NAMM 2017: Selling Your Music Gear On Reverb.com

Aloha!

I have been selling music gear on the biggest online auction website for almost 20 years now, and as the years have gone by my satisfaction has waned as costs and regulations have ballooned, while finding buyers has become more difficult. Don't even get me started on Craigslist, which is a cesspool of humanity and scam artists.

I have been using Reverb.com for online purchases for a year now, but never even thought of using it to unload gear that I am no longer using. And I have a lot of gear that is not doing much of anything right now! After speaking with Rachel from Reverb.com at the 2017 NAMM show, I am going to have to give it a shot and get some of my guitars, basses, speakers, and live sound equipment up for sale pronto.

Reverb.com is pretty much an online service that puts buyers in touch with retailers and everyday people who are selling new and used gear. The company is based in Chicago and was founded in 2013 by David Kalt, who you might also know as the head honcho for Chicago Music Exchange. This website is a completely separate entity that was founded to be “An online community created and run by musicians where buying and selling music gear is easy and affordable.”

In my dealings with Reverb.com, I think that they have achieved this goal. When I buy something through them my interactions are with musicians who are knowledgeable about their products. Many online auction site sellers know nothing about the gear they are peddling, and I have been disappointed many times with products I have received. This is not the case with Reverb, as my very few less than great experiences were solved quickly after contacting the sellers, who were more than happy to make things right.

Rachel went through the whole process of signing up for a Reverb.com account, which is free, and explained the fee structure to me. It is simple, really. There is no fee to list items, and Reverb.com collects a 3.5% fee of the final selling price of items ($0.50 minimum and $350 maximum fee) – compare this to what you are paying on other sites. She also showed me how to list items (also easy - only one page to fill out) and let me know that listings can go until the items sell, with no charge if you need to cancel the listing for any reason.

It seems like a no-brainer, so I am going to have to give Reverb.com a shot. I will document how everything goes, and provide updates on Rex and the Bass. In the meantime, head over to reverb.com to check things out for yourself!

Mahalo!

Hapa-haole Songs

Greetings!

I am on a ukulele kick this month, so how could I leave out the contributions of hapa-haole songwriting? Hapa-haole is a Hawaiian term meaning mixed blood, usually Hawaiian heritage mixed with something else (usually Asian or mainlander). And it is an appropriate term for this type of music, which was most prevalent during the first half of the 20th century.

Hapa-haole music has predominantly English lyrics with a few Hawaiian words/names thrown in to make the songs seem more exotic. Hawaiian influence is heard in the melodies, with big interval jumps, but the mainlanders did not stray much from the normal song structure and lyrical clichés of their times.

In my opinion the best music was written before the 1950s, and it is uncanny how you hear the mainland influences of the time, based on when the music was written. For example, early hapa-haole songs have a ragtime feel, while later music progresses through jazz, blues and eventually big band themes.

And there were some prolific composers that wrote a lot of this music, including R. Alex Anderson, Sonny Cunha and Johnny Noble.

But my favorite songwriter from this era is Harry Owens, a vaudeville band leader and former musical director of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel Orchestra. He is most famous for Bing Crosby’s Academy award-winning song “Sweet Leilani”. He wrote hundreds of other hapa-haole songs, many of which are still popular within the ukulele community. Check out “Princess Poopooly” on Youtube sometime. Here is a sample of the lyrics:

The Princess Poopooly has plenty papaya and she loves to give it away. Now all of the neighbors they say: “Oh me-a, oh my-a, you really should try a little piece of the Princess Poopooly’s papaya.”

Now Princess Poopooly’s not truly unruly to pass out papaya each day. For all of the neighbors the say, “She may give the fruit, but she holds on to the root, and so she has the root and the fruit to boot.”

You get the picture, I am sure…

Anyway, things have changed quite a bit since the middle of the last century, and Hawaiian-influenced music is no exception.

Popular Hawaiian since the 1960s has seen influences from many cultures, and blends reggae, rock and folk feels into the genre. The term hapa-haole has fallen by the wayside, and all of this music is now lumped into the category of “contemporary Hawaiian music.”

Mahalo!