About

A great shot of me by the extremely talented Toby Forage from a gig a few years ago.

My name is Chuck Smeeton – media guy, muso, surfer, dad – and finally after many years I’ve started doing basic recordings of my original songs. The Cavan Project is what I’ve created as a home for these songs, and a bunch of other stuff. I’m primarily a bass player but try my best at all the other instruments in these tracks!

In 2012 I commenced a goal of trying to write and record at least one song from scratch each month – sometimes it comes easily, sometimes it’s a real challenge, but I love the discipline it creates. I managed to complete the year, but it was so much fun that I’ve decided to keep it rolling for as long as I can.

The idea of this site is to capture the process, share ideas and hopefully learn a thing or two along the way. Of course it’ll also be a place where I put anything else that interests me (that’s why I made a “Stuff” category in the nav bar). In fact over the past year or so I’ve refined the kind of content I put up with the addition of lists probably the main thing. I’ve always loved lists in any form, and it’s a bunch of fun coming up with ideas and presenting the results.

Oh, and Cavan Project? It’s named after the street I lived on when I started this caper and the “project” of creating the monthly songs.

Enjoy!

5 Comments on “About

  1. Hey Chuck! I love your month songs list project! I can’t believe I did not find it before today! The very first playlist I started the very first day I downloaded iTunes (the first year it was out) was a Days of The Week list that then moved to months of the year. Just like you I found certain days and months have been sorely neglected by songwriters. I continue to add to the lists but finally decided I was only adding songs that I would actually choose to listen to, rather than a completist-type list. I’ve since done Colors and Numbers and Birds and Songs with Hey and US States and Cities. The state and city lists turned out to have the most potential and are now quite large. My favorites now are three “pair lists”: Foreign Language/English versions; Songs and Answer Songs; and Rip Off Songs (originals and songs that copy melodies and riffs (not samples, obviously). Hope you continue to enjoy your listing work. Cheers!

    • Hi, just wanted to comment on your “Bands that have had the most members” piece. You left off Blood sweat and tears, who have had 175 to date. Also, The Fall had over 60, and Hawkwind and Savoy brown had well over 50 each.

  2. Sir, I have a name to submit for A TALL Musician. My Dad, Ed French, of Dallas, Texas, U.S.A was six feet nine inches tall (6’9″). He began music career in 1965 as a drummer, but eventually made the transition to playing bass in th 90’s, semi-retired due to back troubles. Sadly he passed away this year on 26 May 2018, but his legacy lives on. I’m xhort kid, measuring in at six feet two inches. We used to joke about his being the tallest, but now I wish we had taken it just a bit more seriously. Howecer, since he had enoough notoriety for years of pretty much always being the tallest in the room, to add a further distinction,such as Drummer, Bass player, etc.

    https://www.facebook.com/ed.french.376

  3. Hello Chuck. I was on the page with the 2 string bass and could find no way to leave a message, so here I am. I had a very good piezo output by sandwiching a 28mm piezo disc between saddle and bridge. from the top down, it was floating threaded bolt for saddle, below that a floating bridge 1×1.5×1/16″ piece of paneling with 2 tacks at forward edge as stops (kept threads off piezo and spread out saddle pressure), below that the piezo with wired side up is 2-drops-superglued to a slightly larger piece of paneling permanently glued to cigar box top as a bridge-base. Other pickup is a “flat-pup” type hand-wound by me. Reply will get you info on how I “tricked” the piezo into not stealing the mag’s vol pot and turning it into a tone pot. Yup. Tiny bit of wiring mod. David, a.k.a. the ConnMan.

  4. davidbrianroth – Philadelphia, PA, USA – I received my BA in Biochemistry from Rice University (after a briefly considering a music major), earned an MD/PhD from Baylor College of Medicine, and did a pathology residency at the National Cancer Institute. After a postdoctoral fellowship in Martin Gellert's lab at NIDDK, i took a faculty position at Baylor College of Medicine. After a happy decade, I moved to NYU as the Irene Diamond Professor of Immunology. After another decade, which included stints as the Chair of Pathology and Director of the MD/PhD program at NYU, I moved to the University of Pennsylvania's medical school as the Chair of Parhology and Laboratory Medicine. I'm interested in education, issues in academic medicine, the transformative changes coming to the practice of pathology... and also, as am amateur musician and photography, and in discovering beauty in the world around us. All content on this site solely represents the views of the author and not my employer.
    David

    Just discovered your site through your review of the Bass Buddy. I bought one. Love your site. I’m planning to do something similar!

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