Oh, and in other news I’ve recently been reliving my Spectrum days and playing Head Over Heels, which I found over at Retrospec.  Their implementation of rent a car bulgariaManic Miner is also very good.

So, there’s now a new source of gas in the house:

Because of which, updates might appear on this blog even more rarely than my usual less than prolific rate.  I’ll leave you with this thought about hearing development that occurred to Derek and I whilst we enjoyed beer and take-away curry in James’ honour.  Isn’t transposition weird?  That you can recognise the same melody even if it’s played a fourth or whatever away from where you’d usually hear it, yet obviously the individual notes are different.  As Derek said, a person who has perfect pitch won’t hear them as the same, yet the rest of us probably won’t notice the change.  Is it the same as seeing the same pattern in different colours?  Different frequencies of information (sound, light), yet the relative changes within the information are the same.  Is change more important than absolute values in perception?  To add to the confusion pitch is on a log scale, so doubling the frequency raises the note an octave.

In other news, I’m working on a whole new series of baby music collections called “Baby loves Bob”.  So far I’ve trialled Messrs Marley, Johnson and Cray with some success, though I’m thinking Bob Plant might be a bit of a shock to his tiny ears.

I’ve been working on the ideas shown in a video I found on youtube:

The melodic minor use is quite interesting; playing the minor a fifth away from a dominant seven chord I’d heard of (so playing E melodic minor over A7), but the other use that’s shown, where you play the seventh mode of the melodic minor over a chord that I guess is functioning as a V, is something I’d not really got under my fingers before.  However, the thing that I really like the sound of is the (admittedly fast and showy) run he uses around 9min20 over the vi chord.  One of the comments says it’s a harmonic minor, though I’m stuck on exactly what he’s up to.  If it’s the same scale he describes at 4min20, it’s just plain weird:over a F#min7#9 he plays C# B A# G F# F E D C# (descending, obviously).  Which looks like… B harmonnic minor but with added chromatic stuff.  Lots of added stuff.  Which all sounds rubbish when I play it.  There’s a real gap between reading, “Hey, play this scale over this chord!” and being able to do something interesting with it.  I think it might be time to get a couple of lessons again.

While browsing Amazon I discovered a jazz guitarist called Fareed Haque, who has a few lessons on his website.  One of them that caught my interest is about how to play jazz chords; I’m interested in voicings of chords with a reduced number of notes, firstly for ease of playing, and secondly because between me, the keys player, the bassist and couple of horns players, there are probably enough notes flying around already.  How many people really need to play the fifth anyway?  So recently I’ve been experimenting with things like this:

   Bb7  Eb7
E ----------
B ----------
G --13--12--
D --12--11--
A ----------
E ----------

This nicely ties up with my liking for moments where two chords require very few finger movements to alternate between, e.g. on For Once In My Life.  The downside of this technique is that my practice is sounding less and less like the actual song I’m playing along with: once you take out the root and fifth, things don’t sound quite right.

Don’t adjust your eyeballs, it’s just a theme change.  This time I’ve gone for Retromania, made by Jay Hafling.

It’s often been said by those of us in Casa that this band needs lights.  This ranges from a need for small clip-on lights so that people can read their pad of music (the horn section complains that their parts are more complicated than the rhythm section’s, because they’ve got, like, notes and stuff?  So they can’t memorise them), up to a full set of stage lights, lasers, dry ice, mirror balls, and fireworks.  The reason we haven’t bought lights yet is that they’re just one more piece of kit to lug around, and given that Dave, our drummer, already looks after our PA, and he knows full-well we’d get him to carry the lights too, he’s vetoed it.  However, for the gig we did on Saturday we were presented with a large, souless hall with two possible lighting settings: inquisition glare or moonless midnight.  Fortunately we had Derek on drums, and he has a friend who was willing to lend us 3kW of lighting rig at short notice.  For once we looked totally professional!  Err… ok, we were a bit easier to see on stage.  But, given that I carted the lights home and returned them on Sunday, I think Dave has a point: more kit is A Bad Thing.  I think that in the next life I’ll be a singer and just roll up to gigs with a microphone.

