David Mead – Talking Guitars

A New Guitar And The Headless Video!

2012-02-23T05:20:00.001-08:00

It's always an exciting time when you receive a new guitar. Well, for me it is anyway; others may suggest I seek help – and fast. But I'm harmless...

So at the end of last year, I had the pleasure of unpacking a brand new hand built acoustic guitar. It's a Fylde Goodfellow – a stablemate for my other acoustic which is a Fylde Falstaff – and a lovely little instrument to play.

For the enthusiast, basically it's an 00 body size with a cedar top and sapele back and sides plus a Honduras mahogany neck with a rosewood board. The on-board electrics are a Headway FEQ system.

But enough about vital statistics, you want to hear what it sounds like, right? OK, but first I'll just tell the story of how we recorded this video... It's headless because essentially this was the feed from Camera 2; for some reason Camera 1's feed was too dark to use and so I thought that nobody would care if they couldn't see me gurning for the world, they'd be more interested in looking at the guitar. So we let it go through.

Sound-wise, what you're hearing is mainly the Headway pick-up with a little ambient 'room' from a Zoom H1 (which picked up a passing motorbike towards the end). The eq is flat and we added a little Lexicon reverb just to make everything a bit more sonically cosy.

So here's the Headless Guitarist playing a track from my first album 'Nocturnal' entitled 'Time Together'.

A Night At The Movies

2012-02-13T08:00:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd share a few videos that I've hung up on You Tube recently... So if you'd like to settle yourself in the upper circle, let's dim the lights and get on with it.

The first features guitar legend, good friend and fellow Elixir String endorsee Martin Taylor and myself engaged in an impromptu jam at last year's London Acoustic Show. The story behind this one is that I'd just got off a train and been hurried into a very hot stuffy room (the windows were shut because of the filming and it was a surprisingly warm September day) and told to 'play something'. That's why I look a little hot and bothered!

Anyway, this is the result...

Our next presentation is from the same video shoot which finds me talking to Martin about the use of partial capos – a composing device to which I am particularly, erm, partial...

Speaking of partial capos and moving swiftly on, the next video was recorded at The Glee Club in Birmingham last year. The sound is not as good as I would like and it was very dark in the club, but the rawness and general low-light artiness kinda makes up for it... The piece I'm playing is entitled 'A Stranger's Tale' and you can just about make out a G7th capo over the four bass strings if you look really hard...

I played this gig with my fellow acoustic troubadour, the very excellent Ben Powell. One afternoon recently we engaged in a fit of trial and error with iMovie and produced a sample of the 'in the round' show we do together. Ben's playing his custom Patrick Eggle Saluda and I'm playing a Custom Fylde Falstaff. Oh and we're available for hire!

Finally, let's go back to where we started; the London Acoustic Show last year. Another feature of that (very busy) day was that I played a set on the Elixir Strings stand. The full performance was filmed (but I haven't as yet seen it) but here is a short extract filmed by my son Tim on his phone. It gives the flavour of the day, anyway!

So there you have it: the lights have come up and impatient-looking cinema staff are cleaning up all the spilled popcorn.

Thanks for watching!

'So What Sort Of Music Do You Play?'

2011-11-20T07:37:00.000-08:00

As you can imagine, this is a question that comes up quite regularly in any musician's day-to-day existence… and it's getting harder and harder to answer. The reason, I think, is that we have become so fond of categorisation in music – and, worse still, many of these convenient little compartments are subject to further division into subcategories.

I play what I think is termed as being 'acoustic fingerstyle' guitar. That's what I and various other practitioners call it anyway; trouble is, no one seems to understand what it actually is. I've had some people say to me, 'Oh, you mean country music?' or 'What, like jazz?' and neither is right, as far as I'm concerned.

It's the same in record shops. If you play within the remit of this particular musical niche and are lucky enough to have attracted record company support, you're quite likely to find your CDs stored under 'World', 'New Age' or 'Jazz'. Furthermore, in the digital domains like iTunes, eMusic and their like (where you yourself have little or no control regarding which category your music ends up under) there's no provision for acoustic fingerstyle. My CDs have been placed under 'Relaxation' or 'New Age' or 'Music For Meditation' and, as far as I'm concerned, it's not anything like. Certainly, if I was going shopping for CDs by Michael Hedges or Pierre Bensusan, looking under 'new age' or 'world' wouldn't be my first port of call.

Things used to be a lot more simple. Once, I'm told, your music was either classical, commercial or folk. Take it or leave it. The definitions were easy to understand: classical was anything involving orchestras or ensembles playing Bach, Berlioz or Beethoven, commercial was pop and rock and folk was... well, everything else.

Under this form of categorisation I'm a folk musician in that I don't consider myself a part of music's commercial landscape. Seriously; ask my accountant.

It's easy to think that this is really a trivial problem and unlikely to have too much of an impact on a career; after all, does it really matter where your music is filed in the public consciousness? Well, yes it does. The problem reveals itself when you try to get gigs, for instance.

If you play in a blues or a covers band, it's likely that you'll be able to make a promoter or club/pub owner understand what it is you play much easier than I would. Blues? What? Like Muddy Waters, Joe Bonamassa, Eric Clapton – that kind of thing? Covers band? What? Rock covers? Queen, Bad Company, bit of Supergrass, Elbow thrown in for the students? Deal done. But 'acoustic fingerstyle'? What's that?

You see my problem. I guess it's a matter of time before we acoustic minstrels find a home under one roof or other. It may be that a champion will reveal himself; someone will have a hit with a film theme or something and immediately afterwards everything reboots and we can say, 'You know, like so-and-so...' when asked the inevitable question.

But until then, it's a no man's land of misunderstanding.

The Wonders Of The Internet

2011-08-03T08:48:00.000-07:00

Just trying to set up a selling account for my website and it's driving me mad!

Thought I'd share that with everyone...

Hard Shoulder

2011-07-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

As around .0000001% of the world knows, last September I released my second album of acoustic fingerstyle guitar tomfoolery on the public at large. Obviously, in such circumstances, the thing to do is to get oneself onto the touring/gigging circuit and make people aware of its existence. After all, success in the music biz is only around 10% having a good product out there, the other 90% is down to letting people know about it.

All well and good, then. But, as everyone knows, the best laid plans of mice, men and acoustic guitarists oft go awry and in January of this year I began getting pain in my left shoulder. Worse still, it all felt very familiar and I knew what was coming…

Anyone heard of a condition known as 'frozen shoulder'? The medical name for it is 'adhesive capsulitis' and it works its evil magic by gradually paralysing the shoulder joint and rewarding you with a bolt of very serious pain every time you try to move your arm. Not good for playing guitar, then.

To make matters worse and to illustrate the bitter irony of the situation still further (I'm not after sympathy here, honest) I'd had it before in the other shoulder back in 2003 and so I knew that it's effectively a very long slog in terms of recovery time as the condition can last between eight to 18 months.

There's nothing doctors can do except offer sympathy and any painkillers you choose. I chose Tramadol, because they worked last time, but despite the fact that they numb the pain quite effectively and allow you to drift off into sleep, they also have nasty side effects – even more so when you stop taking them.

It's now July and I'm only just getting most of the movement back in my arm (it never fully returns) and experiencing little or no pain and so it's time to get back out there. Taking seven months off sick when you've got new tunes to play people is nothing short of a disaster, which is why I've chosen to re-release 'Arboretum' on my own label and kinda start all over again.

So, as I type, the album is being pressed onto those silver shiny discs that some of you might remember and at the same time being delivered in digital form to all the usual outlets on the internet. There are even dates in the diary, starting with a gig at this year's London Acoustic Guitar Show at Olympia. Sunday 11th September on the Acoustic Café stage at 2.30pm, to be precise.

Now, with a seven month lay-off behind me, the only thing I have to do is get back to practising like a maniac to restore the strength in my left hand and arm – and trying to remember all the pieces!

O.K. So We're Not Exactly Radiohead...

2011-04-28T08:14:00.000-07:00

Depending on who you happen to be talking to at the time, the current state of the music industry is either

a) A right bloody mess

Or

b) A fertile landscape ripe for entrepreneurial derring-do

The followers of answer 'a' will quote you statistics about the slow and painful demise of the CD as a platform for music and how piracy has spoiled things for everybody, whilst the 'b' camp is the exclusive domain of the web gurus and sundry other optimists.

So who is likely to be right?

Well, one thing's for certain; the world would be a poorer place without music – either live or recorded – and so it's definitely going to survive all of this. The question is how?

There are folk out there who believe that the future of live music is a thing which is not under their control, but I think it is. You'll have guessed that I tend to follow the 'b' thinkers and so I'm going to set out one way – and I'm sure there are many more – whereby music lovers all around the country (and most likely the world) can shape the future by taking back some of the control.

I currently work as part of an acoustic instrumental duo with another guitarist called Ben Powell. At present, we're trying to put together some gigs for later on in the year when we can get on the road and come out to play for people. My idea as to how this might come about is to ask people who enjoy our kind of music (and you'll be able to sample some at the end of this sermon) to get in touch with us and tell us about venues in their particular area who put on this type of music.

I understand that there are loads of places across the UK where a room above a pub, a cellar, village hall, arts centre or community area is set aside on a regular basis to host live music. They're not necessarily known on the national circuit because they're small, off the beaten track, run on a tight budget and generally don't get a look in when more renowned artists go on tour. But as far as we're concerned, all it takes is a contact, either in the form of a phone number or email address and we'll make the arrangements to turn up and play.

We're not Radiohead. We don't have legions of fans. We don't insist on four figure fees and five star accommodation. But we put on a good show, people enjoy themselves, the venue sells some beer (and a fruit-based drink for the ladies), the promoter earns a bit, we earn a bit and so everybody wins.

We'll even give a pair of our CDs and free entry to people who give us contacts that turn into gigs. How about that?

So here's the commercial. First of all, here's a video of me playing a track from my album 'Arboretum'. It was recorded live in the studio and so what you see is what you get:

And here's Ben, playing a track from his album at this year's Celtic Connections in Glasgow:

If you think that you might be able to put us in touch with a venue in your area, please drop us a line by clicking here.

Hopefully, we'll see you on the road!

Highway To Hello?

2011-03-04T07:20:00.000-08:00

As a part-time scribbler for magazines, I get sent press releases via email on a daily basis. Recently, I've been noticing that many of them are worded very similarly. So allow me to give you a glimpse into the inbox of a calloused, highly cynical hack for just a few moments. A typically worded email goes something like this:

Introducing [insert name here; always someone you've never heard of, commonly female and usually coyly misspelt like 'Kandi' or 'Syndii'] an amazing new voice on the R&B scene! Her latest single [insert almost literally anything] was voted 'Most Exciting New Thing' by radio station WXBJ.com [i.e. an internet-based radio station with around 17 listeners]. 'Kandi' [or whoever] will be performing [i.e.'miming'] her new single at [insert name of tiny backstreet, London-based clubette] on [probably next week]. RSVP to reserve a press pass [or not, we're not exactly expecting a stampede]. Free bar [this is the clincher – journalists are inveterate alcoholics].

Now I'm all for new talent breaking through, but I wonder where all these young divas are coming from; and, more importantly, who is fronting the money for a professional PR company to distract us merry inksters away from on-line gaming and internet porn for long enough to give a damn? Anyone who has ever tried to release something into the vast emptiness of hyperspace (where no one can hear you scream, let alone play anything nice) will know that it takes a small fortune to launch an artist these days. The figure was recently put at $1M by some overpaid researcher at the BBC and that money has to come from somewhere.

One thing for sure, these would-be pop princesses (not forgetting the occasional prince) are coming from somewhere and I'm pretty sure that it's no longer the club scene like it used to be in the perceived 'good old days'. Their press pictures don't reveal them to be road-weary chanteuses; more like fresh-faced debutantes that you wouldn't think twice about introducing to mother. So is there an academy, an agency or whatever who try the well-worn principal of 'some of this sh*t has to stick' knowing that they only need one hit on their hands to pay for their rabid entrepreneurialism across the board?

It's beyond me...

HMV And A Dying Breed...

2011-01-13T06:54:00.000-08:00

I'm sure that many will have seen the forecast of store closures from record retail giant HMV in the press recently. I believe the first estimate was that 60 outlets were due for closure but recent updates have put this figure nearer 40. Of course, we can see this as just another nail in the coffin for our friend the CD as downloads, legal or otherwise, begin to dominate the music consumer consciousness. But is that the whole story?

OK, stores close every day and it could be said that it's all part of a kind of natural selection out there in the retail jungle, but a casual comment made in today's press made me wonder if HMV have fallen victim to their own ambitions.

If, as I suspect, HMV's strategy was to dominate the high street by elbowing out the smaller independent record shops then they really shot themselves in the foot when they began realising it. The past 12 months or so has seen stock reduced across HMV stores to the effect that you don't have to wander too far away from the beaten track to find that the album you want on the day isn't any longer available on site but subject to a 'sorry, but we can order it for you' initiative. And if you think I'm talking about wanting an album by some obscure 1960s folk artist, I'm not; my local HMV didn't have any of the 60 plus albums by Frank Zappa in stock last time I looked!

This can't be helping, surely? Up until now, artist back catalogue was big business and there's no reason to believe that this trend has changed. Consumers with mammoth vinyl collections are probably still replacing treasured albums on CD to this day and it's quite likely that a lot of these purchases are on spec impulse buys. I've been in the situation myself when I've seen an album from my past for sale at £3 in a shop and a combination of pure nostalgia and the sense that I'm getting a good deal has witnessed me walk out with it in a bag.

I know that downloading music is probably the future, but I personally mourn the demise of the old curiosity record shops and their hoard of treasure.

Frank Zappa Interview: March 1993

2010-12-11T07:42:00.000-08:00

Frank Zappa would have been 70 on the 21st December 2010. In order to mark this in a very personal way, here is a transcript of the interview I did with Frank on March 23rd 1993 for Guitarist magazine. His album 'The Yellow Shark' was due for release and his ongoing health situation meant that the interview couldn't be scheduled in advance as normal; in fact I had only two hours' notice on this occasion. It was an honour to speak to a man whose music had given me so much pleasure over the years and the resulting interview was one of the most memorable of my career as a music journalist.

The interview was carried out on the telephone. At the time, Frank was working whenever he felt well enough to do so. I was aware that he was doing me an enormous favour by taking the time away from the studio. In fact, our conversation began with something of a reminder of this fact from the man himself...

“We’re right in the middle of a session here and so I’m taking time off to do this,” he said. I got the impression that he really didn’t want to be talking me at all, but I was genuinely a fan of his music and didn’t want to think that I was just another career journalist and he was just a notch on my CV.

I had heard an excerpt of the new album on BBC 2’s Late Show - a track called ‘The Be-Bop Tango’ which originally featured on Zappa’s ‘Roxy And Elsewhere’ album and told him so - adding that it wouldn’t be the same without the girl from the audience on the original track who says on mic, ‘I’ll do anything you say, Frank…’

“Heh heh - what was her name? Lana!”

After this, Frank relaxed a little. At least he knew I’d listened to at least one of his albums. I told him I was going to ask some guitar related questions…

“Well, there’s not anything guitar related [on ‘The Yellow Shark’] although there’s a guitar player and a mandolin player in the Ensemble Moderne [the classical outfit who had recorded the new album].”

What attracted you to the instrument in the first place?

“I liked the way it sounded.”

You’ve cited Johnny Guitar Watson as an influence before.

“I used to listen to him all the time,” confirms Zappa, “and I used to listen to Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown.”

So it was the latter end of the 50s blues period that first got you interested?

“Yeah.”

You’ve spoken too of an interst in 50’s do-wop records.

“Yes, I like that music.”

Mixed together with your interest in classical music as well - it’s a fairly bizarre combination.

“I just listened to it and liked what I heard. It became my musical world.”

The first piece by Edgar Varese you heard was…

“‘Ionisations’”

You’ve always been interested in percussion?

“Yeah, in fact the piece I’m working on now is all percussion. It has some synthesiser sustaining things in it, but 99% of what’s being heard in this piece that we’re working on today is all different kinds of percussion instruments.”

I remember you saying on a radio interview once about writing ‘percussive harmony’.

“Oh sure. You can write rhythmic dissonance or you can write the equivalent of rhythmic consonance, too. What I would describe as a dissonant rhythm is 23/24, where things would rub up against each other in a dissonant way in just the same way that notes that are a half-step apart have a certain tendency to twinge your ear. Rhythms that are fractionally off from each other create another kind of linear dissonance. A consonant kind of rhythm would be like march or disco music where everything is ‘boom, boom, boom…’"

Common time like 4/4 or simple 2/4, you mean?

“Yeah.”

What did you learn from Johnny Guitar Watson records? Was it the pentatonic approach?

“Well, you know, what Watson was doing was not just pentatonic scales. One of the things I admired about him was his tone; this wiry, kind of nasty, aggressive and penetrating tone, and another was the fact that the things that he would play would often come out as rhythmic outbursts over the constant beat of the accompaniment.”

Is that something you tried to incorporate into your own playing?

“Yes. It seemed to me that was the correct way to approach it, because it was like talking or singing over a background. There was a speech influence to the rhythm.”

What was the first guitar that you had?

“It didn’t have a make on it - it had been kinda sandblasted. My brother got it for $1.50 at an auction and it was an archtop, f-hole, ugly motherf***er with the strings about a half-inch off the fingerboard.”

That’s usually a good sort of guitar to start with…

“It builds your wrist up…”

Everything you play afterwards feels like going downhill after one of those.

“Heh heh, yeah. My father had a guitar which he kept in a closet, but I never played that. I didn’t really decide to mess around with the thing until we got this god awful thing at the auction. That’s why I liked it - because it was so tinny-sounding. It was just an acoustic guitar, but for an acoustic instrument it was moving closer to the direction of that wiry tone I liked with Johnny Guitar Watson, especially if you picked it right next to the bridge.”

Did it have one of those moveable wooden bridges that wrecks the intonation?

