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#32: WHERE THE HELL HAS MY MUSIC GONE!?
9 years ago
General
Short answer: I've lost interest in it.
Long answer:
Well, as much fun as I do have playin' my guitar & playin' my favorite songs, among a select few that I have written. It just seems to me that it's all for nothing if it's just either going unnoticed or if I post it to places such as YouTube, I just get nothin' but negativity from what little of a "fan base" I have.
Like, don't get me wrong though, when I played up at FurCoNZ, that was a blast for me. But, at the moment, 'cause I'm still just by myself IE I'm not in a band (& I'm probably in one of the worst places in New Zealand to even attempt to form another metal band).
It makes me feel like it's a wasted talent.
Not only that, my inspiration for writing music is practically non existent right now. Every time I pickup one of my guitars right now it goes a little like this...
> Warm up with a couple of covers.
> Try to come up with somethin' by layin' down a few riffs & maybe toss in some leads here & there.
> Record it (If I even feel up to doing just that).
> ...
There are a couple of ways that I write songs: 1.) Pickup my guitar & play. Spend 3+ hours writing it in Guitar Pro so that I won't forget it later. 2.) Spend 3+ hours writing it out in guitar pro... lose interest & move onto something else. Only to let it disappear into the bowels of my hard drive to never see the light of day again. 3.) Come back to an old song that I wrote possibly three to four years ago that I never finished & go "Wow, I wrote THAT!? That sounds amazing." Then go "Oh. THAT's why I never finished it." & then leave it alone forever.
As far as teaching myself new covers or even after I have written out new music, again, I just quickly lose interest in learnin' how to play it all for the aforementioned reason.
The way I'm starting to see things is that it's not worth doing if it's just gonna go unnoticed & for too long my music & my guitar playing has done just that. It's also been an accumulation of nothing but negativity in just about everywhere I go with my music, be it everything from apparently using "crap gear" (Ya know, guitars, amps, effects) or just generally being told to "fuck off."
Now, just to clarify, I don't use crap. When I pick out my guitars, I literally walk into the local music shop & spend an upward of two hours going through every guitar that they have until I find "the one" (being that it has that sound or that feel or that special something that fits the bill) with the exception of the Great Southern Trendkiller.
That particular guitar is a total scratch build that my dad & I worked on & I have only just recently decided on a paint scheme & how I want the headstock to be shaped. So, my dad's paintin' it & cuttin' that headstock to my spec. More on this axe later in this journal.
My "main two" guitars are a prime example of what happens when I spend about four hours in the Rock Shop to look for that specific tone. They are the Blitz "Cuban Cigar," a Gibson Les Paul copy so aptly named because of its tobacco sunburst & art deco "Al Capone" era style. The second being the Jackson JS-23 "High Voltage Super Strat" so-called because it's made of Indian maple & is finished in a clear lacquer, giving it an industrial look. Plus, it sports a bright yellow "Warning: High Voltage" strap. The former is usually my rythm guitar & the latter is usually my lead guitar. My cover of ZZ Top's "Rough Boy" features both of these guitars.[/url That very song was how I came up with my "Afterburner" lead tone that you guys know & love today. Albeit, I've perfected it a little bit more, but it's largely left unchanged in the four years that I've had that tone.
The Great Southern Trendkiller; AKA the BCR-500 is my "Swiss Army knife" guitar. It works well FOR ME in both rythm & lead roles (as you've heard in my version of God Defend New Zealand). Not only that, when I was looking for a new guitar (before building this one), I wanted to break away from the "Les Paul," "Telecaster" & "Stratocaster" shapes that appear to pop up everywhere I turn my head. Now, I've played Strats, Teles, SGs, LPs, Flying Vees & even Dimebag Darrel's lightning bolt ML. Yea. Ya read that right. I was in Whangarei & the Rock Shop were sellin' it for 15k & I got to play it for free.
It was then that I decided that I liked that particular shape. I liked it because, unlike a Flying Vee, it didn't have the tendency to fall outta my lap all of the time if I tried to play it while sittin' down. I didn't wind up with "Tennis Elbow" after playing it for two hours, like I would get with Telecasters, SGs & some Stratocasters (Both Fender/Squier & Gibson/Epiphone ones). Also, that lightning bolt shape was so radically unusal... it fit the bill nicely.
