In which I take a photo every day that I'm 50, and post it here on this blog, with a bit of related blurb.
 |
| work less, climb more |
One of the most significant and valuable life lessons I ever learned was the incredible power of active learning.
I had an epiphany one day in the early 1990's, that has had a profound and ongoing impact on my life ever since.
As a child, I'd always been musical, able to coax a tune out of any instrument without really trying...I could have made a career in music, if ever I'd bothered to apply myself. But my youthful arrogance told me that I ought to be able to play anything easily - and therefore, I shouldn't need to practise.
The ultimate impact of this little psychological, illogical thought pattern was that I never learned to play any instrument properly.
I had clarinet lessons and piano lessons, classical guitar lessons, French horn lessons and percussion lessons...in each case, I started reasonably well, as I could pick things up easily...but as I didn't practise, I made no progress and quickly fell behind what was reasonably expected, and so would drop the instrument and move on to another one.
This carried on until I was in my late 20's, when for the first time in my life, I bought an electric guitar, which I'd never played before (I'd dabbled on the acoustic guitar over the years, and knew a few party pieces, but I was never all that enamoured with it, and of course I didn't practise!).
In my head, I placed huge value on playing by feel, and (again, illogically) equated this with not learning or honing technique, and neither learning nor applying theory and knowledge of music.
Somehow (in my head), it was a good thing to not know what I was doing.
As I later realised, not knowing what I was doing actually meant that I was unable to express myself fluently - I just didn't have the musical vocabulary, nor the knowledge required to build one.
Then at some point as I was dabbling in the electric guitar, I came across two articles that piqued my interest.
The first was about George Benson, the jazz guitarist. In an interview he was asked how he learned to play jazz, and he said something like,
"Well, first I had lessons, and practised my scales day in and day out. Then I learned theory, scales, modes, harmonic theory...but mostly, I played jazz all day, every day, for ten years...".
Another article, this time on Jimi Hendrix, who epitomised all I admired in his style of musicianship, talked about how hard he had studied and practised, learning scales and chords and paying his dues, musically...
My epiphany came when I realised how ridiculously arrogant I'd been in deciding that I shouldn't need to practise...
...if jazz legend George Benson, and even the late, great Jimi Hendrix had to study and practise in order to fully express themselves in their own unique ways, who on earth did I think I was to not need to do that?!
I immediately started to study and learn...and within 3 years I reached a professional standard of playing, developing my own, bluesy voice on the electric guitar along the way, and I was teaching and gigging much of the time through the mid 90's.
It was truly revelatory, and made me realise how much value there is in standing on the shoulders of giants.
There is absolutely no point in reinventing the wheel - when you want to achieve something, simply go and find the latest, best information source, and learn how to do it properly from the beginning. Actively research, learn from the collective wisdom of all who have gone before, and you can get to a lowly, yet functional level of competency in a new skill area in a remarkably short space of time.
In this way I've learned to play drums, to take better photographs, to build PC's, servers and networks...I'm learning to slackline, to skateboard, and to do Tai Chi...
And of course I've learned to climb...
 |
| read more |
Being older than those around me when we started to learn to climb, I knew I couldn't keep up physically...but I realised that whilst I couldn't climb harder, I could climb smarter.
So I read voraciously on technique and theory, and tried hard to practise what I learned.
When we started to venture outside, I devoured books on rope techniques and climbing hardware. This meant that we could more or less venture out on our own straight away, and the lack of an experienced guide just added to the adventure.
I feel sure that my tactic of actively learning about my current interest brings so much more value to the whole affair, that I can't imagine why you wouldn't do it.
It's enabled me to be confident and capable, and unafraid to turn my hand to new things...this year in particular, I'm reaping the rewards of this general philosophy, and I'm really grateful to have had the opportunity to learn such a valuable lesson.
So this evening, I noticed that our collection of climbing books has grown rapidly. We have guidebooks that map out the climbing in various locations...biographies, story books of one kind or another, on the adventurous climbing lifestyle...and importantly, reference and educational books.
