What I Play

Three kinds of music made my music. First the American folk music revival of the 50's and 60's which meant playing the strange and wonderful music that was once too ubiquitous to be recorded. Bob Dylan heard it and it taught him how to be a songwriter that changed the way we think about a song.

A few years later some of the folks that heard the same thing plugged in electric instruments and started trying to make sense of a very frightened and hopeful time by playing adventurous music. In this time it was expected that the players would try to play to the utmost of their abilities so to transcend from fear to hope and that by doing so it would midwife a new reality. You no doubt heard it was about drugs, but that was just the cover story. It was an experiment in mass belief that limed all the boundaries of belief.

And when they felt the belief start to contract, they tried one last time to make it happen. The last troops were thrown onto the field of battle: the artists, the poets, the bohemians, the irregulars, and they were to fight a guerilla action to keep the hope of a new reality alive. The flag was D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself), a music scene that would will itself to exist on the edges of commerce. You were told this was about being stupid and some new fashion trends and it got called "punk"..

I started in this as a poet who picked up a guitar. I'm continuing these days as a mute poet who predominantly plays guitar instrumentals. So how can I say all this when someone asks what I play. I say well I'm really a folkie at heart. Or I say I play a lot of different stuff. When I was in a band we called it Punk-Folk, but one gig poster got misprinted as Punk-Funk. Well I play that too.

My Tools

I play a variety of cheap guitars. In fact I'm quite besotted with the sounds that different guitars make. The guitars I play the most are a Seagull S6 Folk, a small-bodied cedar acoustic guitar made in Canada and for electrical work one of several Telecaster-style guitars has been the most common thing. In the past year copies of of a Strat, a Les Paul and a Flying V have gotten lots of string time, but I do come back to the Telecaster. Amp wise I use one of several small combo tube amps, but I sometimes color them by putting a POD in front the them. The POD is a device for emulating the effects of may different kinds of tube circuits via a Digital Sound Processor chip. I've made use of one of several other effects boxes from time to time: a Lexicon Jam Man, a Lexicon MPX100 time based effects unit, a Korg AX1G (a seriously cheap multi-effects box), and a 1970's Electro Harmonix Big Muff overdrive box. Microphone-wise I'm garage and bar band simple: Shure SM57s and SM58s. My mixer is a Yamaha 12/4 which has served me quite well.

I currently record into a Digidesign ProTools Digi001 installed into a Equus Celeron 333 mintower with a ASUS P2B motherboard and Maxtor IDE drives. Digi001 is kind of picky about PC hardware and stupidly uses Windows 98 as its only supported "Wintel" OS instead of the more stable and robust WinNT/2000 generation. None-the-less, it's working OK for me right now. My recordings prior to this set up were done onto a Tascam 424 MKII 4 track cassette deck. Tascam's 424 "Portastudios" are great cheap tools to learn with and have fun.

What Does It Sound Like

Since the host for this web site is limited to what it can handle in terms of streaming audio and storage space, you'll have to go to my site on IUMA or MP3.com to hear I sound like. Just click one of the links below:

Frank Hudson Streaming Audio on MP3.com

Frank Hudson Streaming Audio on IUMA