Thursday 24th August 2006
Song: David Ford - Song For The Road
For a long time, I've been trying to work out how on Earth you make a piano sound good. I've had music theory understood for years as I was taught it properly at a young age, but I just wasn't sure how you're supposed to apply it to a piano, to make interesting music. So at about 1:30 am last night/this morning, I decided it was a good time to have a crack at it. I immediately thought I'd use "How Did It Ever Come To This", the song I put on here a while back. It has a chord progression that I was by now very familar with, and a pretty basic melody which my right hand was used to. Music lingo follows.
So, I basically just sat there trying all sorts of combinations of things. I know from learning the Evanescence song, My Immortal, that arpeggiating your left hand is a pretty simple way of making something sounds more interesting than chords. Also double stops work quite nicely it seems. Going with the first and fifth (a power chord, for those who rawk) actually sounds quite good on a piano, if you get your right hand filling in the gap.
So anyway... I made another MP3. Listen to it now!
There's still a few places where it could be improved, but frankly I think I've now run that song to the ground. I need to find a new one now. :)
Btw, for those who are wondering what this song that I keep insulting is... Click here I do think it's a contender for the best song ever, so I think you should all listen to it anyway.
Saturday 19th August 2006
Song: Oasis - Live Forever
I expect no one cares about this... But I do, so I'm going to write about it.
A few days ago, I mentioned a popular guitar tab site having been shut down, and said I hope that ultimate-guitar doesn't go the same way. Well I was quite pleased to have just found out that while they have in fact been sent a friendly letter from those stupid bastards in America, they're not going to be shutting down any time soon. What I didn't know before, was that the site is hosted in Russia, and they're apparently feeling quite safe under some Russan law at the moment. So this makes me quite happy.
This was very interesting though... "we've tried to get in touch with all big US publishers, and we've got no response. They are NOT interested to do anything about this. The only thing they care -- is to shut down all tabs websites with no alternative to offer."
It's a shame there's not more widespread media noise made about how unfair or generally ridiculous the money hungry American music business people can get.
My favourite, the time the RIAA sued the women who had never owned or used a computer, for having downloaded music.
Wednesday 16th August 2006
Right, so here it is!
How Did It Ever Come To This?
I must warn you, there's no distorted guitars, so for those who only like to rawk, look away now. Aside from this, please do have a listen, and let me know what you think. When I started this I was getting quite bothered over not being able to get to one of the chords in the verses quick enough, on my acoustic guitar. In the end, I decided what's good for David Ford is good for me. So I've basically just layered tonnes of stuff on there.
I've managed to use: 3 guitars, a bass, a piano (keyboard), a harmonica (keyboard), a choir kind'a noise (keyboard), and drums (software).
My main limitation really was not having enough stuff! I did look at harmonicas on Wikipedia briefly, but they look terribly complicated, and can only play in one key. So I'd inevitably buy one in E major, and probably never really learn to use it properly. I did have a conversation with my dad about drums earlier though. :D
Tuesday 15th August 2006
Song: Easyworld - A Stain To Never Fade
Woop woop, I had a box waiting for me outside my bedroom door this morning. It was my lovely Fender "Stratorcaster". It was missing the high E string as advertised, and is in "excellent condition", as advertised. So I'm quite happy. All I could fault on it was one really shallow scratch on the back, but it just looks like a bit of hair. Considering my other electric guitar has numerous knocks and dings on it, I thought this was pretty good. Look!
I mentioned the other day, that I was recording Easyworld's, "How Did It Ever Come To This?", well it's going quite well, so I think I'll probably make this the first of many things to be stuck up on this big internet thing. I can't do it yet though, as I need to rerecord a lot of it as it's too quiet. I now have an acoustic guitar doing rythm; a lead guitar playing some really simple little tune; a bass line that gets moderately interesting in the chorus; some dreadful sounding drums that were done by computer; and last night at 1am I was sat at my keyboard recording a nice harmony thing for the chorus, and working out the vocal melody. The only problem is I seem to have hit the limit of how many tracks my little laptop can cope with. Woops.
Monday 14th August 2006
Song: Easyworld - Bleach
So far I've been out every night since last Tuesday. Tuesday, Frank Turner, Wednesday meal out, Thursday meal out to see James, Friday meal out to see Daniel, Saturday I managed to get out of another meal out, but went out at 9:30 to see the film Cars, and last night back for another meal out. A part of me just wants to do nothing this week as I feel a bit tired, but I think the problem is that I've been over sleeping too much, and not doing enough. Hopefully anyone reading this who has ever over slept for a week or so will know that strange tired feeling you get left with.
