Dream Fulfilment

When it comes to musical equipment I am a self-confessed guitar effects pedal junkie. As far as small boxes of electronics that change the sound of my guitar go I just can't get enough of 'em. They are simple, (usually) fairly inexpensive, easy to operate and just plain fun.

Most effects pedals fall into fairly run of the mill categories that haven't changed in about 30 years; overdrive, chorus, wah etc. About 13 years ago Digitech came up with something genuinely new - the original WH1 Whammy Pedal.

This amazing gadget changes the pitch of the note produced by your guitar in real-time when you move a rocker pedal up and down to make 'woooOOOOP' noises. I've wanted one of these since I first read a review of one in 1991, but never had enough money to buy one. Over the years Digitech have released a number of different whammy pedals, but it's widely acknowledged that the original WH1 was the best ever made by some margin.

The best I've ever managed to get my hands on is the 're-issue' (that isn't) Digitech WH4. It's ok, but I always really wanted a WH1 - only problem is they usually only turn up in America, and then for silly money.

But now, thanks to the wonder that is ebay and the equally amazing Paul Creedy (who knew I was looking for this holy grail of guitar gadgets), I'm finally going to get my hands on one after 13 years!

To say I'm happy at this is a bit of an understatement.

Mr. Creedy: put quite simply, you rock.

Genuinely the most inspirational album I've heard in ages. Not only is the story behind it's production novel, the actual music that resulted is incredible. It doesn't just sound like rapping superimposed on White Album tracks; apart from the odd recognizable riff, the tracks all sound fresh and original.

Amazing stuff, and I can't stop listening to it.

Beating record companies at their own game

I'm not a big fan of Marillion's music, but I do like what I've read about how they are promoting and selling (huge numbers of) records via the internet.

Continuing the 'remix/mash-up' theme

Take my songs - please, says Bowie

"David Bowie has invited fans to bootleg his music - and he's offering prizes for the most creative theft.

The musician's Web site urges fans to mix classic Bowie songs with material from his latest album, Reality, to create a "mash-up" - a track that uses vocals from one song superimposed over the backing tracks of another. Developments in music software has made the technique long employed by record producers easily accessible to thousands of "bedroom DJs" - a fact that has alarmed record companies battling for control of Internet music distribution..."

While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Yo.

DJ Danger Mouse got himself into legal hot water recently when he fused together The Beatles White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album to create The Grey Album.

Copyright arguments aside, here's a fascinating look at how The Grey Album was actually made.

Remember your first ghetto blaster?

The Birth of Boomboxes 1976-1981 - from pocketcalculatorshow.com, an online museum of the age when electronics had soul.

"We sprayed Bill gold once. He was pissed drunk, so we painted and lacquered him. We never realized we could've killed him."

- Ozzy and Tony Iommi of Black sabbath talk drugs, the devil and how they invented heavy metal

A doodah started by Adrian:

"Let's see if we can get a little meme thing going here. What are your very earliest musical memories? Don't cheat by naming the first cool teenage albums you bought; this has to be a cathartic experience for all of us."

The Beatles - The Red Album

When I was very small my dad would get out his record collection on Sunday mornings (when there were only 3 channels and there weren't owt on t'telly) and play his 70s-tastic vinyl collection, which at the time didn't possess the knowing ironic 'retro cool' aspect it does now; at the time it was just a bunch of embarrassing old records. This was an album I always enjoyed though - all the early Lennon and McCartney bright and breezy pop hits. Brilliant.

The incidental music from 'Bagpuss'

A kids TV show that was shown at lunchtime before I ever went to school. I was given a tiny spanish guitar when I was 3 and I swear I could just about get it to plink-plonk along with the tinkly incidental music of this show. Child prodigy, me.

Some 70s Christmas album

Can't remember the title of this one. It was basically a set of well known Xmas standards - Little Drummer Boy, White Christmas etc - done by a bunch of session musicians and singers in that terrible cheesy 70s covers-album style that deserves a whole genre to itself (if only to keep it well away from the rest of all other music anywhere, ever). This was played every Christmas in the 80s that I can recall and was a good sign that Xmas was really here. I have a horrible feeling my dad still has it somewhere.