“I had no idea what intonation was! I didn’t find out for maybe five or six years that you even had to think about things like intonation It was bad enough just tuning the damn thing up with the pegs, let alone worrying about whether you’re going to be in tune at the octave.”

When did you make the move to electric?

“The guitar my father had was a round holed guitar of anonymous make and I stuck one of those DeArmond sound hole pickups in that. So it would be one of those bad-sounding magnetic pick-ups that you stick in the sound hole of a normal acoustic guitar. It would merely amplify the acoustic sound - so it wasn’t a real electric guitar. I guess it was around four or five years later that I actually got an electric guitar. There was a music store not far from my house, and I rented this Telecaster for $15 a month. Eventually I had to give it back, because I couldn’t make the payments on it any more.”

Were you ever in High School bands?

“I had a band when I was either a sophomore or a junior in High School I actually started off as a drummer, playing in a band in San Diego, but that didn’t last very long.”

A lot of guitarists started out playing drums - like Eddie Van Halen, or Extreme's Nuno Bettencourt, both of whom seem to have developed solid right hand techniques as a result.

“Well, I don’t know whether I could vouch for that because I wasn’t a very good drummer! My main drawback was that I didn’t have good hand-to-foot co-ordination. I could play a lot of stuff on the snare and the tom-toms and the cymbal and everything, but I couldn’t keep an even beat on the kick drum while I was doing all this which was one of the reasons why I was no longer employed as a drummer - nobody could dance to it.”

This is something that obviously didn’t translate onto guitar with hand-to-hand co-ordination.

“Yeah, hand-to-hand I’m fine. The only thing I had to co-ordinate with my feet was the wah-wah pedal and turning little stomp boxes on and off.”

How would you sum up your guitar style on the early Mothers recordings?

“It was okay, but back then the guitar wasn’t a featured instrument in the way it was on the later albums. As far as a precedent for it... I don’t think there was anything you could compare it to; it was the only way I knew how to do it. There was no reason to do it another way, and anyway, everybody else was doing it the other way.”

The rock guitar influences that are the most common are the ‘60s icons, players like Clapton and Hendrix...

“When ‘Freak Out’ and ‘Absolutely Free’ were done, there wasn’t any Hendrix. We met Hendrix in the summer of ‘67; he sat in with us at the Garrick Theatre, so we’d already made those albums before I even knew that he existed. But Mike Bloomfield was a popular guitar player, he was in the Butterfiled Blues Band. I saw Butterfield when they came to Los Angeles, but I don’t own any of their records.

“Actually, I think my playing is probably more derived from the folk music records that I heard; middle Eastern music, Indian music, stuff like that.”

What specifically?

“For years I had something called ‘Music On The Desert Road’, which was a recording of all kinds of different ethnic musics from different places in the Middle East. I used to listen to that all the time - I liked that kind of melodic feel. I listened to Indian music, Ravi Shankar and so forth, before we did the ‘Freak Out’ album. The idea of creating melody from scratch based on an ostinato or single chord that doesn’t change - that was the world that I felt most comfortable with.”

You prefer to improvise over a single chord vamp.

“If you listen to Indian classical music, it’s not just pentatonic. Some of the Ragas that they use are very chromatic, all sustained over a root and a fifth that doesn’t change, and by using these chromatic scales they can imply all these other kinds of harmonies. The chords don’t change; it’s just the listener’s aspect that gets to change, based on how the melody notes are driven against the ground bass.”

That sounds like a parallel with your own guitar improvisations, where the band plays a fairly straightforward rhythmic vamp, and you insert dissonance via the solo - you use a lot of chromatic tones and whole tone scales in your solos.

“Well, you stick them in where you think they belong when you think they belong. Sometimes you guess right, sometimes you guess wrong. The most dangerous thing is improvising with a band and thinking ‘Okay, now’s the time to play that diminished scale,’ and somebody in the band is thinking, ‘Now’s the time to play a major chord.’ Those kinds of accidents do happen...”

Your guitar style underwent a marked change around the time of ‘Overnite Sensation’.

“That was partly because of the rhythm section, and partly because of the equipment I was using. I imagine that anybody’s guitar playing would change if one day your keyboard player was Don Preston, and suddenly the next day it’s George Duke - know what I mean? Or the difference between (drummers) Jimmy Carl Black and Chester Thompson - that certainly made a difference. Or the difference between Roy Estrada and Ton Fowler. When you have a completely different rhythm section with a different musical perspective, you’d be a fool not to take advantage of it.”

So things became tighter?

“Much tighter and harmonically much more interesting because George is a more interesting keyboard player.”

It was you who got George Duke into playing synthesiser, wasn’t it?

“I had to almost strangle him to make him do it! Up to that point, the closest he would get to a synthesiser would be to use an Oberheim ring modulator that he would plug his Fender Rhodes into and every once in a while he would jerk the handle on it and get some sort of a metallic sound out of his Rhodes. It took quite a bit or persuasion to get him to pick up an ARP Odyssey. Also, I knew he had a really nice voice, but it was hard to get him to sing and now he sings all the time.”

There have been many musicians that have gone through the various manifestations of the Mothers and you later bands who have come to prominence. There’s a parallel there perhaps to the Miles Davis bands - almost like a music college or finishing school.

“Well, if you come to it with that attitude, then it’s true - you can derive a lot of information from doing the job. However, most of the musicians look at it as just a way to earn an income. It takes an exceptional musician to work in the band and to really appreciate the type of training and information that is being delivered during rehearsals for the show. So you can either learn a lot of different things in the band, or you can just learn your part, play the gig and pick up your paycheck. I’ve had both kinds.”

You’ve had some remarkable musicians in the band; Steve Vai being a fairly obvious example. But Chester Thompson, Adrian Belew, Scott Thunes, Arthur Barrow…

“Terry Bozio - he was here yesterday for a visit…”

Now you always cite his playing on ‘Hands With A Hammer’ from Vol 3 of ‘You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore’ as a near perfect drum sound.

“That’s true and you know it was recorded with just one of those AKG Dummy Head microphones and a C24 - there’s no close miking on the set at all. It’s all just ambient miking. It’s really a fat-sounding kit.”

If we can move back to that radical change in your guitar sound…

“It also changed because I started playing an SG.”

Was this your custom built one?

“The first one I had was stock, I got it second hand. At a gig in Pheonix, Arizona this guy came up to me after the show with this hand-made SG and he said he would like to sell it to me and I played it and liked it and bought it for $500. As a matter of fact, Dweezil’s guitar roadie was just here and he’s taken it down to get it strung up with really light strings.”

So you could put the difference in your guitar sound down, at least in part, to a new instrument?

“Not just a different instrument, but also different amplification because prior to that time I’d been playing either a Gold Top Les Paul or a Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster, which was a large, fat, three pick-up jazz guitar which really had uncontrollable feedback. I was playing through a Fender amp or an Acoustic amp with a fairly nondescript tone - I just didn’t have enough money to invest in new equipment. But by the early ‘70s I was playing this SG, and I switched over to Marshalls, and started playing through a device that a friend built for me, which had compression, phase shifting and some other little specialities.”

Wasn’t there a control you had fitted to one of your guitars which acted as a sort of parametric eq?

“That came later.”

In the past, you’ve quoted ‘One Size Fits All’ as being your favourite album.

“Well. I think it was probably a good example of what the band with George Duke and Ruth Underwood could do. I think it’s a good sounding album, representing that group.”

Volume 2 of ‘You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore’ features that band live in Helsinki…

“Yep.”

…and the full version of the solo from Inca Roads shows just how dramatic your editing was on the ‘One Size Fits All’ version - where did you pick up your editing technique?

“I started around ‘62, before The Mothers, when I was working in Cucamunga.”

Those were all razor edits - literally cutting up the tape?

“That’s right.”

But everything’s right on the beat. You’d never know that you’re not hearing the complete story.

“I’m a pretty good editor...”

What about your technique of editing together a song from completely different performances - even different bands?

“They come in on the beat!”

I was thinking of the ‘Ship Arriving Too Late’, from the ‘You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore’ series.

“Oh yeah, where it goes from the 84 to the 82 band?”

How much time does an edit like that take?

“Well, it took years. I worked on it for five or six years.”

You’re also a fearsome archivist of your own material…

“I do have a large vault with material in it.”

Any idea how many hours of material it represents in total?

“Heh heh, No [laughs]. There’s mountains of stuff in every format from little five inch reels of quarter inch tape a 1 7/8 IPS all the way up to digital video and all stops in between.”

You’ve also taken live backing tracks and superimposed studio performances on top - for instance, the ‘Sheik Yerbouti’ album...

“Yes, but I’ve gone in the other direction, too. For example, ninety percent of the guitar solos on the ‘Joe’s Garage’ album were from live shows, pasted on studio tracks. In the studio, they called it the ‘Ampex Guitar’ - I had all these quarter-inch tapes of guitar solos that I liked from the ‘79 tour, and when we went into the studio to do ‘Joe’s Garage’, I would just go through my files to see what key a certain solo was in, and just experimentally hit the start button on the playback machine and lay it onto the multi-track.”

Didn’t you have trouble with tuning variation?

“Well, we did that with a VSO. We did have to wiggle the pitch around to make sure it sounded like it was in the right key.”

At one time, the live band used to tune to the vibes as a source of fairly constant pitch, didn’t they?

“Yeah, when we had vibes in the band. Remember, we were on the road long before there were Peterson strobe tuners. If you tuned up to a piano that happened to be somewhere on the stage, there wasn’t any guarantee that the piano itself was in tune. So, for the first five or six years of touring, it was really a crap shoot as to whether you’d be in tune with anything.”

You overdubbed the guitar solo on ‘The Purple Lagoon’ from ‘Live In New York’, because you recorded it on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and had to fill the gap where John Belushi did an act as a Samurai bebop musician.

“Yes, that’s right, although he didn’t do that act in the regular live show. I overdubbed it with a home-made SG through a Pignose amp and an Eventide Harmoniser set at 99.”

Can you remember which guitar you used?

“Yeah, it was the hand made SG.”

How did you come to own the fire-damaged ex-Jimi Hendrix Strat?

“Well, there was this guy named Howard Parker - they called him ‘H’ - who was Hendrix’s roadie, gofer and general assistant. He stayed at our house for a couple of months in the late ‘60s, and he had this guitar which Hendrix had given to him - I thought it was from the Miami concert. He gave it to me and we had it hanging on the wall as a decoration for years and years, and then I met some guys who were capable of putting guitars back together, so I had it done.”

When I spoke to Dweezil he said that you still have the original neck.

“Yeah, somewhere around here…”

Does it have an individual sound?

“Yes, it did have a sound all its own, especially after it was reconstructed, but that sound was not what you would expect from the Hendrix guitar. It didn’t sound like all the Hendrix guitar solos you’ve ever heard. It was a different kind of sound.”

It’s gone through various pick-up transformations as well, hasn’t it?

“Yeah, it used to have a chrome scratchplate and it had, I think, at that time a Barcus Berry in the neck and also a preamp…”

Didn’t you use that guitar on a couple of tracks from the ‘Shut Up And Play Your Guitar’ set?

“If it’s in the liner notes, it’s true, but I can’t remember off hand. I didn’t play it that often because one of the characteristics of that guitar was it liked to feed back unless you were in exactly the right environment where you could stand in exactly the right relationship to the amplifier.”

What was the story behind the 1988 band?

“Actually, it didn’t start off large and get smaller - it started medium, and got large. It was a 12-piece band, and an argument broke out between Scott Thunes and just about everyone else in the band apart from me and Mike Keneally. The others all decided that they hated Scott’s guts; it was very weird.

“We were almost at the end of the European portion of the tour in the early summer of ‘88, and we had other dates booked in the United States - big, outdoor, high-paying gigs, but because most of them refused to go onstage with this guy, I had to cancel them all. There was no time to replace anybody at all, no breaks in the tour to rehearse anybody new, so I just had to break it up.”

Was that one of the formats of the band that you were most happy with?

“WelI I was very happy with it and also the audiences really liked it too, and the reviewers thought it was a great band. It was unique because it combined a very strong five-piece horn section with all kinds of electronic stuff, with effects on the percussion section, on the drums, multiple keyboards - a very interesting blend of this horn harmony and very strange sound-effects.”

I missed seeing the band on that tour. I was on the way to Scotland the day you played Wembley…

“Wembley was the only concert on the tour that got a bad review! Someone wrote that we were all too old to play rock’n’roll. But all the rest of the reviews, even Rolling Stone writing about our performance in New York City, surprisingly gave a good review.”

The resulting live CD of that tour - ‘The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life’ - is testimony to that.

“Think about it, there are no overdubs on that, either. All those little effects and things coming in, that’s just the way it was on the live show.”

You’ve got sampled dog barks and stuff on that - was that the Synclavier?

“Yep.”

Were you generating that from a keyboard?

“There were three stations generating samples: there was Ed Mann, who had this whole vocabulary of dog barks and bubbles and weird shit, then there was Chad Wackerman who had all these strange percussion things hooked up to a big rig, and then there was the Synclavier which I could play when I wasn’t playing the guitar. There was a MIDI link between the other two stations and the Synclavier so that thay could trigger Synclavier samples while something else was going on.”

So you played your parts on keyboard?

“Yes, I sat down and played the keyboard.”

Did you ever try using a MIDI guitar to control the Synclavier?

“Yes, but I couldn’t make it work…”

Was that to do with your playing style?

“Well, I think in order to make it work, the detector only wants to hear the vibrations of a single string, and if you’re not constantly damping and muting and doing all sorts of gyrations, then the detector can’t really read accurate pitch. So if you’re playing on the top E string and you’ve got an A string ringing or something like that, it tends to f*ck things up. So you have to worry about damping the other strings while you’re playing and it’s just a technique that I’m not very good at.”

You pick with a lot of upstrokes…

“It’s just the way I learned.”

A lot of people will pick ‘downstrokes heavy’, but using a lot of upstrokes is fairly unique.

“It’s just the way I learned…”

What’s your attitude towards the guitar now?

“I seldom touch it. I was doing a little overdubbing here in the studio, but I don’t have calluses anymore. In a way, I think I used to be a guitarist, but not any more.”

How do you feel guitar-playing is going at the moment?

“I don’t think there’s much on the street that interests me. I mean, there are certain guys that I admire because they play well and they play musically - I like Jeff Beck and I like Allan Holdsworth and Michael Hedges. These people are all real geniuses at what they do. And I can’t remember the guy’s name - one of the heavy metal groups - I heard him play a solo that was just wonderful - really interesting stuff. But I can never remember the name of the group or the name of the guitar player! I just saw it whizzing past the channels on MTV.”

What interested you about it?

“Well, it was the whole approach to the solo. The tone was great, the intervals were great and it wasn’t the usual thing where a guy will just weedle away on any kind of scale that he thinks he can get away with in the middle of some fast, fuzztone background. This really had some thought to it.”

The Steve Vai-transcribed ‘Frank Zappa Guitar Book’ is amazingly complex-looking stuff...

“It’s even more amazing when you get him to tell you how he did it!”

He said he didn’t slow it down.

“He couldn’t slow it down. He was taking it off a cassette machine.”

He must have an incredible ear…

“Yup. [laughs]”

There’s a song you did called ‘The Jazz Discharge Party Hats’; I heard that when Vai was playing with you, he wrote out your skat-singing vocal part, and then overdubbed it on acoustic guitar.

“That’s right.”

That’s frightening!

“That’s right!”

And was it 100% accurate?

“It’s not 100% accurate, as a matter of fact, because if you play the pitches of his transcription without the vocal, there are certain things that just sound a little bit weird. I’d give it 99%, though. I don’t think there is anybody wandering around that knew they could do something like ‘The Jazz Discharge Party Hats’ unless some other lunatic said, ‘Do it’.

“When you’re transcribing something to publish in a magazine, that’s one thing. But when you’re transcribing it and you know that within a day or so you’re going to be overdubbing on the track, and you’re going to be sight-reading your own transcription, and it’s got to sync up exactly with what’s on the track - that’s when you’ll really know whether you’re a good transcriber or not. But that’s how he did it; he wrote it out, he came in, we turned on the tape, he read it and he did it in two or three takes. He even put in a string-scratch for when I laughed! I went ‘Huh, huh, huh’ and he’s got that little ‘scrape, scrape, scrape’ in there. He nailed everything.”

He got a lot of criticism for doing the big rock thing with Dave Lee Roth and Whitesnake.

“He should be able to do whatever he wants. If he wanted to go country and western he should do that, y’know?”

It’s interesting that not all the members of your bands have been able to read music...

“That’s right; maybe 10% have been readers, but the rest of them all had to learn it like a parrot.”

There seems to be a free exchange between your ‘orchestral’ pieces and your ‘rock band’ pieces. The transfer of ‘The Be-Bop Tango’ on ‘The Yellow Shark’ from band to orchestra is one example...

“Well, look at it this way; they’re pieces. Pieces of music that have harmony, melody and rhythm and some sort of an idea that makes them go, and the rest is just a matter of orchestration.”

How did you acquire your skills as an arranger?

“Trial and error.”

Did you have any formal training in harmony?

“Uh, I had a couple of classes early on. When I was a senior in high school I was an incorrigible student and one of the people in the office decided that maybe I would be socially better adjusted if I was given the opportunity to study something that I was actually interested in. So they arranged for me to go to the junior college to take a harmony course, one hour a week; that lasted for two or three months. I was studying out of the Walter Piston harmony book and I found it really boring. I probably finished up with a D grade, or something like that. There wasn’t anything there that I thought was going to be useful for what I wanted to do. I didn’t like the sound of the musical examples, I didn’t like all this f****ing Roman numeral horseshit that you have to deal with. Still, I guess it was better than putting up with the stupid classes they had at the high school.”

Is there a way to teach music in a constructive and ‘student friendly’ way?

“I think that it’s kinda useless to teach it, because what are you going to do? A person gets out of school, how’s he going to earn a living? In order to make money doing something that you call music, what you wind up doing to earn a living is not music - it’s shit! So why bother to teach them anything? It just seems so redundant to teach composition or harmony, when the people who will make the most money will come out of a metal shop or something like that, do something sub-mongoloid and make a fortune out of it.”

