OK, I’ve come upon this link a month or so late, but behold the Metasonix G-1000.

“The G-1000 consists of two totally independent amplifiers, with very different preamp sections. One channel is called the HAPPY channel. The other is called the ANGRY channel.

For damn good reason. One sucks your face, the other gnaws your foreskin off.“

Even more appealing is the name: the Fucking Fucker. This reminds me of a cocktail party I went to while I was a student; the two cocktails on offer were called “Gentle Ben” and “The Fucker”. The Fucker was a real hit amongst the cognoscenti, I can assure you.

Everyone loves a meme, and I’m no exception. This week is the Make Your Own Album meme, spotted over at The Spaghetti Factory. (Sorry for populating your comment feed with broken img links, Adrian!) Anyway, the rules:

1. Go to the Wikipedia random article generator and note the title of the randomly selected article. This is your band name.

2. Similarly, go to this random quotation page and note the last four words of the last quotation. This is your album title.

3. Now to Flickr’s interesting photos feature. Download (or screengrab if necessary) the third picture. This is your album cover picture.

4. Now put the whole lot together in the photo/graphics application of your choice. Populate your imaginary music business with exciting acts!

And my effort:

Imagination have stormed the scene with their thought-provoking live performances and introspective lyrics. Their new album touches upon the environmental catastrophe awaiting the planet, juxtaposing it with a young man’s desperate attempts to get laid in a post-twentieth-century urban wasteland.

Nuts, this blog was hacked at some point in the last month with a code-injection exploit that was fixed in version 2.3.3 of Wordpress. I browsed to my homepage but was interrupted by Google telling me that visiting my site would bring untold death, destruction and the loss of my firstborn… or maybe it was something about badware. Anyway, after much gnashing of teeth and using www.spybye.org, I spotted that an iframe had been inserted into the site

I also simultaneously discovered that the Wordpress database backup plugin does not do what it says on the tin; it seems to send me a gzipped file with a 4kB file in it which only contains my database log-in details, and for the life of my I can’t work out why.  I could still do a manual back-up via my host, then text search in the file to confirm that I’d removed all references to the iffy iframe.  Hopefully the site should now be free from such crapola. Apologies for any inconvenience. If this isn’t a gentle nudge to keep up-to-date with Wordpress releases, I don’t know what is.

I just installed Ubuntu on my work laptop, and was setting up the instant messenger on there. I thought I’d have a buddy icon to show that I was on linux rather than windows, just to give people a clue that there was something different going on, so I did a google image search for Ubuntu logo. So that’s what those dirty linux geeks are up to. It’s nearly on a par with the ol’ Citroen logo search results of yesteryear.

This is genepi:

It’s holiday booze of the highest quality, and has the unusual side-effect of conferring immunity to hangovers upon the drinker. Or that’s what our chalet host told us last year: do you, dear reader, know any different? How many people out there have had this stuff? And if you’ve had it (preferably before any other booze), did you get a hangover after? Enquiring minds want to know.

Recently I’ve been working on a couple of new scales, locrian natural 2nd and the 7th mode of the melodic minor, which go over IIm7b5 - V7#9 turn-arounds.  I got that from an article over at bassplayer.com which demonstrates it using Dizzy Gillespie’s Woody ’n’ You.  (I hope they look at their search engine hits - when I looked up the link for the article I used the search phrase “Your melodic woody,” which at best is a rather surprising mental image.)  It’s fair to say that both these scales are baking my noodle; there’s something about a scale that lacks a 5 that my fingers refuse to accept.  It’s also got me interested in something that’s so painfully obvious that I really should have thought of this before: build your solo on the notes of the chord and what you play will sound OK.  Chord has altered 5?  Use it, it’s probably there for a reason.  All this started with me hunting around for ideas to play over ii-V-I turn-arounds, because in Acuphuncture we cover Street Life, most of which is a set of ii-V-Is mascarading as a song (even if most of them aren’t altered).  I have to admit that it hasn’t really helped, but it’s still a bit of fun.

That said, maybe I should just work on basic stuff - I was trying out the Jimmy Licking example over at www.guitarblog.co.uk and can only get to a measly 64bmp on the ol’ metro-gnome before it sounds iffy.

(First post in AGES!  Sorry to those who’ve been waiting for my latest missive with baited breath, though I suspect that’s a short list.)