Finally, A good photo!

I decided to mess around with a camera and a little photo editing program to see if I could make a great picture of my guitar and this is what I came up with.  I know its not much of a blog post for today but I like this picture and since this is a blog about music and musical instruments, why not?

Ok so what I did was I took a rumpled piece of black fabric and then placed my guitar on it.  Then I took a picture with my camera and then imported it into gimp (which is an open source photo editing program which is very similar to photoshop, only free).  Then I put the guitar on one layer, put a gradient filter overtop of that, and a black background under, and Poof!  Sweet picture of my guitar.  Enjoy!

Ugly Blog

Well I have done a little research and looking at other people's blogs and I have come to the realization that My blog is ugly.  This is no good.  I want to make my blog look awesome so that I when I write about guitar playing, or piano playing or music in general, people aren't distracted by the ugliness.  Its time to go digging around and see what I can do in order to make my blog a little less of an eyesore.  Suggestions?

About the Piano

I am a piano player.  In fact, that is the instrument that I'm taking at University!  I know that it would be difficult to tell because of all the posts that I have done about guitar... 

Now, I like to consider myself a social creature.  I like to interact with people and perhaps that is part of my problem.  In all of my piano playing that I have done over the last 20 years, I haven't had the chance to sit down with someone else and make music.  My job was to master a piece of music, usually written by someone long dead, well enough to play at a recital or exam.  When the technically perfect performance was given, picked apart, and found acceptable, I was then able move on to another piece and start the process all over again.  Along the way I learned how to play scales, chords, arpeggios etc. but never learned how to apply them in a more social setting.  In contrast, when I started to play guitar, I jammed for the first time probably six months after I started on songs with which I was familiar!  I had FUN!  I want to be able to jam that way with piano but I'm afraid that I am too engrained with the classical discipline.  I NEED HELP or else I may be doomed to conversations like this:

"Hey we should get together this weekend and have a jam"

"Yeah!  That sounds like fun!" 

"Great!  I was thinking maybe I'll play keyboards, and I'll have a bass player and a drummer lined up and you could take lead guitar?"

"Sounds like fun what are we playing?"

"Ooh, well are you familiar with Bach's prelude and fugue in Bflat major?  I was also thinking we could do the first movement of his Fifth Brandenburg Concerto."

"....Seriously?"

"Yeah! You know the ones... BWV 866 and BWV 1050!"

"I take it back, it does not sound like fun after all."

Now don't get me wrong, Those Bach pieces are great works of art and are enjoyable to listen to, however you need to be classically trained to play this stuff and even then, the challenge is formidable.  Once the task of learning such a piece is complete, there is very little room to play around and add your own flavour to the piece. Especially with Bach, because with Bach, there is only one flavour... the Bach flavour.  You can't just improvise your own keyboard solo in a Bach piece, mostly because he is already playing the best notes that could ever go there, but also because he will curse the musical talent right out of you from the grave (or so I've heard).  All this doesn't make me want to practice piano much.

So, you can see my conundrum.  I want to be able to play music with people (which I think is one of the best things about music) but there are very few people who know how to jam with a keyboard and I don't know where to begin to teach myself.  Ooh well.  I guess I'll just do the best I can and maybe by playing along with the stereo, improvement in this area will be improved, and this will increase my desire to be awesome at piano and I will practice more.  

Help! Gear Stolen in Vancouver

Hello everyone who visits my blog,

Someone named Maurice had his music gear stolen in Vancouver.

CLICK HERE to see his poster on craigslist.

Maurice, I don't know who you are or if you will ever read this post but I sure hope that you get your gear back and that in their wrath, the Gods of Karma strike the dirty thieves down!!

First Attempt at Garage Band

Alright Ladies and Gents,  This is a piece of a song that I created shortly after I started to play the electric guitar so its not full of shred-tastic awesomeness, but it has a good rock groove.  I decided to try to record something on Garage Band and this is what happened.  Now that I'm beginning to learn the ropes and whatnot, I'm sure that there will be more posts like this one, just with better tunes.

This is what I did.  I made the drum track on Garage Band with the typing keyboard then I plugged my guitar into my little blackstar 5 watt amp and the emulated headphones out from my amp into my computer (no interface just right into my audio in jack).  Then I laid down the guitar track a couple of times.  After that, I grabbed a bass, plugged it right into the computer, laid down that track and poof!  A simple song!  Looking back I probably should have done the drums first followed by the bass then the guitar.  Ooh well.   I guess the point to this post is that Garage Band has all the fancy toys that I need at the moment.  Maybe after I become proficient in Garage Band, I'll explore some of the bigger programs.

Booted from a forum

The other day I wrote on the ultimate guitar forums that I had written up a blog about strings and how to choose them, and do you know what they did?  They kicked me off of the forum!  When you are banned from the ultimate guitar forum, they only let you post in one little area called "the forum of the banned" and I asked if it was because I posted the link to my blog and they said yes.  Anyway I picked the wrong option available to me at the time.  These were the options that I could have done with my blog post:

1. I could have done what I did.  Consequence: Booted from the forums
2. I could have copied and pasted what I wrote onto a forum page.  Probable concequence: Booted from the forums for spamming
3.  I could have just not told people about what I found.  Consequence:  Less people would know about strings!

Ooh well, I guess you can't win em all eh?

Sound Like Yourself

One of my favourite things to do is learn songs by some of my favourite artists.  I love to put in my headphones, get into my power rock stance, put on my rock face, grab my guitar, turn up my amp and go!  I become untouchable!   After a long while I was puzzled to hear that I didn't sound exactly like the guitar players I listen to even though I played all the same notes that were played on the recordings and my tone was set so that it sounded like the recorded tone.  Eventually I realized that its because I'm not the guitar players in the recordings.  Thats why I sound different... and its good.