The View from the Spaghetti Factory (proper redesign coming soon!)

Mostly tinkering this week, so no audio files to share with you.

I’ve been working on some ideas with my friend Richard; before Christmas, we knocked together the general gist of a track based on a demo he’d recorded on his 8-track. I’ve since done some tweaking and remixing, and we’re going to do some more work tomorrow, hopefully incorporating some real drums. Updates as they happen.

On a more mundane note, I’ve been having a very minor studio clear-out. I realised I just wasn’t using my Line 6 effects enough to justify their presence. The FM4 Filter Modeller went off to a grateful Ebayer in Italy last week, and the Echo Pro is listed on Ebay right now (click here by 4 Feb if you’re interested). The rack is going to look very sparse, but the upshot is that I’ll now have sufficient space on the patchbay to have all three FMR units (RNC, RNP, RNLA) hooked up for instant routing.

Y’know, I spend a lot of time backing the BBC. I’m happy to pay the license fee and I’m comfortable with the concept of a patriarchal state media corporation that dares to tell us what it thinks we ought to watch, rather than letting the “Great British Public” drag programming content down to the lowest common denominator. I’ll gladly defend it against the likes of Paul Dacre, who seems to think we’d be better off with a fully commercial US-style range of TV channels, where the primary motives are maximising viewing figures and keeping the advertisers happy.

There’s plenty on the various BBC channels that I hate. No problem… I don’t expect my every whim to be catered for. What’s sad, though, is when part of the BBC’s output goes so dramatically downhill, dumbing down faster than you can say “well… duh”. I’m talking about the news bulletins. With laptop on lap, I sat and watched tonight’s 10pm news programme, typing this accurate (-ish) transcription…

Yeah, I know I’m cynical and the Big Brother thing has (whether I like it or not) been a big media event, but really! And yes, the weatherman really *did* describe tomorrow as being “usable”. I may get out of bed after all.

Well, it’s installed. Upgrading and reinstalling WordPress is very easy, especially once you get over the initial fear of blitzing years of precious blog drivel. The backup process is very clearly documented on their site, so there’s little chance of anything going wrong.

This post is mostly just to test whether the LiveJournal Crosspost plugin is working properly. In its current state, the plugin will not work in WordPress 2.1, but a useful comment on the programmer’s site provides the necessary hack to make it work.

I’ve also noticed that the very pretty Snap Preview Anywhere plugin is acting quite strangely, so I’m going to leave that uninstalled for a while until I know it’s compatible with the latest WP.

… a lovely tin of whitewash!

Somehow, I just wasn’t surprised by the results of the Competition Commission’s investigation into large supermarket chains and their effects on the grocery market. Where I live in suburban south London, the cushy status enjoyed by these companies is all too apparent. You’ll shop at a supermarket or do without. It’s a terrifying thought, but I can’t think of a single “proper” butcher anywhere within a two-mile radius of my house. Or a baker (Greggs don’t count!) for that matter. There’s a decent fishmonger, and I try to buy from him as often as possible, but he’s a rare gem in a sea of flavourless pap.

Instead of going into more local detail, I’ll just redirect you to the more eloquent work of Felicity Lawrence (writing for the Guardian’s Comment Is Free site)… A grocery understatement.

This should have appeared sooner, but an air-conditioning failure at 34sp’s datacentre put a temporary spanner in the works. Anyway…

Another week, and not so much time for recording. In the continued absence of Exciting New Musical Concepts (not that I’ve tried particularly hard) I decided to spend more time working on my improvising. Still focusing on ways to reduce the “burble”, I knocked up a backing track featuring three key (or rather mode) changes, forcing me to use “target notes” and play around the chords.

The result, via Youtube… Burble with Key Changes

(If you’re interested in the gear used, it’s just my recently acquired Tokai Love Rock plugged straight into a Cornford Harlequin, with a touch of reverb and delay applied in Logic)

Well, that was the first full week of my “record something every week” resolution.

Lacking any concrete musical ideas, I decided to try and resurrect my atrophied improvisation abilities. A recurrent trait in my playing is that, after periods of less-than-diligent practice, I tend to “burble”. The technique is there, but the mental sharpness disappears, so my fingers seek out the comfortable, well-trodden routes.