The Smurf Song

Smurf-tastic single given to me by my next door neighbour. Never could work out what it was all about; it just had Father Abraham doing a question-and-answer thing to himself over a European folk backing with squeaky Smurf voices. In retrospect it was utterly bizarre, though it seemed to make perfect sense to a four year old version of me.

Various Pickwick Records fairy-tale singles

A selection of narrated classic fairy tales with incidental music on a bunch of 45s. My dad used to put a stack of them on the turntable to play automatically one after the other, and I would be transported to magical worlds with forests and castles in the clouds with giants. Any self respecting four year old these days would demand to know where the Xbox is, and quite right too. But we had to make do back then.

Barry Manilow - Mandy

My dad's again. Hideous.

Harvest For The World - The Christians

First and only vinyl single I ever bought as a kid 'cos it was a charity single.

Various Abba albums

My dad was a big fan.

Foot in Mouth Syndrome

What's the worst social gaffe you've ever made? - A fantastic list of tales where things just went horribly, horribly wrong.

Unbelievable!

After 20 years worth of aborted attempts, The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy is finally being made into a film. That's 'being made' as in 'has actually started filming', not 'arsing about with scripts and studios to no avail'.

More info here.

Oh, this is absolutely beautiful

Type the following words into Google:

weapons of mass destruction

- and follow the top-rated link.

Guitar refinish update

Many thanks to all who have contacted me with suggestions on how to refinish my fretless guitar. Some of the more notable suggestions were:

- Covering the guitar with material

- A holographic finish

- Scorching the body (this has already been done by someone else)

- Tomato sauce red with pea green knobs and orange pickups

- Paint it a base colour - say a solid pale red, then scribble on it with a wax crayon or candle. Now spray a contrasting transluscent colour. When dry, wash with hot soapy water. The wax will melt and take the paint with it. Repeat with more scribbles and different translucent colours as often as you like.

- Whatever paint you use, mix up some fluoroscent dye with it. The guitar will take on an unearthly glow under ultraviolet light.

- Racing green lotus finish with the number on the plate

I was considering all the above and more, and then I realised something: I don't currently have a workspace where I can spray my guitar. This means I'm either going to have to cough up to get the guitar sprayed professionally (costly, time consuming) or paint the thing myself with a brush.

After work today I went to Focus DIY.

I found some interesting paints there - Crayola make a heat sensitive paint for kids bedrooms that changes colour when you touch it. I bought a small pot of this as a tester, and also my main favourite - a tin of deep blue smooth finish Hammerite.

I painted a little bit of each on non-visible areas of the body to see how they turned out, and here are the results:

The Crayola didn't take to the guitar body very well, would need a lot of coats to get a good finish (and this stuff ain't cheap) and gave a crappy dull finish. The Hammerite gave good glossy coverage, will only need 2 coats and looks the absolute badger's nadgers. So - Hammerite it is.

Oh, and thanks to Brendan in uk.music.guitar for reminding me of this - hours of fun!

More on last Sundays UKMGPU: James has a good summing up of the day, and Pete took far better pictures than I did.

'Toothing'

Bluetooth is the name for a great bit of technology that allows different devices to communicate with each other at no cost via radio waves. Whatever the two Bluetooth enabled devices are (laptop, mobile phone, PC etc) you don't need to connect the two with a lead to send or receive data; they just have to be within about 10 meters of each other to 'find' each other to send pictures, messages or whatever you want.

And Brits, being the innovative folk they are, have found what could certainly be described as a novel use for Bluetooth.

Double Booked

Went to Liverpool this weekend to celebrate the birthday of my good friend Stuart Edwardson. Stu's birthday also always doubles as a good excuse for a reunion of friends who were at Liverpool University together, and there was further reason to celebrate this year as Stu has just completed his Phd - good work fella! We congregated at Stu's on Saturday afternoon for a few drinks, went into town to an excellent Tapas restaurant, headed out to Flanagan's and Pogue Mahone for Guiness and live music, then finally ended up in The Raz for more beer, music and dancing. Notes: fruit-flavoured cream tequila is a no-no, don't mention Red Bull and Vodka in front of Nik, Tapas should be eaten more often, don't trust girls with stick-on moustaches with your sausage and chips. A picture gallery of snaps taken on my phone can be seen here.