I could waffle about that for a bit, I thought, being short of inspiration for a post tonight...
And as a nice little bonus, I got to (adventurously) take these photo's without moving from my chair!
I'm going to call it supreme efficiency...
;-)
 |
| no guitar amps |
Before I start, I'd just like to remind you that this is Andy's fault.
Seriously...blame him!
If you're not blaming him yet, I reckon you might be by the end...
Andy's question was (as I'm interpreting it) broadly about how you can get a decent guitar sound in the house, without annoying the neighbours.
This probably sounds like a silly question - there's a volume knob, right?
(by the way, gecko poo...you know who I'm talking to...)
But it's not that simple...
The guitar produces a very small, clean signal. Guitar amps were originally valve amps, which use vacuum tubes to amplify this signal to a level sufficient to drive a speaker, producing a sound loud enough for us to hear.
When driven through an amplifier at relatively low "gain", an electric guitar sounds smooth and clear - think Hank Marvin (and the Shadows).
However, if you increase the gain up to the point where the valve can no longer cope with it, the signal starts to break up. In valve amps this signal degradation happens in a smooth, warm way, and if you continue to increase the gain, the signal becomes fuzzy...think Jimi Hendrix on Purple Haze or Voodoo Chile.
Keep applying more gain and you eventually get into Heavy Metal territory.
To keep things simple, I'll just say that gain is closely related to volume...you can only get this overdrive effect by turning the amp right up...and valve amps are loud!!
Many professional guitarists would use amps as large as 1-200 Watts.
I have a 30 Watt valve amp, and it's literally unusable in the house!
In order to drive the valves, you need to apply some power...the net effect of which is that the amp makes almost no noise until you turn it up to about 2, and then it's suddenly so loud it seems like the windows might break.
So how can we get this tone without the volume, for use at home? The short answer (you'll be relieved to know) is digitally!
There is an ongoing debate over the merits of digital versus analogue signal processing, but if you look at the quality of, say a video on your smartphone, it gives you an idea of how far digital media has advanced over recent years. The same is true of sound processing, of course, and I think it's fair to say the quality of digital systems is very high now, and it takes an expert ear to detect a difference.
What this means to me is that I can use a Guitar Effects Processor to fake this fuzzy, over-driven sound before I amplify it, then I can just use normal levels of gain and volume, and get very similar tone to what you'd get from a large'n'loud valve amp.
From the top in the photo, there's a vocal processor, a power amp, a small mixing desk, a PC on the right, a guitar effects processor, and a pile of assorted cables.
The trick is to assemble these in the correct order to create sound!
It should go something like;
1a) Guitar into Guitar Effects Processor
1b) Microphone into Vocal Processor
2a) Guitar Effects Processor into Mixer
2b) Vocal Processor into Mixer
3) Mixer into PC
4) PC into Power Amp
5) Power amp to Hi-Fi speakers
As I was about to start setting this up, I realised that I've apparently lost the power supply for the Mixer, which as you can see, is right in the middle of this signal path!
So, a quick bit of improvisation, ditch the microphone (I wasn't going to sing along anyway!),
and this becomes the much simpler:
Guitar to Guitar Effects Processor to Power Amp to Speakers.
 |
| job's a good'un |
Sorted!
So, Andy, I don't know why you felt it necessary to subject everyone to that. I hope you're suitably ashamed of yourself!
;-p
 |
| rock the room |
Today is the greatest day I've ever known.
That's a fairly bold statement to open with, isn't it? To be fair, it's not my line, but the opening line of Today by The Smashing Pumpkins.
Anna was up to something in the lounge to which I'm not privy, so I took the opportunity to put my Rock Band Xbox back together upstairs, and have a bit of a play on the drums.
The way it works is that you choose a song to play along with, and a difficulty level, and then play along with the song, following on-screen prompts. I only play drums with this game, because it is very much like actually playing the drums.