So, having recorded a bass/drums/chords backing, I set about improvising a few solos, with the aim of editing, harmonising and generally arranging them into a supposedly “written” piece of music. This is an approach I love… Frank Zappa used it on numerous occasions. However, having started all that, I then got sidetracked by a thread on uk.music.guitar where a few people were jamming over a backing track and posting the results on Youtube. This seemed an ideal opportunity to investigate using iMovie to combine high-quality audio (recorded in Logic) with video clips from my compact digicam.

The resulting solo is a bit messy, but the experiment worked well enough to convince me that it’s a useable working method for future projects. In particular, I found some tips for optimising iPhoto projects destined for Youtube… thanks to Martin Backschat for being more patient than I could ever be (tips in handy visual form on Flickr).

Video on Youtube… Slow Gilmourish Jam

In the long, speculative build-up to the announcement of the iPhone, my attitude varied between mild intrigue and real excitement. As the sort of mobile phone user for whom being able to talk to people is one of the least important functions, I knew that the right mix of features could easily put me in the market for yet another Apple toy.

In this particular case, though, they just haven’t hit the mark for me. First of all, the cut-down version of OSX used on the iPhone doesn’t allow for the use of third-party applications. That’s a bad limitation, and Steve Jobs’s explanation doesn’t really wash with me. I don’t recall hearing of Sony Ericsson’s being criticised because of their smartphones bringing down mobile networks.

There certainly quite a tasty selection of software already on the iPhone, but the internet features seem to be geared towards access to Wi-Fi or, at the very least, EDGE networks. Free public Wi-Fi is still a rarity here in the UK; the rip-off wireless services offered by cafés and certain rail companies are more common, but still not sufficient for widespread mobile phone use. As for EDGE, Orange’s UK network was only launched last year and still seems quite limited.

No, if I’m going to be making the best of the ridiculously expensive mobile internet facilities offered by UK service providers, I want to use WAP sites for the basic information services (train timetables, football scores) and a browser (such as Opera Mobile for cut-down, bandwidth-saving versions of regular websites. See? That’s why I want to use third-party apps, iSteve.

Finally, although the interface looks absolutely beautiful (in true Apple style), I wonder how effective the touch-screen system will be when you want to start sending emails or writing documents. For that sort of task, I would have thought that handwriting recognition (with a stylus) or a physical QWERTY keyboard would be minimum requirements. With that in mind, I think I’ll be sticking with my P900 for a while yet…

Happy New Year, readers!

I considered writing at length about several things over the past week, both serious global events and trivial domestic buffoonery. But in the end, I just couldn’t be arsed. I decided not to do a “review of 2006/plans for 2007″ post because… well, just about everyone does them and, after all, it’s only an arbitrary division of an infinitely divisible dimension, innit?

Another type of apathy prevented me from commenting on the Saddam execution. I mean, what is there left to say? Our glorious liberation forces might not have bombed them back into the Stone Age exactly, but they definitely seem to have landed Iraq squarely back in the Middle Ages. And when those grainy phonecam pics make a callous monster like Saddam look for all the world like the shivering, innocent victim of a terrorist kidnap, you know something’s badly screwed up.

But anyway. I wasn’t going to go into any of that.

I do have a resolution of sorts, though. It’s not strictly a “New Year Resolution” because I thought of it a few weeks back, but this seems as good a starting point as any. My musical output over the past year has been pretty stingy and it’s not like I haven’t had the time or musical inspiration. It’s simply a matter of getting out of the habit, the routine of taking those hesitant first creative steps that usually (for me, anyway) start the whole snowball effect of musical exploration.

So… for the whole of this year, at least while I’m not away on holiday, I will record *something* every single week. Regardless of length, quality or usefulness, I’ll have some sort of SOUND at the end of each week. The year started on a Monday, so I shall report back every Monday with my latest offering… whatever it is.

Finally, while we’re on a musical theme, here’s my first favourite pithy quote of 2007. Jim Nugent, discussing the enharmonic keys of Db and C# on the uk.music.guitar newsgroup…