Cinnamon Kennedy is the co-founder and co-editor of the Holy Crap Podcast and Music Magazine. She is also the drummer for the Egg Eaters, and one half of Bad Banker, a band that sort of exists.

 

My favorite thing to wear onstage
Sleeveless shirts. Because I have some biceps, like Larry Mullin Jr. I put in some work there. I want people to see

  

Me. Iconic U2 drummer circa 1987. Pretty much identical.

The last musical instrument or musical-performance-related item that I bought and loved was:
A pawn-shop violin. Actually I requested that this be purchased for me. I’m terrible at it and I almost never play it. But I like looking at it.

The musical instrument or musical-performance-related item that I really really really want is
A looper. Bad Banker is a two-person band, and when two people in a two-person band don’t really know how to play, you gotta start making shit up

(check out me and John learning the looper here)

Something I wish I’d known before joining/starting a band:
The drummer is seated, and in the back. Therefore, nobody in the audience can ever see the drummer.

The Egg Eaters at the Town Pump in Black Mountain. Do you see me here? Nope!

I live in:
Black Mountain, NC. Because it’s the sha-zizzle. The general vibe of this city is `it’s ok to wear yoga pants’. Everyone at the grocery store knows everybody else. Since I teach yoga to a lot of people in this town, and also have extremely poor vision, I have to smile vaguely at everyone in the grocery store because it’s safe to assume that I know them but can’t see/recognize them.

Black Mountain. Probably you should move here.

The best place to play music in Black Mountain, NC is
The Town Pump in Black Mountain. It has probably smelled like beer for over a hundred years. I have received two marriage proposals from blind-drunk strangers at the town pump. Thumbs up

The best place to SEE music in Black Mountain, NC is Pisgah Brewing. They have kombucha. As a non-drinker, I love a place that thinks to stock interesting fermented-mushroom-yoga-drinks for those of us who need it. Honorable mention is Grey Eagle because they have tacos.

In my fridge you’ll always find
mayonaise

The last music I downloaded was
‘The Lust I Lost’ by the White Eyes. Because I have the best job in the universe #holycrappodcast4ever

(Check out our mini review of the album  可笑的一天 here)

A beauty staple that I’m never without is
My yoga mat. Because if you can move, you’re beautiful. But much more important than that, if you can move then you can fucking move.

The best place to eat breakfast in my city is
I don’t eat breakfast. I’m too vain.

My favorite websites or apps are
wikimedia commons, freesound.org, bandcamp, spotify, youtube. It’s the age of aquarius! I would not want to be alive anytime but NOW!  This is IT, baby!

When people come to visit me, particularly if those people are cooler than I am, I take them to
Dynamite Coffee on highway 70. Because they have a record player, and people are allowed to just get up and put on whatever record they want. This kind of behavior is not encouraged outside of small towns. It’s a good reason to live in Black Mountain

Dynamite Coffee on highway 70 in Black Mountain

The last meal that truly impressed me was
puff pastries filled with cranberry and camembert from Trader Joe’s . I ate them yesterday. Still thinking about them.

For the first time in 2000+ years, here is an all-new take on conformity (we love it). John thinks they sound like the Monkees, and he also thinks that is a compliment. These Spanish mambo-punks will win your heart. Featured on our #36 podcast, Revenue Streams.

 

A looper is quickly becoming something that every musician needs, but for those of us who are a little behind the eight ball in adopting computers into our practice/performance, it can be pretty daunting. Although I had been wanting a looper for years, I was not entirely sure what exactly a looper was. I sure did want one, though.

When our Boss R-3 looper arrived in the mail, John took it out of the box, plugged it in, and started playing with it immediately. I, feeling much more cautious, instead watched a bunch of Youtube videos about how to use it. In spite of our different learning methods, as you can see from our video performance, the speed-of-adoption of the technology was about the same for both of us (mediocre-to-acceptable). Squinting at the manual and watching Youtube are probably optional: the looper is frustrating in the beginning, but it’s built for stomping on — in hindsight, I say just go for it.

One thing that might help in learning to speak to your looper are your distant memories of a flip phone. Many of us learned (briefly) to triple-touch-type. Communication between you and your looper will have a similar morse-code kind of feel: Tap once to do something. Tap twice to do something else. Press a button and then tap and hold to do a third thing. You get it. Functions like looping, overdubbing, saving, and deleting are all tapping-sequences that you’ll have to memorize, but don’t worry — it’s relatively easy and it improves greatly with practice.

Any musician who has played with a click-track before knows that non-human drum beats are scary. An electronic rhythm will not flow with you. It will not wait if you mess up. It will not catch up to you when you get excited. Most of the youtube videos that I’d watched on the subject of looping gave strong and strenuous warnings that loopers were the meanest kinds of computers: The loops must be done exactly, exactly, EXACTLY on the ‘1’ — One-two-three-four-STOMP/start playing!-two-three-four-STOMP/stop playing! The video hosts — invariably longhaired young men who work in guitar stores — strongly implied that if you miss the `1’ by even a little, the whole thing will be ruined, and you’ll be embarrassed for the rest of your life. That made us pretty worried, as John was born without rhythm, and I am the stereotype that all dumb-drummer jokes are based upon.

Fortunately, the R-3, ‘Cadillac of Loopers’, seems to have been designed with imprecise people like myself and John in mind. As you see in the video, he misses the 1 by a fair amount on his first try, and the loop still sounds ok. I can’t explain how that works (it has something to do with their programming, and that, fortunately, is theirs and not mine to worry about), but I can say that John and I tried this many times and although our rhythmic skill didn’t necessarily improve, the looper continued to be friendly and work with us. Each time, it grabbed our loop, in its approximate relation to the `1’, matched it to our chosen beat (I should mention that the R-3 comes with a good handful of beats, a couple of which are quite fun), made it into what it thought we were trying to play, and off we went. It really will make you feel like a super cool musician. (If you already are a super-cool musician, I imagine that it will make you feel stratospheric.)

So what, specifically, do you need the Boss R-3 looper for? Although my initial vision of myself was of traveling the world performing in one of those looper festivals, beatboxing and violin playing with all those tattooed girls with dreadlocks, in practice the R-3 turned out to be a much more practical tool. It’s a workhorse, and specifically a workhorse that wants to practice with you: if you play an instrument that doesn’t practice well alone, such as bass, or drums, or if you’re working on your complicated face-melting solos, putting down a short guitar riff into the looper will make you feel like you’re practicing with a band. (A version of the band that will not guffaw at your mistakes, so go nuts with those solos.) It also holds up to 99 saved loops, which is handy, as John and I are already up to 17. It will also attach by USB to bring beats back and forth to your computer. I tried to bring a couple of loops into GarageBand and I have to report that this worked only fifty percent of the time; that may, however, have been because of my cord. You know how cords are.

By itself, the Boss R-3 looper may not be good for performance, because it won’t switch loops between parts of the song (I’m told an attachment, called a ‘twin,’ —which we will review anon—, will allow for this); however, what about adding a continuous (or occasional) human beatbox to your next show? As you observe in the video, the R-3 looper makes it damn easy. Welcome to the future.