Tad Dreis

This show was a return engagement at Duke University’s Campus Concert Series in the Bryan Student Center. Specifically, it’s a return to their Armadillo Grill in the basement.

When preparing for the webcast, I tweaked the audio/video settings to try and get a clearer picture and sound, and it’s a little better, but the audio is still kinda warbly. Oh, and the video doesn’t appear in this posting, but it’s up at http://tinyurl.com/tadwebcast

Following me on the bill at this show was Duke student and hiphop artist TOON.

I’m returning to Duke to play the Campus Concert Series tonight at 7:30pm. It’s in the Armadillo Grill downstairs in the Bryan Center. For directions, go to Shows and click on the little globe icon.

Also, depending on internet availability, I’ll try to stream video of the show live on my Ustream channel. Just check my Twitter status to get a link. Oh, you don’t already follow my sandwich updates on Twitter? I’ll bet you can guess the link.

Enchiladas and live music, woohoo! Let’s see, any other news? There’s a strange burned plastic / cigarette smell in my room that I can’t figure out or find the source of. Fingers crossed that it’s benign.

See you tonight!

In this one, I’m at the Cave, another place I don’t get to all that often. I don’t play at home. For some reason. We can get into it another time. What’s important is that you’re going to see me playing under Christmas lights, and you are going to hear the voice of Joel Ackerson, my long-distance music friend of going on six years now. Well, you’ll hear Joel say something off-camera, if you listen through the warble. I’ve seriously gotten that a lot better on webcasts as of April 2010. The stuff before then, yep, kinda distorted, kinda blurry, kinda underwater-sounding. This is an edit from April 15, tax day, by the way. Anyhow, here’s the link for this show. I took the embedded video down because it was slowing down the homepage opening up. Enjoy!

Ok, I made some calls and it’s confirmed, I’m coming to Charlotte to play tonight at 8pm. It’s at Common Market on South Tryon St. Come out and let’s warm our toes together in a punkrock deli!

Wow, this year is coming rapidly to an end. Looks like my last shows will be this weekend – tonight in Chapel Hill, NC at Harry’s Market out on 54, and tomorrow in Charlotte at Common Market’s Southend location on Tryon St. All this is, of course, barring some sort of snow apocalypse, but it doesn’t look like any of what’s fallen so far is going to stick, so I’m pretty sure these shows are going to be as scheduled.

It’s been quite a year for me. I released my first new CD in a few years – and if you’re still doing your holiday shopping, all my CDs do make fine gifts – and I went to the Kerrville Folk Festival for the first time and worked staff, camping out in the Texas dust for almost a month and breathing folk music. This spring, I also played my first webcast show, and ended up doing three or four of them, both from home and webcasting on location from clubs where I was playing. That’s really kinda neat. I’d like to do more of that this coming year.

In 2009 I began teaching harmonica lessons and I’ve enjoyed rethinking the rudiments of another instrument and doing some research as to how best to present them. Ukulele also entered the scene this year, and while it’s really similar to guitar, it has its own quirks that I’ve had to take into account when helping people get started. All this started from guitar for me, and I’ve been teaching guitar for going on ten years now, if you can believe it. Wow.

My year-end project is to set up new websites just for my teaching. Not sure if it’ll be one site to rule them all, one site to find them, etc – I’m leaning towards having individual subdomains for each instrument I teach, to give them each their proper due and hopefully help drive search traffic by doing only one thing at each site.

In other computer news, I’ve also been enjoying working on my computer using the Linux operating system. So far, I can do everything I need to do, although sadly, Netflix doesn’t have Watch Instantly support yet for Linux because of DRM issues. Drat that DRM.

Dunno if this will be my last posting for 2009. I’m pretty spontaneous with most of my web stuff, but if this is it, happy holidays and see you in the new year!