A scrolling display on the screen tells you which drums to hit, and when. Mostly what it tells you to play is very simplified, to make the game accessible. But you can choose Expert Pro Mode, in which case you have to play pretty much everything the original drummer did on the track in question.
I only play Expert Pro Mode... B-)
The drum kit and Xbox haven't been used for a couple of months, as it all needed wiring up after some reorganisation of the Rock Room...
Climbing gear, guitars and drum kits...do you see what we did there?! ;-)
Having set the kit up and got all the various parts talking to each other, I decided to test it on Today, a song I know fairly well.
First thing I've played in months....gold starred it! To get a gold star you have to play it almost perfectly, hitting every note on every drum in perfect time with the track.
I so wanted to say "Nailed it!" in the style of Archer, but in truth I didn't nail it. I did hit more than 99% of the notes, but in musical terms that basically means I also hit a bunch of bum notes...amateurish!
Today is moderate difficulty level, so not too challenging...but I was pleased to play reasonably well on my first track in a while.
And I like the sentiment!
Today is a great day, because it's the only day. Yesterday is long gone and Tomorrow will never arrive. There is only Today...
Spend too much time dwelling on the past, or eagerly awaiting some imagined future, and you're missing Now, which is the only time it's possible to live.
Now is literally your only option...
Why are you still here, you should be off living your life...
Today is the greatest day you'll ever know!
This is that special bonus video edition I was telling you about...you were paying attention, weren't you?!
Anyway, if you have ten minutes of your life to spare (which you're never going to get back), I'm still not sure I'd advise you to click on the video above...
As mentioned in an earlier post, last night was our Inaugural Funkfest Jam Session, or IFJS. That's so ridiculous I might actually consider it as a working name, at least...then again, no, no I won't.
So only 2 of the 3 planned attendee's showed up...hmm a two piece rock band...Black Keys...White Stripes...any other shades of two out there? Nope, it never really works for me.
Fortunately, Jool's electronic drum kit brain has a whole load of backing tracks you can play along to. The tracks have no drums, and consist of mainly bass and keyboards. This enabled Jools to play drums and me to play guitar, and it was more or less a whole band...Rock On!!
As we hadn't played together in over ten years, as far as we could remember, and I haven't even picked up my guitar since my birthday, it was going to be interesting to discover how out of shape we were, musically.
So we put this little groove on, which is just 1 chord, never changes, and played along for a while. Playing along to a fixed rhythm and chord pattern is sometimes known as "vamping", and is great for developing your improvisational skills. You can allow the piece time to evolve, try to get into the groove, and see how well your hands work and how much you can remember.
What I found was that whilst my hands work pretty well (thanks to climbing), I can't remember many riffs or phrases.
A helpful analogy is that it's like I had been fluent in French a long time ago, but hadn't spoken it for some years...and on trying to speak again, I find I still have the perfect accent, but I can't remember many words.
So we grooved for ten minutes or so. It took a while to get going, and got a bit repetitive at times, but at other times it was interesting, dynamic and fluid. We have all the wrong gear, and we're short of players...conditions were all wrong - cold, bright, late on a Winter's eve...we're rusty as anything and had no idea where we were going...
But in spite of all that, it was great fun and I think it has some potential...though I can't tell you that a 10 minute groove with little structure and no harmonic variation is particularly entertaining for a listener (you have been warned!)...
We also played a few other grungy, groovy things without the backing tracks, and they were great, but for the lack of bass.
Apart from when I played bass...then we were short of guitars...and short of singers, as I discovered that playing bass and singing at the same time is hard!!
Also, singing when you can't hear yourself because your p.a. is somewhat Heath Robinson, that's not easy, either...
And when you have no idea of either the words or the tune (as when we played thickfreakness, a track I barely know and Jools didn't know at all, after watching only the first minute of it on youtube)...well you just have to make some shit up.
Honestly, that track was so raw and dirty, it was great! :-D
I'm sure there'll be more to come on this little project...
I won't force you to listen to it...
Probably... ;-)
