the pedals themselves…

The strip has nine loops (i.e. ins and out for pedals) and a master bypass, which immediately just goes guitar to amp, leaving your settings. Very handy. I’ve labeled each loop with a number and the name of the pedal. Then I labeled it with the name of the pedal again because I found some glow-in-the-dark tape. Which is super cool.

So we start with the Ernie Ball volume, which has a tuner out going to, wait for it, the tuner. Then we go to the true bypass strip and the first pedal is the AnalogMan “BiComp”, a dual channel compressor pedal. I usually leave it on the more typical Ross side, but the Orange Squeeze side is way more intense, and I kick it on for the back half of the “When Will I Run” solo.

The second pedal is the “4-Speed Overdrive” by Tim, the Pedal Doctor. (One of the other great things with this setup is that you don’t have to put the pedals in their exact order. Instead you can put them on the board wherever they would best fit, in this case, all the way at the top, where I’d never put something as often used as an overdrive.) The next pedal is the FullTone “FullDrive 2″. Live, I usually set the “4-Speed” a little darker and heavier, and leave the “FullDrive” as more open and clean-ish. In sessions, though, they get changed around constantly. They both have so many tone options.

Next up is the Line6 “Echo Park”. I used to use the big green Line6 delay, but I don’t really love any of the sounds except for the swell, aka auto-volume delay. I got this mini version to just leave on that sound. It’s not a bad pedal, actually, a nice surprise.

From there we go all the way up to the top left to the Electro-Harmonix “MicroSynth”. This pedal is just plain crazy. I got this during the making of Photographs because Malcolm Burn told me I needed it. Four years later I figured out how to actually use it. Two years after that I finally got it on a board. With this thing your signal is split into four, the octave below, above, the natural range and a square wave. You blend these together and then pick the high and low points of your synth wave (crazy) and then the speed of the filter sweep. I can’t even describe what this sounds like, because every time it sounds different. Therein lies the fun. It’s always a bit of a surprise.

After that it’s the Digitech “Space Station”, which I use for a string sound and which Josh told me is almost done. Again. Then it’s off to the Carl Martin “Trem o’ Vibe”, which is a great tremolo and vibrato pedal. I usually use the trem, but both sounds are amazing. It’s up front so I can switch between the two sounds.

Then we go to the Boss “GigaDelay”, which has the best “Memory Man” and “Space Echo” sounds I’ve heard besides the real things. And since this is smaller and won’t break every six minutes on the road, it’s the right thing for the board. There’s a small tap tempo button for this right in between the volume pedal and the bypass strip, which has turned out to be a handy spot.

The last pedal is the Option 5 “Destination Rotation”, a leslie simulator. You can set the high speed and the low speed and ramp between them. I have it placed so the ramp button is nearest the front. This is the newest addition to the club. After a session for Ben Shive’s amazing record where I played through the Leslie at Sputnik for every song, I realized I really needed the ability to have that sound at any time. It’s not as amazing as the real thing, but it’s pretty dang close. I may try and swap this out with the Micro POG occasionally. Has anybody had any experience with those?

From there it goes to the output selector, a big box made by AnalogMan that Josh at the studio rewired to be 1 in 3 out. Josh’s nickname around Sputnik is “Soup” and he decided that this pedal ought to be dubbed “$OUPERTRONiXXX”. From this pedal I can go out to the DI for acoustics, the Fender “ProSonic” and/or the BadCat “Cub II”.

The board itself is a PedalTrain Pro, which comes in a great hardcase. I love these boards. You can run the cables through the slats of the floor and you can use zip ties as well as velcro to really secure the pedals down. Also, the whole board is powered by a Voodoo Lab “Pedal Power II”. Good power makes a HUGE difference. That and good cable, I use George L., helps so much with clarity and openness of the sound. Can’t recommend that stuff enough.

Well, I think that’s about it. Thanks for indulging me. Feel free to ask any questions. Onward Tone Warriors!!

