Sproing

Heh, as it turns out there is something bad about fitting fat strings to a cheap bass: the damn machine heads can’t cope with the tension. The A peg has escaped its gears somehow, so I can only tighten the string as far as G or so. Nutbags. It’s doubly annoying as I’d just recorded a couple of tracks of guitar and drums and was looking to add a bassline to finish it off. As I’ve got today off I thought I’d try and put something down without trying to tax my creative juices, so, inspired by The New Mastersounds, I recorded a little thing I’ve called Funky. As ever my timing’s dodgy; I first put down a track of metronome as a guide, then recorded the guitar following it. After recording the drums, however, I noticed that throughout the piece I was rushing the drum part ever so slightly, so I went back and rerecorded the guitar part to follow the drums. I must practice more with a metronome in 2005! Then I discovered that my bass is b0rked but I thought I’d upload it anyway, so passed Digital Fishphones Blockfish compressor over it and away we go.

Rattle ‘n’ hum

Restrung that new bass of mine with 45 – 105 gauge strings; they are apparently for long scale length basses (e.g. 34″), but mine is a short scale (only 30″) so the fat bit of the string ends up being held in the slot of the tuning peg. Hope that’s not a bad thing. The new strings are definitely fatter than the old set, and are even fatter than the set I had on my old P-bass copy; the E string feels like a damn bridge cable. Still, tightened the truss rod to compensate for this and lowered the action while I was fiddling with it, which forced me to check the intonation. I was expecting having to set it in a compromise, as it only has two saddles rather than one per string, but surprisingly a little bit of fiddling resulted in a near-perfect set up. Sadly the lowered action has really highlighted the worn state of some of the frets, in particular the E string rattles on a couple of notes. Maybe I actually will defret it sometime in ‘05, the process doesn’t look too tricky. Another weird thing I noticed about the bass that I didn’t when I first acquired it is that it has a zero-fret. This is fairly uncommon in (six-string… err… non-bass) guitars; apparently the aim of it is to remove the difference between a fretted note and an open string, as the latter is vibrating against a piece of bone or plastic rather than a metal fret. Bassists are captivated by gimmicks however, so a quick google turns up a few examples of zero frets.

It’ll never work…

This has to be one of the worst ideas ever: they’re making a film adaptation of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. A story that centres around a misanthropic rapist leper written by a man who swallowed a dictionary. They were some of my favourite books when I was a teenager and have the same epic scope as The Lord of the Rings (which I hear did quite well at the cinema), but… well, I’d say it’s got disaster written all over it.

I gots da blues

Toying with a new style sheet as the old dark on white style was a little stressful on the eye; hopefully this dark blue background will be more restful.

A new addition to the family

Kyla’s brother and his wife have just had their first baby, Gabriel. Unusual name; I reckon they’d been influenced Swordfish and thought the Travolta character was cool, but they claim otherwise.
I’ve also had an addition to the guitar family… well, a swop at any rate: I exchanged my bass with another guy’s, as he said the frets on his were too low for him to learn on. It’s a jazz-copy, no brand but sounds pretty good and looks pretty too.

Needs new strings and the action tweaking, but plays as well as my old bass. I might actually strip the frets off and go fretless, but only if I buy a decent fretted bass first.

Late Living Room thoughts

Kyla, Andrew and I went to the Living Room gig at CB2 last week. It was very good again, though this time quite folky in sound, rather than the last one I saw that tended more to an indie feel. It kicked off with Richard Ecclestone, who turns out to live on the same road as I do. He was accompanied by a guy with a telecaster and a lovely Marshall amp (no idea what model, looked like a 2×12″ combo so a bluesbreaker?) that he used with a tremolo pedal to give a real country vibe to the songs. Also on stage was a percussionist who appeared to be playing the bottom of a square foot-stool. Unusual, but very nice sound; he alternated between using a brush or beater with one hand, whilst the other either slapped the base for a kick drum sound or knocked on various bits of the frame.
Next up was Redhouse, who had a kind of Americana/R’n'B vibe going on. My favourite of the songs they performed was a cover of the Nick Cave version of Stagger Lee; if you read the lyrics, you can guess why this amused me.
Stryngs were on next. I’d been wanting to see them since “Bang Bang” Derek joined the band, and I wasn’t disappointed. Strings had the most impressive voice of the singers there that night, she put a lot of emotion into each rendition. She also gave a lot of background on the inspiration behind the songs, which almost got a bit much; I now know more about Strings’ life than I do about some of the women I’ve… well, enough of that.
The evening rounded off with Sunday Driver, who were also impressive, though they did repeat a song that I’d heard at my last visit (the one that involved one of the guys from Kill Freeman plus SD’s sitar). They did a couple of pieces of Indian classical music, which was interesting although really I wanted to hear more of their songs.
The evening definitely reinforced my opinion that having a good between-song banter is as important an element as well-performed songs; all the artists had a good interaction with the audience, which in the crampedcosy CB2 basement is virtually a necessity.
Andrew and I will have to put our heads together and work out what kind of thing we can do; I think I am going to use it as an excuse to buy an acoustic guitar sometime soon…

Wakka Chikka

Some rather funky tunes available here: Comfort Stand – [Various Artists - Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka]. Whether the wakka chikka is a wah pedal or… heh, something else… hey, it is “porn music for the masses”!

Tis the season to be jolly…

So get in the spirit of things with Monkey Beer, b3ta’s newest meme!

(No, I didn’t make that, I just nicked it.)

toffeedog

These are some nice tunes, from toffeedog; jazzy latin-tinged house. Seems to be something to do with the guys from down at the jazz funk jam session at the Haymakers that I’m never able to attend.

Mad drumming

I saw this linked over on WAN; it’s a video of a guy pounding out the most amazing rhythms on what looks like four buckets, grab the video from here. (It’s 5.6 MB.)