Jumping the shark, in modern parlance (or in geek circles), relates to an episode of Happy Days where Fonzie jumps over a shark on water skis and after this event it was deemed that the show went downhill. Every TV series jumps the shark, every exponent of popular culture somehow runs out of creative steam and outlives its welcome in this fashion.
When I was first introduced to the Internet back in 1996, I could instantly see the appeal – though I couldn’t envision the future we have now. Back then, things were slow and it was primarily a service that relied on great wodges of text to read, the very odd picture (though it would take minutes to download thanks to that crappy 33k modem) and very little multimedia.
The thing that instantly struck me was the ability to communicate simply and easily over vast distances. I became addicted to the early chat apps (though this interest soon waned as it grew popular and any attempt to engage with individuals was swamped by saddos cruising for anonymous, no-strings sex) and newsgroups were a great place to discuss music interests and computing problems. It thrilled me that you could self-publish your ideas relatively easily and give yourself a voice – so your hobby and interests could be shared with other like-minded individuals.
That was then. This is now. The Internet has naturally grown in popularity and increased access speeds means that we can access previously impossible multimedia files with ease. The idea of streaming live TV shows or downloading high quality movies in a second was beyond my ken back in 1996. I remember once downloading a three minute music file in WAV format that took something like three hours.
As the popularity has increased, the tools to self-publish on the Internet has increased – for example, this website is created using a content management system called Movable Type. In the old days, I had to code by hand and then it was editing code by FrontPage. So there is no reason why young and old aren’t unleashing their creativity on the World Wide Web. It’s just a matter of finding your niche and investing your time and energy into it. YouTube has been a breeding ground of new talent and you can find all manner of imaginative stuff on there. The same can be said of MySpace and music.
While the likes of Facebook and Bebo has passed me by: it’s hard to have a social network when you aren’t particularly sociable, I understand the appeal to generations young and old and as an effective method of communication. By now, you might have a glimmer as to what I am heading towards with the main thrust of this post.
For a while now, I have silently been observing the Twitter phenomenon and I can now state that: I just don’t get it! To me it seems as if two forms of communication have been spliced together to form a bastard hybrid. Texting and social network: an unholy alliance if they had ever been. No, actually that last bit is wrong because I think I have spotted the flaw in Twitter for me.
You see, Twitter is housed in the wrong delivery system: the world wide web. If Twitter’s home platform was the mobile phone and its currency were the text message, I think I’d understand it more. It would be a quick fire way of building up a network of friends and keeping in touch with all of them: simple. But the Internet version appears to me as a complete waste of time resources and is the web equivalent of standing in Trafalgar Square with a megaphone shouting 10 word statements about your day:
“Had eggs for breakfast!”
“Thinking of having a poo!”
“Don’t you think that twitter is a pile of old ….”
Etc.
An appropriate logo purloined from the Skidnee website.
But then you’d have to also shout out replies that other people have shouted at you in order to validate their comments. So what Twitter does is create this completely one-sided, disjointed dialogue to no-one in particular. I’ve looked at Twitter threads and they work better when it is a monologue: with one person giving a single commentary, but when that person starts replying to other commentators it becomes like an experimental cut-and-paste beat poem syncopated by @ symbols. You cannot follow the narrative thread without jumping back and forth between twitter streams and soon enough you become lost pretty quickly.
Then there’s the whole stalker aspect that is a bit freaky. Gone are the idea of subscribers replaced by followers. Look so-and-so has so many people “following” him. I don’t know, it seems silly but that just doesn’t sit well with me. Does anyone really want to be followed, virtual or otherwise?
It wasn’t so long ago that comedian Dom Joly sent up mobile phone culture with his oversized handset and the echoing cry of “I’m on the train!” or “I’m in the library!”…well that’s Twitter that is. Except the mobile phone has been replaced by the Internet. Bereft of creativity and the craft of creating blog entries or getting your personality onto the page, the Twitter entry is just an exclaimation of the now. A pointless cry in the wildnerness. So when Stephen Fry was twittering about being stuck in the lift, he might as well had a giant mobile phone held to ear and been bellowing: “I’m stuck in the lift!”
So if you have any sense of craft or interest in using the Internet for creative purposes say no to Twitter. And like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Friendsreunited, it’s influence will slowly wane.
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She really is a “Black Beauty”
I hadn’t played a Gibson Les Paul style guitar since I sold my Columbus copy back in 1996, so when I saw one of these come up on eBay for £330 I thought it was a bargain. So I purchased the guitar and an internal MIDI pickup kit from Roland to do a DIY install so I could use it with my Roland GR-33 and VG-99 pedal boards.
