Yes it is.

One new bass! A Yamaha BBG-5S. First impressions are that it sounds a shit load more professional than my old P bass copy. Whether that’s build quality or the active pickups, who knows. There’s not a wild tonal palette available; the two band EQ (treble and bass boost/cut) plus pickup mix and master volume just serve to make minor adjustments to the overall sound, but hey it sounds good to me, so I don’t mind. I was toying with an eBay purchase for nearly double the price I paid for this beast, but then had to remind myself that I’m neither an inventive nor talented bassist, so budget was reduced. Still, I’m having a lot of fun lobbing in unnecessary low Bs into my grooves. Actually the B string is a little loose, but I have a set of “standard” gauge strings (45 to130) that I might change to soon. (That said the last time I changed the strings on a bass I broke the damn thing, so I’m a bit nervous about it.) The main problem I’m having is stopping the strings ringing all the time, I thought I was playing well (unamplified) then plugged in, only to find that I sounded like someone playing a piano with the “damper off” pedal permanently pressed down. Better get practicing!

I design websites for fun. I’d design websites for fun and profit, but frankly I’m not good enough at it and there’s not enough profit in it. Still, I became aware of a local independent online record store called Rhythm Online via the We’re All Neighbours bulletin board. Their original site layout was frames-based, which can cause problems with indexing in search engines and anyway requires writing some form of no-frames version of the site for… I don’t know, surely all browsers can cope with frames! Some real-ale internet weirdos, no doubt. Anyway, I offered to help them out with a crafty site redesign, keeping the original look and feel but moving to a no-frames, CSS-based layout. They’ve just gone live with this updated version, so go there and buy much stuff!

The Apple iProduct. Exactly how I feel about most Apple equipment. Not that I’m not tempted by a second hand iBook, but really I only need one computer, I’m not that much of a geek. Honest.

Hmmm, eyeing up a bass I spotted in Mark’s Music; a nice 5 string Yamaha, I think it’s a BBG-5S. Fairly cheap, but my bass skills aren’t in demand apart from for my own home recording stuff, so who cares.

Kyla and I played squash for the first time on saturday. My muscles are still complaining. Still, we were grinning like loons by the time we’d finished, so think we’ll play more often, once the pain has subsided. I also noted the different word used for this exercise: we played squash. I play the guitar. There’s an element of fun. However, I go to the gym. I think the distinction is an important one.

Fantastic site comparing all the classic 80s action films that I had to watch on video because I was too young to see them in the cinema. The reviewers are damn right, Commando is the best of the bunch.

I was given this recipe my dad’s wife, so it’s very vague; she’s a good cook so simply knows what’s going to work and what won’t, and her written recipes reflect this in the fact that there aren’t many specific quantities in them.

• Enough puff pasty for two layers
• Two large onions, thinly sliced
• 3 x volume of the onions in chopped mushrooms
• Clove of garlic, crushed
• Cup of white sauce (50g of butter, cornflour, milk)
• 1 packet of vacuum packed chestnut pieces, rouchly chopped
• 30 ml of port
• Grated nutmeg, salt, pepper

Fry the onions in a little olive oil until soft. Add the mushrooms and fry for a further 4 minutes. Once done, add the garlic, port and chestnuts and take off the heat. Prepare the white sauce in a seperate pan by melting the butter over a low heat, then gradually add cornflour whilst stirring until what you’ve got looks thick. Gradually add milk, whisking all the time, until you end up with the required volume and consistency - if it’s too thin, up the temperature until the sauce thickens. Finally add nutmeg and seasoning. Grease and line a pie dish with one layer of puff pastry, put the mushroom and chestnut mixture in first followed by the white sauce. Top off the pie with the remainder of the pasty, then bake in a hot oven (gas mark 5) for 30 minutes. Eat and enjoy: that’s an order.

(Dredging the barrel of the old site’s material…)

I’m a bit of an effects monkey, when I hear bands play I’ll often have a guess at what sort of effects set up they’re using, and when I listen to music and have thoughts like, “Oooo, little bit of phase on the piano, nice.” Yes, I am a geek. eBay is my major source for pedals; I rarely have the urge to buy anything new, as most stomp boxes are made of metal so unlikely to sustain much damage beyond the merely cosmetic. (And in the case of my wah pedal, I cosmetically damaged it by spraying it purple.)
I’ve done a fair bit of thinking about how I use effects, which is an important thing to do as there’s so much that can be achieved it’s easy to end up overwhelming your sound, which might not be the desired result. On one level, the more pissing about you do with your signal, the more degraded it’s going to be by the time it makes it out the speakers. In Casa I tended to use stomp boxes (analogue ones, not that I don’t lust after a stack of Line 6 gear), usually running my guitar into a Boss CS-2 compressor, through a Jim Dunlop Crybaby, then into the amp. Sometimes I’d add a Marshall Drivemaster after the wah to give a different solo sound. Really I can do without the compressor, but I liked to remove some of the dynamics from my rhythm playing, particularly as my parts often mixed chords and single note passages. It also gives a nice disco guitar sound (think Chic). In the fx loop I used either an Ibanez FL-9 flanger or a Danelectro CoolCat chorus for a little bit of wobbliness. (It’s generally accepted that time-based effects, e.g. chorus and flanger, should go after distortion/pre-amp in the signal path, and tone- and filtering-based effects, e.g. wah, should go before.)

