Chris Tune's Blog

Well I could not make the Church Christmas concert. My pastor joked (I hope he was joking. . .) too bad Chris has to find another Church to go to. . . You see Pastor Wade is an excellent trombonist in his own right, and now, with me stuck in Mobile, AL . . .or actually flying somewhere over the great U.S. South or Southwest on my way to LAX. . .well, Wade had to go it alone on the Christmas concert. I'm going to really have to make it up to the man. . .to all the guys and gals at the concert. Maybe I can fix them some kind of great dinner or something. At least a representative of the Tune family was able to make the concert. Adam played clarinet on the performance at 5pm Sunday. He thought it went well. I know the choir is sounding great, so I had every reason to expect a great concert. I've learned what happens when you try to stuff a lot into a complicated weekend of air travel and musical performing. Things can go very, very wrong indeed.

This is the worst I've yet experienced with airline travel in doing music. I accepted a gig to go with Direct From Vegas - The Rat Pack and, of course the gig part of this trip went very, very well. However, the airlines and the connections were very bad: In setting up this blog entry I should explain that the flight out was provided by the producer and this involved getting to LAX Thursday morning. I was told by my company, however that I absolutely could not be out Thursday. So I first figured that I could get a separate leg flight out from Burbank airport and would be able to fly in to Chicago later and join the orchestra and cast in Elgin, IL. I was able to pull this off with an arrival in Elgin at around 2am Elgin time. So far so good. . . Now as we flew from O'Hare to Mobile, AL the really bad things began to happen. The set of flights purchased as part of the Rat Pack gig, were designated by the airlines as "use all, or lose all". This was NOT OBVIOUS f

Another wild time we had recently was the very fun 50th birthday celebration for my boss, Scott Leonard (Scott, his brother Mark and Mark Simon are the owners of Western Studio Service). Although Scott doesn't look a day over thirty, he was, in fact celebrating the great half-century mark, and so we used the "party room" at the Colorado facility. After major set dressing by Carrie Randazzo, and some real cool help from Don Reinhardt and Anders (last name?) from Village Christian School who set up some cool lighting and ran the slide show. We had a band coming from our Sunday school group, which rocked us with oldies. We also had a very nice bit of fronting the band by Kelly Leonard who did a few tunes, and especially memorable to me, a kickin' "Sweet Home Alabama". Here are some shots (note the genuine surprise on Scott's face - he thought there was a massive water leak going on upstairs at this building - well that was just the "pretext"):

I've had some very interesting things going on in the last few months. Of course this gave me very little time to post blog entries on the events. The first that comes to mind is the very last gig that I, or anyone else, will do at the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Nick De Gidido has basically always stayed at the Frontier and has put up his band members there. The Frontier was a great deal and it represents old Las Vegas, so we old fashioned entertainer types love it. Here are the pics: So you can tell that this was kinda wild. We had four horns, and guest bass player Gio Valle. We also had a sit in by my trombone teacher's son. Any of you who read all my stuff will know I was taught trombone by studio player (1947 to 1960 or so Paramount Studio Orch) Harold Diner. His son is a great, great drummer - Evan Diner. Evan has played with major persons including Nelson Riddle. So he fit in like perfection. Evan played a "head" with us, and then read a

Here is my recent tour of the Main Location in Burbank: The first image is the main alley in our Burbank 805 S. San Fernando, "main" location. Several of these buildings are either housing sets, lock up storage, or are devoted to individual "mills" (e.g. a set maker's shop). Right now WSS has roughly 1.8 million square feet of storage in seven locations around the San Fernando Valley and Saugus. The next image is an office / mill space. Once a manufacturing office or dispatch space, this is now a great area to be used for a production office space. Western generally offers superior rates for your production office needs. Also, Western has nearby storage for your sets, and can sometimes provide locations when industrial sites are the thing you need to do a shoot. The third image is the doorway and front of a large warehouse building. This is our core business and we have dedicated warehousemen and truck drivers to make your storage of media-related materials

