funkysimon

Whilst in the gents today a guy with the nigh-on ubiquitous white ear phones of an iPod in his lugholes walked past me and headed into a cubicle. Now I’m all for personal soundscapes to enliven hum-drum daily activities, but a soundtrack for your dump? What’s on that playlist?

1. Eruption, by Van Halen.  (Double marks for “Brown sound” reference; maybe he’d had a vindaloo the previous night?)
2. Release the Pressure, by Leftfield
3. Push It, by Salt ‘n’ Pepper.  (Not enough fibre in his diet?)
4. Anything by Scouting for Girls (no scatological references, they just irritate the shit out of me)
5. …  ?

There must be others, but it’s time for me to log off.  Arf.

I’m trying to work out if I like “reliced” guitars.  (For those that don’t know, that’s a guitar that has been artificially aged to look like it’s got 60s mojo.)  This ranges from slightly discoloured pickguards and hardware with a patina of rust, through to looking like a previous owner had acid sweat and sandpaper skin.

Why?  Oh, no reason.

Adrian recently linked to Swing to Bop, a weblog about developing jazz guitar technique.  I’ll be following this with some interest, because I still just do not sound jazzy enough for my tastes.  I think what Derek once described as “wallpaper be-bop” is something that I’d like to be able to do, then hopefully move past it into something more interesting.  Anyway, I quite liked this video dealing with improvising over major chords; flat 9s and sharp 5s are two notes that I rarely throw in (unless I switch with H-bomb subtlety to a half-whole diminished scale or the harmonic minor; my knowledge of scales is well beyond what I can do tastefully with them), so it has been fun trying to use them a bit more.  I also like the little legato 4th-minor 3rd-major 3rd move, and it’s yet another example of someone avoiding the fourth.  I think I’ve been using the minor pentatonic for so long now that fourths just don’t sound off to me; my new playing mantra is “stay the fuck off the fourth”.  It’s so tempting a note, though… right there, nestled between the third and the fifth… what harm can it do?

My home machine runs Windows Vista.  I know, I must have been bad in a previous life or something.  I actually  have no real problem with MS’s fancy new OS; the user account control is very much like the same thing you get in Linux so that doesn’t really bother me, and since service pack 1 the speed of certain directory listing and file copying operations have improved significantly.  Perhaps the people that complain about Vista are doing a lot of real work on their machine, whereas the most complex thing my Vista box gets to do is run Team Fortress 2.

And therein lies the problem.

I’d noticed that Vista wouldn’t go into sleep mode via the time limit set in the screen saver page.  Vista’s problems with sleep are well documented on the web (just google for Vista insomnia and you’ll see), though the symptoms of this problem were subtly different, in that I could manually send the computer to sleep and it would happily stay there, and recover without a hitch.  After fruitlessly fiddling about with the various power settings suggested on pages I found via google, I started to wonder if it was any of the background applications that prevented the machine from entering the idle state, and hit the answer first time: if you exit Steam, sleep mode works fine.

So there you go: gamers, if your computer is having problems sleeping, try turning off Steam.

I read the post over on Guitritus about getting a whole bag of new plectrums (plectra? Is it Greek?) with envy.  I’ve got a problem with guitar picks: I only like one.  There it is in the photo.  It’s pink and it’s a  millimetre thick and because I’ve had it for about ten years it’s got a weird wear pattern on the end and the logo’s nearly gone so I can barely read who made it but its mine and it’s the only plectrum for me.

Every time I drop it off the back of a badly lit stage I have to spend a horrified few minutes scrabbling in the mess of dust and cabling until I’m joyfully reunited with it.  If I was to have a signature piece of guitar equipment, it would be a plectrum: I’d have my original mapped to micron precision with lasers and recreated exactly, but even then I’d not be happy with the copies and would keep using mine until its worn away to a nub.

Believe me, I’ve tried others, but they’re just not as good.  Not quite the right flexibility, or too thick, or they’ve got funny dimples to aid grip, or (and here’s the catch) they’re just not worn in enough.  I think I need to buy some more, but file the ends down slightly to match what’s happened to my pick.

Seriously, Eric Johnson might complain about the brand of his batteries, but he’s got nothing on me and plectrums.

Acuphuncture played the opening set at Clare Ball on Monday night, at the work-friendly time of 9 til 10.30PM.  This of course meant that we played to an empty tent, because most punters arrive at a ball and immediately head for the food and booze; the biggest crowd we had was mainly thanks to the band who were on after us, The Anomalies.  Incredibly we even managed a soundcheck, thanks to the Anomalies finishing their check on time, however due to the usual fucked communications at a May Ball, the tech sheet we had submitted hadn’t been passed on to the sound guy.  This meant that Myke (our intrepid multi-instrumentalist and backing vocals chap) had to channel all of his musical output through the single remaining SM58 that the soundman had brought.  Irritating.  Our set up on stage was made even more complicated by the headline act, The Delays, refusing to allow any of their kit to be moved after it had been set up, resulting in us being perched in a long line across the front of an already less than generously sized stage.  The Delays are obviously cunts.  Still, the gig went ok, though our linear set-up meant that we had a few communication issues.