I can't justify paying fifteen grand (NZ$15,000.00) for a guitar that I would probably play only once or twice & put back up on the wall, only to gather dust & never to see an amp or a studio or a stage ever again. ESPECIALLY seeing as it was one of Dime's guitars; I felt it deserved a better player. Yup, I told the guys up in the Whangarei Rock Shop that "I'm not worthy of such a guitar." So, that sparked (har har. Pun intended.) the idea for the Great Southern Trendkiller.
I personally found that the lightning bolt shape of Dime's guitar felt "too straight" & didn't reflect my "feminine tendencies" *coughs*androgyny*coughs* in the same way that my previous guitars had done. Now, I think that a guitar is an extension of the person that is playing it & I think that it should be a reflection of a few key aspects either about them or their "stage persona."
Now, all of my guitars are curvy per se & I wanted to carry that on with the Trendkiller.
There's a few reasons why the BCR-500 has a long-winded name: The obvious one being a salute to PanterA & one of my favorite albums of theirs bein' The Great Southern Trendkill. The other one being that this axe looks less like a guitar, but more like an axe. Kidding. But, it breaks away from the conventional Stratocasters, Telecasters & Les Paul guitars that I see everywhere. I mean, let's face it. EVERYONE has or has owned a Strat, or a Tele or an LP at least once & the BCR-500 to me was a complete paradigm shift. This guitar even has a Floyd Rose locking system in it like what Dimebag Darrell had in his guitar that I played at the Rock Shop in Whangarei.
Say what you will about Floyd Rose systems. I think they're the cat's whiskers when they're setup PROPERLY. Keep in mind that I have an engineer's mind. Not a guitarist's mind. IE I have the patience to actually set one up where most guitarists would rage quit & give up.
But, yea. Floatin' bridge/locking nut system. Yea. Best thing I've ever put in a guitar & the most versatile thing in terms of playability. 'Cause with that guitar, I can either be a badass with it, I can make peoples' ears bleed with it OR I can make an almost ethereal racket with it. All kinds of fun. =^/.^=
Before I say anythin' further, I'll give y'all a short history about my dad & why he's so awesome.
He used to build animatronic creatures for movies such as Hercules & Xena, The Truth About Demons, King Kong, The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. In fact, that Uruk Hai sword he made was literally a ten second design & he made it at the very last minute while he was workin' on set. He's made animatronics for various New Zealand TV ads & he made the laboratory sets & Michelle Rodriguez's helicopter for James Cameron's Avatar. He's made massive iceberg & glacier sculptures for the Hukawai Center down Franz Josef/Fox Glacier ways.
He's built custom guitars for various New Zealand guitarists (Don't ask me who they were, I don't even know, myself), he's built various hot rods (three famed ones were "Tertle," "30 Koop" & a Fiat Altered that he used to drag race up at Meremere). He also used to X-ray weld the major pipelines 'round Taranaki way & as of 2011 he builds custom valve guitar amplifiers, custom (& some resto jobs to his dislike) British motorcycles such as Triumph, BSA, Norton etc.
In short... my dad's a clever guy & he knows his shit.
As far as my amplifiers go, like the BCR-500, they are custom built from the ground up by my dad to my specifications. What he & I did (particularly with the Mississippi Mouse) was he based the preamp stage on a Fender Champ & the power amp stage is something that he designed himself.
He used off-the-shelf components in the sense of local availability EG if the 6L6 or the tiny ECC83 goes kaput, I can hit up the Rock Shop for replacement valves.
The Mississippi Mouse only has two adjustment knobs on it: Master Volume & Gain.
I usually run bugger-all gain on that amp ('cause it all comes outta the ME-25 now). But, in the off chance that I crank the gain on that little sucker up... It's "the Mouse that roared" as my dad would put it. Don't believe me? Ignore my crappy singing in it & listen to my cover of Joe Walsh's Rocky Mountain Way.
My father is just about finished with my custom amp head (the big 80 that I keep talkin' about), just awaiting parts & gettin' $$$ together.
An older amp that he made for me was the Texas Cat. That was a 14 watt tube amp that he had based on a Bad Cat Xtreme distortion pedal... but all-valve. This amp had two distortion channels: One of which he & I spent a lot of time fine tuning the circuitry to get that "Rolling" distortion that ZZ Top had. The other was still a distortion channel but we both called it "the dirty channel" because it was purposefully not clean enough to be considered a clean channel & it didn't have enough drive in it to be as full on as the first channel (Think the start of ZZ Top's "La Grange").
