What’s (been) going on

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so it’s time for a quick update.  Firstly, I’ve done gone joined a new band.  I’m not straying too far from the fold, however, as it’s more disco-funk: the band is called Bonne Bouche, and we do Big Funk with a three piece horn section and a couple of lady singerists.  If you check that link you’ll find some recordings we took from our first gig, a self-organised bash at the University Sports and Social Club, featuring a large quantity of inflatable lips, a black/white/red colour scheme (hey it works for the White Stripes), a grumpy troll on the door and a large number of bad wigs (apart from me, I just had my disco shades).  The main thing I learnt from those recordings is Fuck That Shit, If You’ve Bought A Nice Amp Don’t Settle For DI, with the corollary lesson of Oh My God, DI’ed Overdrive Pedals Sound Nasty.  If you fancy seeing us live we’re going to be doing a few tunes at the Funk Jam, which is currently being held on Wednesday nights down at La Raza – we’ll be there on 28th April.  Turn up with an instrument and you get in free.

The other thing that has just started goin’ on is that one of the mighty Bouche’s lady singerists Beth Walthew has asked me to play guitar at her album launch party (just as a one-off – Beth’s usual axe-slinger, the incredibly talented Justin Dwyer, has double-booked himself).  This is going to be held at the B Bar on Sunday May 30th.  Having just had a little listen to the samples on her website and myspace page, I wonder if I might want to fit a pickup to my acoustic – I reckon that Slippin’ tune on her myspace needs some strummery to complete the Zero 7 feel.

Melodic Minor video

I really need to get this scale happening under my fingers.  I’ve been watching and working on the ideas in this video:

There are some useful ideas in there; the b5 dominant lydian thing when changing the fourth is something I particularly liked.  At the moment whenever I try this it is the equivalent of a boxer telegraphing his next punch, it turns up as a disconnected scale run in the middle of whatever I’m playing.  Ah well, hopefully this will become more natural.

Soft Cell remixed

Not guitar related, this post is more accordian-driven Stasi folk pop: our comrade in the Fens, Derek, has escaped the gulag for long enough to appear in a J2O advert.

I don’t know if this will ever turn up on the tellybox, but with a bit of luck it will go viral online.

And thinking about rathergood.com, there was a recent “What’s the best cover version EVAR” discussion on Radio6 one weekend, and Elbow’s cover of Amerie’s One Thing (a song much in favour with this author) was gushed all over by a presenter.  This is rubbish, their cover of Independent Woman kicks a whole lot of arse.

Current practice items

At the moment I’m working on a couple of things. First up is my picking so I’m playing this kind of thing:

   1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...1
E ----------------------------------
B ----------------------------------
G ----------------------------------
D ----------------575--5------------
A ----5--57-579579---97-975975-75---
E -579-79--9------------------9--975

Playing it until my fingers get BORED, which is usually about a minute or two. At the moment I can keep this as clean as I want at a rather pedestrian 100bpm, but hopefully I can increase that over the next few weeks. This kind of ascending or descending semi-quaver thing seems to turn up in quite a few solos (no examples spring to mind immediately, maybe I’ll add some in as they occur to me), though often they’re arranged as triplets (or sextrumpets as someone once wrote).
The other thing I’ve noticed is that my legato is shockingly poor, this kind of thing:

E -15p14p12----------15p14p12---------
B ----------15p14p12----------15p14p12
G ------------------------------------
D ------------------------------------
A ------------------------------------
E ------------------------------------

leaves my fingers aching after maybe three or four repetitions, and in general doesn’t sound very clean. (Not that I’m playing with an amplifier, I’m sure that with a hefty dose of gain even my crappy skills would get that sounding right.) My little finger tires the quickest, and I’m never happy that it manages to get the pull-off sounding loud enough. (Yes, I have small hands, so I’d probably play that with little, ring and index fingers.) Hopefully this is just a question of strength and it will improve with practice.

A month of bass followed by a month of guitar

No, it’s not one of Joseph’s lesser-known dreams, it’s my recent practice schedule. Last month I played bass at a couple of Casa del Funk gigs, and this month I’ll be back on guitar for an Acuphuncture gig. Switching back to bass was fun, though the rehearsals quickly reminded me how much more physical the instrument is: my left hand and wrist were aching from the extra stretching and strength required for fretting, and my right-hand fingertips were getting chewed on the strings. I quickly drafted in my usual practice tune, Dark Lady by DJ Food, which is used as the backing music in this video:

(Which is as strangely fascinating as time-lapse videos normally are.)
The line goes something like this:
   1...2...3...4...1...2...3...4...
G ---------------------------------
D -57--------------------------57--
A ---00000020305067~7------------00
E -------------------0000003500----
It’s a great semiquaver work-out for the right hand with string skipping and makes you do a bit of damping practise with your left.

Welcome to my new home

Hello everyone joining me from my old site at funkysimon.com!  I’ve moved over here to save a bit of money, frankly.  Hopefully all the posts have been imported successfully, though I do have to fill in my linky blogroll type thingy.  One thing I noticed was that my old blog had been hacked by some Bulgarian car rental firm – when I imported the posts there were a few links scattered in amongst the more recent posts.  What’s particularly odd was that they don’t show up if you look at the blog on screen, but appeared when I exported the posts from funkysimon.com and imported them over here.  Hopefully I’ve found them all, but if you find something that looks like spam do drop me a line in the comments and I’ll clean it up.

Coil taps are annoying

Hey, I finally remembered my password so I can post again.  OK, that’s not the reason I was neglecting my blog, but that’s the weak excuse I’m sticking to.

I played a gig with Casa last night at the Vet’s graduation party.  We’ve done vet gigs before, and usually they are alcohol soaked and riotous.  In stark contrast to this last night was quite restrained, for the simple reason that their parents were present.  One girl came up to us before we started and said, “Do you see the lady in the white top and black hair-piece?  She’ll probably try and get on stage with you at some point; please don’t let her.  She’s my mother.”  As it turned out, Mrs Heinz is quite a step up from the usual band interloper, displaying some skill on the tambourine.  I imagine her daughter was hiding somewhere whilst her mum was up with us.

In preparation for this gig I cleaned and restrung a couple of my guitars, the strat and my Patrick Eggle Berlin.  Taking them both, I soundchecked with the strat but then had a change of mind and used the Berlin.  Tip from the top: don’t do this.  I had to fiddle about with the EQ and volume to adjust to the Berlin’s humbuckers.  At least the humbuckers have coil taps, so I could drop back to a single coil sound when I wanted, although this reminded me why I don’t like coil-taps: the volume and EQ is completely different.  You get everything set up on your amp for one pickup combo, then flick a switch on the guitar and now you need to change everything again.  I’m starting to think that versatility in guitars is a bad thing, one trick ponies are the way to go.

Five little Dragons

Recently most of my youtube usage has been dominated by nursery rhymes, rather than my usual guitar videos.  Recently, Kyla thought she’d look up “Five little frogs,” and found this video, which nicely combines guitars and nursery rhymes:

What were Dragonforce thinking of?  Surely this is deliberate.

Midnight Sun

In lieu of any guitar-related content, have a bit of booze news: there’s a pretty good porter currently available in Tesco called Midnight Sun.  It’s all roast caramel and chocolate notes (can’t belive I used the word “notes” there) and is just what the doctor ordered now the weather’s turning cold.  Recommended.  Between this and Old Hookey from the Hook Norton brewery I’m quite enjoying a bit of bottled ale at the moment (even if CAMRA would tell me it isn’t real ale in a bottle as neither are bottle conditioned).

Retrospec

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 Manic Miner is also very good.