So you still stand by your quote of a few years back when you said that the average American wouldn’t know good music if it came up and bit them on the ass?

“That’s right. But I mean, it’s not their fault because they haven’t been exposed to anything other than the commercial stuff that is the non-stop stream of shit that comes out of the media.”

No ready solution, then?

“Well, how can you draw a conclusion about music unless you’ve heard a wide range of it? I think that the most useful thing that could be done in school is to put more emphasis on music appreciation and make sure that people, whether they’re going to become musicians or not, get to hear music from different cultures, music from different eras, different periods of classical music - something so that thay have some kind of a home base of knowledge from which they can make personal decisions.

“The cost of the music education course is so small compared to what it costs to buy new uniforms for the football team and the rest of the shit - and yet most schools in the United States don’t even teach it any more.”

Really?

“That’s right. I mean, I was lucky that I was in school at a time in American history where they not only had music appreciation courses, but had record libraries at the school. Even in the little towns where I lived you could go in and have access to a large portion of the Folkways library. If you wanted to listen to music from Tibet, or wherever, just go in there and find out what it is... Not any more.”

There was a story about you finding something in a harmony book that conventional wisdom said should never be done and you tried it and liked what you heard…

“It wasn’t a harmony text book, it was a counterpoint book. It was on the first page and what it said was, ‘You may not write the following intervals.’ The intervals were F and A, a major third, expanding to E and B, a fifth. It also said you could not write G and B, a major third, expanding to F and C, a fifth. So I played these things on the piano and said ‘Why? Why can’t we do this? This sounds great!'”

And so you closed the book?

“Yeah - I mean, I figured that if on the first page they were telling me that I would have to be going against something my ear immediately liked, then why should I learn the rest of that stuff?”

Tell us about the projects you’re working on at the moment.

“Well, there’s ‘Civilisation: Phaze III’ and the idea for that is to put it on stage as an ‘Opera Pantomime’. All the music and the sound effects will be included in the compact disc, so what you’d see on stage would be a dance pantomime manifestation of the action and the music.

“It’s due to be performed in Vienna in May of ‘94, but I’m still waiting to find out whether it’s actually going to happen. We got a fax from them yesterday - there’s been a meeting between the organiser and three of his partners who are talking about financing the thing, but I don’t have a contract with them yet. The CD is already done and finished, but I don’t know about a release date yet. If the performance in Vienna comes off on time, then I’ll hold the CD up until February of ‘94. But if they’re not going to stage it, then I’ll probably put it out in September.

“Another project I’m doing is called ‘The Lost Episodes’, which is a collection of unreleased studio cuts - quite early ones. Some of them come even from before Cucamunga. And that includes film soundtrack, ‘Run Home Slow’.

“And what I’m working on right at the moment is a Synclavier album called ‘Dance Me This’, which is designed to be used by modern dance groups. It’s probably not going to come out until next year.”

Happy birthday, FZ.

The Art Of Arboretum

2010-11-22T06:23:00.000-08:00

While I was recording 'Arboretum' ideas for a cover image kept running around inside my head. I wanted something that represented the music and acted as a suitable illustration for the title. We did quite a few mock-ups along the way and, seeing as these are unlikely to surface elsewhere, I thought I'd share some of the design concepts that didn't make it through to the final cut.

My first idea was a sort of 'secret garden' where a gate in a wall was open, revealing a woodland beyond. A bit like this...

The album title would have been on the wall to the gateway's right hand side. The back cover would have been a similar picture but taken at night with the gate closed. I abandoned this idea after a visit to a bookshop where I found similar pictures on quite a few book covers. The cliché alarms went off and I went back to the drawing board!

Next, a visit to an actual arboretum yielded a picture of a really lovely tree with the sun glowing behind it. We decided to digitally enhance the picture and tried out this format...

I liked it, but it didn't quite 'make it' if you see what I mean. The final blow was struck when we found out that the arboretum didn't permit the use of images of their trees for commercial purposes without charge. What can I tell you? The budget was tight...

Next, I went through loads of pics of trees that we'd been taking for months and decided that I'd mess around with a few. This heralded in the 'reflection series' where I took an image of trees reflected in water and messed around with the image. At this point I knew I wanted a sunrise and moonrise theme...

Sunrise...

Moonrise...

And variations...

I decided that, although we were going along the right lines, the resulting images were too sinister. I was going for 'mystical' or even 'magical' and so I had to look again. I came across an image, taken ages ago on Solsbury Hill (as in the Peter Gabriel song) and began to mess with it.

After a lot of trial and error with Photoshop, I came up with twin images for sun and moonrise...

These images seemed to fit with the music and so it was just a question of finding a suitable canvas and font. I tried to make the lettering on the front of the album look like twisted wire – a sort of 'wood and wire' concept – and ended up with this for the front...

And this for the back cover...

So there you have it – a DIY album cover! All the original pics were taken by Carol Farnworth.

Simply Beautiful

2010-11-03T08:33:00.000-07:00

I once had the pleasure of attending a recital given by the classical guitar maestro John Williams. Around half way through, JW began to play a student piece – something I had myself studied during a brief flirtation with the classical guitar back in the 1980s. At first I couldn't work out why a world-renowned virtuoso would be playing something from the Grade 4 repertoire. It seemed a bit odd somehow...

Afterwards, having had time to think a bit, it all made perfect sense: there's nothing wrong with anyone playing simple music beautifully, irrespective of their perceived 'ranking' in the world's hierarchy. For one thing, there would have been students present in the audience who were studying the piece and who would have benefited greatly by watching an acknowledged master interpret it.

But to many, 'simple' means 'demeaning'.

It's probably something that many of us forget. In many ways, we want to take on some complex, difficult music to mark out our territory – 'Look at me, I can play this...'. And it's quite probable that the real reason behind it all is that our own insecurity demands it. An opportunity to psychologically rise above the rank and file and take up residence in the exclusive and hallowed domain of technical brilliance.

John Williams' performance that night made me realise that the real trick is to be at peace with your own level of musical accomplishment at which point you are truly, spiritually free to play music without any consideration given to its technical demands.

And in so many ways, that state of mind is more difficult to reach than any advanced technique...

Digital Downloads – The Future Or A Musical Limbo?

2010-10-25T05:26:00.000-07:00

Debate is rife in the record industry at present as to how people are going to buy the music they want to listen to in future. Opinions differ, but the only certainty is that no-one actually knows...

The Pink Floyd's Nick Mason went on record the other day saying that when his band was formed it was a much more cut and dried affair; if you wanted to hear The Floyd play 'The Dark Side Of The Moon', for instance, you either bought a concert ticket and went along hoping they'd play it or you purchased the vinyl. You might be lucky enough to hear it on radio if you were happy with the somewhat Russian Roulette nature of that medium, but that was about it.

Now, of course, the options are seemingly endless; digital music is everywhere and a perfect fit for the fast food generation. But whether people will ever be at peace with owning something that has no actual physical presence in their lives is another question.

I attended an interesting talk with bookshop mogul Tim Waterstone the other evening and he said that people have been predicting the death of books and magazines for almost as long as he has been in the business and yet, despite dedicated digital readers like Amazon's Kindle, books are still selling well and giving no sign of becoming an endangered species any time soon.

I'll hazard a guess that it's going to be the same for music; despite the convenience and instant gratification of digital downloads, there is a generation out there who still prefer their music in physical form. After all, something that you can't hold in your hands might just be perceived as being of little real value; we always had the option to copy LPs to cassette and yet the question of piracy has only really become a serious concern in this digital age.

So is it possible for the recording music industry to move forward without its silver spinning discs? Evolution without revolutions? I somehow doubt whether change – when it comes and whatever guise it takes – will be as radical as some pundits believe.

It's Alive!

2010-09-20T07:25:00.000-07:00

Today sees the official release of my new album 'Arboretum'. It's been a long slog and much has happened since I last mentioned its recording in this blog.

So basically, in order to give you a brief summary; the last session was held on May 14th and this was to lay down the strings on a track called 'Almost Lost At Sea' (see the video in the last blog). We recorded a passable string section, but also captured the MIDI so that when the album was sent for mastering at Adam Crute's studio he had optimum control. In fact Adam was a real star and ended up replacing the string sample I'd recorded with a far more realistic one and the result is amazing. Thank you Mr C!

After mastering, the album was sent up to The Guitar Label HQ in Perthshire and the download site was organised.

At present, it's possible to download high quality WAV files from my website order page at www.davidmead.net/order – some MP3 files are included in the download too so you can pop them straight into the iPod of your choice and begin listening.

I also wrote out three of the tracks in TAB and these are available as a download, too. The tracks are 'Almost Lost At Sea', 'Come Find Me' and 'Waterfalling'. There will also be three short tutorial videos available soon which will show me taking you through the more difficult sections in glorious hi-def video.

So there it is, then: after nearly two years in the making 'Arboretum' is now available. I'm hopeful that I will soon be putting together some live dates so that I can get out on the road and play the material in concert. You can hear four of the tracks now in the player below and download a free track by visiting my website...

Almost Lost At Sea...

2010-09-18T07:06:00.000-07:00

I can't remember when it was that I first began to document the development of my new album 'Arboretum'. I think it might even be around two years ago – time flies, dunnit?

In any case, the album is now finished and available as a digital download via my website at www.davidmead.net/orders. You can download a free track and listen to four sample songs, too.

I thought I'd celebrate the launch by posting a video of a piece on the new album called 'Almost Lost At Sea'. Rather than showing me sitting there playing the track, the music acts as a soundtrack for the story that inspired me to write the song – in the manner of many Hollywood teaser-trailers.

In any case, I hope you like it...

Having An 'Off Day'...

2010-02-16T07:53:00.000-08:00

Let's face it; we can't expect to be on form 100% of the time when we're involved in something as complex as making music. Especially when it comes down to recording an album – after all, posterity has a long and rather unforgiving memory...

I had a studio session for my new album recently where I was down to record one of the most demanding pieces I've written so far. Why demanding? Well, it involves playing over virtually the whole fretboard so there are a lot of position changes, it's quite fast (138 BPM, if you're interested), it changes key in the middle and loads of other yippy-eye-oh-fol-de-diddle-all-the-day type of fingerstyle skulduggery. I'd deliberately booked a whole day in the studio because I knew I wanted to get it right and if that meant doing 25 takes to get a good one, then fair enough.

As it turned out, I discovered quite early on in the session that I wasn't having a good day. Having practised the track beforehand until my fretboard screamed for mercy, I was sure I was ready to record it... Trouble is, I just wasn't 'in the zone' mentally. My mistake was to plough on with grim determination; by the end of the afternoon I was literally playing takes with gritted teeth and, as I've said in most of my books, if there is any tension in your body, you're like a machine beginning to seize up and you're definitely not going to be capable of putting in a good performance.

If you want the full list of excuses (and if you don't, please skip this paragraph) then I could say that my car had exhibited a worrying tendency not to start earlier in the week; my computer – which I obviously rely on for a great deal of my work – was beginning to behave rather strangely and I was sufficiently distracted to the point where I couldn't get that sublime head-to-heart-to-hands connection necessary for putting in a good reading of the piece concerned.

I could have saved myself a great deal of soul-searching angst if I had remembered some very good advice given to me once by a very well-known musician: 'Everyone has bad days,' he told me. 'The trick is to save yourself a lot of grief by recognising that you're not on form early on in the day, forgetting about it and going down the pub instead.' He was right. There's always another day – it never does you any good to beat yourself up over circumstances that you haven't much control over.

Battle will recommence at the end of this week... and this time, I know I'll nail it!

Nailed It...

2010-01-25T06:11:00.000-08:00

Now I'd be the first to admit that I take girlie care of my fingernails, particularly on my right hand (the left hand nails are cut back very short). The reason for this obviously has a lot to do with playing fingerstyle acoustic guitar, but it also has a lot to do with hand position...

Let me explain: my right hand tends to adopt the 'classical position' when I play. This means that my fingers are virtually perpendicular to the strings, whereas a lot of fingerstylists tend to angle their right hands towards the bridge. This means that my fingernails have to be quite long on that hand – I'm not absolutely sure why this is, but you can be sure that I've experimented with all lengths and settled on one. Trouble is, it happens to be the one that leaves the nails most vulnerable to accidental breakage!

Around a week ago, I had another session for my album and spent the day making sure my right hand didn't do anything heavy duty enough to break a nail. About an hour before the session, I noticed that – inexplicably – I'd managed to tear the nail on my middle finger. I still don't know how I managed it because my nails are actually very strong, but whatever... I was in trouble.

Sure, I can play with my fingertips, but if you're in the middle of making an album and want an even consistency of sound over all the tracks, altering your right hand technique temporarily causes more problems than it solves. So I was stuck. In fact, I had to resort to the oldest remedy in the book: glue. A healthy dollop of glue on the nail, hastily dried underneath a lightbulb, got me through the session without further damage (or sonic irregularity) but I have since had to cut the offender down to size.

I'm investigating acrylics as a solution to nail damage as players I know who use them tell me that the nails retain and almost Wolverine level of strength with only a bi- or tri-weekly application. It looks like things are about to get even girlier!

The Worst Gig Ever...

2009-12-29T07:46:00.000-08:00

It's completely true that whenever musicians get together, conversations often begin, 'I did this gig once...' followed by a tale excerpted from the many mishaps that have occurred whilst on the road. I have to say that it's all delivered with relish – somehow, it's generally acknowledged that these personal disasters just increase your general ability to cope. A kind of 'If it doesn't kill you, it's making you stronger' philosophy.

Well, I've had some experiences on the road that I wouldn't care to repeat in any great hurry. The worst were definitely way back in the mists of time when I was still working in a semi-pro dance band. I won't mention the name of the group just in case you were in the audience one night and are still bearing a grudge...

Anyway, we arrived at a venue one night and asked if there was somewhere we could change. We were trying hard, you see, and actually took different clothes to change in to for our time on stage. In my case – and remember please that this was the 1970s – my stage apparel consisted of white Levi jeans (which might have even been flared) and some sort of groovy T-shirt with, ahem, cowboy boots. Yes, I know: I have since sought help.

In any case, the manager of the 'joint' directed us to the gents' toilet as a place we could use as a dressing room. I think a couple of us went to get ready while I went to set up my gear. When my bandmates came out they warned me to be careful when I went in to change because the floor was 'very wet'. Now I won't go into detail about what the exact composition of the liquid on the floor was, but I'm thinking that your imagination can probably do a fine job.

So I had to change into these tight jeans (look, I was going through my Jeff Beck period, ok?) and boots whilst standing on a toilet so I didn't accidentally transfer any of the floor's 'wetness' to my clothes. I believe I drove home still wearing the white Levi's that night, not wishing to repeat the experience of the high wire balancing act I'd had to endure earlier.

So what exactly did I learn from this experience? Well, the next time we played that venue, I left the cowboy boots at home and took a pair of wellies instead...

Number One Or Number Two?

2009-12-18T07:14:00.000-08:00

I should think that just about everyone who gives a damn knows about the controversy surrounding this year's Crizmuz number one: will it be Joe McElderry or Rage Against The Machine? The pro-RATM campaigners on Facebook want to make a stand against the predictability of another of 'Simon Cowell's X Factor karaoke puppets' taking the slot, but is it a point that's actually worth making?

Before the dreaded X Factor came along Crizmuz number ones were always a mix of saccharine-laden sentimental hogwash or ludicrous kiddie songs and I don't think anyone took them at all seriously apart from the record companies who were, as usual, thankful just to see their profits soar. Then, when Cowell took over, the whole thing became organised like a military operation – the X Factor final is always positioned just before Crizmuz and, after three months of intense TV exposure, the winner is generally a dead cert to take the top slot. It's sheer marketing genius; let's face it, with that kind of exposure, just about anything could be number one – and Simon Cowell says that the Facebook crowd are being 'cynical'? I would have said that it's more 'mischievous' than anything else and if the Facebook anarchists are successful then it might prove that not everyone likes being manipulated. But it will be a short-lived victory – the whole thing is set to be even larger next time around; for 2010 I hear that Cowell has his eyes on an internet campaign with an X Factor final in a stadium somewhere...

So even if this year's battle is successful, I don't think it's a winnable war, in the long term, to be honest...

The Boyle Effect

2009-12-04T07:33:00.000-08:00

I have to say that I greeted the news that Susan Boyle's CD has set records for mega-sales on both sides of the Atlantic with a broad smile. Why? Well, people who know me well would fight each other to be the first to tell you that I'm not at all optimistic, generally speaking; but I think that this phenomenon might just send a very important message out to record companies and music moguls alike...

The message would read something like this... You can create boy bands, girl bands and airbrushed teen divas (of both sexes) all you like, but every so often the public is going to come face-to-face with raw talent and find that it's actually superior to your short-term media sensations in almost every respect.

If it is indeed true that the public gets the music industry that it deserves then surely Susan's success – not only as a performer but as a fully saleable entity – has got to represent some kind of turning point? I've said before how I miss the innocence of the 1960s and early 1970s where anybody could get into a band as long as they had the required talent to play their instrument to an acceptable level. It didn't matter what you looked like or even how many years you had on the clock – if you were good, you were in!

When I interviewed Eric Clapton for Guitarist magazine back in 1994 I asked him what it was like to be a musician in rock's formative years and he told me: "Well, anybody that had any idea of how to play any instrument could just about hold their own because there was no competition - there was no one around. There were only a handful of bands, and anyone that could play Sam and Dave was OK. When I started out, Stax and Motown were in the clubs and anyone who could play those songs, any drummer who could play that feel, or anyone who could approach that, was a master."

Doesn't that sound like a healthier music scene to you? The only filters were talent and dedication rather than the whims of music industry tzars with their eyes set on another get rich quick gambit.

Realistically, I don't expect the industry to change overmuch – but if Ms Boyle's success makes them think a bit it will be enough for me.

If You Go Down To The Woods Today...

