Chris Tune's Blog

It may just be me, but I'm seeing a bit more of the goofy "NESARA" concept being propagated online. This is an idea that the money system will be converted over to full SPECIE (metal, like gold or silver as the only currency, not Federal Reserve Notes). This also conceives there being an elimination of Federal Income Tax and some other ideas. This is a real idea, which was promoted by a real person and even got some interest on Capitol Hill, but NEVER. . . I repeat NEVER was even sent into a committee, and of course, was never passed into law. This is NOT LAW.  Here an online anti SCAM site called QUATLOOS (a nice name - means some kind of "money") talks about this thing, in its more heavily scammy form:  http://www.quatloos.com/NESARA.htm  This is an old scam, but seems to be getting ground going among Q anon folk (who justifiably are suspicious of government, but thus may be susceptible to things like this) because this purports to be: POWERFUL WORLD CHA...

Online Marketing is very interesting. There is an entire cottage industry of persons working in marketing and working entirely online. The infrastructure around this is getting more robust all the time. There are content curation and provisioning companies, and many major long standing vendors offer affiliate channels to encourage web creators to post affiliate linked ads on their sites. Although the conventional "purchase ad, and place online" model appears to reign supreme, there is this substantial, though smaller independent, third party marketplace where content creation, marketing and product curation and hosting is operating on a different basis.

So it is fairly official: I am playing bone as much as is humanly possible, while also training and improving my computing skills (these devices seem to be with us for the long run...). So, it would also make sense for me to post here more often. I just got off a weekend out of town gig and am back in Van Nuys practicing, taking calls and cleaning up my kit (bones, clothes, mute bag) Will play a rehearsal tonight and a few this week, though Thanksgiving will interrupt and therefore this week will likely be light.

I seem to be continuing to practice and practice. One thing this is showing me, is that I need to continue to do this to improve as a jazz player....an improviser. I am often simply in the other room with a boombox and some Aebersolds.. ..when not cleaning the horn or running through basic chop "calisthenics". Otherwise, I will be playing something written, such as Rochut, or various recital style music....I have a bit of a collection of trombone recital type music.... Or.... I could be trying out some kind of "stunt".... Stunt stuff would be going over and playing and practicing something you would not normally think a bone player would do. Recent examples are: Circular breathing...more and more intricate efforts at polishing this activity. Using the Yamaha practice mute to create an electronic instrument similar to an electric guitar (solid body type). This is demonstrated by Italian trombonist Nicola Ferro : Or.... Learning the "Marie" trumpet solo...

I am now taking everything I can in trombone land. I am trying to get the word out that I am the darndest, super-cool, freelancer trombone player you will ever have in your group...(hear that, contractors?). Have extensive experience in Top 40 band/ R&B...Jazz groups large and small....orchestras...chamber music (e.g. brass quintet) church music, theater work onstage and in the pit, and recordings. I am in the Local 47 directory (will be in 2010 book), and can be reached at (818) 309-8804 or (818) 763-9397 I come in from the Van Nuys area, so I'm centrally located for most LA based work. I also enjoy doing work with many of my longstanding friends from Orange County. So, I really get around this great big city. PICS COMING! So I am doing quite a lot of playing. Keeping my Union dues up, too! [above is the racked equipment used in a festival here in town... also, you can see a big band setting up in Simi Valley, and nearby, and the thing we all like--applause...well, an ...

The music business can be pretty exasperating...perhaps Hunter S. Thompson had it right: The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs . There's also a negative side. Be prepared to laugh if you decide to be a musician...it will be a better survival tool than the most powerful military hardware...and try not to be too much of a "good man"... So that brings me to last nite's gig..it was great. I played with a great leader and band and his full troop of Rat Pack look alikes. We had Dean, Sammy and even Susan who is perhaps the most remarkeable Marilyn Monroe look alike in the world. So, even though we had to do the somewhat corny "I Want to be Loved By You" and the other Monroe tunes, which are naturally a bit spoofy (it is important to note that the audience really gets a laugh out of this part of the show, as some poor schmoe gets his temperature raised by "M...

Well, the more things change, well...the more they change! I no longer work as controller for Western Studio Services...there is probably not a lot to be gained by going over that...it was a very, very stressful job, so things are better that way, for sure. That situation forced a coming to grips with the mortgage loan. That means selling Alcove Ave and taking the remaining equity out, waiting until the FICO improves and then re-entering the San Fernando Valley real estate market... So now (as of mid 2009) the Tunes have moved to Van Nuys, into a smaller (1230 sq ft as opposed to 1640 sq ft) 3 bd home. This one has a pool, which is unusual for us Tunes. Nice garage...have to set up the packed stuff better to allow for a shop and so forth. So in 2011 will be looking for a home in the valley. I'm thinking of going for land, and building to suit added size and rooms onto an existing structure. I find I really like carpentry, masonry, electrical, all that stuff. Thing to do, thou...

Now we have set up with Fluidhosting. The URL of WesternStudioService.com does not have its "A" record set over to the new octet of the website hosting company. I will switch that on Network Solutions. The way the records for DNS work on INTERNIC and Network Solutions is pretty interesting. Once you log into the editing tool on Network Solutions and you look at the mappings, you can see how your email and remote login could be done to your MS Exchange and SBS server WAN interface, while your website with the same ending of the Domain name (WesternStudioService.com) could very well point elsewhere. That is what we are going to do. I appear to have to edit the "A" record and change the OCTET that shows in only one area of the record. Then, the domain name lookups and propagation of the tables will occur allowing users of web browsers to hit www.westernstudioservice.com and go to our new website. Fascinating, really. . . I've now got the pages set up for the ...

I'm doing the build of Westernstudioservice.com into a "customer oriented" web site. That means I'm taking the same marketing oriented basic website and changing it into a modern CSS based site with a logon for designated customers (several at first. . .possibly more later) who will be able to access a secure area to see PDF versions of their current inventory as printed by Michael Brittain. Michael's database is based upon Filemaker, which is currently at version 9. I can see there is a web section to the filemaker product. It is possible I will ultimately have to either migrate the database to a SQL type engine like SQL Server or MySQL and have Michael's database talk to that, or to have the Filemaker work through the net with remote logons managed through the website. For a first run, I'm interested in getting Filemaker reports available on a logged on basis, then I'll attack the redesign necessary to allow for up-to-the-minute access of a databas...

This video is very hard to look at. But we NEED to remind ourselves, not just of the events of 9-11, but of the nature of the enemy. We are at war, but so many of our populace simply ignore the fact. This war is unlike any other in that it is fundamentally based not upon pure political matters like the two world wars, the Korean Conflict and Vietnam, but instead is based upon a distorted version of religious fervor. One thing that libs do have right is their fear that religion can result in great, unrelenting, irrational violence. The Fascists, socialists and communists knew that too, and therefore they sought to create a religion of the state. The state takes the place of family and God. Fast forward to today's middle east and outward to the festering pockets of militant extremist Islam, and you have the same thing, without a very clear political goal. The very fact that these people do not even have a clear idea what they would do, in detail, if they were to achieve their goals,...

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 ...

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. ...

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.