This morning, I see the "Online Guitar Archive" has been shut down by those money grabbing bastards in America. This is quite sad. I just pray that Ultimate Guitar doesn't go the same way, as I use that more. I was actually considering submitting a new tab to UG earlier too, but I might not now after reading the lawyers letter to OLGA, as it seems the person who submits the tab is also a copyright infringer, as well as the site that distributes it. It is a bit stupid though, as as someone on Slashdot said, "A guitar tab of copyrighted music is like a plot summary of a copyrighted movie. It's a description of a work, not a copy". More often than not guitar tabs are riddled with mistakes, and never quite sound the same anyway. If people were putting up websites with scans of the official sheet music, I'd agree that that was too far. But they're not, what it is is people listening to songs, grabbing their guitar and working out how the song goes, based on how it sounds.
Earlier, after failing to find a tab online, I worked out that chorus of Easyworld's "You And Me", goes E5, A5, B5, Bb5, A5. Am I now liable for a suing too? What about if I go to a gig and watch how a guitarist plays a song? Do they need to come after me with one of those flashy things that they have in Men In Black to make sure I don't rememebr how the song goes by the time I get home? Things like this really annoy me! *shakes fist*
Last night was fun, it had rained pretty hard nearly solidly from about 2pm to 8 or 9 in the evening. At 7:30, we decided it would be a good idea to go to our old faithful Hungry Horse for dinner. We'd expected one or two roads may be a bit flooded, and with living in the area we of course knew which roads and where were the most common flooders. But Christ, it was bad. It took us what we at the time thought was ages to get there. We ended up going through Chobham, but on the road between Knaphill and Chobham, there were several places where it had flooded the whole width of the road. So we were crawling through very slow, with only one car going through at a time, so that they could grab the middle of the road (the shallowest point). Anyway, I'm not sure how long it took to get there, but we eventually made it. While there we then had our new friend who works finishing her shift at 9, coming to sit at our table with us for the rest of the evening. Wasn't a bad evening, on the whole, even though I did miss out on the chance to play bingo. So then we got to leave at 10:30, by this point it hadn't rained in over an hour. However... it was about 12:15 before I got home. That 15 minute drive from here to Bagshot took 1 hour, and 45 minutes! Basically, there's a dual carriage between there and here, and of the four lanes (two in each direction), only one was open. Thankfully, that one was on the side we were on. From the end of the dual carriage way there's a few different roads of varying sizes to get home. Every single one flooded. So after having turned round and headed back a bit about four times, we had the option of either joining the queue of traffic that wasn't moving *at all*, or going for a detour. So, we did just that. Away from Woking, sort of past Camberly, through Frimley, through Aldershot, through Guildford, and back into Woking from the other side. It was quite an exciting journey, it's own funny way.
Thursday 10th August 2006
Song: Angels And Airwaves - The Gift
I was a bit naughty... and I kind'a got this today. This makes guitar number four. The problem is, I don't have enough room to store four bloody guitars! I've still got the problem of having five computers in here. And my room is pretty tiny!
So today, I went with Marc to get a guitar strap for Matt, as he has work commitments. He said he didn't mind what the strap looked like, so we got him this one:
I thought it was a very nice one.
So I started experimenting with a recording of Easyworld's, "How Did It Ever Come To This?" today. The problem is I don't have, nor do I know how to use, a harmonica. I'll probably try and work out the melody and just do it with keyboards. I want to redo all of the guitar tomorrow. There's a few places where it falls out of time. Whether or not I'll put a finished version up on here is yet to be seen. Depends how good I think it sounds at the end, I guess.
So last night I saw Frank Turner again. I really enjoyed it! There were four acts on, and amazingly none of them were too bad. Beans on Toast (that's just one guy) was absolutely amazing. Have a listen to some of his songs on his MySpace page. The username thing on there pretty much sums up the content of his songs... Sex, drugs, and politics. He even has a song about MySpace!
Of course Frank himself was as impressive as always. We all got to sing on a song that will hopefully be put on the album. Here's a cool picture of him with lots of people on the stage. Good times.
Sunday 6th August 2006
Song: Catatonia - Johnny Come Lately
Right, so you may see there's a little white box up in the top right corner of the page now. I've recently worked on making a new stylesheet for this page. It's been blue for too long, and I now have a lot of spare time.
I have a problem though... I still don't really like the white one that much yet. It's missing something, I feel, and I don't know what that something is. So, have a look, and give me your thoughts. Don't worry, if you think it looks like shit, there's a little blue square on that one to get the blue one back. If you do by chance quite like the white one, you'll be pleased to know that your selection will be honoured, and when you next come to look at the site, you will be presented with the white one? Isn't that just marvelous. Unless of course you're one of those people who deletes cookies, in which case I'd like a chat with you about quite why you do that, as you don't benefit at all, and you're just making life harder on yourself.