2009-11-18T07:26:00.000-08:00

We're probably all aware about the various campaigns across our planet to conserve and preserve nature and most of them are absolutely right and proper. However, some, fighting under the general banner 'save the rainforests', are, methinks, taking things a tad too far...

In case you hadn't heard, the Gibson guitar corporation – arguably one of the most famous makers of musical instruments in the world – was raided yesterday by the feds; and they were looking for... wood. Yep, wood. Now, I admit that I don't know the ins and outs of this particular instance, but I gather that it revolves around whether some Madagascan rosewood the company are (allegedly) using was imported legally. It's a grey area, apparently, as the Madagascan forests are of prime concern to conservationists, but the country's new president seems to have upset the apple-cart by proclaiming the export of this very sought-after wood perfectly legal. Or something. I'm not really here to speculate on this case in particular, more the clamp down on the use of so-called 'naughty wood' in the manufacture of guitars in general.

I've watched from a distance as the whole debate of what you can and can not use as a bodywood these days has raged and, somewhat predictably, turned into a bureaucratic mess of muddled thinking. Fair enough, let's stop the illegal cutting down of trees in South America by legislating against its use in furniture and musical instruments – but what about instruments that were made well before the conservationists began to raise the red flag? I personally own an instrument which contains Brazilian Rosewood – the naughtiest of all naughty woods – but it was cut down prior to 1941 and I have a certificate to prove it. Trouble is it's only effective in Europe. If I want to take the guitar to the US I have to apply for a certificate so that I can get the guitar through customs without having it seized – and that takes 90 days, apparently. The onus is on the owner to prove that the wood used in his or her instrument is legal and, as you can imagine, that's a tough call in many instances.

The interesting thing is that violinists, cellists, viola and double bass players all use bows made from a very rare and extremely naughty wood (pernambuco from Brazil) and at first, the 'wood police' were on standby to pounce on any unsuspecting orchestra's string section with sap-lust in their eyes. Trouble is, they were outnumbered and, realising that they would have to seize virtually every single bow on the planet, decided to give this particular wood immunity. Not fair, right?

So, your 1958 Martin Dreadnought with Brazilian rosewood back and sides will be impounded unless you can prove that the guy who cut the tree it was made from had legal rights to do so, but the symphony orchestra walks straight through customs without a care. See what I mean about a bureaucratic mess?

It needs sorting... soon. Guitar manufacturers are doing their bit by sourcing sustainable woods but vintage and 'old wood' guitars are never going to go away and so they need some sort of agreement here, too. And what are the wood police going to do with all their impounded instruments? Burn them? It makes me shudder to think about it...

Studio Log: Days Three and Four

2009-11-05T06:47:00.001-08:00

I need to fill in a bit of background to this studio log entry. Bear with me!

Sometimes a composition takes years to come to maturity. A long time ago, I'm guessing that it would be around three years ago, I went over to the studio to record some music that I hoped to punt to an agency who deals with film music. One of the compositions I took with me back then proved too hard to 'let go'; I felt it had a bit more life to it than to see it spend its days waiting for a director to pick it up and use it for some anonymous purpose. I came over all possessive, y'see...

So when I knew I was recording a new CD, I immediately thought of this particular tune and how I should seize the opportunity to at last give it wings and let it fly. But its metamorphosis wasn't quite done, because when I said I wanted to use it, producer Martin Holmes said he thought I should play it on classical guitar as per the original session and not on steel string as I had intended. The thing is, I've been playing the tune on steel string for the past three years or so and so I had got used to hearing it that way, but Martin's major point of reference was those original sessions.

Now, never let it be said that I don't respond to ideas and so I practised the piece on nylon string (an Admira Elena-E) and went over to the studio to record it. It turns out that Martin was right; the fragility and vulnerability that the classical guitar brings to the piece breathes new life into it.

So far so good, but there was another element on those original sessions. Back then, I was in the studio with a double bass player called Ken Knussen, someone I've known since we were at school together. We both had professional music in our sights back then but Ken went into classical music and is now a very busy freelance player. So I called Ken and he was able to fit a session for me into his incredibly hectic schedule.

We haven't mixed the recording yet, but it's safe to say that the piece which has the working title 'Come Find Me' has changed yet again, Ken's bass offering another dimension, not to mention a new counter-melody.

I'm wrestling with the idea of expanding it still further by adding strings, but we're adopting an 'acoustic only' policy and so it's quite likely that we'll be wrangling some faded-in guitar chords to sound like a violin section instead.

I think it will sound grand and can't wait to get back over to the studio to add the final touches.

Giving In To McMusic?

2009-10-29T08:41:00.000-07:00

I just thought I'd air something that's been bugging me for a couple of weeks...

Reading how a daily newspaper dubbed one of the starlets in that dodgy firmament called 'pop music' as being 'brave' because she sang one verse of her new single (and mimed to the rest) live on TV recently was enough to induce a diva-sized rant from me and several of my brothers in arms. But this was just a single incident; surely the insidious practice of allowing artists to mime in a so-called 'live' situation has gone far enough?

I have friends who have turned up to gigs where they have been booked to support some of pop's finest only to find that there are absolutely no facilities which would allow them to plug in and play. In other words, miming is dangerously near to being accepted as the norm, in pop circles at least. What's more, the public (bless 'em) don't seem to feel in the slightest short changed by the fact that they have bought a concert ticket – not cheap, by anyone's standards – in order to listen to a pre-recorded performance.

And the Musicians' Union are sorta being quiet about it, too. Sure, they make the occasional growling noise, but never seem to actually bite.

I guess all this self-righteous indignation on my part comes from the fact that I know loads of people who put in many hours practising and working incredibly hard to gain their chops in order to go in front of an audience and play. They overcome nervousness and fear – stage fright, if you will – in order to do the job they love and wouldn't dream of taking the easy avenue by resorting to the artifice of let's pretend.

I don't see a resolution on the horizon, either; not while people are prepared to accept McMusic instead of true artistry...

OK. Rant over.

Another Day, Then...

2009-10-13T08:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was another day spent at the recording studios for my new album – and it turned out to be a bit of an epiphany...

Let's begin at the beginning. I was booked into 'The Holmestead' (as it is called) to record a track with the working title 'Lullaby' with my producer and engineer Martin Holmes at the controls. For this I had taken the guitar that the tune had been written on, a Yamaha LLX500C. Now this is the guitar that I used to record my previous CD 'Nocturnal' in full, with the exception of one track where I used an Admira classical guitar. In other words, I had the fullest confidence in it to do a fine job.

After the usual span of time we always spend faffing about with microphones and making sure that I am 'studio-proof' which means that I have to empty my pockets of everything that might jingle or jangle and show up on mic and I also have to take off my watch because the wristband makes the occasional noise as I move my hand. (Add to this the fact that I have to remember not to wear anything with zips, buttons or rivets and it's a little like going through airport security! But it's all in the name of art...)

After the traditional inaugural mug of tea, we set about going for the first take and I think we both sensed that something wasn't quite 'right'. The last time I was over at the studio we recorded a video of another track (see blog entry below) and it had been easy; after about four takes we had it in the can. But 'Lullaby' was proving a bit difficult to get down. I knew it was an awkward piece to play in certain sections – I have this nasty habit of writing things that stretch my technique a little, but that's how you progress, isn't it?

After one of those takes where just about everything that can go wrong actually did, we decided to adjourn for coffee and a chat. I said that it shouldn't happen that you can record a track in a problem-free single take despite the added pressure of knowing that the whole thing was going down on video like we did with 'Unseen Sunlight' and yet have trouble with the next piece where silly little glitches were showing up all over the place.

Now, I know that it's a bad workman who blames his tools, but the only real difference between this and the previous session was the guitar I was using. For the video I used a Fylde Falstaff – surely it can't make that much difference? Or can it? We decided to do some checks and sure enough, when we compared the sound of the two guitars, there's no doubt that the Fylde sounds much better than the LLX – in fact I think both Martin and I were both a little shocked by how much difference there was. Even listening back to a raw, unmixed take that I did a while ago, the Fylde sounded like vintage Rioja and there was no way we were going to be able to achieve that necessary consistency of sound without using it exclusively for the rest of the sessions.

I think the thing we both previously noticed as being 'wrong' was simply the fact that there was something lacking in the quality of sound and it was affecting my performance. In the act of struggling so hard to get a good sound out of the Yamaha, I was losing my 'vision' of the piece as a whole and making stupid rookie mistakes as a result.

So we decided to throw in the towel and cancel the session with the intention of using the Fylde when we resume recording. It means I have to re-learn around six pieces on a different guitar – which doesn't sound like too much of a big deal, but the Fylde has a wider fretboard and so all the pieces will need a little re-orienteering. Then we should be good to go and I think the album will sound 100% better as a result. The proof, of course, will be what happens at the next session...

Watch this space!

The Silver Screen...

2009-10-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

As a sort of sequel to September's 'Making The Video' blog, I thought I'd follow through and actually provide a link to the finished article.

Now it has to be said that anything you upload to You Tube has to go through a process of compression imposed by the site itself which has the effect of mashing the quality of both audio and picture. The video itself was shot in hi-def and the audio recorded at DVD resolution – 24bit 96dB – and consequently a humungous size. But by the time it's been through the masher, it's a relatively small file, but a lot of the original finesse has been somewhat pished away!

Of course I'm being defensive! Anyway, here's the video to 'Unseen Sunlight' – enjoy!

Inspiration: Where Do You Find It?

2009-09-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

I've always been fascinated by the idea of where exactly the idea for a song begins. I've had the great fortune to speak to many great songwriters over the years and have often asked if such-and-such a composition can be traced back to its origins – and frustratingly, the answer is usually the same: no one knows!

I'll give you an example; when I interviewed Pink Floyd's David Gilmour for Guitarist magazine a few years ago, I asked him about 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' and he told me that the song began with the band jamming in a rehearsal studio and the famous four note 'chime' just 'falling out of my guitar...'. Apparently something in those four notes reminded Roger Waters of their fallen son, Syd Barrett and a piece of prog history began to form then and there.

Singer-songwriter James Taylor insists that he is merely a conduit for his songs and that they come from somewhere outside him, whilst other people I've spoken to will go from the mundane 'it started with a collision of two chords and then the hard work began to turn that idea into a whole piece' to the mystical 'I literally woke up one morning with the melody complete in my head. I don't know how it got there...'

Possibly the most humorous comment was from Peter Frampton, talking about one particularly inspired day of songwriting: 'I wrote 'Show Me The Way' in the morning and 'Baby I Love Your Way' just as the sun was setting... I'm still trying to work out what I had for breakfast!'

For my own part, I've just returned from a week in Cornwall and naturally I took a guitar with me (I'm finishing some pieces for my new album and so I can't afford to be sans guitar for too long at present). One morning a whole middle section of a composition I've been working on just happened; I just played it, whole and complete like I'd known it all my life – and I'll be darned if I can put into words what kind of cerebral process brought it into being. One thing I suspect was that with views from our rented cottage like this one...

...it's actually hard not to be inspired!

Studio Log: Day Two – Making The Video...

2009-09-10T07:07:00.000-07:00

It might seem a bit of an odd thing to do: making a video of a track before the actual recording sessions for the album itself have actually started. But my rationale was two fold:

1) Why not?

2) Never underestimate the power of You Tube

So off to the studio this morning in order to sit on a stool in front of a hi-def video camera to shoot some footage for a new composition of mine called 'Unseen Sunlight'.

Now, for the technically-minded, the video was shot 'live'; that is to say that I was actually playing and not miming to a backing track as is the norm in a lot of promotional videos you see online. It's a case of 'what you see is what you get' with this video. So this means that we didn't record the audio via the camera, rather it was picked up by two mics and the direct signal from my Headway FEQ pick-up inside the Fylde Falstff guitar and sent off to a hard disk via some unfathomable electronics. Video and audio will be synced by some more studio magic in the mixing suite later on.

The two mics serve an obvious purpose – stereo audio; but we also include some of the direct feed from the piezo in the mix so that the bass 'speaks' faster. Bass frequencies are notoriously lazy and tend not to do too much until you're about six feet away from the guitar. You can get around this by a little ambient miking – that is having another pair of stereo mics further away in the studio, but if you're shooting a video and space is limited then it's better not to invite the added possibility of outside noise creeping in to the mix. The piezo signal is immediate as it comes straight from the strings' passage across the bridge and so, when it's mixed back to the mic signal, voila! Instant good, solid bass.

I'm sometimes asked how to cope with 'red light fever' – the condition where something you can play in your sleep suddenly becomes like climbing Everest on stilts when someone shouts "We're rolling!". If I knew a sure-fire way of overcoming it, I'd speak up, but I find that you just have to try to focus on the music and 'blank out' the fact that you're in the somewhat artificial environs of a recording studio.

In any case, after a couple of takes to 'settle in and find my muse' (ahem) we had a video. And when it's mixed, cut and edited (and they've put all the special effects in that I asked for) it'll be up on You Tube as a trailer for things to come.

Software Vs Hardware

2009-08-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I had a reputation as an inveterate 'fiddler' when it came to guitars. I just couldn't stop tweaking, changing pick-ups being my favourite ploy. In fact, when I bought a guitar from a well-known luthier once he said to me, 'And don't you dare change those pick-ups!' as I left his workshop. He knew me and my DIY habit well, y'see...

The thing is, now I don't know why I did it. I must have spent a fortune on replacement pick-ups back then: Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio, Paul Reed Smith – all these guys are richer because of me. I was looking for something, but I'm not quite sure what because my experience since then has taught me that a good player can get a good sound out of even the most average instrument. It's not the gear, it's the player, after all.

I sometimes see it in students I've taught, though; that idea that if they could get hold of a very expensive instrument, effects unit or amplifier then all their problems would somehow go away. After all, isn't it easier to play great blues guitar on a great blues guitar? The answer, in case you're wondering, is 'no'; it's certainly no easier, but it's arguably more pleasurable and I think that's the answer to the whole conundrum. We invest more in peripherals or changing instruments because of the way it makes us feel as opposed to the way it makes us play.

So if walking on stage with a vintage Strat makes you feel better about being there and has the knock-on effect of making you play better then it's worth the investment. But it's a heck of a lot cheaper to adopt the mindset that the majority of your investment ought to be directed at your playing, rather than your gear!

The Les Paul – Object Of Desire!

2009-08-14T05:59:00.000-07:00

With the passing of Les Paul, I thought I'd offer a few personal reminiscences concerning the instrument he created...

When I was a kid, owning a Les Paul was very, very high on my 'to do' list. I wasn't particularly interested in Strats or Teles or even acoustic guitars; I just wanted a Les Paul. I even had pictures of people playing them taped to my bedroom wall!

This was around the dawn of the 1970s and it was still very hard to find anything with either Gibson or Fender on the headstock out in the provinces where I lived. If you were after the real thing you had to travel to London, which wasn't particularly difficult for me, seeing as I spent a few years at school there. And so it was that I became one of the all-time guitar clichés: a kid with his nose pressed against the various windows of guitar shops on Denmark Street and Charing Cross Road. A friend of mine and I would make a regular lunchtime pilgrimage to those shops and dream of the day when we'd actually get to pick one up, let alone own it!

When I left school I got a job and saved hard for an electric guitar. Alas, a Gibson was beyond my means and so I opted for a Shaftesbury Les Paul copy in black instead. It took me three very hard months of saving, but eventually I went over to a music shop in Staines, Middlesex and put the money down. I can still remember arriving home with my new pride and joy – the shop had thrown in a rose-covered guitar strap and I didn't even care that it wasn't very rock'n'roll. I was in love...

The trouble was, I didn't have an amplifier. That had to be saved for separately and took me another gruelling few months. Meanwhile, my only recourse was to travel to my fellow window shopper school friend's house to use his – and he lived around 40 miles away!

I played a couple of gigs with the guitar and it sounded good enough, but not like the 'real thing'. At the time, I didn't understand why, believing it must be my lack of chops – not knowing that a plywood body and a pair of cheap humbuckers are never really going to do the same job as solid mahogany, maple and Gibson's overall finesse.

When my fortunes changed a little and I was at last able to upgrade, I still couldn't afford a Gibson Les Paul and so I settled for an SG for £150 from one of the same shops in London that had a groove in their window where my nose used to fit. It was a nice guitar, but it still wasn't a Les Paul.

In the ensuing years, I went through many guitars, bands and phases. There was a jazz archtop phase, a Strat phase, then another Strat phase and so on. Fast forward to 2001 and I was in the Guitarist magazine offices one day when a Les Paul Standard arrived for review. We bonded. I bought it. So after years and years of pining for a 'real one' I now have one sitting in my closet waiting for me to get over my current 'acoustic phase'.

One of the other cases in there contains the original black Shaftesbury Les Paul copy. It might not be a real one, but it carries a lot of sentimental weight, believe me!

RIP Les – and thank you.

Clone Wars

2009-08-06T05:05:00.000-07:00

I don't usually follow links posted on social networking sites that inform me 'If you like THIS GUY then check out THIS OTHER GUY' but this morning I succumbed. What I found when I got there was that THIS OTHER GUY was so similar to THIS GUY that I had to ask the question, 'why?'. This was far beyond being influenced by someone – this was actually trying to be that person, lock, stock and barrel!

Perhaps it's a thing that we all find ourselves thinking when we first try setting foot on that unstable and perilous landscape that is the music biz. If we follow in the footsteps of another artist, then we too might find a way – grab a hold of the comet's tail of their success, so to speak.

It might be that this is the thought process which has fuelled the abundant 'tribute band' scene. The would-be clones have found themselves a home, satisfied to rent the applause from their audience without ever really owning or truly deserving it.

It troubles me, though, I have to say. It's not just prevalent in the music business, either; next time you go into a book store, check out how many titles on the shelves are obvious clones of 'The Da Vinci Code'. Even the covers look similar...

Maybe this actually answers my own question: people copy successful artists and writers because there's a living to be made from doing so. But if the results are just super-diluted facsimiles of worthy originals then, to me, there's no point.

Of course, we have to question a marketplace that actively encourages style piracy – but the morals and attitudes of publishers and record companies is another thing entirely!