It is sometimes remarkeable how we live here in the media capital of the world. As an example I've loaded a picture of Adam waiting in line right in front of Disney Studio's office complex with the identifying Seven Dwarves columns. Adam and I were over at Toontown Online's live meet "Toonfest". So we had fun and we only had to drive five or six miles over to Burbank to join in with the fun. We saw some new features and Adam got to play for quite a while on some high end workstations set up for the Toonfest visitors. Adam and his friend Philip also got to go onstage to participate in a Toontown Online trivia contest. They didn't ace the quiz but they got most right and had some real fun all day long. Meanwhile, I continue to be very lucky and blessed in terms of getting to perform on trombone and in terms of generally having good productive work to do. Hopefully, I can also contribute at work in terms of developing their web site. Now people often expect servi

Now seems like the time that I will be blogging more and will be back developing my personal website. I'm moving the project at work into the final stages. This means that we will be doing work with more modern GL tools. This includes the ability to program using Visual Basic and kindred VB (e.g. VBA) to achieve business goals. Some of those goals will be: Advanced cash management Budgeting (a first here) Accrual Accounting Management reporting of pricing and economics for storage rentals Manpower costing and efficiency analysis Pension accounting and compliance This list is not necessarily in the order of importance. In fact, this is one of those situations where so many things are highly important that one wants to dive into all of them. We have some advances in each of those areas already, even without proper modern GL tools. And of course, a GL is a GL even if it were done using paper ledgers. The truth is, however, that modern tools allow for much quicker reporting and

I’m just about to fold up and get ready to go to the Simi Valley “ Towne Center ” and do a gig with Bob Couto and his Big Band.  I had an “interesting” day.  That is in the sense, that the Chinese curse “may you live in ‘interesting’ times” means.  We heard from ADP saying that our regular Union payroll would not occur unless we wired money to them.  Well, that was because they did not release the payroll when asked to by our Payroll person.  It came down to a “he said/she said” sort of thing and ADP did do the good thing of fighting to get the PR out.  So it is only ½ demerit when taken in entirety.  I’m really not that hot to judge them hard.  I feel they are strong in the area of attention to changes in regulations. They are also dragging their big, bureaucratic organization forward, which, in itself, is quite an accomplishment.   Anyway we got an agreement to do the thing, including banking the way it should be. [I’m still holding my breath . . .]  I will make the transfer

I almost think that there are not enough hours in the 24 hour day.  I’m constantly moving from work to home to work to home, with an occasional stop off at church.  Tonight, maybe I can stop at church.  Maybe.   I’m also helping a person with trombone playing, so I may be late.   I’m up to my A** in Alligators to quote my predecessor here.  The image does conjure up a dangerously busy person.  I’m managing to keep the plates spinning.    [I prefer that old image of the guy who went out on the Ed Sullivan Show and started plates spinning on top of those long rods. . .]   At least now, I’ve got the email set up so that I’m Ctune@westernstudioservice.com   That is as it should be.   The financial conversion is still moving along, even if it is a bit sluggish.  I’m getting through this month’s close, with help from all those good workers we have.  So, with that and some prayer, we’ll most likely be OK.   Chris    

I’m testing this facility to allow me to post blog entries via email. This should allow for an easier way to put up entries. Today is my birthday. I’m old. Well . . . maybe not that old. Gina gave me a nice plant for the office and I got lots of cards and stuff. They had sundae icecream at lunch. Overall this was not bad.

I'm pretty certain I'll buy the horn. The closed wrap model is probably a good thing, since I'm sorta clumsy and would likely bend up an open-wrap horn. So, together with a reasonable price, that makes the decision to buy pretty easy. The hack increasing the number of simultaneous connections to IE (I'm using ver 7) seems to work well. The same site also had a way of increasing speed with Firefox. I use both browsers now, quite often. IE gets used particularly when an ASP.NET type page seems not to work right with Firefox. I am a bachelor now for a week. Michele and Adam went to a Mexico mission trip where lots of Christians from all over North America go down and help churches in Mexico. They should be back in a week. I may see if there was any blogging or pictures available of previous trips. Michele is warning me that the house better be neat when she returns. Maybe this is an opportunity to just focus on cleaning and organizing. I'm playing music on Ea

I'm deciding if I will buy Dick Nash's Bach 42B. Steve Ferguson had it at his store. I took it home to try out. It plays well. From the serial number, it appears to be of 1982 or 83 vintage, so it is actually newer than virtually any of my other horns. Nonetheless, it is of the older design. The closed, compact valve section. The question I guess is how much better does a symphony tenor with F attachment play if it has the open valve design? Is this really a big deal? I'm thinking it really may not be a big deal. I played an open version 88H about five months ago, having borrowed it, and it was not that much different. I'll just have to decide. I could use a large bore with F attach.