The following day I was scheduled to attend the fantastic ritual that is the UKMGPU, this one being held in Manchester. After Family Guy DVDs and farewells in Liverpool I set off down the M62 towards Manchester's appalling traffic system. Met up with everyone in The Salisbury - excellent turn out! Sold my Steinberger cricket bat guitar to Rick, had a go on a ridiculously small Flying V, was given a SCSI CD drive by Ian, met the charming Lidbert for the first time, generally chatted and had a good time of it. We then headed off to the excellent Wagamama for Japanese food where I drooled over Mike's Ipod, took the (hic!) piss out of (hic!) Adrian (hic!) Foden's inability to (hic!) eat chilly without (hic!) getting terminal hiccups and had a damn good feed. All too soon it was time to go, farewells were said and I headed off home. But not before a drunken stranger fell onto Ian and tipped his pizza all over the shop. Phone photos from Manc are here.

All in all a great weekend, and I'm just glad I managed to get today off work to recover.

:-D

On the subject of fretless guitars, I just found this rather cool website: www.unfretted.com

Your input needed!

I'm currently putting together my second fretless guitar. It's based around the body of an Ibanez guitar with a yellow finish that's so 80s you could put it in leggings and call it "Madonna".

If you have any suggestions on how I could refinish this thing to make it look better (other than the usual 'paint it black') please let me know in the guestbook.

The best thing I can think of at the moment is to paint it deep blue. I am sure there is a better answer...

How You Remind Me Of Someday

Nickelback? In the studio? Hit upon a formula so good they wrote exactly the same song again?

What were they thinking?

</fast show>

Oh, by the way:

XP Service Pack 1a also b0rked my home network.

Ok; so I did the cheapskate thing with a couple of network cards, a crossover CAT 5 cable and XP's Internet Connection Sharing. Point is: it worked fine before.

And now it doesn't, no matter what I do.

Think I need a router. A wireless one.

In (Hard Disc) Space, No-One Can Hear You Scream...

So I went to DCS in Doncaster to get a top-notch 200Gb hard drive they are currently selling at a bargain price. Got it home, fiddled about in the cramped innards of my PC, got the drive connected and working, formatted it and fired up Windows XP.

Windows explorer shows my new 200Gb drive has a maximum capacity of 127Gb. WTF?

A quick search on Google revealed the answer: to use discs bigger than 127Gb, XP needs to have Service Pack 1a installed. Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Went to download SP1a, and... it's 125Mb. Even on broadband, that takes a while. Installed Getright, started the download, went away and did something more interesting.

Came back, started to install SP1a. Waited. And waited. Got bored, went away and left the damn thing to (sloooowly) install.

Came back again. Success! SP1a successfully installed. Now to get my full 200Gb!

Or not. Still showing 127Gb. Arsecakes.

Further Googling revealed the full truth: not only do you need Windows XP with SP1a, you need a BIOS that supports large drives. Did the boot-up-hit-delete thing, got into the BIOS and... no dice. 127Gb and that's your lot with this motherboard, bucko.

I wanted 200Gb one one partition so I could edit and compile huge whopping great uncompressed video files, but I've had to settle for two 100Gb partitions instead, which will still allow me to do do what I want as long as I don't go waaaay overboard with my file sizes. Ah well.

On the bright side: 200Gb of storage for the price I paid is a definite bargain!

Ever look at all that junk email you get every day and wonder 'how did all this Spam business get started anyway?'

Wonder no longer: Happy Spamiversary

Phone Fetishism

Some may say it's bland, but I like the look of this; Nokia have just announced their latest phone - the 6255.

Unless I win the lottery, my 3650 will do me for now.

Modern video games as they would have looked on the Atari 2600

More Wigan Disc 2 DVD News

All the editing has been done, all that's left is to render out the footage as one huge MPEG2 file and then build the menus. I've done a couple of renders and the audio has had some sync problems, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve to fix this. At least I've had nothing like the nightmares I had trying to get the first disc finished...

I took my self-exploding DVD player back to WHSmith, they gave me a helpline number to contact. I rang it and I am told that the manufacturer will replace my player when they have some more in stock. Fair enough.

In the meantime, I have taken the opportunity to upgrade; if, like me, you need a DVD player that will play anything you put into it, get a Yamada DVX 6600 - it was delivered in a few days, is a bargain at the price (they have since put the price up by a tenner) and plays absolutely any type of disc, even Divx files. Top stuff!