The Meme ‘Geme’

From reading Rick’s blog this morning it appears that fellow ukmger Penfold has started a Meme:

“Your meme, should you choose to accept it, is to rank the following bands in order, from couldn’t live without to couldn’t care less. To add value to this process, you must also add one band to the list, and remove one band from the list, before passing the meme on (including these instructions).”

Cool

Taking Rick’s list I would have to probably remove ‘The Sex Pistols’. My experience of punk extends to the ‘The Clash’, yeah I know, anyways when punk was around I was still dribbling snot from my nose and putting my parents through Toddler Hell.

Who to add though? Hmmm…soo many great bands on my listening list at the moment but I think it has to be ‘Audioslave‘. Having recently purchased their CD I’m hooked on Cornell’s vocals ( as I was as a Soundgarden fan ) and the riffing of Tom Morello. A fantastic combination.

Therefore my list would be:

Audioslave
The Red Hot Chilli Peppers
Queen
Radiohead
The Beatles
Nirvana
Harem Scarem
REM
Fleetwood Mac
Pink Floyd

Feel free to continue the Meme by using the comments system or if you blog it, let me know and I’ll post up a link .

It’s been a while

Been a while since any updates/posts so here’s some linkage till I finalise the first installment of the Exercise pages.

Rock ‘n’ Food!

It appears that a book of recipes from stars of the world of music has been published which features the one and only Steve Vai. I enjoy cooking, food and of course Vai’s music, question is, am I that much of a fan-boy to actually buy the book? Probably.

Levels of excitement are reaching critical levels due to an guitar related event drawing ever closer. Yes the event of which I speak of is Jemfest UK!. A weekend of all things pointy. Headlined by the fantastic Rob Balducci, whose two CDs I own and love, and featuring ukmg’s very own Clive Murray, whose CD I also own and love, it promises to be a memorable and inspiring weekend.

Some recording links

With a new month comes a new Guitarist Home Recording Collective task, which this month is to arrange a song around a popular TV theme. As I’ve been working on the drum track for my month’s entry I thought it would be a good idea to share some drum linkage.

Until quite recently I used to use the Gold Drums Soundfont for all my drum sounds, from using the laptop more and more I started looking for a VST option and discovered the fantastic Natural Studio Kit. A collection of samples of a pro kit which to my ears provide a far more realistic drum sound compared to Gold Drums.

You can hear a raw unprocessed sample of what nskit is capable of here.

Creating drum tracks on the laptop is now just a simple process of loading the WAV samples into Battery and using the Drum Roll in Cubase to create the patterns.

Of course creating the patterns is the tricky bit . Having never played drums at all I try and get an idea of what drums should sound like from the music that I hear or if possible try my hand at creating one from scratch and adding in fills etc. from drum tabs. An invaluable source for seeing how ‘real’ drummers play is mxtabs.net, which provides a huge resource of drum tabs. In addition Tweakheadz have useful articles on MIDI drums and creating quick and easy drum tracks.

Get the best out of your practice time!

Recently I have been reading Fundamentals of Piano Practice, 2nd Edition by Chuan C. Chang, ( cheers Matt ). If you wish to further yourself as a musician I heartily recommend you give this book a read.

Yes it’s primarily geared towards pianists but the methods detailed in certain sections are equally valid for guitarists. Beautifully written the book discusses why the ‘intuitive’ way of developing technique or learning a musical piece is flawed and instead provides a collection of alternative methods that produce far more effective results in a shorter period of time. Ideal for getting to grips with those impossible Vai runs or Petrucci picking sequences .

P.S – Yes, I’m still working on the ‘Exercise’ section for the website, the book has given me some new ideas