SpikedHumor.com » Lightning Fast Browsing Trick For Internet Explorer And Firefox » SpikedHumor.com This is video describing how to improve speed performance for high bandwidth internet connections. It increases the number of connections allowed to something higher than the defaults. There are two separate instructions - one for Firefox, and another for Internet Explorer. Hope it works. Hope I have time to try these. Chris

Now we are chewing our own legs off, or so it appears when looking at the 2nd amendment community. Veteran writer Jim Zumbo commented that he thought it was stupid to use an "assault rifle" (sometimes also called "black rifle", since the AR-15, for example is black plastic in many areas). Now, he has lost most of his gigs with magazines and the NRA, and many of the gun enthusiasts are just fine with that. Also, I note that some are now trying to tell Ted Nugent what to do. . . .(not a good idea, mind you!). He has posted apologies and restatements of position from the 67 year old gun writer. . .apparently, Zumbo made his dumbo comments about "terrorist" rifles and now lots of folk think this is "ammunition" for more efforts to abolish certain types of rifles, and pistols. I think this is "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". We don't need to chew up veteran, 40 year NRA member authors regardless of WHATEVER they may say, a

TENS OF THOUSANDS DEMAND IRAQ WITHDRAWAL Forbes covers the AP Feed on this. . .and my mind says: That means that there are more people gathered in D.C. listening to Jane Fonda, and others than the KIA in Iraq in the three years of action there. We now have slightly more than 3,000 KIA in the Iraq war. During the war in which Jane Fonda committed TREASON, [we lost slightly more than 47,000 KIA in Vietnam] we lost in excess of ten times as many soldiers. During the very first BATTLE that the US Marines fought in World War I, (in France, part of a combined breakout effort by French, British and US forces). . .the Marines lost roughly 5,000! YES five thousand souls lost their lives for a single mission. . .they did this in the course of a very few days, and for the goals of ONE BATTLE. I believe sincerely that Jane Fonda, and all the other anti-war protesters are INSULTING all those who lost their lives for these other wars. Whether WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or other actions which are

The title is linked to a page for "Convergence 2007", a Microsoft Dynamics oriented convention scheduled for 2007 in San Diego. On this page, there is a list of blogs having to do with MS Dynamics. So, if you found this blog because of a search on Microsoft Dynamics, feel free to pop over to the list. I think it could be useful. Don't forget to bookmark this blog, especially if you like Jazz music, and/or trombone. DYNAMICS-IS. . .WELL, DYNAMIC! As I thought, Dynamics is having a wonderful run-up with coverage by the user community, hip EDP-oriented , bloggerly folks with much to say about this very powerful financial software. I'm looking forward to learning more about what all those users and developers out there are doing with Dynamics. Here at Western Studio Service, we plan on implementing MS Dynamics GP starting this coming month (February). This should vastly improve on ledger function and provide a base with which to fully track

I was listening to Frank and his video of him doing Monk's "Well You Needn't" and was astounded as he did the melody over both in the low octave and in the upper octave. You should note that this is a leaping melody which starts on a low C and leaps up a fourth to an F and then does a "bebop" sounds down to F# (with a sort of tritone sound to them). The point is that there are these very high brief upper notes to the "bebops". . .the "tops" of them, so to speak. The range is very, very high. And Frank sounds like this is simply not very difficult at all. This tune was the last one played on this half hour show. He then immediately launches into the theme music and again plays in tessiatura that is simply not supposed to be on the trombone -- it is more trumpet range, if you look at the orchestration books. Now Frank played a very small mouthpiece but a medium bore conventional trombone (a Conn 6H. . .a .500 bore medium trombone mode