New Meme

Just spotted another Meme via Mike - “Assuming your neighbours are out of town and you wanna crank it up to 11 and dance around the house in your underwear, whats the top 5 tunes you’d rattle the siding off of the house with?”

At this moment ( difficult to pick just five from so much good music ) it would have to be:

Muse - Absolution - Time is Running Out. Utterly stupendous uplifting track off Muse’s latest album. Matt Bellamy’s vocals are just amazing, great to sing along too.

Guns ‘n’ Roses - Appetite For Destruction - Nighttrain. Possibly my fave GnR tune ( Rocket Queen is not far behind ), great riffage.

Audioslave - Audioslave - Gasoline. Shout like Chris Cornell! yeah!

Prodigy - Music For The Jilted Generation - No Good. Classic classic Prodigy track, great sweaty-smokey-jump-about-like-a-maniac club vibe.

The Seahorses - Do It Yourself - Blinded By The Sun. Could have picked one of the many mighty Stone Roses’ choons here but I simply love the vocals on this track, shivers down the spine good. Crank it and sing-a-long!

Website tinkering

I’ve recently being tinkering with the website and have made some changes to a couple of areas.

Firstly I’ve finally sorted out Greymatter’s Archiving capability and now thankfully have my entries archived in a tidy manner.

I’ve also added a links page with links to some of my favourite places in webland and is by no means finished/complete.

And finally, to the left you may have noticed I’ve added links to blogs I read regularly, I recommend you check them out .

Quick Drum Link

In my continuing quest to improve my MIDI drum programming I recently stumbled across several Drum lesson threads on mxtabs. The threads cover lots of drum specific techniques which incorporated into a MIDI pattern will help to give the drum track some ‘life’.

“Hello Mars?”

Today the 2nd of NASA’s Mars Rover vehicles, Opportunity, has touched down on our enigmatic red neighbour. It joins its mate Spirit and Europe’s ill-fated Beagle 2

I’ve been fascinated by the Cosmos and what could be ‘out there’ since quite a young age so all this recent Mars exploration activity is very exciting for me . I can only imagine the sense of accomplishment and joy of the teams working on these projects ( well the projects that are in charge of working Rovers ), in a way I am actually quite jealous. While studying Physics at University I at times dreamed about working on such projects, helping mankind break into those new frontiers, helping to further our knowledge. I suppose I’ll have to do with helping mankind via Telecommunications ;).

Recently Bush announced plans for a manned mission to the Moon by 2020 to work and live to prepare for further manned exploration in the Solar System. If he keeps to his word this would mean a Moonbase in my lifetime and potentially a manned mission to Mars as well :). I look forward to my middle age.

One final thought, I hope none of these landers are messing up my land on Mars. Oh yes, I own Area D-2 / Quadrant India 10 at latitude/longitude 30 degrees - 31 degrees N and 160 degrees - 161 degrees N. A 25th Birthday present from my Girlfriend ;).

New exercises added

I’ve added some new exercises to the website covering alternate picking :). The powertabs for each exercise are available but apologies for the continued lack of video footage. I’ll sort them out soon, honest ;).

Dream Theater @ Manchester Apollo: Report

On Friday myself and many others (Neil, Neil’s mate Steve, Adrian, Ian, Rick, Trev, Mike, James and Paul - Follow the links for more reviews of the gig -) met up in Manchester to watch the opening night of Dream Theater’s latest tour supporting their new album Train of Thought.

As it was my first time seeing the band live I had been looking forward to this for several months and boy they didn’t disappoint! Our seats were situated in the second row of the circle providing a superb view of the stage and the video screens, which opened the show with a short video run down of the history of the band from their ‘Big Hair’ days through their various albums/tours to the present day. It was interesting to note that the albums ‘Images and Words’ and ‘Scenes From A Memory’ seemed to get the biggest cheers.

Once the videos ended the band took to the stage blasting out the opening track, ‘As I Am’, from the new album. They looked and sounded fantastic with a leaner La Brie,a much balder Rudess and cooler looking shades wearing Petrucci. The show was split into two parts with the first covering the songs from ‘Train of Thought’ and the second covering older material, with plenty of fan favourites. Sound wise there were a couple of hiccups, but of course as it was the first night of a new tour I’m not that surprised. Don’t worry about it John, we all step on the wrong patch sometimes ;).

Having watched the ‘Scenes From New York’ DVD many many times and marvelled at the sheer virtuosity of these musicians, seeing them live was truly inspiring and will never be forgotten. How on Earth do they remember all those notes!

Update: Some pics from the gig

Dream Theater Gig

Tomorrow I’m off to Manchester to see, live for the first time, the fantastic band Dream Theater. They’re playing at the Apollo a venue I’ve never been to before so excitement levels are high.

I’ve started work on transcribing Midnight Blue by Kenny Burrell, although to be honest I will be working on it just one night a week. For the rest of the time I’ve been writing a new song based on a little warmup exercise I use, arpeggiating around the chords Aadd9, Badd9 and C#madd9. The chords provide a nice backing for some lovely lines, watch this space ;).

Since the demise of MP3.com most previous users have started moving to Soundclick as a place to host/promote their music. Since I’ve made a decision to record more this year I thought why not join Soundclick as well. So I did just that.

Oh, apparently I have a very ‘Mooie‘ guitar.

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