Voodoo...

2009-07-29T03:07:00.000-07:00

While I was working for Guitarist magazine, we coined the expression 'Guitar Voodoo' for when we thought a manufacturer was, shall we say, trying to push things a little with his claims for a particular product. These would include certain products which, when retro-fitted to either an electric or acoustic instrument would apparently have some sort of beneficial effect on its tone…

…And most of it was complete bull****!

So, working in that environment kinda encourages a cynical overview of the music manufacturing industry in some respects. You're certainly not taken in too easily, anyway.

So when it came time for me to think about changing the bridge pins (the plastic 'plugs' on an acoustic guitar bridge that wedge the strings in place) for purely cosmetic reasons, I was a little bit wary when I began to read the claims made for different types of pin. There are, for instance, ebony pins and ones made from brass, synthetic bone, real bone, mammoth bone (I'm not kidding) and various other stuff, too. In virtually all cases, there are claims about what this change will do to your sound. In fact, the claims are usually directly proportionate to the cost of the product – the more expensive they are, the better they sound. Allegedly.

So I bought a set of Tusq bridge pins for around ten quid; like I say, my reasoning here was that they would improve the looks of the guitar, rather than its sound – and for ten quid, if they did have a positive effect as a by-product, then I would be happy.

When I installed them, I found a distinct difference. Instead of the wildness you normally get when putting a new set of strings on an acoustic (I replaced the bridge pins as part of a string change) everything was suddenly uniform. It's difficult to describe, but whatever was happening was for the good of the instrument's tone and certainly not to its detriment.

But sometimes I don't believe my own ears and so I bought another set for my other acoustic guitar and went through the same procedure again – with the same effect. Nice, uniform tones across all of the open strings and a kind of warmth from fretted notes which I'm sure wasn't there before.

Strange.

I've read postings on guitar forums where people say that replacing bridge pins doesn't make any difference, or that it does – the debate rages on. But all I can say is that from my own personal experience, backed up by years of reviewing instruments for magazines and sifting out the truth from various manufacturers' hyperbole, I can notice a difference.

Studio Log: Day One

2009-07-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

Y'know it always used to confuse me as to why albums took so long to record – and I'm not sure that I know the answer even now! But I would read in the music press how bands like Yes, Pink Floyd, The Beach Boys and even The Beatles would spend literally months shut away from the world in the murky depths of Abbey Road or somewhere similar in order to record around 45 minutes of music... and I thought, 'What are they doing with all that time?'

My own studio experiences, of course, are a lot more modest. A lot of my books come with CDs and, in general, they all took between one to two days of studio time to finish. However, my first all-music CD 'Nocturnal' took over a year. It seems that when creativity comes a-calling, something weird happens to one's own personal space-time continuum.

Naturally, I wasn't in the studio every day for a year; all-in-all I would suspect that there were around 14 sessions during that time and it was my work schedule and, I must confess, a certain scant regard for self-discipline that drew the whole process out. I made the album in what was essentially my 'spare time' you see... I really do work better when someone gives me a deadline!

So when it came down to making another album, I told myself that it wouldn't take anywhere near as long. I couldn't tell you how we spent all those days working on 'Nocturnal' and so, in order to make sure that every session on its sequel – 'Arboretum' – is accounted for, I thought I'd keep a log.

So 'day one' was yesterday and both myself and my engineer/co-producer Martin Holmes knew in advance that we wouldn't get any actual recording done. Yesterday's mission was merely to mic up my new Fylde Falstaff acoustic to see how it recorded, generally talk things through about how we were going to project-manage the album – and drink tea.

We ticked all the boxes; the Falstaff sounds lovely with just three mics on her and the snippets of new material I played in order to reach that conclusion sound good, too. The main obstacle I face now is to get rid of a bit of what I suspect is tendonitis in my right wrist – and the only way to do that is by resting and not practising like crazy like I ought to be. So 'day two' is already an unspecified date at some point in the future.

I'll keep you posted!

Hard As Nails?

2009-07-09T07:05:00.000-07:00

I play fingerstyle guitar, which means that I rely on my right hand fingernails rather a lot. Let's face it, fingernails are really grow-your-own plectrums and an intrinsic part of your sound. I ought to take more care of them than I do, but I've found that it's when I try to act all precious about not breaking a nail that I run into problems.

Once, I was about to play classical guitar at a Masonic dinner and had walked about with my right hand behind my back for most of the day, just in case. In the end, I was drawing the living room curtains and I tore my thumb nail... It happens doing the most stupid mundane stuff. I can use power tools or service a 747 quite happily and my nails remain intact – but simple interaction with the living room curtains and suddenly we're at Defcon 5.

Luckily, I had my 'don't panic' kit which comprised a tube of glue, the make of which was recommended to me by a flamenco player. It was only available in Spain and so if anyone I knew was going over there, I didn't want any duty free, just some glue. Some of my friends suggested counselling...

Anyhow, the glue did its trick and my nail helped me entertain the Masons. I've since stopped using it and have forgotten the make, too – and if anyone goes to Spain these days, it's a bottle of Rioja, please.

Michael Jackson – Dangerous Days

2009-06-29T07:29:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to add to all the furore surrounding the death of Michael Jackson, but I feel somehow compelled to contribute a personal memory of the man.

Back in 1992 I was still fairly new to the role of music journalist and was really just learning the ropes. I had interviewed Michael Jackson's guitarist Jennifer Batten for Guitarist magazine and was surprised when she sought me out at a music show in London when the Jackson 'Dangerous' tour hit town. When I asked her how the tour was going she asked me if I would like to see the show and I said, 'Yes, please...' I wasn't a Jackson fan, but I was aware that the show had been dubbed a spectacular second to none and thought, well, why not?

So I set off to Wembley Stadium a few days later – and I remember that day particularly because someone chose to smash into the back of my car at a roundabout on the way into London!

When I arrived, I picked up my press tickets and passes and went off backstage. Now, before you ask, no I didn't meet Jackson – I didn't even manage to get to say 'hi' to Jennifer. Backstage security was so tight I think it would have been easier to slip inside Buckingham Palace. In fact, as my backstage credentials hadn't been countersigned by one of the security overlords, I was restricted to the bar and VIP areas only. If that happened today, I'd know where to go in order to make a fuss, but I was still pretty green back then.

In any case, when showtime arrived I found my seat and told myself that it would be great to see Jennifer strut her stuff with Jackson, even if I was unlikely to get too excited about the music itself.

I guess you know what's coming; I was pretty much blown away. The show was incredibly impressive and Jackson himself had this indefinable aura about him – and it was so obvious just how good a showman Michael was. I would put witnessing a Michael Jackson performance up there with seeing Elvis – the realisation that you're seeing a legend and not just another pampered pop star.

Sadly the intervening years have not gone well for MJ; it would be wonderful if a performer of that magnitude could actually have a reasonable expectation of leading a 'normal' life. If this were possible then maybe the thousands of people who bought tickets for the now abandoned O2 shows would get to see something truly historical.

Flying In A Blue Nightmare...

2009-06-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

I have never actually flown with a guitar – never really needed to as the bulk of my work has kept me within the UK. I've had the opportunity to take short domestic 'hops' but have always chosen to put in the extra motorway miles instead. Why? I've heard too many horror stories, that's why...

Now I know many musicians who fly with their instruments all the time and, for the most part, nothing goes awry. Some have told me that their precious hand-made whatever has ended up in one place while they landed in another, but there's generally a happy ending to the tale, even if there's been a little bit of inconvenience experienced along the way.

But I heard a story the other day that surprised even this old cynic. A very famous musician was flying between Germany and the UK and checked two guitars into the baggage hold. Bear in mind that in order to do so, you have to sign a document which releases the airline from any responsibility if the instrument(s) are damaged in transit. Something which kinda gives baggage handlers carte blanche, in my opinion...

Anyway, when he arrived, one case was clearly very badly damaged. In fact, he said that you could see tyre tracks across the top of it. In other words, somewhere along the line, it had actually been run over! Obviously, we can expect our luggage to experience a few knocks and scuffs along the way – it's understandable, as airports are very busy places and the sheer ergonomics involved in loading and unloading aircraft at speed is inevitably going to cause some minor mishaps. But tyre tracks, fer gawd's sake?

Fortunately, and somewhat unbelievably, the guitar wasn't damaged, which is a tribute to the case manufacturer concerned; but I'd love to hear how the airline responsible talked their way out of that one!

Going Postal...

2009-06-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

Now I don't usually use this blog for my own personal soapbox-hopping, but an incident occurred earlier this week that I feel needs commenting upon...

I had to go down to the post office to buy a stamp, you see; something I've done hundreds of times before and, over the years, I've come across many variations in queueing strategy. Years ago, it was the norm to find around six 'windows' staffed by post office personnel and six queues in front of them. Then, someone had the brainwave that space and potential 'queue rage' could be saved at a stroke by having a single line of customers, coiled serpent-like around the public area, waiting to be called forth by a recorded message from someone who sounded far too cheerful to be human.

As far as I know – and what I learned about logistics in those brief moments of wakefulness in maths lessons at school – both systems were adequate in their own way. I mean, think about it; there are six people serving and 20 people waiting in line. It doesn't really matter if it's one line or six separate ones, does it? I would imagine that customers get served in approximately the same amount of time. And, of course, with the former, there's the added delight of playing 'post office queue roulette' where you have to make the decision about which line would be speediest to join.

However, now it seems we are subject to a new generation of middle-management types who make decisions about simple ergonomics – and they've hatched a real corker of a plan for Bath post office. Now customers have to take a numbered ticket – like the deli counter at Sainsbury's – and sit around waiting for that far-too-cheerful voice to tell you which window to go to.

OK, so far so good. There must have been a reason to change over to this system from the old one – although I have to admit that I can't work it out. But, here's the twist; the number you are allotted is different depending on what you're visiting the post office for. The machine that issues your ticket has around five different designations (and, before you ask, no I can't remember all of them). Certainly, one is for 'identity services' which I took to mean that perhaps you were visiting the post office to sort out your new passport or driving licence application – and fair enough; you know what it's like waiting in line for a stamp when the guy in front hasn't filled the form in properly. Grrr, right?

But a member of staff must have witnessed my hesitation, standing there as I was wondering where all the happy queueing public were hiding. This is a rough version of the conversation that ensued:

"Can I help you?"

"Yes, I'm just trying to work out your new system..."

"You need to take a ticket – what have you come in for?"

"A stamp."

She pressed the computer screen at the point where it said 'Identity Services' and handed me the ticket that appeared from nowhere.

"Identity services? For a stamp?"

"Yes..."

"Really?"

I think her sense of humour had waned by now. It must have been a long day, after all, and so I merely smiled in what I hope was an ironic way and walked off to await the summoning of the cheerful one.

But I'm seriously thinking of going back on pension day to see how they cope then...

Right Place: Right Time...

2009-06-03T07:06:00.000-07:00

Just about every musician I've ever spoken to has agreed that a great deal of an individual's chances of success in the music business relies on them being in that mythical right place at the right time. But I think there's a lot more to it than that. I think you've got to be in the right place at the right time – but with the right attitude.

To illustrate what I mean, I'll give you a few examples.

I once knew a bass player who was really, really good. He was a joy to play with in that he could find the exact groove necessary for whatever we were playing and deliver it in spades for as long as you needed him to. It was just a matter of time before he got head-hunted and sure enough, he received a phone call from a name musician asking if he would do a European tour. Despite the fact that it meant we were suddenly minus a bass player, we were all very happy for him and wished him well. The trouble was that whilst he was together in the playing stakes, from a businesslike point of view, he was nothing short of a disaster.

Doing any kind of tour isn't just a simple case of getting on the right plane on the right day, it takes planning and a lot of paperwork. Back then, you needed some sort of work permit for certain European countries and in order to get them, you had to produce documents and fill in a few forms. For some reason, the bass player in question could not (or would not) get his act together on this front and, after weeks of phone calls from the band in question with increasingly more and more desperate demands for his papers, he lost the job. The music business is like that: you generally only ever get one chance.

The next couple of contrasting scenarios feature me in the lead role...

I was once called to do a gig where a legendary saxophone player was guesting. The band concerned was a jazz fusion outfit who occasionally drifted into funk in a sort of Miles Davis kind of way. So naturally I took a Strat, a box of effects, an amp and my jazz fusion head along. After the first half, the band leader called me over and told me that Mr Sax Legend wanted to open the second half with a duet – with me. So I went and sought him out to ask what he wanted to play. He said he wanted to play My Funny Valentine – a jazz standard. Now, it occurred to me that I had with me some entirely inappropriate gear; I'd left my archtop at home, along with the necessary mindset for playing standards. But, in the spirit of 'the show must go on' I borrowed a real book from the bass player, checked out the chart for 'Valentine' and went on stage hoping I wasn't about to end my career on a low note.

But the worst was yet to come... While we were playing the first few chorusses with me providing some pretty (and hopefully apt) changes, a thought struck me like a knife in the chest: any minute, he was going to nod me in for a solo. And when you're the only other instrument, 'solo' means solo. My mind raced from 'surely not' to 'oh, God our help in ages past...' and sure enough, Mr Legend turned round and bade me take my turn in the spotlight.

Now I have no delusions whatsoever about being Joe Pass, but I must have managed to painfully scrape something together because no-one actually laughed. But I certainly wasn't asked for my phone number that night.

Fast forward a few months and the same thing happened; same band, different sax legend. This time, though, the music remained in that funky fusion comfort zone that both my gear and I were happy with. The gig went well – and three months later I got a phone call from Sax Legend II asking me if I would be interested in joining his band...

Right time, right place, right attitude – and the right gear.

Disasters!

2009-05-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

I was recently musing about that age-old musicians' favourite topic – the worst gig you've ever played: stories from the trenches of musical combat. Looking back at my history as a gigging musician, I've experienced some absolute nightmares on stage... Here are a few of the more memorable ones.

There was a time when the band I was with had a booking at a pub in Felixstowe. We were a five piece, with our own PA and when we arrived at the gig we asked the publican where we should set up. So he moved a few tables away from one corner of the pub and we began to set up our gear. One of us noticed that there were no power sockets anywhere in sight and when we asked where the nearest outlets were, the publican told us to give him a nod when we were ready and he'd unplug the juke box. One socket to power guitar, bass, PA, sundry effects, etc... Not a sensible option. I think we used every extension cable within a four mile radius that night.

Another time (different band) we arrived at a venue and couldn't find the power amp for the PA. The bass player and keyboard player looked at each other and announced simultaneously, 'I thought you were bringing it!' Luckily, one of my guitar students was in the audience that night and he was able to run home and get the amp from his own band's PA.

The there was an occasion where we were booked to play at a country house. It was out in the wilds of the Essex countryside and directions were vague, to say the least. We phoned the guy who had booked us (it was a garden party) and he said not to worry, he would be putting up signs from the main road, directing his guests to the house. I set off and drove towards the gig and got totally lost. At one point I saw the bass player's car approaching on the other side of the road. We stopped, decided to form a convoy and set off once again. Eventually, we came across the house down a long driveway and when we said to the host that we must have missed his signs he said, 'Oh, I haven't put them up yet.'

I was at a gig one night – one of those rare occasions when you get to play on a really large stage – and my big moment was approaching; one of those tunes where the guitar makes a seriously dramatic entrance. I was milking it for all I was worth, too; stalking the stage looking suitably cool and posing inordinately. My time arrived and I hit the first note: nothing. I'd walked so far from my amp I'd pulled the guitar lead out without noticing.

They say 'the show must go on' and it's particularly true when you're playing a solo gig. There's no one to cover for you and so you have to muster through, whatever happens. I was booked at an arts centre to play some solo jazz guitar, but the problem was I had a seriously upset stomach. That's seriously upset, OK?. I'll never forget those last moments before I went on stage, tuning my guitar in the toilet...

Possibly the worst experience, though, was playing at a large London venue where, owing to a game of Chinese Whispers between the venue, the guy who booked us and the band we had to play the entire set without monitors. It was a very big PA system and a huge stage, but for some reason the venue thought that we didn't need a monitor engineer (the guy who has a separate mixing desk at the side of the stage for the PA foldback) and so we couldn't hear each other at all. We played the gig using telepathy more than anything – from where I was standing I couldn't hear any vocals, bass, drums, keyboards, not even myself. It's surprising how sound just dissipates completely in a large open space. Needless to say, we came off stage at the end of the gig feeling really despondent – until the guy who booked us poked his head around the door of the dressing room and said, 'That was really great! What an amazing sound...'

And they say that music has one of the toughest apprenticeships in the world!

Eurovision: Please Let It Die!

2009-05-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

First, a fantasy conversation between Noël Coward and Andrew Lloyd-Webber:

"Ah, Mr Lloyd-Webber – I am, of course, familiar with your work. I particularly enjoyed the music to West Side Story."

"But I didn't write the music for West Side Story."

"Quite..."

Now I've got that off my chest... Seriously, isn't it time we let the Eurovision Song Contest die? And this isn't just born from sour grapes because we failed to trash Norway; it's just the whole farcical nature of the thing.

To begin with, according to my knowledge of geography (which I'll admit to being somewhat sketchy at best) Russia isn't even in Europe. So the rules are being kinda stretched a bit these days, eh?

Secondly, the guy who won last night is already a huge pop star in his country and not some random element picked from a tiresome TV talent show (no offence Jade, but it's the truth).

So when we did we start playing games with our European brethren (and Russia) with a self-imposed handicap? In the past, we've had Cliff Richard, Lulu, etc batting for our team but is it now down to some sort of national conceit that we pass over the fact that British pop music is actually quite good and decide to knobble our chances?

If we can extend this kind of thinking to sport, would we enter a football team against Germany in a cup final which was made up from enthusiastic amateurs? Or would we pick the best of the best and really go for it?

And then there's the BBC dedicating three and a half hours to the thing (add an hour if you include the documentary that ran earlier in the evening). I recommend that the Beeb's programme planners spend the evening in a DVD rental shop on a Saturday night when Eurovision is on: when someone rents Heaven's Gate as an alternative to Euroboredom, it's surely a cry for help.