Casa kicked off this year’s May Week festivities with a gig at Hughes on Saturday night/ Sunday morning.  (Is it wrong to make a Phil Collins reference in a post?)  Booked from 1AM to 3AM, that was actually pretty much the times we played.  We were preceded by a pair of guys doing rock covers; both played guitar and sang, and used backing tracks to fill in for the rest of the band.  They were quite good, and I felt sure that if I’d challenged them with any guitar-based number from the 50s onwards they’d have been able to play it.  I bet they go down a treat at weddings.  They also had the gear issue totally sorted; both used a pair of mic’ed up 1×10″ combos combined with Boss multi FX units, and the tones they got were frankly ROCKING.  Size isn’t everything, kids.

The gig itself was good, though I was severely flagging towards the end of the second set.  In fact of all the things that happened on Saturday, by far the most remarkable was walking out of the underpass next to Hyde Park and being passed by the of the World Naked Bike Ride.  The word peloton is apparently derived from the French for ball.  It was never more appropriate.

Don’t wipe the sweat off your instrument.

Wise words.

The more astute visitor may have noticed a slightly different look to this site.  I’ve made a theme change to Mandingo, prompted by an upgrade to Wordpress 2.5; I thought I’d change to something that was labelled as being compatible with the new version.  I’m not 100% happy with the theme (italic block quotes make the TAB look a bit iffy, though maybe I should be using a prettier method for that anyway, and a spurious extra “-” symbol in the title of the front page), and though it will do for the moment, there are liable to be more changes.  If I had unlimited free time I’d write my own theme, but currently I’m very easily distracted by the lure of Team Fortress 2.  If you’ve been fried by a pyro going by the moniker of “yer mum,” that was me.

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned: it has been over a year since I changed the strings on my guitars…

I used to change strings almost religiously after every third gig or so. I just didn’t want the hassle of suddenly having one let go, particularly because my main guitar has a floating trem, so if one does go ping! all the others are pulled sharp by the balance springs.  Actually it was worse than that: I used to carefully wipe the strings after playing in order to make them last longer.  Then somehow I grew less and less bothered… I blame playing bass, with strings as thick as bridge cables there’s relatively little chance of one letting go, and if it did it would probably take a finger off with it at the same time, which would be of more immediate concern.  I’ve been meaning to change my strings all week, then suddenly it came to this evening and time to pack my stuff up and head out to the gig, and no string-changing had happened.  Also since I changed to using 10s (guitar speak for a pack of strings that have a high E string with a diameter of 10 thousandths of an inch) I simply don’t break strings as often as when I used 9s.  I can’t imagine how prone to breaking a set of 8s are, I assume they’re like some mysterious high energy sub-atomic particle that only exists for fractions of a second before vapourising.

Of course, the longer I go without breaking a string, the less likely I am to change them (it ain’t broke…)

So, being back on guitar in Casa has a few surprises in store for me, namely the tunes that I’d learnt the bass part for but hadn’t had to play “up the octave.”  Stevie’s version of For Once In My Life gave me a headache trying to play Jamerson’s bass part (which frankly I never managed to get under my fingers), and now the chords are giving me some problems, though they are also quite an interesting piece of harmonisation.  Stevie plays the song in F, but we prefer C, so for us it goes C, C+, C6, C#dim, Dm, Dm(maj 7), Dm7, Dm6.  This looks like a jazz road accident but is just harmonies around a chromatically ascending then descending line: G, G#, A, A#, D, C#, C, B.  It became particularly obvious when I played the chords:

E -0-0-0---5-5-5-5--
B -1-1-1-5-6-6-6-6--
G -0-1-2-3-7-6-5-4--
D -2-2-2-5-7-7-7-7--
A -3-3-3-4-5-5-5-5--
E ------------------

Nice.  I don’t play it down there normally, I came up with that while messing around on an acoustic guitar post-rehearsal  I really like it when you get this kind of pattern where there are stable notes in a chord contrasting with other mobile notes; an example from the busker’s real book is Oasis’ Wonderwall.  Another example I’ve seen is a I7-iim7b5 change, something like:

E ------
B -5-5--
G -3-4--
D -5-5--
A -3-4--
E ------

Never having had any formal musical education, the thing I have no experience with is coming up with a melody and harmonising it in different ways.  If I sit around trying to come up with song ideas I usually start from the chords and see what melody fits over them, rather than the other way around.  It’s certainly another thing to work on!

I just got back from a gig with Acuphuncture.  This is what I learned this gig:

1. It takes a non-zero amount of time to load my gear into the car.  (Though I learn this every gig and forget by morning.)
2. Effects pedals have little red lights on them to tell you when they’re on.  These are rendered useless by a fuck-off huge red stage light pointing at them.
3. Grappa, whilst MANKY, is the only spirit left in the house.