I’m considering a new guitar (nothing unusual: I’m always considering a new guitar); I’ve got a thing for semi-acoustics after the Squier ‘69 tele (look at the background photo) I acquired sounds so good with my valve amp. Between that tele and the Silhouette I own I’ve got single coil sounds pretty much covered, probably with a fair amount of overlap, so it’s humbucker time. I’ve always wanted a 335 but really can’t justify the prices Gibsons go for. Luckily Yamaha do a version, the SA-2200, that can be had for less than a thousand. I may get rid of the tele to part finance it as the MusicMan is so nice to play, despite sounding less “organic” than the tele.
Frankly it’s all simply toy acquisition as I’m currently not playing any band-based music while Octosound is in recess. The other option is an acoustic guitar, potentially a nylon-strung one as I live to be different; Andrew’s getting his orchestra vs. beatz project up and running, which I may be contributing guitar lines for, and I think an acoustic sound may fit better. Or maybe a medium budget bass (OLP MusicMan Stringray 5, or an Ibanez BTB) and amp, if I find a band that needs a bassist (unlikely).
Anyway, that’s just an update from the avaricous side of me; really I should just follow the old adage of “It ain’t what you got, it’s what you do with it” and learn to play better!

Well, I wiped my home machine and reinstalled XP; it had started to get a little flakey after I’d installed Thunderbird (well, ok, and a million other little programs), so I thought I’d have a tabula rasa in time for SP2. Very easy to achieve, well done MS… I guess! I didn’t get along with Thunderbird anyway; the “Next” and “Previous” buttons in the mail and news folders were stuck on “Go to next/previous unread message”, whereas sometimes I just wanted the adjacent message. Hmmm.
SP2 is interesting. Just moved over at work, and suddenly IE has its own popup blocker. So I’ve not bothered with the google toolbar this time. However, a couple of the features I liked in Firefox were the context menu “search web for selected text” option, and the dictionary.com lookup by typing “dict [foo]” into the address bar. Trylookinghere.com sorted me out though, I now have the google search and dictionary.com search bookmarklets in my Links toolbar. I’m trying to ignore the lack of tabbed browsing; I’ve nearly convinced myself that when XP collapses the various open IE windows in the taskbar it’s created a kind of tabs set up. Hmmm. The main thing I really miss about Firefox is the Adblock extension, which gives you the power to block any image or object on a page. It’s weird seeing all the adverts in webpages again! I’m only staying on IE for the mo at work while its likely that our sysadmin has to dive into my machine to fix anything SP2 has, err, “fixed.”

Hmmm, messing with opacity filters for the content section. I think it might actually make the text more difficult to read, so maybe it’s not a good idea. However I realised that depending on the size of your browser window, you might not be able to see the background image, so I thought I’d let it show through… Frankly I just fancied fiddling with the template, particularly as Derek has a shiny new website design; makes me want curves on my site!

Hmmm, now I realise that the TAB below is wrong, the descending riff ends with a semi-quaver. Actually, using a . to represent a held note, the riff is:

  1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
G --------------------------------
D --------------------------------
A -------------3..-------07060503.
E 5-5-5345-5535---5-5-53----------

Ta da!

Oh, and in a dancey mood, I’ve taken a Rhodes sample that Derek gave me ages ago and started working on something more sample-and-loop. Download it here.

This is the bassline from that idea posted below:

  1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &
G --------------------------------
D --------------------------------
A -------------3---------0705030-3
E 5-5-5345-5535---5-5-53--------5-

I can’t quite play it fingerstyle, but I’m not far off. The 16ths are a real git, and it took me some time to work this tab out. Whilst transcribing it I realised that rather than tapping my finger on 8th notes, it was actually easier to think about it from a guitar plectrum point of view, using alternately-picked 16th notes (i.e. up then down then up then… etc.). Not that I actually play in this style, I’ll often skip a 16th just so that a stressed note is on a downpick. However I think I’ll have a go at doing so, as it might improve my timing on quickly picked sections.

I use the Firefox browser at home and at work. (I also recently switched to Thunderbird to read my mail at home.) I do this because I like tabbed browsing, I like the context menu (highlight text, right click and away you go with a google search for that text in a new tab), and I like the extensions that are available for it (the web developer one is particularly handy for working with CSS). However, this discussion on Slashdot shows an interesting side effect of Firebird’s developers being too friendly; basically, it’s simple (via XUL) to create a spoof window that looks like your browser, making phishing exploits very easy. This flaw isn’t peculiar to Firefox; people have been doing the same to IE for years. Also, it’s easy to foil, as you can disable the options to allow popup windows to hide their status bars. (XP Service Pack 2 will also do this, nice one Microsoft.) What’s odd is that Mozilla decided to hide this “flaw”, marking the bug confidential for 4 years; an interesting decision for what is apparently an open source project! Anyway, if you’re using Firefox it’s worth disabling a lot of JavaScript’s permissions using the Tools|Options menu, and perhaps even tweaking the about:config menu as suggested in the linked article.

Woah, that’s a ropey piece of recording I did. Too much going on, guitar’s obscuring the bassline…
Hangover. Nggngngn.

I’ve been playing with new ideas (musically, that is). The prince idea is still there, but I’m not sure about it now; I’ve got a Bb9maj7/D - F11 thing going on, but the lyrics I came up with were uninspired. So I’ve changed direction, and recorded an idea that sprang from a web cartoon I saw years ago, the Field Guide to Snapping. It’s again rather out of time, but this time because this post is sponsored by Leffe Brun (a lovely brown Belgian beer), and Badger Brewery’s Golden Glory (weird peach-scented beer, not too sure about this one) and Champion (an elderflower beer, light and refreshing). Yes, I’m drunk while blogging this. Anyway, here’s the music: idea number 1. I think it needs a verse… or maybe that bass riff is the verse… hmmm.

On the weekend Kyla and I plus friends went to an outdoors classical concert on Hamstead Heath, in the grounds of Kenwood House. We dined upon caviar and champagne (well, crisps and houmous) while the London City Symphonic banged out a selection of popular numbers (chah, they played the William Tell Overture but skipped straight to the Lone Ranger bit, much to Kyla’s disappointment). It was a fun evening, though we ended up sat far enough away from the orchestra that the majority of the sound was coming through the PA rather than directly from the players, though that was easily rectified by wandering forward… which coincidentally put us near the free champagne tent, ho ho. Anyway, here’s a photo from when the started letting off fireworks during the 1812.