It's gone past that stage when Eurovision was so bad it was actually good, so let's just cut and run...

And bring back European It's A Knock-Out instead!

Recording in The Field: A Survival Guide

2009-05-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

When I was recording my album 'Nocturnal' I came across a problem which required an unorthodox solution. It all started when I decided I wanted some real sea noises on one track...

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: silly old hippy. But that's only half the story; not only did I want sea noises at the start of one of the tracks, I wanted to record them myself and they had to be taken from the very place that inspired the piece concerned. This meant a trip to Cornwall with some portable recording gear.

So I set off for St Ives with a Sony stereo recording Walkman, a microphone and some headphones. The first couple of days after we arrived there was a stiff breeze and anyone who has ever tried outside recording will know that wind is your worst enemy. This is why news reporters and the like use those microphones that look a bit like stuffed badgers. Their fluffy exterior (the mics', not the reporters') act as a baffle for the wind, meaning that your recording is free from most extraneous weather-produced interference.

I knew all of this, naturally; but I don't have a furry muffle for my mic and, to be honest, I didn't think I'd need one. Sigh.

So the first day that the wind quietened a bit, I went down to the shore with my gear and tried to get some 'lapping' noises on tape. The results were a bit iffy, and I was still getting wind noises (and wet feet) but there were sections of tape that I thought would probably be useable.

Wrong.

It's one thing listening to your efforts on a pair of headphones back at the hacienda, but another one entirely when the results are played back in the discriminating environment of a recording studio. In short, there was too much tape hiss (yes, I wasn't geared up for digital, either) and not enough clear 'lapping' to show through the quiet acoustic intro to the track.

Back to the drawing board – and, as it turned out, back to St Ives. But this time I was prepared. Well, almost. I managed to borrow a Mini Disc recorder from the recording engineer (Martin Holmes) knowing that this would rule out the tape hiss, but was trusting luck that my stereo mic would be good enough to pick up some uninterrupted sea noises.

This time, the weather was more favourable in St Ives; but I was still picking up the wind on the mic. I had to think and, drawing upon survival instincts I didn't know I had, came up with the solution. I got hold of a potato-masher from the kitchen where we were staying, an old sock and a rubber band. By managing to suspend the mic inside the potato-masher with the rubber band and covering the whole assembly with the sock I had a makeshift baffle – and to my surprise (and that of the recording engineer when I played him the results later) it worked. I managed to get about 30 minutes of sea noises from about three different locations and no wind noise.

Recording the sea – improvised mic assemblage in my right hand

We ended up using about 20 seconds of the recording on the album and yes, I know I could have got exactly the same noises from using a library sound-effect disc, but the devil is in the detail and now, whenever I listen to the beginning of 'Dark Harbour' I know that the sea noises came from the exact geographic location where the piece was conceived.

Susan Boyle Syndrome

2009-04-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

I feel moved to comment on the latest sensation to take the entertainment industry by storm – Susan Boyle. Now I have to say that I think the media have responded predictably; but a little hysteria never hurt anyone, I guess. It was just that one article I read set me thinking. It asked the question, 'Do you have to be beautiful to be talented?' This, of course, refers to the fact that Susan isn't exactly Paris Hilton in the looks department – something about which I'm sure she's quite justifiably relieved. But let's think about the question they're asking here: is this where we're going wrong? Are we judging performers by their looks rather than open-mindedly listening to what they have to say? Does anyone with any wisp of raw talent now have to check into a health spa or beauty salon before their audition? I for one hope not. (Come on, you've seen the pictures...)

I find myself thinking if Einstein would have made more of a contribution to science if he looked more like Hugh Grant? Would some of the ugly buggers from the first generation of rock'n'rollers ever got where they are now without surgery?

Another important question is whether society has now decided that talent is merely the province of the young and anyone who hasn't 'made it' by the time they are 40 might as well sod off and grow vegetables. So maybe Susan Boyle's story is a timely reminder that we should avoid the temptations of prejudice and learn to listen with our ears and not with our eyes.

Incidentally, if you haven't already seen the You Tube footage of Susan's performance then you should. Even if, like me, the whole idea of TV talent shows makes you want to go and throw yourself from a tall building. It's worth it – even if it's just to see the look on Simon Cowell's face!

It's here.

The Hidden Dangers Of Teaching Guitar

2009-04-17T07:45:00.000-07:00

OK, so I know guitar teaching isn't dangerous in the same way that putting out fires on oil rigs or deep sea diving are – but it has hidden dangers if the teacher wants a career as a player as well as an educationalist.

Naturally, I can only draw on my own experiences as a guitar teacher – but all the same I don't think that my story is at all unique.

Before I started private teaching, back in the 1980s, I was really only interested in jazz guitar. That was my oeuvre, if you like... When I began playing during the previous decade, I was interested in progressive rock bands like Yes, Genesis and Pink Floyd – and I liked some blues-based heavy rock, like Zeppelin, Cream, Deep Purple and so on, too. But after punk hissed and spat its way onto the British music scene in 1976 I lost interest – and I think I lost hope, too. Suddenly, prog bands were seen as yesterday's news and so my prime influence was no longer valid, somehow.

I retreated into jazz as a sort of haven where chops were still necessary and musical invention still lauded. Hopeless case, huh?

So when I began teaching, I was really into teaching jazz; but my jazz pupils were outnumbered around 10-1 by people coming to me to learn rock, blues, pop, folk, metal and everything else besides. An average evening for me would be teaching someone an AC/DC riff, transcribing a Smiths song, showing someone a Hank Marvin instrumental and then maybe something by Stevie Ray Vaughan... In other words, I had to diversify in order to survive. Luckily for me I've got a fairly quick ear and, music being music, was able to pick out solos and riffs from various styles quite quickly. But it meant that, to a certain extent, I had to become something of a guitar chameleon at the same time.

It had a knock-on effect on my playing to the extent that at one time I found myself playing in a rock covers band, a jazz-fusion band, solo classical guitar and solo jazz guitar! It might be tempting to think that I was applauded for my ability to diversify – but the truth was that I was quickly becoming a jack-of-all-trades... And, insidiously, master of none.

So what happened? Well, I got into journalism which meant that I didn't have time to teach – certainly not every evening, six days a week, anyway; I still gave seminars and did the occasional private lesson, but the teaching eased up considerably. I still didn't have much time to think about playing, though; journalists are busy people.

When I left the magazine in order to write books, I was eager to start paying again and sat back to see what would happen. First of all, I got back into jazz, but that quickly evolved into acoustic guitar playing – DADGAD and so on. It strikes me that this is the first time in my career that I have actually specialised; I don't have to transcribe Metallica, SRV, Hank, Def Leppard any more and so I needn't immerse myself in diversity on a nightly basis. I can just concentrate on one style on one instrument. No distractions.

I know that there are many players who also teach – but most tend to teach what they themselves play: a single style. Anyone who shares my own experiences should be aware that there are perhaps fewer teachers who play...

The Shock Of The 'New'?

2009-04-14T03:54:00.000-07:00

Every so often, something comes along which is truly new and innovative - and what happens? Everyone copies it. This is a recurring nightmare in just about every branch of the arts. After Dan Brown's success with 'The Da Vinci Code' in 2003, similar titles - with similar cover art - started popping up on the bookshelves. All of a sudden authors were working on plots which detailed how their heroes had found some sinister significance in the works of Charlotte Bronte, which led to a showdown on the Yorkshire moors with an arch villain who would have been played by Sir Ian McKellen in the movie.

It happens in music, too - especially pop, but I think that is probably stating the obvious. Just listen to the radio for half an hour... soul divas, rap masters, boy band power pop; it's not just that I've reached 'that certain age' it does all sound the bloody same!

As a journalist who witnessed the 'instrumental rock guitar revolution' at first hand you would not believe how many CDs turned up on my desk at Guitarist magazine that had been sent in by artists who all wanted to be another Joe Satriani or Steve Vai. Honestly - you wouldn't believe it. After Stevie Ray Vaughan died we received bundles of blues guitar CDs accompanied by press releases all claiming that their artist was 'the new SRV'. And in case you're interested, they were generally really, really bad. Imitation following innovation, but all lacking that essential spark.

OK, so why does this happen? One reason is the pressure that agents, managers and record companies exert on new artists to make their work easier to categorise. Which pigeonhole would you like, sir? You're much easier to sell if we can align you with some sort of dynasty of musical style, after all. This doesn't offer a lot of hope for anyone who thinks that they have genuinely discovered something 'different' - and yet the paradox here is that all areas of the arts desperately need the 'shock of the new' in order to progress.

No wonder they say that art is pain.

I guess that musicians who have found something new to say all have MySpace, YouTube and iTalk Guitar as 'viral' outlets for their work - and we've already seen a few new talents plucked from obscurity thanks to the internet. So I guess my message to guitarists in particular is to try and turn off the chatter that surrounds you, begging you to somehow conform to current standards, and listen to the music inside your head. Your music needs you.

Head Or Heart?

2009-04-02T06:28:00.000-07:00

I think that teaching composition must be one of the most difficult things you can do. The reason for this is that I believe the process to be incredibly personal, subjective and almost certainly a different experience from individual to individual.

As someone with a background in teaching I'm sometimes asked if I employ my actual knowledge and reasoning where music's concerned or if I rely purely on instinct and gut reaction. Literally, a case of 'head or heart'?

Well, like I say, it's probably different for everyone, but speaking for myself I have to say that it was a long time before I realised that I had to actually 'switch off ' the teacher inside before anything really creative could come through. In other words, I had to subdue my intellectual reasoning and rely purely on 'autopilot'. At least, to an extent...

I suppose the real breakthrough for me as a writer was discovering the world of alternate tunings. (Incidentally, I must point out at this juncture that I'm not in any way holding myself up as anything other than a 'jobbing guitarist and writer' here. I've long since come to terms with the fact that I am not and definitely never will be another Paul McCartney or Sting!) When I threw out everything I knew about the guitar from a tuning point of view, I had no option but to rely on instinct. I deliberately didn't start the journey all over again and begin to work out scales, modes and chords in whichever tuning I found myself. That would be retrogressive, I thought, as I would begin to intellectualise everything I did once again. Thought processes like, 'shouldn't that chord be a dominant 7th?' or 'you can't do that!' aren't helpful when you're trying to access the creative side of your brain.

For me, a composition starts with the clash or collision of two ideas - it might be a few melody notes that seem to want to be together or two or three chords which somehow sound like they 'belong'. I don't know exactly what it is, but a switch is definitely thrown and the songwriting process begins. From then on in, it gets personal. I have a kind of editing device whereby I never write anything down in the initial stages, figuring that if I can still remember it 24 hours later then it must in some way be memorable enough to build upon and take to the next stage.

That 'next stage' is usually a case of improvising around the idea for ages until it seems to want to go somewhere else. All the time, the intellect is sitting on the sidelines offering 'helpful' observations like, 'ok, that's the verse sorted, now you need a chorus' but I've learned to ignore it. I'm aware of the conventions of traditional song structure, but if we all stuck rigidly to it, we'd all still be musically living in caves.

It helps if I can summon up some kind of visual imagery at this point and coming up with a title certainly helps. If you're involved in finishing something called 'Summer Rain' it tends to help direct you towards the appropriate - a bit like writing a film score for pictures inside your head.

Writing music is a hard process for me; I find writing books a breeze by comparison! But it's an immensely rewarding process when you come out with something that somehow works and something which is definitely a part of you. By that time, of course, all the birth pains have been long forgotten and I'm often left wondering where melodies and chord sequences have sprung from. But I don't want to analyse my own music, write it out, or even talk about it too much. The most surprising thing is that I don't want to teach what I do on acoustic guitar as I think that would invite the intellect back to the party and I'd lose the power to engage autopilot. And I don't want that to happen!

Research? Count Me In!

2009-03-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been noticing the results of research, surveys and so on being published in the press - and you know what? They're getting sillier and sillier...

Here's a few examples from recent weeks: in all cases, these news items were prefixed with 'recent research has shown that...'

Kids who spend a lot of time watching TV and playing video games have a greater risk of obesity

Parents should monitor their children's web use

The current financial crisis could force poorer families to accept an inadequate diet

People who store personal data on their mobile phones are more prone to identity theft

And there are many more I've forgotten. But, as Pink Floyd would have it 'every day the paper boy brings more...'

My point is, erm, duh? I mean isn't the above as clear as day? Does it really have to be subject of actual research? And more importantly, who the hell conducts this research, how much are they paid and where do I sign up for it because it sounds like a really easy gig!

TAB: The Phantom Menace?

2009-03-05T06:38:00.000-08:00

As you can probably imagine, I'm a fairly frequent visitor to guitar forums and on many occasions have seen what I am beginning to think is a worry addiction among students of the instrument; TAB Addiction.

Now before you discount this as the ramblings of a guy who spends much too much of his time writing about guitars and technique, just let me ramble on a bit and explain why I think this is definitely not a good thing.

Whenever a 'hot' guitar album is released, it's generally not too long before it becomes a talking point on the many forums out here in webland. It's inevitable that one of the posts goes something like this:

"Oh man, this album burns! I can't wait for someone to TAB it out..."

OK, so what is wrong with this sentence? Well, the problem I have with it as a teacher and player of many years is that current trends seem to conclude that TAB is the answer to everything and that its seductive 'painting by numbers' interface is all you really need to turn you into a player of phenomenal girth. Wrong. And I've proved it many times.

There are two basic reasons for my unrest with the TAB-as-the-answer-to-everything approach to learning guitar: one is source material - many transcriptions published on the web are littered with errors and, seeing as these are copied and republished numerous times, the errors they contain become compounded. In other words, the 'wrong' version becomes accepted as being somehow 'right' (more on why this happens in a sentence or two...). Even the books you buy from music shops - you know, the ones that boast 'note-for-note' transcriptions on the covers - tend to be a bit hit or miss. When I was teaching full time, I had a student come in to see me clutching a book containing a transcription of Eric Clapton's song 'Layla'; I don't know who did the transcription, but the decision to write it out in the key of A flat should have been picked up somewhere before publication (the riff is in A). So instead of open strings down at the nut, the riff was tabbed as being at the fourth fret - not only did this make it more difficult to play than in the correct key, but it just didn't sound right, either.

In interviews, I've often asked players if they ever get to see transcription books before they go to print and none of them have said that they do - and yet they are the only guys who could possibly tell you if the music is right! The only exception to this was Joe Satriani - and he told me that he found a serious error in that a whole piece had been transcribed in the wrong time signature. Oops.

OK, so I've trashed the nefarious 'free tab' available from the internet and questioned the properly paid for variation available in the market place. What's the other reason that TAB is so bad for players? It's all down to invisible techniques and pitch training...

Let's take them one at a time: what the heck do I mean by 'invisible techniques'? Quite literally, there are many techniques in play in any guitar piece at any one time - some obvious, others not. Is it important, would you say, to recognise that a riff is played with all downstrokes instead of alternate picking, for instance? Well, it is if you want to nail that piece 100% - I'm talking about the slight difference in timbre that separates one picking stroke from the next. And is it important to note that the note A in the second bar was in fact played at the 14th fret, G string, rather than the easier 5th fret E string? Sure it is - for all the same reasons, too.

So the music has to be right if anyone has got a chance to reproduce it - but the other important concern is what's happening to people who are allowing themselves to become 'tab dependent'. Simply put, I think it means that their ears aren't developing. What used to happen was that someone who was learning would hear something they particularly liked on a record and really struggle to work it out themselves (there was no TAB back in the pioneering days of playing guitar). It was a heck of a pain and, having spent many hours doing this myself, I wouldn't blame anyone for taking an easier way out if it was on offer. But what all those hours did to me was develop my ear - it was subtle and I didn't particularly notice at the time, but it led me to the point where I can usually find my way around the guitar landscape these days - and of course I do the odd transcription for magazines, too.

I've heard similar stories from loads of players from my generation - and beyond it - too. In fact, the legendary jazz guitarist Tal Farlow told me once that he learned to play many of the tunes in the jazz repertoire from listening to the radio. He said that when a track he liked came on the radio he used to pick up his guitar, knowing that he only had this one pass to get the music right - if not, he just had to wait until it was on the radio again. But he had the most amazing ears and could play virtually anything he wanted to because of it.

So what's going to happen to the 'tab generation'? Poorly developed ears means even greater TAB dependency, very slow progress for the individual and the loss of many of the more subtle nuances that players use and which makes the instrument so magical. And that's not good for the future of guitar playing...

Music Education Sucks!

2009-02-24T07:49:00.000-08:00

You may have read a government report published recently regarding how music education in schools is considered inadequate in many instances. I forget the exact statistics involved - which doesn't matter because everyone knows that 74% of published statistics are made up on the spot. Ahem. In any case, the report showed that music lessons haven't really moved on since I was at school. The reason seems to be, according once again to the government report, that a lot of school music teachers are, and I quote, 'out of touch with modern trends'.

Well hallelujah - someone's noticed at long bloody last!

Back in my murky past as a guitar teacher I had the opportunity to teach in a school (I won't mention its name) as a supply teacher. I guess they were desperate or something... Anyway, I had to teach classes full of young people according to the prevailing syllabus of the day and top of the list was 'instruments of the orchestra'. Now, you probably don't need me to tell you that the average 14-15 year old doesn't give a rat's ass about classical music. To them, it's what you listen to in preparation for old age and death and so the job definitely wasn't an easy one. No matter, I was told - the syllabus is written by wise men for us to follow and who are we to question them?

Well I wish someone had because that was 22 years ago and it doesn't look to me like anything has really changed since. Last week I was shown a mock GCSE music paper and at least 70% of it was based on classical music and orchestral instruments. Why don't they learn? Kids don't want to hear a load of dead guys' music and so why not play them something they do want to listen to instead? After all, music is music - it's not like Bach employed a wholly other set of rules when he sat down at his mighty organ to compose. There aren't one set of regulations for classical music and another for popular/rock/blues/prog/metal. It's basically the same - especially if you're teaching kids about time signatures, minims, quavers and other assorted delights.

