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Lonely for You – From the “How to Teach Common Courtesy” Video
The F.D.O. Scott Sigler Visits Chicago – Joins Heavy Metal Band
Last night was rad – got to meet one of my favorite authors and podcasters, Scott Sigler. He came to the Barnes and Noble downtown to promote his new novel Pandemic. After reading from the front end of it, the FDO spit some truth at the Junkies about everything from creativity and how publishing works, sports and Dungeons & Dragons. After he joined the band, he signed my book. Ominously.
Can’t tell if it’s a thinly veiled threat, or a promise to kill me in an upcoming story.
If you don’t know his work, you SHOULD. He writes horror and hard scifi, has a wicked sense of humor and is a total creative badass in general . Also, he agreed to play drums for Something Beautiful – even though he’s actually a bassist. Would have been weird having two left-handed bassists in the band.
FDO with SoB
After the book signing and Q&A, we all headed to The Bar Below where everybody except Scott had delicious adult beverages. Scott drinks… I can’t even type it.
After having been a junkie for a whole mess-o-years, it was too cool to spend some time picking his brain in between all the other questions that were getting slung at him from every direction. He’s real interactive with his fans and is well practiced at not dropping spoilers when he talks about his work.
Only bad part of the night? The part where the conversation turned to hockey. Here’s a picture of J, Nikki and Me being bored almost into a collective coma.
I could probably write a TON more, but I got some stuff to do. Here’s the front half of his bio and some legit links:
New York Times best-selling novelist Scott Sigler is the author of ANCESTOR, INFECTED and CONTAGIOUS, hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing, and the co-founder of Dark Øverlord Media, which publishes his Galactic Football League series (THE ROOKIE, THE STARTER and THE ALL-PRO).
Web: scottsigler.com
Twitter: @scottsigler
Facebook: facebook.com/scottsigler
Free Mp3 Download and Outtakes – We Shall Overcome
image by NerdyGirlDesigns
So there’s a dropbox link for the audio of We Shall Overcome, with Eric Mcghee (SenGames.com)
And a little something extra – here’s some outtakes and bloopers from the night!
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Chords for We Shall Overcome
It occurs to me that somebody might want to play the song at church or something over this weekend or on Monday or Tuesday, so here are the chords I use to play We Shall Overcome. In the video I did with Eric McGhee, I used an F chord to suspend the verse endings, and maybe I made a mistake here and there, but this will get you through the whole tune, however many verses you want to sing.
C F C C F C
We shall overcome, we shall overcome
C Am E7 Am D7 G
We shall ov – er – come someday
Am G/B C F C F C Fm
Oh – deep in my heart, I do believe
C F C G C
We shall overcome someday
Reading a text chart like this can get annoying, I think – but the only places I would expect any problems would be the Am E7 Am change on line 2, and the Am G/B change on line 3.
Of course you can watch the video for reference, but I’ll talk you through it real quick.
On line 2, think of the Am E7 Am change just like you sing the “o – ver – come” in the line. Am on beat 3, E7 on beat 4, and Am for beats 1 and 2 of the next measure.
For the “Oh” on line 3, the Am sits on beat 3 with the G/B on 4 so you get the sense of walking up to the C chord on the word “deep”.
Hope this comes in handy for you!
We Shall Overcome
We Shall Overcome: Dale Tippett Jr feat Eric McGhee (Sen of Sengames.com). It’s Martin Luther King day on monday, and I figured we’d do something special.
I’m not a pundit. I have ideas about social and economic justice, but now’s not the time for that. This is a time for remembering and honoring a great man, not a time of pushing any personal agendas. If I can encourage anything, it would just be to love each other, and work together to make the world a better place.
I’ve known Eric for about a million years, and it’s about time we got to do a little bit of music together. He is involved in, among many things, game design – check this kickstarter out if you like Munchkin or Magic the Gathering
Taking some time for family!
Thanks for all your support through the christmas season, and I hope you’ve had a great one – I’ll be taking a couple weeks off of the website, but I’ll be back right after the new year
Looking forward to getting some quality time in with Nikki and the kids!
Rock on, and happy holidays, everybody!
Designing Christmas
So I’ve always been real good for singing some Christmas or holiday songs at parties, churches, TV, or the food pantry, but one thing that gets me in trouble every few months is the look of Christmas. I’ve never been one for holiday sweaters – though I’ll wear the occasional hideous sweater for kicks: 
But by and large, I don’t do the ‘festive’ look… Enter Nikki!