The guitar was really well made for a copy and I was very surprised by the finish and most importantly the variety of tones you could coax from the instrument with the three humbucker pickups without any fancy effects. The instrument had a good weight and the setup was low, with minimal fretbuzz.
Here is the body of the guitar complete with MIDI pickup
Converting the instrument into a GK-2A midi guitar was trickier than installing it into a standard Fender shape body because you don’t have the routing beneath the scratchplate to play with. Instead, you have to fit the circuit board in the existing cavity where the tone-pots are housed, which is a bit of a squeeze and fitting the control buttons were also a problem, unless I wanted to drill holes in the front of the guitar and ruin the finish.
Here you can see how I mounted the controls in the plastic pickup housing
I didn’t want to do this, so I came up with a novel way of housing the control buttons, pickup switch and activity LED light. Using a very small hand-drill, I made holes in the plastic pickup housing closest the bridge and housed these controls there. I needed a steady hand with the soldering because there wasn’t much space to move and I purchased some small switches from Maplin for the job. It was a first class job and I really impressed myself.
The only other fly in the ointment was fitting the separate volume pot for the MIDI output, and I could either drill a hole in the body or fit it into the scratchplate. I did the latter, even though it was a tight squeeze.
The Epiphone was a great MIDI guitar like this and I really regret selling it on, because my GK-2A installation was a thing of beauty, even if I do say so myself. The main reason for me selling it was that the brass fittings gradually lost their lustre over time and I read elsewhere cases that they actually started to go green, so I decided to sell while the guitar was still in good cosmetic condition.
The golden GP-100 sitting magnificently at the centre of my old rack
This is part of the “gear that I have owned” thread. I bought a second-hand Roland GP-100 guitar effects processor from a seller on eBay back in 2003 in a whim. I didn’t really need it as I was using a Roland VG-8 guitar system, but I’d read in the past that Robert Fripp of King Crimson had used them and in a supreme case of “monkey-see, monkey-do” I bought this unit in an attempt to search for the “new sound”.
The GP-100 is austentatious in its gold casing and fits in a 1U rack. In terms of sound, I was quite impressed by the COSM effects inside the unit considering it was quite an old piece of kit at that time and had been superseded by other effects units in the Roland range. I used it for parts of my Textures, Without Words and Empty Spaces albums. I tended to use the more unearthly effects that unit could produce and I must admit that I’ve found it hard to reproduce these sounds on my current rig.
While I was impressed with the sounds, I wasn’t so impressed with the editing functionality. The unit came without instructions, so I had to bluff my way through using it and I found the editing side of the GP-100 rather user-unfriendly. But then I had been spoilt by the VG range of units from Roland and their slightly easier to use interface.
I eventually sold the unit after a short period because it had developed a fault that meant it used to freeze up and stop working. The only way of fixing this fault would mean me taking a screwdriver to the unit, opening it up and removing/replacing the battery inside, which would somehow reset the unit back to normal. This took time, and was frankly a pain, so it had to go.
If another one of these came up on eBay for the right price, I’d probably grab it just for the heck of it – though I am wary about the condition of these units now as they are rather old, they do go wrong and the front panel control are a little prone to wear.
I don’t particularly like living in a shed, but since our incident I have been forced to do whatever recording and work for the shop from this shed. Don’t get me wrong, it is a nice shed. It has a nice rug and decor and lots of flourescent lights. The downside is that it is frigging cold (even with the electric heater on full blast) and I have noticed that something in the shed likes to bite me. Fleas. Yes, fleas. I have this theory that rabbits might be living under the shed, but maybe I was watching the video clip in yesterday’s post too much.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that recording time has been incredibly limited. I’ve done a few things and tried to commit some base tracks to work on, but it has been hard to concentrate, what with the cold hands and the constant whacking of my head on the low beams inside the shed. Also, the cold plays havoc with my bladder, so as soon as I get a creative wind behind me, I have to retreat indoors for a pee. Ahhh, the details of my life on the page. This makes great blog reading, dunnit?
One track I have managed to finish is this item called Slow Drift. I’ve posted the demo of this before, but this is the finished surround sound version. The thing about the recording of this is that the lead guitar part was recorded on my Godin Multiac nylon guitar and was recorded in one take with the drum part as backing. I was just riffing to the track and managed to capture something in one take. On top of this I laid some more guitars and some stuff from my 6-string bass guitar.