(Oh, one more thing: if you click on the photo to view the original on flickr, look closely and you’ll be able to see Derek’s ‘tache in the wild.)

Recently I’ve been listening to Cambridge’s community radio station, Cambridge 209, during my daily commute.  I do this not through some act of local solidarity, but mainly because the Jukebox show doesn’t have a DJ, it just plays music.  No talking, no adverts and rarely any station idents, plus the most unpredictable playlist I have ever come across.  For example, this morning’s journey was accompanied by New Frontier (Donald Fagen), Jump (Pointer Sisters) and Whatever happened to? (Buzzcocks).  Occasionally you get seriously heavy rock followed by classical music.  It’s like a party with the worst DJ in the world, and frankly I love it.

I’d like to get involved, though I haven’t really got the time.  (I had an idea about getting Tom of Acuphuncture/The Beauty Room fame to bring his extensive vinyl collection along and do a jazz funk show that took music WAY too seriously.  Nice.)  I used to do a radio show with a friend at Uni; an hour of bickering, biscuit tasting and… well, I’d say beats, but at that time my music collection was dominated by Soundgarden, Metallica and Faith No More, so things were a bit more rock than they are today.  (Sadly there was no beer; they told us that drinking alcohol whilst in charge of a radio station is illegal, which seems unlikely but we never checked.)  Doing your own radio show is similar to the implicit narcissism of writing a weblog: you talk, and assume the world hung on your every word.  Or maybe that’s just me.  In reality the CUR transmitter had a range of a stone’s throw, so  the chance of anyone actually hearing us was pretty low, but it kept us amused regardless.

Thinking about the 209 station idents (and an advert for another show I caught), there’s just a slight lack of sheen that differentiates them from what you’d hear on Radio 1.  Maybe it’s some effect on the “professional” station’s sound samples - potentially 209 could slap a bit of delay and a load of compression on the voices to make them sound a bit more in your face - but it seems that when the Radio 1 DJs joke about the jingles costing a few thousand pounds each, that expenditure does make a marked difference.

Canal boat chase ends in capture after 8 days.

Inspector Harry Graham, head of the thirty-strong pursuit team, blamed an initial delay on the need to get permission from British Waterways to exceed the 4mph speed limit. ‘When we got the necessary clearance, we found our boat would only do 4mph anyway. So we decided on a softly-softly approach and dug in for the long haul.’

I’ve been on a barge holiday, and this is exactly what it’s like.

Well well, google released a new browser.  I just downloaded and installed it and was blown away by the speed of the thing.  My Yahoo mail loaded so much faster than in my usual browser (Firefox 3.0.1), and general performance seems to be better than FF.  All good, until I was looking around online and spotted in the comments section of the Guardian article about Chrome that the Chrome EULA (of which I of course read point 1.1 then skipped the rest) includes this section:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.

Nice: anything I look at or post in Chrome belongs to google.  Looking around on the net I found another post about the Chrome EULA, which has several useful links, and is written by a lawyer who claims that this effectively rules out the browser’s use by a whole slew of people.  And even if Google says “Oh don’t worry about that,” should we worry about it?  If it’s not needed, don’t put it in the EULA.

I’d request your presents as well, but perhaps that’s asking a bit much.  Anyway, we’re playing a gig at B Bar this Thursday, the 21st day of August 2008.  Come down.  Buy beer.  Dance.  Or just sit stoney faced and stare at us, it’s what the crowd did last time.  We’re on from 9 and it costs nothing to see us, so it’s credit-crunch friendly too.  And as long as you avoid the Erdinger I’m sure it won’t even affect your productivity on Friday.

Derek’s doing the whole Tache Back thing, his target style being “Frank Zappa Jr“.  That’s a classic ‘tache and monster soul chip thing Frank’s got going on.  Question is, is Derek’s chin a match for the poly-rhythmic prog rock prickliness that’ll be unleashed?  He needs your cash to help him (and cancer research) find out.

Check this out:

1 gigabyte in two days!  And all from China.  I only found out about this because we got a warning from our hosts about going over our bandwidth limit; I think I’ll add some “Free Tibet” banners so we get banned by the Chinese government, these idiots are costing us money.