Saw this on Google Video and just had to share it. It’s the voice of Darth Maul himself sending up Hollywood.
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I always find it a little apprehensive when it is time to re-string a new guitar. OK, you’ve had the guitar for a couple of months and you want to fit your favourite strings. You take the old strings off and replace – but will the tension of the new strings be any different, forcing you to adjust the bridge? Will your once perfect guitar setup be blighted with fret buzz? Will the guitar’s sound change for the worse? These questions naturally swim around your head like little fishes in the goldfish bowl of consciousness.
My Godin XTSA is a fantastic guitar. In fact, it is probably the best guitar I’ve ever owned or likely to own. Despite this, it had a few tuning problems that meant whenever you used the tremelo arm or “whammy bar” for you youngers, it went seriously out of tune. This can be a common problem. It is an issue with the grooves in the nut where the strings rest against. If the grooves are too tight, the strings snag, causing the tuning instability when you bend strings or use the temelo.
I’d had enough of the guitar drifting out of tune and me constantly having to retune, often in mid song. So I decided to pluck up the courage and remove the old strings and replace them with some Ernie Ball Slinkys – my brand of choice. The XTSA is interesting because it has locking tuning pegs. This means that you don’t have to wind the strings around the capstan like other guitars. You cut the strings to length, with about 2cm extra to thread through the eyelet and then you screw the lock onto the string. The winding pegs are of a tension that when you give them a couple of turns, the string is almost in tune.
Marvellous! This meant that I had my guitar strung in literally half the time. Of course, before I restrung the guitar, I applied a good dose of graphite to the nut. I know it sounds high-tech, but it is in fact a low-tech solution. You take a soft pencil and rub the lead into the grooves of the nut, providing some much need lubrication. This means that the strings will no longer catch and shouldn’t lose their tuning. Do you know what? It worked. The guitar now stays in tune when I use the tremelo. I had a similar problem with my trusty old Fender Fat Strat when I first bought it and have been using the lead pencil trick for years.
Maybe I should record my next video guide for the XTSA? It is rather a clever guitar, you know.
Hurrah!. My faulty D-Link modem has been replaced. How cool is that? I bought the modem over a year ago and it crapped up the other week when I tried to upgrade the firmware. I contacted D-Link and they replaced it without question. Now that is what I call customer service. By doing this, they have insured that I’ll buy D-Link products for the rest of my natural life.
On Saturday, I worked on some more jingles for the Iain Lee Show on LBC 97.3. He challenges the listeners to send in their own MP3 tracks and I responded the other week with a re-recorded version of “Mr Straight”. This time around I sat down I recorded from scratch. It has been quite a good exercise really because it has got me back into writing lyrics and considering recording “proper” songs again instead of solely instrumentals. Anyway, I hope he plays these two new jingles over the coming week.
Got a big letter from Ernst & Young about the collapse of Highbury House. As a creditor, I get all this bumf – like I am interested. I am only interested in getting my money. It was too early in the morning for my sleep-addled brain to read all this stuff, so the Missus read it on my behalf.
“You’re fucked,” she said delivering her summation with a succinctness I appreciate over my cornflakes.
Oh well, if by some fluke of luck I do get the money owed to me, I’ll buy my loyal reader a drink.
Today, I also got a letter from my bank with a invalid cheque in it. This was from one of my many eBay sales and this is the first time I’ve ever had a cheque returned. The reason? I don’t know. The jargon was BankspeakTM and it just said “Refer to Drawer”. What? I, the drawer, says that this cheque is fine. Cash it, you swines. Well I’ve already sent the CDs off to the chap who paid with this cheque and I am hoping that he is filled with the milk of human kindness and will issue another, more valid cheque. The funny thing is that when I looked at the cheque originally, I remarked to The Missus that I thought we’d have trouble with it. I think it was because this guy’s handwriting seemed to be of that of a three-year-old. It should have been in multi-coloured crayon to top the effect. Oh well, easy fucking come, easy fucking go? No?
