Recently took my Lapstick on vacation – see iPod for size. It even fits right inside my smallish suitcase! I spent a lot of time with it on my mini-break learning some fiendishly difficult Allan Holdsworth licks – made easier by the Lapstick’s short scale length.
My custom Lapstick:
15 years after their debut Focus, I just found out about this baby that came out in November:
I first heard of the guitarist Paul Masvidal and drummer Sean Reinert from their session playing on the Death album ‘Human’ and was floored by their taste and technicality. The opening drum bombardment on Flattening Of Emotions is to this day still one of the heaviest blast beats ever put on vinyl and Masvidal’s liquid solo on the same track is a jaw dropping tour de force. Chuck Schuldiner never had any better sidemen to work with in my opinion (and there was some seriously tough competition, Gene Hoglan, Andy LaRoque, James Murphy etc.).
My old buddy Dax who worked for Roadrunner at the time got me a copy of Focus and I absolutely loved it. Progressive, aggressive, textural, technical, melodic and just plain weird in places, this was Art Death Metal at its most highly evolved and has not really seen any real challengers to its uniqueness to date.
Traced In Air is on order.
A colleague of mine wants to sell her Squier Stratocaster – it’s in fairly good shape except a bit of rust on the bridge screws and some dirt here and there but otherwise ok. I said I’d restring and clean it for her and get it shipshape for sale.
It also had a missing pickup selector switch so I dutifully went down to Davis Guitar at Peninsular and picked one up for a Buck. The problem was that it was bright clean virginal white and the pickguard was a kind of stained yellow – like to teeth of a Gauloises-smoking Parisian Cafe owner.
Ah-ha! I exclaimed. I can soak the new little white knob in a strong solution of tea and coffee for that ‘Aged-by-Tom-Murphy-of-Gibson-Custom’ look. I ran to the pantry, quarter filled a stryofoam cup with hot water, dropped in a shot of espresso, dunked in a Lipton teabag and left it over the weekend in my desk drawer so the cleaning troll wouldn’t throw it into the trash.
Monday morning – I checked back and FAIL. No difference whatsoever. The thing is still whiter than the collective bleached underpants at a Neo-Nazi rally.
Oh well.
Forwarded to me by a buddy who found this on The Gear Page.
It’s obviously bullshit – everybody knows Hendrix hated green (he was robbed of his candy as a child by a green clown), and the strings are upside down. Additionally it is not recorded anywhere that Hendrix ever visited Nuremberg.
Just stare at this picture for at least 10 seconds.
Open Microsoft Word.
Click ‘Insert –> Table –> Insert Table’
Set Columns to 12
Set Rows to 5
Copy the resulting table about 6 or 7 times with a gap in-between then hit print (I like to do two pages per sheet at least). Voila – ready made blank neck charts for you to doodle scales, chord shapes, etc. onto with a pen.
About 90% of the time I play in C major. Another 10% I’ll be in G (mainly the E minor variant). Then the remainder probably in D, E or A.
Well, what about the other 7 keys? Embarrassingly they get very little coverage but recently I have been making an effort to cover them. Having been taking lessons from Master for about a year now and with the exposure I am getting to the Jazz idiom getting more and more extensive I’ve been having to negotiate increasing numbers of progressions such as:
Dm7 | G7 | Cm7 | F7 | Bbm7 | Eb7 etc…
..which traverses keys – C to Eb to Ab and so forth. Consequently I have been trying to spend more time in those other keys to gain more fluency by shifting patterns along and trying to visualize where those chords are, where the scales lie and so on ‘properly’.
As you can imagine this is a huge effort to do and the temptation to go off and shred in C or E or G always remains. Imposing the discipline on oneself to stay within the key one is trying to practice is tough, though for the last two nights I have stayed wholly in Bb and Eb respectively jamming over the ii V Is of each.