So what do we do? For one thing, we need to start teaching the teachers differently in order to get rid of the compound errors inherent in the system. After all, it's probably true that all music teachers in schools today were taught by the previous generation of educators - and this is something that has been going on unchecked for years. So let's change things...

Want some suggestions? When I was teaching, the syllabus insisted that I played my class Debussy's La Mer and banged on about 'impressionism in music'. Boring. I could see the kids glaze over after the first few sentences... Until, that is, I suggested that possibly modern day film music had carried on the tradition of painting pictures with music. Take Star Wars, for instance... You should have seen the change in mood in the classroom that day - Star Wars? Now you're talking, matey! Using this root I was able to get across loads of information - did they realise that the instrument at the beginning of Jaws was a double bass? No? Well now you know what one sounds like. Job done!

So come on, people - everyone agrees that music is an important art form so why not teach the next generation in a way that holds their imagination and let them discover the classics in their own time, eh?

Going Bespoke: Slight Return

2009-02-13T08:23:00.000-08:00

For a few months we followed the making of my Fylde Falstaff guitar in pictures which were provided by its maker, Roger Bucknall. In actual fact, Roger sent me 50 pictures in all and I didn't publish them all, fearing that the amount of space they would take up here would cause some sort of bandwidth catastrophe in the process!

But if you're at all interested in how an acoustic guitar is made, then I'd invite you to check out the 'director's cut' - a photo album comprising all of the photos, neatly captioned, with comments telling you what is going on in each. The album can be found here.

If you have any questions, send me a message via the iTalk Guitar site and you might also like to check out the brand new Fylde Guitars site, too.

Oh, and this one goes to 11, too...

2009-02-05T08:29:00.001-08:00

Every so often I find myself hunting through the videos on You Tube to find something in particular and, being a very helpful site, they tend to recommend me videos that they think I will enjoy based on my various searches. So I'm usually met with a menu of random Family Guy snippets, something about the latest endeavours of the SAS (don't ask) or some super-widdley guitar hero doing his best to rid the world of actual melody forever.

There seems to be a kind of worrying genre beginning to spring up, however, and that concerns the fiery young amateur axe merchant who is seeking credentials for his playing by submitting something to the site. You can usually spot it straight away - the title is a dead giveaway. Just to give you some idea, I'm talking about videos that call themselves something like '18 year old boy plays Eddie Van Halen's 'Eruption' solo' or '14 year old boy plays Yngwie Malmsteen solo'. Things like that. I must say that it always makes me grin a bit because I instantly recall Spinal Tap's excellent Nigel Tufnel saying that Jimmy Page was 24 when he wrote 'Stairway To Heaven' but he could play it when he was 12. I mean, isn't it the same thing?

The fact is that it's easy to imitate, hard to innovate and so if you've mastered a difficult guitar showpiece in your early teens then good for you - it shows that you are developing technically along the exact right lines. But please don't take it as anything more than that, OK?
I have personally met young players who have mastered some very complex guitar pieces, but it's rarely an indication of extreme talent, just dilligent - and often blinkered - hard graft to the exclusion of everything else.

To illustrate what I mean, there is a story about a young boy who went into a music shop in the north of England and asked to try a guitar. Once plugged in he proceeded to play a simply breathtaking rendition of 'Eruption'. In the shop at the time was a seasoned player who plucked himself a guitar from the wall, plugged in and said to the kid, 'Let's play a blues together!'. The boy looked up and said, 'What's a blues?'

Going Bespoke: End Game

2009-01-29T06:51:00.000-08:00

We have now reached journey's end in the tale of the making of my new Fylde Falstaff acoustic guitar - it's now home with me and settling in to its new surroundings nicely.
Last Tuesday (ie the 27th Jan) I went up to Penrith to collect the guitar and Roger treated me to a look around his workshop while I was there. Having been a guitar journalist for 17 years or so (and a guitarist for around twice as long) I have a great interest in how guitars are made and I must say the look around was fascinating - from the bare wood to the finished product in segmented stages. Great stuff - and I'm hugely indebted to Roger Bucknall for taking the time out to show me around.
Here's a pic of me with Roger in Penrith - grinning broadly having just had the Falstaff placed in my hands...

Now that I'm home, I'm looking forward to sitting down and spending some time with the new instrument - at present, work commitments have stacked up a bit and virtually all my time is taken up with writing; but heck, the weekend will soon be here and I'm aiming at grabbing some 'quality time' for me and the Falstaff. Here's a pic of her in my living room...

As I say, I haven't had too much time to sit and play so far, but initial noodlings have revealed a good, bright, well-balanced tone which is both sweet and profound. The harmonics are crystal clear and the sustain goes on forever. In short, I'm happy.
Before too long, I'm going to be in the studio again and I'll make sure that there's an MP3 of what the Falstaff sounds like available on the iTalk Guitar site so you can hear how sweetly she sings!

Going Bespoke: The Finishing Line

2009-01-22T08:05:00.000-08:00

The photostory of the master craftsmen at Fylde guitars making my new Falstaff acoustic is now complete with these three final pictures - although I will be posting a couple after I pick it up, no doubt!
This first picture shows the guitar awaiting its first set of strings...

Once the strings have been put on, there is a bit of final adjustment to be carried out down at the nut...

Now, the guitar is ready for its first tune up. Obviously I've yet to hear it myself, but Roger Bucknall emailed me to say that it 'sounds lovely'.

So there you have it - the making of a Fylde Falstaff acoustic guitar from the day the wood was chosen right up to the time when it's all strung up and ready to come out to play.

Going Bespoke: The Final Straight!

2009-01-20T07:36:00.000-08:00

Construction of my new Fylde Falstaff acoustic guitar is nearing completion and it's now time for the neck to be fitted. But first, some finishing touches: here, the body is receiving its final sanding.

Next, the body is buffed to a shine...

The neck, too, receives some final attention - after the sanding it received in the last crop of pictures, it's now being fine tuned with wire wool.

Now the really critical stuff begins... First of all, Roger removes the lacquer from the body in the places where the bridge and fingerboard will be glued in place.

I must say, I really love this next picture - a sort of guitar-orientated still life!

Now Roger makes the final adjustments to the heel of the neck before it's fitted.

After fitting, the fingerboard and bridge are both clamped in order to let the glue dry thoroughly.

And lastly, the frets are added.

You can see from the picture above that I'm not having any fretboard markers fitted. To many, this represents 'flying blind' but I think it makes the guitar look nicely understated. Classical guitars don't have markers on the fingerboard and I have always liked that look. It might take a bit of getting used to, but I've always got the dots along the side to keep me in the right place.
I'll be picking the guitar up next week - there might be one more batch of pictures to come before then, but they'll certainly be some afterwards!

A Game Of Two Halves...

2009-01-15T08:03:00.000-08:00

Over the past few weeks, we've been spying on the manufacture of my new Fylde Falstaff acoustic guitar. When we left it last, the body was enjoying multiple coats of lacquer - a lengthy process because obviously it has to be allowed to dry after each coat and I understand that there is some sanding involved in between, too.
Well, I'm pleased to report that the body has now received its full complement of lacquer and is nearly through the final 'resting' period where the last coat has to dry out thoroughly before the next process can begin. So here it is - one half of my new Falstaff, all dressed up and shiny, awaiting the time when it will be introduced to the neck...

Talking about the neck, the last time we checked in, it was being shaped by Roger. Now, the final sanding process is being applied before it receives a coat or two of satin lacquer. This has the effect of giving the neck a slightly 'worn in' feel from the start - a high gloss finish on the back of a guitar neck might look great (although, let's face it, who gets to see it?) but there is a noticeable 'drag factor' on the hand. Guitarists (a funny bunch at the best of times) generally agree that a neck which has seen some action usually feels a little more user-friendly.

I'm told that these two halves are going to meet very soon - the neck will be attached to the body and the bridge put in place. Then the frets, pick-up and final trimmings will be sorted out and... Well, then I'll be driving up to Penrith to pick it up quicker than you can imagine!

Going Bespoke: The Neck

2009-01-07T05:08:00.000-08:00

When we left my new Fylde guitar before the holidays, the neck was really just a Honduras Mahogany club sandwich - a single piece of wood, sliced into three and glued together with some black dyed boxwood inserts, awaiting the insertion of its truss rod...

Seeing as the instrument's body is currently at the beauty salon, enjoying multiple coats of lacquer, work has been focused on transforming the neck into a much more familiar shape. Firstly, it is 'rough shaped' (notice, incidentally, that the truss rod has now been inserted and the fingerboard is in place).

Here's one we made earlier... This is what the neck assembly looks like now that it has been rough shaped. It's now ready for fine-tuning and this is something that Roger Bucknall does the traditional way - by hand, employing craft, experience and, he tells me, a lot of love!

First, the heel is cut to shape...

As is the headstock...

Then the neck itself comes under the knife - a drawknife, to be precise. In a world where most guitar necks are shaped by machine - using CAD technology in some instances - it's great to see this level of craftmanship going into an instrument. Having played virtually the whole Fylde range, I can tell you that their necks are some of the most comfortable and natural feeling I've ever experienced. Just the right width with a very subtle 'V' that sits nicely in the gap between the left hand thumb and forefinger...

So there you have it - pretty soon the fingerboard will be fretted and the neck attached to the body, the bridge will be put into place and the final fittings will be added. There's probably no need to tell you that I literally can't wait to make some music with this new instrument!

X Rated

2008-12-30T08:02:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me that if music is going to be at all competitive, then the playing field ought to be level, at very least. Call me an old radical, but I'm suggesting that there should be an entirely separate chart for singles released by X Factor winners.

Let's face it, if you promote anything on TV for around 16 weeks, it's going to capture the public's attention and, as such, nothing else can compete. That type of promotion would cost six figures - way out of reach for most artists - and so judging an X Factor single alongside something with a 'normal' amount of PR behind it isn't at all fair.

In fact, I'm surprised that the fair trading people haven't caught onto the scam - but there again, it's only music, isn't it? (And yes, I think Jeff Buckley's version of 'Hallelujah' is much better than... oooh, wass'ername's!)

Dreaming Of A Fylde Christmas...

2008-12-23T07:41:00.000-08:00

Here are some more 'work in progress' pictures of my new Fylde Falstaff acoustic guitar which is currently being built for me in Penrith by Roger Bucknall and his team. Last time we had reached the stage where the body was being glued together; now, the first picture shows a rebate being cut into the body to allow the decorative bindings to be fitted.

This picture shows the bindings in place around the perimeter of the body... Which means that this stage of construction is pretty much complete and the next step is to apply the first of around a dozen coats of lacquer.

After a thorough sanding, the body is now placed in the spraying area to await its first coat...

This next shot was taken after the initial coat of lacquer had been applied - you can see from the picture that this has darkened the rosewood down a little - and that it's beginning to look like a real guitar!

The body will now be hand-sanded between subsequent sprayings - Roger tells me that the final coat is left for up to 12 days to harden thoroughly before being buffed to the famous Fylde mirror finish.

So while all that is going on, work starts on the neck. This begins as a single piece of Honduras mahogany which is sliced into three sections before some black lamination is inserted - then it's glued back together.

Once the glue is completely dry, the channel for the truss rod is carved out...

And there we leave it for now. If you're interested in having your own guitar built for you at Fylde - or would like to be kept abreast of developments with the company, why not hike on over to their website at www.fyldeguitars.com and sign up for the email newsletter. Alternatively, take a look around the site - there are bags more pics to look at and many more details regarding how all the instruments are built.
Finally, if you own a Fylde and you've moved since you bought it, drop Roger an email via the site and let him know your new address.

Now I think I'll go and uncork myself a bottle of seasonal yo ho ho... Happy Holidays!

Going Bespoke IV

2008-12-10T08:50:00.000-08:00

Photographs from Fylde Guitars continue to flood into my inbox. When the guitar arrives here, I'll probably write the whole thing up into an article - I find the whole subject of acoustic guitar construction fascinating and I hope a few other iTalk Guitar members will, too!

In any case, our latest batch of pics starts pretty much where the last lot left off; we'd got to the stage where the slots for the guitar's inlays around the soundhole had been cut - and here they are being filled in.

The bracing on the underside of a guitar's soundboard is there for two principle reasons: firstly to add strength and secondly to influence the way in which the top vibrates as this has a great effect on the sound of the guitar. Each maker has his own formula for bracing - here we see the classic X brace (pioneered by the Martin guitar company) surrounded by Roger Bucknall's own tried and tested formula for producing a solid, rich tone from the soundboard.

The back of the guitar receives some bracing, too. Two centre reinforcing strips along the 'seam' or joint in the bookmatching, plus horizontal braces to add strength.

Now it's time to begin putting the various elements we've seen constructed together. Here, bracing is being added to the guitar's sides - once again, this is for strength, in order to make the 'box section' of the guitar sturdy enough to withstand the various slings and arrows that we musicians inflict on our treasured instruments!

Once the various components of the guitar's soundbox are ready for final assembly, the top and back are both test fitted to the sides to ensure a good fit. Here, the back is being scrutinised before gluing:

The final stage before the body is finally glued together - test fitting the top:

I'm hugely indebted to Roger Bucknall at Fylde Guitars for sending me these pictures. As many musicians know, it's possible to form a very special bond with an instrument and these images will ensure that I will literally know this acoustic guitar inside and out!

Going Bespoke III

2008-12-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

Excitement is rife here at Mead Towers as more pictures are coming in showing the construction of my new handcrafted acoustic guitar - a Fylde Falstaff.

In the first picture, the back of the guitar is being reinforced down the centre joint using spruce strips. The back of an acoustic guitar is usually a piece of bookmatched wood, which means it is a single piece of timber that has been cut in half parallel to the grain and opened out like a book. If you look at the Rio's grain in the pic, you'll see that each half is a mirror image of the other.

Next, the linings are being attached to the sides of the guitar. These are strips of wood that have been partially sawn so that they bend in a flexible strip along the guitar's extremities. The reason for this is that it presents a wider surface for attaching the top and back of the guitar using glue.

In the next photo, Roger Bucknall is cutting the top (or soundboard) of the guitar. This is master grade Engelmann Spruce - very straight, tightly grained wood which is native to Canada.

Lastly, the slots for the rosette or inlays around the guitar's soundhole are cut out.

I can't really describe what it's like to see an instrument being created like this - one that I'm going to be making music with before too long. Obviously I expected to be a little bit excited, but in reality I'm like a kid waiting for Santa!

Play (Virtually) Anything

2008-11-27T08:49:00.001-08:00

I saw an episode of the excellent South Park recently. It was called 'Guitar Queer-O' and clearly based on the PlayStation game that has recently grabbed the public's attention. (Of course, Guitar Hero has also grabbed the attention of the music industry as they've been positively queueing up to get the music from various bands included in the next version. The royalties would probably get Woolworth's out of the red. They never miss a trick...)

Anyway, there was one point in the episode which I found really resonant; Randy Marsh (Stan's dad) comes home to find the boys playing Guitar Hero and asks his wife if they've learnt to play guitar. She tells him what goes on in the game and he returns to the living room to ask the boys if they'd like him to show them how to really play the song they'd been 'playing' on screen ('Carry On Wayward Son' by Kansas). He gets out an amp and a Les Paul and begins to play the song for real. Afterwards he says to the boys, 'I can actually play a lot of these songs on guitar. Do you want me to show you how?' Cartman replies... 'That's gay, Mr Marsh...' and they return to the virtual world of cheering audiences and guitar riffs at the press of a button.

Now you might think that I'm about to make some sort of cosmic point here, but I'm not. Well, not really... It's just that I was nearly in exactly the same situation about a year ago. My sons apparently conspired to buy me Guitar Hero for my birthday, the only thing stopping them was... well, I could really play, so what was the point? But I guess I'm not opposed to the idea that guitar superstardom should be available to everyone as part of a video game - although I do have issues with the Wii equivalent because it sounds bloody awful! I might allow myself a slight concern that playing the guitar might just be misconstrued as being 'easy' and I do think that if you're willing to go so far, why not go the whole way and learn for real...

Oh, I said I wasn't going to make any points, didn't I? Sorry. It's hard...

Still, I expect that common sense will click in at some point and people will realise that learning to press some coloured buttons on a plastic guitar isn't really playing. I mean, just because I've successfully completed the first two Halo games doesn't really qualify me for real time intergalactic combat, now does it?

My Day In The Sun

2008-11-19T07:19:00.000-08:00

I was once given away as a prize in The Sun newspaper... Well, okay, it wasn't exactly me personally they were offering up but my dubious skills as a guitar educator - which amounts to the same thing, in many ways.

It all started when I was promoting a new book - I forget which - and my publisher rang to ask if I fancied being sold into slavery in the tabloids. The idea was that we'd offer a free guitar lesson as part of a massive music promotion The Sun was running. I agreed, despite not exactly being a fan of The Sun or any of its orbiting planetabloids. I mean, I stopped reading newspapers when Murdoch bought The Times, don'tcha know?

Anyhow, the competition was run - I believe people had to save the ring pull tops from Coke or Pepsi cans and send them in - and so I guess the tabloids could be held responsible for rotting teeth as well as fragile young minds. And I was their willing accomplice... oh, the shame.

Naturally I bought a copy of the paper just to see what they said about me. No matter how I feel about them, a kindly word or three from a national newspaper is always worth appending to the ol' CV, after all.

In the end, I think they damned me with faint praise by publishing some lukewarm comment about the book I has just written and so, alas, my CV is still unadorned by national rag-praise.

Somebody obviously donated copious quantities of ring pull tops as there was a winning bid for my 'free lesson'. So my publisher called once again and gave me the lucky fellow's name and address - only problem was that he lived in the South East and I live in the South West and so there was the obstacle of distance to overcome. In the end, I received no reply to my email to him and so the prize was left unclaimed - maybe he needed the travel expenses to pay his dentist bills instead.

It wasn't the weirdest experience I've had as a writer, but certainly one of the more bizarre...