Third: The Texas Cat had a valve-driven tremolo that was fully adjustable from rate, depth & level.
Oh & did I mention that that amp also had a "third channel"? Ya, that essentially combined both distortion & dirty channels for an all-out grunge fest. Good for some o' that "Teen Spirit," ta get ya into that state o' guitarist Nirvana, eh?
I also very rarely play through an old Fender Deluxe '85. That's an 80 watt transistor amp that (according to them) Fender "never built." By far it has got to be THE closest sounding amp to a tube amp that I have heard in my life (& that's also up against a Fender Mustang IV; my go-to amp at the Rock Shop when I am trying out new guitars).
My Line 6 Low-Down 15 does its job nicely for what it is. It's a 15 watt digital (solid state) bass amplifier (& "my" bass guitar is an LTD B-50FM). I usually have this amp sitting underneath the Mississippi Mouse, coupled to the above amp via my Boss ME-25; my multi-FX unit.
Chances are, you've all heard the 'Mouse, the LD-15 AND my ME-25. Ya know, that sound I have in just about every lead solo I play? Ya know that really chunky/ballsy sound I have on just about every metal riff I've played? Ya know that smooth clean sound that I play from time to time on my more mellow-er songs? That's all comin' outta the ME-25, mate.
Another thing is my work seems to have displaced my music production over the last few months too. ESP this month, where I've been asked to build a rather high tech "proof of concept" for a local guy here, in Picton. Honestly, this thing has a lot goin' on & for it. I'm controllin' four brushless DC motors with one Arduino UNO as the "Master" unit. I've spent the majority of last year just researching the technology behind these fantastic motors. Mainly on account of having a couple of projects of my own in the pipeline; a UAV & a motorbike.
My vision with my electronics work is this: Open Source Hardware and Accessories.
Which means that I have started out with the Arduino development platform. But, Spy vs Spy-style infighting has pushed me to branch out from the Arduino brand of boards. Keeping within the Open Hardware umbrella, I'm now turning to Adafruit & Sparkfun for various bits & bobs here & there & I'm also gettin' my more complex components from Mouser.
So, that's why I made that hint about teachin' myself C. So I can type up firmware for my Arduino boards. In effect, I have created another Tumblr blog that is specific to my projects. Be it electronics, 3D modeling to engineering. It's all gonna go up there, so check it out!
Long answer:
Well, as much fun as I do have playin' my guitar & playin' my favorite songs, among a select few that I have written. It just seems to me that it's all for nothing if it's just either going unnoticed or if I post it to places such as YouTube, I just get nothin' but negativity from what little of a "fan base" I have.
Like, don't get me wrong though, when I played up at FurCoNZ, that was a blast for me. But, at the moment, 'cause I'm still just by myself IE I'm not in a band (& I'm probably in one of the worst places in New Zealand to even attempt to form another metal band).
It makes me feel like it's a wasted talent.
Not only that, my inspiration for writing music is practically non existent right now. Every time I pickup one of my guitars right now it goes a little like this...
> Warm up with a couple of covers.
> Try to come up with somethin' by layin' down a few riffs & maybe toss in some leads here & there.
> Record it (If I even feel up to doing just that).
> ...
There are a couple of ways that I write songs: 1.) Pickup my guitar & play. Spend 3+ hours writing it in Guitar Pro so that I won't forget it later. 2.) Spend 3+ hours writing it out in guitar pro... lose interest & move onto something else. Only to let it disappear into the bowels of my hard drive to never see the light of day again. 3.) Come back to an old song that I wrote possibly three to four years ago that I never finished & go "Wow, I wrote THAT!? That sounds amazing." Then go "Oh. THAT's why I never finished it." & then leave it alone forever.
As far as teaching myself new covers or even after I have written out new music, again, I just quickly lose interest in learnin' how to play it all for the aforementioned reason.
The way I'm starting to see things is that it's not worth doing if it's just gonna go unnoticed & for too long my music & my guitar playing has done just that. It's also been an accumulation of nothing but negativity in just about everywhere I go with my music, be it everything from apparently using "crap gear" (Ya know, guitars, amps, effects) or just generally being told to "fuck off."
Now, just to clarify, I don't use crap. When I pick out my guitars, I literally walk into the local music shop & spend an upward of two hours going through every guitar that they have until I find "the one" (being that it has that sound or that feel or that special something that fits the bill) with the exception of the Great Southern Trendkiller.