For Octosound songs, whilst sometimes I’d use a straight ahead clean sound, often I’d have an autowah into distortion into trem into delay into sonic discombobulator… ok, I made that last one up. Basically I needed a wide range of sounds that could be quickly switched, hence my purchase of a Boss GT-5. This little beast is a fully customisable digital signal chain dealing with pre- and post-preamp effects, and includes a speaker simulator for direct-to-desk applications. You can play with the order of the effects, putting them in wacky orders (why not feed a delay into an autowah, or compress reverbs?), to achieve nearly any kind of noise you’d care to imagine. For straight ahead sounds it pays to treat it as you would a normal guitar amp and put compressor, wah, distortion etc. before the on-board pre-amp, then chorus and delays etc. afterwards (see the signal path diagram). There’s even an effects loop so you can use your own effects within the GT-5’s set up. This loop can also be moved around, so can be used to give a really complicated but potentially wonderful set up known as “the four cable method.” This is where you run the guitar into the GT-5’s input, use the frequency-based effects, then send your signal out via the 5’s FX loop to the input of your amp. Your amp’s preamp acts as the preamp in the path. The signal is then returned to the GT-5 via the amp’s FX send, after which the signal runs through the time-based effects in the 5, then is output to the FX return on the amp, ready for the amp’s poweramp. Theoretically you can use your lovely tube amp’s preamp and power amp while still retaining the flexible switching of the GT-5. In practice, I can’t get this to sound half as good as just running guitar -> GT-5 -> amp’s input, probably due to the difficulty in getting all the various levels set just right.
Some general points:

• However mad with effects you go, it’d probably sound better if you threw them all away and just plugged straight into the amp
• Your signal is only as good as the weakest part of the signal chain
• When using effects, less is generally more
• Ignore people who tell you what the right way to do things is: there is no right way, there is only tone. If you’ve found one you like, don’t worry about anyone else’s.

Here endeth the lesson.

Sodium Party is a site that details one man’s intrepid investigation into the exothermic reaction between water and sodium metal. Or, Watch Cool Videos of Stuff Exploding! This was particularly amusing at work, as one of the guys had done this himself during uni days in the 80s, using a large pot of sodium and the Serpentine river in London. He said that he didn’t notice any yellow butterflies, as the police arrived in force shortly afterward to find out what the fuck had just blown up in Hyde park. It also brings to mind the video of the group 1 metals reacting with water I watched in chemistry GCSE lesson. Presented in 70s-science-erama, a bowl of water sat unsuspectingly against an institutional grey background. A hand (attached, no doubt, to a bearded man) appeared from the left bearing a spatula, on the end of which a small lump of grey material, lithium, perched. The lithium lump was flicked into the water, where it sputtered and smoked dourly. Sodium followed, burning slightly more energetically, then potassium, which sat on the surface of the water in a halo of flames. Finally, rubidium was tested. The scene cut to a new bowl, larger this time and made of glass, viewed through a clear plastic shield. The hand that entered the shot was protected by a heavy vinyl glove, and the spatula was decidedly longer than that used before. It was at about this point that I thought, “This is going to be good.” The metal was flicked into the water, eliciting a bright flash followed by the glass bowl splitting from one side to the other. I, being a teenage pyromaniac, always wondered how to get my hands on some of this stuff. So far, no luck.

The reason I haven’t posted here for a bit is that I have done nothing of interest. It’s January, and I hate January with a passion; after the excitement of Christmas and the big celebration to mark the start of a new year, January is the “unwrapping your present and finding batteries aren’t included” month of the year. Plus at work I’ve been as busy as a Frenchman living next to a whore house, so have had little inclination to spend time infront of a computer at home. That said, I have managed to finish Return to Castle Wolfenstein (only medium difficulty, mind). Interesting thing about that site: at the bottom, there’s a disclaimer saying that it contains content that is illegal in Germany. I wonder if works of fiction regarding Nazis are illegal over there? I had actually finished the game mid-December but had to cheat to do so, so I went back to an older save game and beat it again, this time playing fair. That probably says something about my psychology.
Everything I know about WWII I learnt from RtCW:

1. All female members of the SS must wear boots of at least knee-length, and preferably PVC clothing
2. Hitler had an occult weapons project (cf Indiana Jones, Hellboy)
3. One man can defeat a whole division of the German army
4. Despite being armed with weapons capapble of firing rates upwards of 600 rounds per minute, most enemy soldiers couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces

Which, as it turns out, is potentially more than Prince Harry knows about WWII.

Do people driving into Norfolk gain Anglia momentum?

Last night I went to a try out for lead guitarist in a rock’n'roll covers band. An unusual choice, certainly; much as I love teh rock (and who doesn’t), bashing out Buddy Holly, Bryan Adams, Beatles and Rollings Stones numbers wouldn’t be my number one choice in a band. On the flip side, I can’t play any sing-along songs at the moment (very annoying at parties: “Hey Simon, you’re a guitarist, play us a tune!” “Ah, well, err, here’s the repeated A chord of ‘I want you back’ by the Jackson 5… anyone know the words?”), and I can’t really play this style of music that well, as four years of funk guitar has taught me to stay the hell out of the way of the rest of the band and just play my part. In this situation I have to do all the things I resisted in Casa, i.e. add gratuitous fills, extend chords, and generally… well, be a lead guitarist in a rock band. I think that if they offer me the spot, I’ll take it; at the very least it’ll be nice to play outside the house again!