This past Tuesday a group of us Square Pegs/songwriters got together over at Randall’s house for a meeting of the Weaklings. Ron Block and David Wilcox came and sat in with us, which was a real treat.

For these meetings we pretty much just sit around and play new songs, new bits of songs, talk about new song ideas, etc… It’s great because other writers will often see things you’ve missed: things like narrator continuity, other word choices to convey different things, and just a general big picture view. Many of my songs have been made better by bringing them to this group.

I’ve never really listened to David Wilcox before, but a lot of my friends are big fans. Well, I’ll tell you now, that dude is a song Jedi. He had some of the most insightful and interesting critiques you could imagine. Out of nowhere ideas that made so much sense. It was fascinating to watch his mind work.

I played a new song, one that we had just tracked with Neilson. I had already sung the song, but we had a day left in the studio if something needed to be changed. And I felt like something did. After I played the tune, which I sort of butchered rhythmically, David had a great idea of how to better link the verses and the choruses, which at the time felt fairly disconnected. His idea was to change the word “nobody” to “none of us”. So simple. Great idea.

Hearing some of the other ideas from the room I decided I needed to completely rewrite the first verse and a line of the second. I left the Weaklings at 12:20, sat on my couch at home with a guitar for ten minutes and the drove to the studio to begin at 1. And by the time I got there I had a new verse.

I called Randall to run it by him (he liked it) and he was with Andy Gullahorn and David. I told him of my problems with the second verse, one line that wasn’t showing up, and he read what I had to the other guys and hung up. They were all working on that one line together for me over at his place. Pretty crazy. And pretty exciting. We ended up with something that I think works very well, and once again, I owe more to my community than I can believe.

It’s great sometimes to not be good enough on your own. It makes us need each other, and for that I’m glad.

Just got back from a nice run. Tonight I got over a mile and a half, which is the farthest yet. Probably the farthest ever, to be honest. I learned that Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky” album is terrible for running, and that “Who’s Next” by The Who is awesome. But it’s sort of awesome in every context, so it should be no surprise.

Wanted to throw up the ol’ bat signal and remind everybody that I’m playing at Christopher’s Pizza here in Nashville this Saturday night, with my friends Nick Flora (aka Coin Laundry Loser) and Owen Pye. Should be a fun show and we would love to see you come out. If not for us, then for the best pizza in town. And these little pizzaroli things that are just stupid great.

I just about finished up the background vocals for my new tunes today, but Jack White was doing a demo at Sputnik this evening and I had to clear out early. Yes, I’m bragging about why I got kicked out of my studio. It’s that cool.

I’ve been working overtime on getting stuff ready for the new website. We’re weeks away at this point, and there are going to be some really fun new things. Peterson, Goodgame and Peters dropped by and made a few contributions the past few days, and it looks like Todd and Garett will tomorrow. It’s a lot of work, but I think it’s going to make for a great experience when the new site launches.

On the home front, it’s been potty training, pacifier withdrawal, used car shopping, air conditioner replacing, kitchen color discussing, etc… I go to bed a very tired man. Though lately I’ve been waking up to a three year old’s face two inches from mine who is, for the moment, a birdie, and she’s saying “tweet tweet, tweet tweet” and you kind of don’t mind how tired you are. It’s too wonderful to want to miss. (Not that I wouldn’t mind it happening an hour later…)

I have a great story about our Weaklings meeting the other day, but I’ll have to get to it tomorrow. It’s late, I’m tired, and I have some new (old) Salman Rushdie on my night stand waiting for me.

Hope to see you Saturday.

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(If you haven’t yet, please CLICK HERE to support me for the Ellie’s Run 5k June 14th!)

Conversations with Andy: Podcast Series I begins next week.  Subscribe Now!

Andy’s gearing up for a busy summer and fall tour schedule; stay tuned!  Check out some of Andy’s upcoming shows.

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