That particular guitar is a total scratch build that my dad & I worked on & I have only just recently decided on a paint scheme & how I want the headstock to be shaped. So, my dad's paintin' it & cuttin' that headstock to my spec. More on this axe later in this journal.
My "main two" guitars are a prime example of what happens when I spend about four hours in the Rock Shop to look for that specific tone. They are the Blitz "Cuban Cigar," a Gibson Les Paul copy so aptly named because of its tobacco sunburst & art deco "Al Capone" era style. The second being the Jackson JS-23 "High Voltage Super Strat" so-called because it's made of Indian maple & is finished in a clear lacquer, giving it an industrial look. Plus, it sports a bright yellow "Warning: High Voltage" strap. The former is usually my rythm guitar & the latter is usually my lead guitar. My cover of ZZ Top's "Rough Boy" features both of these guitars.[/url That very song was how I came up with my "Afterburner" lead tone that you guys know & love today. Albeit, I've perfected it a little bit more, but it's largely left unchanged in the four years that I've had that tone.
The Great Southern Trendkiller; AKA the BCR-500 is my "Swiss Army knife" guitar. It works well FOR ME in both rythm & lead roles (as you've heard in my version of God Defend New Zealand). Not only that, when I was looking for a new guitar (before building this one), I wanted to break away from the "Les Paul," "Telecaster" & "Stratocaster" shapes that appear to pop up everywhere I turn my head. Now, I've played Strats, Teles, SGs, LPs, Flying Vees & even Dimebag Darrel's lightning bolt ML. Yea. Ya read that right. I was in Whangarei & the Rock Shop were sellin' it for 15k & I got to play it for free.
It was then that I decided that I liked that particular shape. I liked it because, unlike a Flying Vee, it didn't have the tendency to fall outta my lap all of the time if I tried to play it while sittin' down. I didn't wind up with "Tennis Elbow" after playing it for two hours, like I would get with Telecasters, SGs & some Stratocasters (Both Fender/Squier & Gibson/Epiphone ones). Also, that lightning bolt shape was so radically unusal... it fit the bill nicely.
I can't justify paying fifteen grand (NZ$15,000.00) for a guitar that I would probably play only once or twice & put back up on the wall, only to gather dust & never to see an amp or a studio or a stage ever again. ESPECIALLY seeing as it was one of Dime's guitars; I felt it deserved a better player. Yup, I told the guys up in the Whangarei Rock Shop that "I'm not worthy of such a guitar." So, that sparked (har har. Pun intended.) the idea for the Great Southern Trendkiller.
I personally found that the lightning bolt shape of Dime's guitar felt "too straight" & didn't reflect my "feminine tendencies" *coughs*androgyny*coughs* in the same way that my previous guitars had done. Now, I think that a guitar is an extension of the person that is playing it & I think that it should be a reflection of a few key aspects either about them or their "stage persona."
Now, all of my guitars are curvy per se & I wanted to carry that on with the Trendkiller.
There's a few reasons why the BCR-500 has a long-winded name: The obvious one being a salute to PanterA & one of my favorite albums of theirs bein' The Great Southern Trendkill. The other one being that this axe looks less like a guitar, but more like an axe. Kidding. But, it breaks away from the conventional Stratocasters, Telecasters & Les Paul guitars that I see everywhere. I mean, let's face it. EVERYONE has or has owned a Strat, or a Tele or an LP at least once & the BCR-500 to me was a complete paradigm shift. This guitar even has a Floyd Rose locking system in it like what Dimebag Darrell had in his guitar that I played at the Rock Shop in Whangarei.
Say what you will about Floyd Rose systems. I think they're the cat's whiskers when they're setup PROPERLY. Keep in mind that I have an engineer's mind. Not a guitarist's mind. IE I have the patience to actually set one up where most guitarists would rage quit & give up.
But, yea. Floatin' bridge/locking nut system. Yea. Best thing I've ever put in a guitar & the most versatile thing in terms of playability. 'Cause with that guitar, I can either be a badass with it, I can make peoples' ears bleed with it OR I can make an almost ethereal racket with it. All kinds of fun. =^/.^=
Before I say anythin' further, I'll give y'all a short history about my dad & why he's so awesome.
He used to build animatronic creatures for movies such as Hercules & Xena, The Truth About Demons, King Kong, The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. In fact, that Uruk Hai sword he made was literally a ten second design & he made it at the very last minute while he was workin' on set. He's made animatronics for various New Zealand TV ads & he made the laboratory sets & Michelle Rodriguez's helicopter for James Cameron's Avatar. He's made massive iceberg & glacier sculptures for the Hukawai Center down Franz Josef/Fox Glacier ways.