So yes! Take a look, and tell me how to make it better, please.
Saturday 5th August 2006
So, Cerys Matthews seems to be back on the music scene. A new single out soon (now?) and album in the next month or so. I was very negative and cynical when I first heard about it, moaning about the disaster that was Cockahoop (I think that's spelt right) and how her solo work's just never as good as Catatonia.
However... I read quite an interesting article in the Daily Mail (I realise it's rare they have interesting articles) about her. We all knew (well, I did) that she and one of the guitarists from Catatonia had a bit of a romance in their early days, and that they broke up and kept the band together. We (I) also know that this lead to a ton of awesome songs. We also all knew (really all of us this time) that she was a terrible alcoholic, she frequently walked on stage with a bottle of wine in hand. What I didn't know until today though (assuming the Mail wasn't lying to me), was that towards the end of Catatonia's life, she had started taking heroin. That to me came as quite a surprise, I have to say. Apparently it got a bit out of hand, and she ended up with having difficulty breathing, and stuff...
So anyway, the problem in her life was in the band, so she ran away. Far away to Nashville Tennessee ("and if I knew anybody, who plays pedal steel guitar..."), and made a disaster of an album. Even I who was conviced she could do no wrong, thought it was dreadful. But, this lovely article this morning tells me, the reason she did that was that being in a rock band had given her all these problems, etc etc, so she wanted to go off and strip it all down to an acoustic setting. Fair enough. Now however, I got the feeling she was ready to plug her guitar back in. So I am hopeful for this! :)
Ooh! She has a MySpace page with some songs on it. I'm going to listen.
"Things are getting strange I'm starting to worry, this could be a case for Mulder and Scully..."
Tuesday 1st August 2006
Song: The Lonelyband - See It Through
It's been quite a good few days. Saturday was my birthday. I didn't have the best start to the day ever, but by the evening, lots of lovely people turned up, and shot party poppers directly at me. I also had a badge that let people know how old I am. It had lights on it. Here's a picture of me taking shortly after the party popping incident. Amusingly, we were met at the door of the place by the waitress who always seemed very unhappy every time we went. Today though, thankfully, she seemed in a much more happy mood. She did reel off stories of a few things we've done there, which was quite shameful as there was people with us who didn't realise we were quite so bad. Anyway, it made me happy that she actually didn't hate us quite as much as it normally seems. Here is a picture of most people who were there. This was taken by Anthony, and before Rob and Marc turned up. During our time there, Richard made a sauce. It was a sauce made up of all the sauces. It looked delicious. Take a look yourself. Also of note, there was a spectacular show by Jamie, juggling salt and pepper... Click here to see. Check out the one in the air!
After that we came back to home for a bit, where my mood started to drop a bit. Apparently I looked miserable or something. :\ On the whole, and once the parents had gone away, it was quite nice. Rob had wobbling windows to show, Mary was Mario Kart champion, and I had a newly acquired bass which has proved to be quite good fun. Earlier today, I set about trying to record, "What's My Age Again". However sadly I kept fucking up the guitar intro (it's actually harder than it sounds!). I may try and redo that tomorrow. It did sound pretty cool, being able to layer the bass over it though.
Tonight, myself, Matt, Tonie and Jamie went back to the place we were Saturday, and on my way in I nearly walked right into our waitress from that night. Except this time she wasn't wearing her normal work clothes, and was... drunk. She then told us where to sit down, and invited herself and her scary friend to join us. We were frightened. To be fair, seeing her when she wasn't working was quite nice. I'm much less scared of her now than I was before when she just always seemed stressed and annoyed that we were making a mess. However her friend was a bit odd, and I wasn't so keen on her being at our table. She was Irish, drunk, and had badly arranged teeth. She offered me a job, once she found out I was unemployed. Somehow I managed to actually cut her off from this conversation, then felt quite bad afterwards. In the end we managed to sneak away and run off to another pub.
So yes, I am now unemployed. So far, it's going great. On Sunday I didn't get that feeling that, "oh my God, it's Sunday, another week lies ahead". Today I woke up at 11:45, which meant I'd slept 9 hours, which meant I wasn't in a crap mood all day. I'm not sure I'm really going to enjoy two whole months of doing nothing, but for now, it just seems so nice! My plans for this time include, mastering the bass (the frets are so much wider!), tidying up my room, fixing the parcel shelf in my car, making an MP3 player (software, not an actual device), and learning QT to be ready to start my final year project. :)