Got another payment from CDBABY. My music has been literally flying off the shelves and the digital download side of things has become a nice little earner. OK – before I could only afford a couple of packets of replacement guitar strings a year with my earnings, but now I can buy those and perhaps some bass strings and some customised picks with my name on. Whoo-hoo! I have arrived. But seriously, every quarter the money is increasing. This surprises me because I am a nobody and I keep wondering to myself what I could achieve if I attempted to become a somebody. The Missus says I need to get some more music out there pronto. She is absolutely right, as per usual.
I also managed to get one of my tunes played on the radio. It was real radio, none of that Internet rubbish. It was the Iain Lee Show on LBC 97.3 and you can hear it if you buy today’s podcast. I was credited as “Darren from The Loughton”. Hearing my own music (albeit in a cut-down and modified manner to fit in with the humour of the radio station) was quite thrilling and the production sounding so flipping good. I actually blushed with embarrassment when The Missus cheered when it was over. Iain Lee said it was brilliant on his show and actually said it was “genius” in an email back to me. Quick – widen the doors, my head is beginning to swell…
🙂
Yuck. That cold had me in its grip for the whole of last week. The running nose and painful sinuses are gone. Hurrah! Normally, I can shake these sniffles off in a day or so, but that was real stinker. But heck, it’s only a cold. Not like I was going to lose a leg or anything.
The Google Video upload has been very popular, being downloaded by over 40 viewers. I also added it to my podcast feed so that those with Video iPods and the like can also view my little presentation. I must admit it was quite fun and quite a distraction from feeling under the weather. I really ought to do more stuff like that because I am most happy when tinkering and doing silly shit like that. Problem is, what do I do for my next video presentation? I dunno…
Recently, I came across a really clever feature of the Sony PSP. Now I used to be a pretty sharp tool, but I think my edge has been blunted with age. Anyway, recently I noticed that you can program RSS feeds into the PSP. Now you might think that this enables it to access newsfeeds and the like, but it is better than that. The RSS feeds for the PSP only accept audio date or RSS from podcasts. OK? Are you following me? So if you add an RSS feed (like the one I have for my podcast on this site http://www.darrenlock.com/podcasts.xml) you can access the contents of the feed wirelessly. It effectively means that you can use the PSP as a wireless access point to podcasts. It doesn’t download the podcasts to memory, but STREAMS them to the device, meaning that it kind of acts as a podcast radio device. Absolutely brilliant! So I loaded in some RSS feeds from the BBC and LBC and I can listen to those while I am in bed for example.
Sometimes technology still has the ability to completely amaze me. Who would have thought that I could stream audio wirelessly over a certain distance to a handheld device while I was in bed? Five years ago, I would have scoffed at this and asked how much it would cost. The future has arrived…I just didn’t realise it.
Yesterday, watched the extended version of “The Wicker Man” on DVD. The Missus bought me that in 2002 for my birthday while she was in Santa Monica. It was a limited edition release in a big wooden box. I really love that film and is one of the few movies that bears repeated showing. Edward Woodward is just fantastic in it and I don’t think ever really got the recognition for his acting ability. I remember seeing the film for the first time on the BBC when I was younger and just being completely blown away by the end sequence. It still unnerves me now. Shame the Hollywood Movie Schlock IndustryTM decided to remake it. 🙁
Been suffering from a horrible “man cold” this week. Tried to get things done, but events have a habit of conspiring against you and before you can say “Holy botched firmware upgrade, Batman!”, my old ADSL modem dies of fright after one too many attempted digital rogerings. Oh well, so I had a couple of days without Internet access. I had a snotty nose and I didn’t miss it.
To take my mind off the rotten way I was feeling, I decided to make a little video presentation. A lot of traffic coming here turns up via Google and many people come this way to look at my lovely little Ashbory Bass. So I decided to record a video to show these errant travellers just how good the instrument is. I have even used Google Video to host it, so it saves me some bandwidth. The video is below and please excuse my snotty nose and poor bass performance. The only defence I can present is that I had a cold…sniff, sniff, sniff…