He's built custom guitars for various New Zealand guitarists (Don't ask me who they were, I don't even know, myself), he's built various hot rods (three famed ones were "Tertle," "30 Koop" & a Fiat Altered that he used to drag race up at Meremere). He also used to X-ray weld the major pipelines 'round Taranaki way & as of 2011 he builds custom valve guitar amplifiers, custom (& some resto jobs to his dislike) British motorcycles such as Triumph, BSA, Norton etc.
In short... my dad's a clever guy & he knows his shit.
As far as my amplifiers go, like the BCR-500, they are custom built from the ground up by my dad to my specifications. What he & I did (particularly with the Mississippi Mouse) was he based the preamp stage on a Fender Champ & the power amp stage is something that he designed himself.
He used off-the-shelf components in the sense of local availability EG if the 6L6 or the tiny ECC83 goes kaput, I can hit up the Rock Shop for replacement valves.
The Mississippi Mouse only has two adjustment knobs on it: Master Volume & Gain.
I usually run bugger-all gain on that amp ('cause it all comes outta the ME-25 now). But, in the off chance that I crank the gain on that little sucker up... It's "the Mouse that roared" as my dad would put it. Don't believe me? Ignore my crappy singing in it & listen to my cover of Joe Walsh's Rocky Mountain Way.
My father is just about finished with my custom amp head (the big 80 that I keep talkin' about), just awaiting parts & gettin' $$$ together.
An older amp that he made for me was the Texas Cat. That was a 14 watt tube amp that he had based on a Bad Cat Xtreme distortion pedal... but all-valve. This amp had two distortion channels: One of which he & I spent a lot of time fine tuning the circuitry to get that "Rolling" distortion that ZZ Top had. The other was still a distortion channel but we both called it "the dirty channel" because it was purposefully not clean enough to be considered a clean channel & it didn't have enough drive in it to be as full on as the first channel (Think the start of ZZ Top's "La Grange").
Third: The Texas Cat had a valve-driven tremolo that was fully adjustable from rate, depth & level.
Oh & did I mention that that amp also had a "third channel"? Ya, that essentially combined both distortion & dirty channels for an all-out grunge fest. Good for some o' that "Teen Spirit," ta get ya into that state o' guitarist Nirvana, eh?
I also very rarely play through an old Fender Deluxe '85. That's an 80 watt transistor amp that (according to them) Fender "never built." By far it has got to be THE closest sounding amp to a tube amp that I have heard in my life (& that's also up against a Fender Mustang IV; my go-to amp at the Rock Shop when I am trying out new guitars).
My Line 6 Low-Down 15 does its job nicely for what it is. It's a 15 watt digital (solid state) bass amplifier (& "my" bass guitar is an LTD B-50FM). I usually have this amp sitting underneath the Mississippi Mouse, coupled to the above amp via my Boss ME-25; my multi-FX unit.
Chances are, you've all heard the 'Mouse, the LD-15 AND my ME-25. Ya know, that sound I have in just about every lead solo I play? Ya know that really chunky/ballsy sound I have on just about every metal riff I've played? Ya know that smooth clean sound that I play from time to time on my more mellow-er songs? That's all comin' outta the ME-25, mate.
Another thing is my work seems to have displaced my music production over the last few months too. ESP this month, where I've been asked to build a rather high tech "proof of concept" for a local guy here, in Picton. Honestly, this thing has a lot goin' on & for it. I'm controllin' four brushless DC motors with one Arduino UNO as the "Master" unit. I've spent the majority of last year just researching the technology behind these fantastic motors. Mainly on account of having a couple of projects of my own in the pipeline; a UAV & a motorbike.
My vision with my electronics work is this: Open Source Hardware and Accessories.
Which means that I have started out with the Arduino development platform. But, Spy vs Spy-style infighting has pushed me to branch out from the Arduino brand of boards. Keeping within the Open Hardware umbrella, I'm now turning to Adafruit & Sparkfun for various bits & bobs here & there & I'm also gettin' my more complex components from Mouser.
So, that's why I made that hint about teachin' myself C. So I can type up firmware for my Arduino boards. In effect, I have created another Tumblr blog that is specific to my projects. Be it electronics, 3D modeling to engineering. It's all gonna go up there, so check it out!