Going Bespoke (Part II)

2008-11-12T08:14:00.000-08:00

Work has started on the new guitar (see blog below for more details). Here, Roger Bucknall is choosing the wood for the back and sides, by going through a few piles of 'Rio' (which used to be known as Brazilian Rosewood before it became environmentally contentious to use it for instruments and such like).

This particular Rio is quite legal and fully licensed - I mention this because I don't want Greenpeace kicking the door down in a morning raid, thinking I've breached some sort of international agreement with Brazil.
So why choose the more expensive option of Rio for the guitar's back and sides? Well, basically it was because my ears told me to. Let me explain... On a standard Fylde Falstaff the back and sides are made from carefully selected Indian Rosewood. This particular wood is very good at its job of providing a sturdy 'box' to support the guitar's more flexible spruce soundboard and I was quite prepared to have it on mine... Until, that is, I played an instrument with Rio back and sides.

It's difficult to describe the difference - it's a bit like banging on about wine - how a Chateau Whatever '59 differs from the more excellent '62. But it did make one heck of a change to the character of the sound - at least, to these tired old ears. The only way I can describe it is that, dynamically and tonally speaking, Indian Rosewood gave me five gears - but Rio was the equivalent of upgrading to a six gear sports box. Whatever it was doing, it made the whole guitar sing - I could feel every note I played as well as hear it and so I just had to include it in the recipe for my new instrument.

The saga continues... watch for further updates soon!

Going Bespoke

2008-11-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

As a few people migth be aware, I'm a sort of 'born again' acoustic player these days. After years of playing with Strats, Les Pauls and sundry archtops, I've come to rest as a member of the unplugged fraternity.

I started playing acoustic guitar - my first instrument was a 3/4 size classical - and so I guess it's a case of 'coming home' in many ways.

My return to the ways of the flat top steel string was as a result of making an album a couple of years ago. To begin with, I was going to play everything on it... guitar synth, baritone, nylon string, archtop - you name it. But I was lucky enough to have Martin Taylor as my producer and he advised me to stick to acoustic so that the album had a uniformity all the way through. I took this on board as very sound advice and completed the album using a Yamaha LLX 500C.

Now, I have to say that despite spending years and years working on guitar magazines and reviewing all kinds of instrument, I had never really looked at acoustic guitars subjectively. You don't - the whole object of reviewing instruments is to remain unbiased and objective. But now, all of a sudden, I was an acoustic guitarist and that changed things for me. I became more interested in things like which woods gave me the best sound, which body shape was better for me personally and stuff like that.

I was really happy with the sound of the Yamaha, but thought that I could possibly improve things as long as I got the basic formula right - shape and materials, etc. I pondered on the whole question for a long time, visiting shops and trying 'off the peg' instruments, but nothing really floated my boat. I had narrowed things down to things like knowing I wanted a spruce top and rosewood back and sides, but most of what I found was either laminated or otherwise unsuitable. It put me in a bit of a quandry, to say the least; what's more, I was scheduled to be making album #2 early in 2009 and so getting something sorted soon became a priority.

As luck would have it, my friend Gordon Giltrap phoned me and I mentioned my dilemma to him. He offered to put me in touch with Roger Bucknall at Fylde Guitars in Penrith and, after meeting with Roger at the Cheltenham Acoustic Guitar Show and trying oodles of different models, I settled on one... This one:

This is a Fylde Falstaff. The top is Englemann Spruce and I have asked for the back and sides to be upgraded to Brazilian Rosewood (or 'Rio' as it is called these days). The neck is Honduras Mahogany and the fingerboard is ebony. All-in-all this represents a brilliant recipe for a great sounding acoustic guitar and I must say that I'm incredibly excited about receiving it.

At present, it's being built for me and I hope to be able to post some pictures of the process some time soon.

Stay posted!

Does Not Contain Plant Extract?

2008-10-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

If the news that Les Dennis is teaming up with The Wombats for a Christmas single wasn't bad enough, it's seemingly true that Messrs Page, Paul-Jones and Bonham Junior are considering touring under the Zeppelin banner - but without Percy.

I've been lucky enough to see the mighty Zeppelin on two occasions and whilst it's definitely a good thing to get Jimmy Page back where he belongs - pounding out historic rock'n'roll on a Les Paul - surely it's not going to be the same without Plant at the helm?

Auditions are allegedly underway to find a Plant substitute (I'm wondering how long it was before David Coverdale was on the phone!) but the world waits a-wondering if our Robert will have a last minute change of heart and lend his tonsils to the project after all.

I, for one, want the song to remain the same...

My Life As A Porn Star

2008-10-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

Apparently, if you ask practically any session musician, he will tell you that at one time or another he has contributed, either knowingly or unknowingly, to a porn movie soundtrack.

I'm not talking about all the heavy breathing and, 'Take me now, Mr Prendergast...' type of banter, but the drear music that (I'm told) accompanies such a cinematic event.

Now, I have to confess, that even my humble session activities have not escaped the film industry's shady back streets - but I didn't find out that my earnest guitar wranglings had been so used until years afterwards. All I knew was that the session concerned had seriously strange overtones…

At the time, I was working on and off for a studio somewhere in Britain (Essex, actually) and occasionally we were asked to provide a bit of music here and there for video or radio. It was generally nothing too spectacular - maybe 30 seconds of anonymous background music in a certain style, that's all. But this session was different; the guy who commissioned the music was extremely vague as to what the film was about, for a start. He told us that he made corporate films for various companies all over the world and this one in particular was for a hotel chain in Australia. Fair enough. They have hotels in Australia, I know, and so there was nothing too suspicious about that…

So he told us that he wanted 15 minutes (!) of music with a sort of 'Crocodile Dundee' type of vibe going on - lots of didgeridoo droning and Aboriginal drums, gradually building in tension. Tension? Must be a weird hotel chain. Oh, and then there's the fast section towards the end... Fast bit? Well, yes; apparently somewhere near the end of the 'corporate film about an Australian hotel chain' there was a car chase. Oh, really?

We asked if we could see a script - 15 minutes of shooting in the dark (sorry) without any sense of musical direction was a bit of a tall order, after all. But we were told, no; no script. Well, could we see any footage, just to get an idea of how the music could tie in with the visuals? Again; no.

So drums, didgeridoo gradually building up to a car chase? OK. Now I sense that there is already some considerable giggling at the back because I've already told you what the music was really wanted for, but in those days, a job was a job and we just, erm, got stuck in.

We got together some samples of ethnic percussion, found a synthesiser setting which sounded a bit like a didgeridoo and set the whole thing up. I played what I can only describe as some entirely out of place guitar on the top using a blue Stratocaster (ironic, eh?) which ended up sounding a little like Dire Straits had got lost in the Australian Outback - and afterwards I drove home.

My compelling vision is the keyboard player (who was late for a prior engagement as the session had over-run) trying to get himself ready for a night out with a toothbrush lodged in his mouth whilst the music reached its inevitable climax (sorry again).

On the day, all we thought was; weird. It was a long time afterwards when it was revealed somehow that the businessman who had employed us that day had what we could call 'an arrangement' with some local ladies who fancied earning a bit of extra housekeeping.

And, before you ask, no; I haven't seen it…

BBC's 'Story Of The Guitar'

2008-10-06T04:12:00.000-07:00

I was afraid that the BBC would take their usual highly superficial approach to this - but was pleasantly surprised when I saw they had dedicated three hours to the subject.
Last night's show was a bit long-winded on the history front, I thought. Yeah, it's fascinating that you can trace the history of the guitar back to stone carvings thousands of years old - albeit in a severely prototypical form - but does anyone really care?

The central nub of Alan Yentob's programme is that the guitar is the most influential instrument in popular culture and that it has enjoyed a lot of controversy in the past as the electronic Messiah a whole generation of parents came to fear. There's a a lot of meat there, surely, without needing to go too far back?

Of course, I shouldn't moan because this kind of documentary only comes along once every 20 years or so and so we should probably be grateful for the attention our instrument is being given by the mainstream media. But I'm a bit tired of being thankful for the scraps thrown out to us whilst the BBC still continues to turn its back on popular music overall. I would gladly swap all three hours of this programme - fascinating though it might be - for more attention being paid to the actual players of the instrument.

Whatever happened to the 'In Concert' series? Or The Old Grey Whistle Test type of programme? Both provided valuable platforms for new artists and music, but now all we've got is dear old eclectic Jools - and if you don't like the format, my dears, that's just tough. What's more, 'Later...' is almost impossible to get on to unless you've got the machinery of major labels and PR behind you. It's definitely an industry where what you know doesn't amount to anything; it's 'who'.

Meanwhile, we have to endure virtually every Prom concert going, from good ol' bums-on-seats Beethoven to new commissions from contemporary composers who continually push the boundaries of what people can actually sit through without haemmorrhaging.

So what about a bit of parity here, Beeb? Mainstream artists (who definitely don't need the exposure, but what the hey? You know who you are...) alongside new artists who have been judged on merit by some open minded producer who can resist the influence of the powerful and seductive opinions of a handful of hack journalists who are keen to push 'this year's new Dylan'.

Opening things up like this would be good for music, surely?

A Metallica Moment

2008-09-17T15:35:00.000-07:00

Metallica are very much in the news again at present, thanks to a brand new album and tour. It got me thinking about the time I was invited backstage with the band at their 1992 Wembley show - and how the experience has definitely shortened my life by at least a few minutes...

The thing was, I was doing my journalist thing, interviewing Kirk Hammett and had agreed to turn up at the band's hotel in central London before the evening's gig. So I turned up and sat chatting with Kirk for around half an hour when a record company type poked her head around the door and said that there might be a problem with transport for the gig. Apparently there was a major rugby match on at Wembley Stadium that afternoon and the band were originally scheduled to turn up for the soundcheck around the time the match finished. Sensing traffic chaos, the record company had decided that the band should leave for the gig much earlier than planned, leaving me - and my interview - a little high and dry.

Sensing my plight, they asked me if I would like to come along and finish my interview backstage at Wembley. I had a Fast Show moment and thought, 'Me? Turning up at Wembley with Metallica in a large black limo, with my reputation? What can they be thinking?' And agreed.

So off we went. In the end I didn't travel with the band, but still got treated to a chauffeur-driven limo... and I got to talk to Kirk for a further 30 minutes or so backstage. Job done.

Next question - would I like to stay and watch the gig? Hmmm... OK. Would I like to go into the infamous Mosh Pit? (Metallica fans will know this as possibly the most extreme courtesy a journalist can be offered by the band). Err... No, side of stage will be fine, thanks very much. My moshing days were well and truly over.

So I stood by the side of the stage, near the back and watched the band led onto the darkened platform one by one. Kirk struck up the intro riff to Enter Sandman and the crowd went wild. Great atmosphere... Hey, rock'n'roll!

But... Nobody warned me that on the first beat of the bar where the band all start playing the riff together after the intro, there would be a bloody great bang and flames would shoot 50 feet into the air - right next to where I was standing.

You imagine it - a bang loud enough to be heard over Metallica letting rip isn't going to be anything other than ear drum shattering and I was a few feet away. I think I jumped almost as high as the flames...

To give you some idea about what I experienced, there's a film on You Tube here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QP-SIW6iKY that will give you the gist. The bang is about 1 min 50 sec in...

Despite the heart palpitations and serious shock, I have to say that it was possibly one of my better backstage experiences, all the same!

Cheltenham Unplugged

2008-09-15T08:58:00.000-07:00

I went to the Acoustic Guitar Show in Cheltenham last Sunday. Now this is nothing exactly abnormal for me because, as you can probably imagine, I go to a lot of guitar shows; but this time I was a man on a mission. I'm in the market for a new acoustic guitar, you see…

Let's face it, the acoustic guitar market can be split into two distinct houses: factory made and hand made - although arguably there are subdivisions like companies whose main output is factory made but who have a hand made division or custom shop.

What's the difference? Factory made instruments tend to be cut out by a machine using some sort of computer guidance and then the various bits are assembled by a largely automated and consequently indifferent process. The woods involved are rarely top notch, either, even if they sound like they are in the brochure. If you're thinking that wood is wood, think again - there are many different grades of tonewood and it's often the norm for the cream of the crop to go to the hand builders. So it's a conveyor-belt nativity for a factory made acoustic, but seeing as this is how a lot of cars are made, it's not necessarily a bad thing overall. I've played some very satisfactory guitars that have been made in this fashion, for instance.

Hand making is altogether a different ball game, though. Here, an instrument is totally bespoke - the wood is of the highest grade and very carefully chosen, cut to size by hand, glued, braced and essentially crafted into existence with love, skill and care by a master luthier.

The difference in tone between these two manufacturing disciplines can be quite pronounced, too, hand made instruments often being louder and sweeter. Naturally, they have a price tag to match - you could bring home an acoustic in a box for under £100 if you shopped around a bit, but a custom build is going to set you back more like £2500 - and that would be the no frills option! Once you begin talking exotic or rare woods, the price starts going up even further.

At the show in Cheltenham I met up with some old friends and waved and smiled at a lot more, too. I spent a brief few seconds saying 'Hi' to Gordon Giltrap, passed the time of day with luthier Patrick Eggle (who I've known for years) but the lion's share of my day was spent talking body woods and tone with Roger Bucknall from Fylde guitars. Roger makes some excellent instruments and I've just ordered one - I'll give you the details when the build has begun, but it should be ready early in the new year, just in time for me to begin recording a new album.

Of course, I tell everyone that getting a new guitar is pretty meaningless for me these days because, after all, they're just tools aren't they? But I have to say that I'm really excited about this one!

Hey Nonny - No!

2008-09-01T07:08:00.000-07:00

Hmmm... It seems that I have been openly and publicly accused of being a folk musician. It's true. Some well-meaning member of the public, having bought a copy of my album Nocturnal, has decided to review it for the Amazon website and, in so doing, mentioned that it is 'a delightful instrumental UK folk album...'

This is something that would have probably wounded me deeply a few years ago because it would have conjured up visions of the heavily clichéd folkie - all fingers in ears, beards, baggy jumpers, real ale and 't'was early one morning' and that's definitely not me, my dears.

But have you heard any modern folk recently? I've been taking a listen and have had any illusions I may have had tested to the limit. It seems to me that the umbrella term 'world music' has now opened up to embrace the fringes of what we might call 'experimental folk' and has created a wonderfully expansive landscape for any adventurous musician looking for a place to call home. As examples of this I'll cite Eliza Carthy's new CD 'Dreams Of Breathing Under Water' and the work Simon Emmerson is doing with his Imagined Village project, which marries up such diverse talents as Martin Carthy, Billy Bragg and Benjamin Zephaniah. Both represent an exciting, rich hybrid of diverse musical forms and are simply light years away from what you might imagine.

So I'd like to thank my accuser and say that it might just be an honour to be referred to as being a part of what appears to be a very fertile and lively musical form.

Gone Shopping...

2008-08-26T14:40:00.001-07:00

I found myself in a guitar shop this afternoon for the first time in quite a while. I don't frequent such establishments as often as I used to in my youth because the whole game works a little differently for me these days. I'm in the privileged position now whereby if I'm at all curious about some item of guitar exotica, I simply phone the company who supplies it to these fair isles and they send me one to appraise in the comfort of my own hovel. Then, I generally spill red wine all over it and either buy it or send it packing with a note to the effect that it must try harder if it wants to become part of the Mead musical battery.

Now I'm very aware that this is a rare and extremely fortunate position to be in - but it wasn't until this afternoon that I realised how lucky I am to be able to audition my potential new toys in this fashion.

My mission on this particular occasion was to examine a range of acoustic guitars from one particular manufacturer (and I'm far too much the gentleman to tell you which) whose website has recently enthralled me with its promises of orgasmic tone at a very reasonable price. I didn't ring them and work my usual charm because I wanted to compare models in the raw and heck, it was a nice day and I hadn't been out in a while...

When I arrived at the shop I was extremely disappointed to find that the guitars were in a quite a poor state; very dusty and loaded with strings so old that I imagine they had enjoyed more than a passing acquaintance with Lloyd George. The environment wasn't at all attuned to peaceful strummery either. The sales assistant was busy plucking away at a mandolin behind the counter, oblivious to me and my fellow guitar enthusiasts on the premises, apparently intent on learning some folky opus at unsociable volume levels regardless of whose afternoon she might be ruining.

So it was actually quite difficult to hear anything on the shop floor - and my British reserve is such that I was far too decent and upright to ask her to shut the f*ck up and give me a chance to hear what I was doing. So I left, my impression of the guitar range rather sullied and with no intention of ever darkening the doorsteps of that particular establishment again.

I spent a fair amount of time as a young plucker visiting guitar shops far and wide and got used to the fact that when it comes to service you had to put up with both the exceptionally good and the rabidly poor with the same kind of insouciance. But this is 2008, I'm a grown-up and things haven't changed at all. Inappropriate service is still apparently rife in the marketplace and guitar buyers are still being treated will all the disrespect they certainly don't deserve.

Now, where's my phone book...

2008-08-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

Dateline 24.08.08 - Beijing Olympics Closing Ceremony…

Jimmy Page - Yay! Whole Lotta Love - Yay! Leona Lewis - WTF?

End of transmission

Welcome!

2008-08-22T06:59:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to the inaugural iTalk Guitar Editor's Blog. Just to introduce myself, my name is David Mead - I'm a guitarist, writer and journalist who lives in the South West of the UK. If you're at all interested in the story so far as far as I'm concerned (and I'm not going to hold it against you if you're not) then the whole sorry tale is neatly wrapped up for you on my website at http://www.davidmead.net.

I'll be using this Blog to record my various rants about sundry topics, some of them related to the guitar in general, some confined to the music industry and some totally off the wall - especially if I'm having a bad day…

I like to think of myself as a simple kinda guy (that's 'simple' as in 'uncomplicated'; I've got O Levels, y'know). In fact, you could say that my likes and dislikes run something like this:

Likes: cats, red wine, music, guitars, books, movies

Dislikes: just about everything else

So it's going to be interesting… See you soon!