Guitar pedal videos have been distracting me from my homework
How many guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb?
Ten -- one to change the bulb and nine to say "I could've done that."
(Note: that low price is in AU$)
Yet it's an observation that I soon found was done in a much more succinct and humorous way when I saw this meme:
Been a while since I dipped into Eno
His recent conversation with Stephen Fry about AI is good, but I'm enjoying this discussion even more.
One of the great contributions Brian Eno has made is promoting the 'process' driven techniques within popular music that were a part of 20th Century art movements.
Brian shares a few strategies for changing approaches in the studio and seems to be becoming more relaxed about name-dropping!
For a long time I didn't buy the Melee pedal because it had an angry skull on it, but I've been playing with it again recently and it's fun.
That pedal looks even nicer now it has a floral design.
If I was cynical, I might see this as a sign that guitar companies are beginning to recognise there's a feminine-identifying consumer demographic that they've been overlooking for decades!
The haiku shared by Naviar Records this week came with a description of the poet that illustrates how deep the form is with history:
Kagami Shikō was a Japanese poet, considered one of the ten outstanding disciples (Shōmon jittetsu 蕉門十哲) of Matsuo Bashō. He was in turn the master of the famous poetess Fukuda Chiyo-ni.
This week I've been engaging in my annual pedal board patching, so I took the opportunity to record a jam across the upright bass and electric guitar using the two effects arrays on the former and looping facilities of the latter.
In this case it’s distortion, delay, reverb and tremolo but I’d like one with quadraphonic panning.
These have been fun for quickly shaping noise, although it's a rambling-kinda galloping all over the settings as I find the particular corner of the x/y axis.
So joysticks are cute but in a kinda inprecise way.
The Disquiet Junto instruction is to "finish something you started last year, likely a piece of music you left unfinished."
This week I've been looking at the annual project of building a pedal board by completing one for guitar and another for bass.
In the process of looking for a cable I found the board that I recognised from being in my videos from a year earlier.
So my initial plan was to cannibalise the remaining guts in the form of the Novation synth and record that through my guitar pedal board.
Afterwards it felt as though something was lacking in the piece and I wasn't ready to finish the Junto yet.
While I began backing-up files from the desktop I though to look in my folder from January 2024's unfinished music, which included the bread crate with the Novation Mininova and a power adapter and bass synth pedal that I'd already added to the bass board.
Last February I recorded some drum parts and this one has a bpm around 120 bpm, which sits well with the recording I made this morning that seems to be about 80 bpm.
When I added drums to the Mininova looping through my guitar pedals it sounded great, of course.
Adding drums to most things seems to do that for me.
That patch around New Year’s when it is overexposed outside is when I find myself plugging and unplugging
Once again I’m balancing the number of items that can be powered with the finite space of an enclosure doing something it wasn’t intended to do.
Then there’s cable management, but I am trying to not get ahead of myself.
