Thursday, May 19, 2011

Possibly the oddest Gig I've been to... Roger Waters does the Wall at the O2

Good gig: huge venue: enthusiastic performer: political content as subtle as a sledgehammer (and bang up to date, including plenty of recent footage from our current war fronts): a spectacular audiovisual experience.

But the audience... weird. Half-dead suits who have dug out an ancient T-shirt (or worse yet, have bought one at the venue): fat, bloated versions of their earlier, more energetic and visionary selves, suddenly half-reanimated like Jackson's backing dancers (and just as jerky in their motions).

Seriously, I sat near a fat bastard who nearly ripped the seat out with his catatonic rocking motions.

And at points, the whole floor audience stood up, and then in the next track realised they were quite tired and really needed to sit down again, but did it very gradually so they didn't look too old.

I spent a good portion of the time laughing at the audience!

Oh - and prostate problems and roving Becks beer sellers create CONSTANT TRIPS TO THE BLOODY LOO!

Gawd, these wispy remains of men...

Great gig though.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Best laid plans of the long weekend...

Well, a combination of things meant I only got a small amount of what I had in mind done. I got the studio set up, but then got myself exhausted moving crap gravel...

On the plus side, I think the project I started a while back is going to arrange itself into a nice trippy piece of 80bpm big-beat bentley rhythm ace / ethereal crossover.

I got experimenting with the GR50 and the 6-string, and started messing with pad13 - a 5ths heavy reverb flute pad affair. After a little low C bass and some heavy big beat, it's morphing nicely.

Today was a 12 hour day in work, so I've been restricted to a half-hour aerobics session on the Warwick. This turned out to be reassuring - fast fingers tonight.

I think the hard work over the weekend paid off - that, and the screwdriver work out I had this morning trying to dismantle a 6th high crate which arrived from Frankfurt... Pulled 8 "screws" out of the marine ply and pine before I realised they were actually a form of nail. Then I used a massive 8mm flatblade screwdriver as a crowbar and split the bastard from stem to stern. Very cathartic.

Sunday, May 01, 2011

1st May Practice and musings

Breeze are playing O'neills in Oxford tonight. Get down there and suck up the sticky goodness.

I've got to mind the fort here at home, so it's 6 string practice time this evening.

25 mins of warmups with doubled finger warmups and some additions to the hammeron/pull off exercises.
Today's scale was A - majors, minors and arpeggios with triads and 7th chords.

Use some Jamiroquai to warm up the funk muscles. Decided on a stamina session so played:
- revolution 1993 full-on, all 10 mins 16 seconds of it. This one will work out your left hand, it's got a lot of B work down at the low end. Feeling pretty good at the end, can still pop around the fills.

Now we'll move onto a song for the day - analysis and catching some new vibes. My big list has some good tracks on it, all on the iPod. The idea here is to try to get some new ideas into the playing, maybe some new rhythmic influences.

Today it's "talkin loud" by Incognito. A challenger. That'll see me through to about an hour and a half of work.

Tomorrow should be a good studio day, if things are willing...