Nikki can pretty much do anything, and is super brilliant at design. I watch her do work for people all the time – restaurants, art committees, fitness professionals. She obviously does all the Dale Tippett Jr visual stuff (if something looks bad, it’s probably something I did) – but whatever she does, she makes sure the atmosphere of the project is right, and her eye for detail is the stuff of legend.
Promo for the Seafarer
Recipe for kick-ass cranberry relish – GREAT on a turkey sammich
Facebook timeline pic for the Northwest Arts Connection
and of course, she is a great photographer, too.
Nikki’s photography – for me, at least – is a place in her skill set where she really shines. I look at some of the best pictures she’s taken of me, for example, and they look super-slick and professional, but what she’s able to do is capture a relaxed moment that has motion and gets you right in the feels. The thing that the regular viewer might not know though, is that I was sick as a dog, in a terrible mood, but needed a photo for this or that promo – she’s able to get blood from a stone. It’s freaky, but in a good way.
The design stuff she’s doing for the Christmas season show and CD is crazy good – I love the promo she did (see feature image) and honestly, I think it all ties in to the aesthetic that she uses for this project rather seamlessly.
If you don’t, go like her on Facebook, follow her on twitter, and check out her blog:
https://www.facebook.com/nerdygirldesignschicago
https://twitter.com/nerdygirldesign
http://nikkispencer.com
PS – 8 days til Xmas show – reserve your CD today!
Holiday CD Progress!
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been recording the Christmas/Holiday CD that I’ve been talking about on Facebook and Youtube. Making a record is a fun process, and I’ll probably talk a bit about technique and setup sometime, but for now, how about some track names?
About half of the disc is acoustic guitar solo performances of songs like What Child is This, Silent night, God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman, O Holy Night and others. Of course, I wanted to play as many of my own standard favorites as well as stretch myself a little – I spent quite a bit of time trying to put together an arrangement of Jingle Bells that I could allow myself to call “cool”!
If you don’t know how to get your copy – heres a video:
It’s been a real pleasure doing all this work, and I’m going to do my best to keep you all posted as to progress and before I sign off today, I’d like to send a special thanks to the Portage Park Chamber of Commerce, NAC, Six Corners Shopping District and my dad, Dale Tippett Sr for showing their support of this holiday project by helping to lighten the load of my production costs!
And here’s the full ad copy that we’re using on the web – loads of details down there:
Join Dale Tippett Jr for a special evening featuring Dale’s original rock and blues music as well as some old holiday favorites!
This free holiday concert will feature Dale’s backup band Tin Lolita, special guest Anna Fermin, and more! Great tunes, great food and great company – see you there!
-HOLIDAY CD-
The $10 “ticket” reserves your copy of Dale’s holiday CD at a special pre-sale discount ($15 at the show). Only a limited number of physical copies are being made, so make sure to reserve yours today!
Reserve your copy of Dale Tippett’s holiday CD via Eventbrite:
http://www.eventbrite.com/
What’s your entertainment thinking about?
I can’t believe I never published this!!!
I wrote this post last year – before I told anyone we were pregnant with Abby, at a gig that was kinda killing my soul just a little. Anyway, I had a lot of fun with it, and I hope you like it too:
I’m at a gig right now. I’m writing instead of focusing on the job. I’m still doing great, don’t worry. Folks are talking, dancing and in general enjoying themselves. I do my people watching at gigs that I don’t have to think too hard about. Here’s some things I’m musing about as these folks go about their celebration:
I don’t care what you saw on television. When you’re confronted with a microphone in public, don’t tap the damn thing. That just makes you look dumb. Scratch the screen if you really don’t know if it’s on or not. Tends to annoy people a lot less.
When that microphone starts to feed back, don’t cover it. That makes it worse.
Pregnant women throwing up is hilarious.
That orange that’s not an orange, but rather a chocolate thing, and you smash it and it’s a buncha pieces? Those are dumb.
Couples that keep their finances seperate freak me out. Makes no sense. Either you’re supporting each other as a unit, or you’re just dating. Kinda.
Jimmy Buffet is kinda boring. I like Brian Adams though. How are those 2 ideas related? Bite me.
I want a CR-V.
I wish the soundcheck feature on iTunes was better.
That’s all I got. I think I’ll sing a few songs now – – – hold on…
Professional people fake hula dancing pleases me. Make a video and post it as a response below!
That is all. Imma go sing now. Do your job well, you guys.
Happy Thanksgiving, You Guys!
That is all, you jive-ass turkey 😉