It’s a little loose, but I think it works. As there has been a reluctance from myself to sit in a cold shed for hours at a time, I have been attempting to archive old master recordings and remix old stuff. One thing I enjoy doing is surround sound mixing (I’ve detailed this before) and I’ve been coming up with new surround mixes for my older albums. Because it literally takes 10 minutes to do a surround mix (I don’t do fancy mixing with elements flying all over the shop, just tasteful placement of sounds) I can knock off a mix quickly and hence I’ve done it for this new song.
If you want to listen to it, connect your PC or laptop to a surround sound speaker system using your optical 5.1 output (if you have one) and play the music file. Alternatively, you can load it onto your Xbox 360 using a memory card (or stream it) and listen to the track that way via your surround sound speaker system.
Direct download: CLICK HERE
The intention is to produce albums of surround sound mixes for your listening enjoyment, like I did with my Textures release. Huzzah for me!
Not sure if this is genius or seriously messed-up…US Military bunnies kill Al-Quaeda camels, sounds like a great idea for an animated series. Let’s really confuse everyone and call it “Cat Shit One”. Only in Japan…only in Japan…
![HOT3062[1].jpg](http://www.darrenlock.com/mt/archives/2009/03/26/HOT3062%5B1%5D.jpg)
Hoffmann-Gill standing erect and proud in front of his mount.
“Time to smash the TV to bits?” asks leading professional milk float driver, Daniel Hoffmann-Gill after reading my astoundingly perceptive review of the new series of “The Apprentice”
Ohhh don’t worry, I am reserving that particular pleasure for the moment you appear on Celebrity Skating on Ice or whatever it is called. 🙂
OK, by now you should all know exactly what “The Apprentice” TV show is all about. It is the TV equivalent of watching a car crash in slow motion or a lioness bringing down a sickly wildebeeste on the plains of the Serengeti. And so we watch a group of hapless, boasting cocks and cockettes parade around in front of us trying to win the approval of the UK’s leading Nookie Bear impressionist (that will get us a few hundred hits from Google – and this time around I seriously believe Surallen has had cosmetic surgery in order to enhance his overall Nookieness. His hair now looks as if it is the cross between the type of fluff you find on the top of the head of an Action Man and the short and curlies located on your scrotum. Mind you, his face does look like a talking ballbag too – but that takes me back to my old illustration for this show where I superimposed a ballbag on the head of the great man. Ho ho – ain’t I a wit?)
Anyway, the producers got their special selection filter out working again. Got the mouthy asian bird – check. The ugly ginger bird – check. The pushy baby faced bloke – check. But this time around there are a few new stereotypes to include, like the Islamic fundamentalist bloke who’ll have everyone running in the opposite direction when they do the task that involves hijacking a plane (I made that up in bad taste, you know) and the whiny American bird who is obviously going to come a cropper during the mid-phase of the show during a big showdown.
The first task involved them cleaning and they chose to clean cars. Of course, you can approach cleaning in two ways: as volume sales or in terms of securing a large contract. With volume sales, it is head down bang, bang, bang – knock it out kind of stuff. The guys did that with the shoeshine business, but also had a car cleaning contract to fulfill. Both the male and female team fell with the contract work because they weren’t consistent and couldn’t work at speed. It’s cleaning frigging cars, ferchristsake. So we all know that they are inept.
Anyway, I lost consciousness for a while and the boys lucked out and won due to the girls blowing too much cash on supplies. A schoolboy error and when it come down to the boardroom, the wrong person got dumped. Moaning Mona should have been given the bullet just for arguing with her potential employer. But Sugar blew it once again purely to keep her in for future entertaining confrontational appeal. Ho, ho.
So it is the same old stuff and there is a law of diminishing returns, but for the first time the UK series has overtaken the entertainment appeal of the US counterpart. For years, Donald Trump has literally trumped on Sugar with a superior programme, by putting on extravagent challenges, amazing rewards and acting like a big fucking millionaire, whereas Sugar always felt more like a desperate manager of Dixons than some Mr Big Know-It-All business bloke.
But this time around Trump is doing ANOTHER celebrity edition (Piers Morgan won last year’s series) and the celebrities are shit and Dennis Rodman dominates the proceedings by acting like an eight-foot baby who has run headfirst into a barbed-wire fence. The show has been limping along and there’s no real tension, no real action and no real excitement, all be it for Rodman getting drunk, disappearing and trying to beat up his team mates.
So at least Sugar is providing a pure “Apprentice” experience. But who is going to win? It’s too early to say. I’d like to see the little baby-faced bloke win – you know, the one who has the funny walk/run. It is a comedy walk that he’s nicked directly from Shane Ritchie from the recent “Minder” remake on Channel 5. Yeah, he’ll do – though it really is too early to tell. Might be the ginger bird? Who knows!