It seems that a subsidiary role of a shopkeeper is to be ripped off by his staff and/or customers (tick as applicable). Sometimes I feel that they think that we are either too stupid or busy not to realise that they are ripping us off. One does soon realise that this type of crime is more about the power to decieve than to make money, and that the money is a secondary outcome, the con is king. Take for example one Sunday news delivery boy who thought it would be a great wheeze to claim his pay from my wife and then wait until my mother took over the till and then claim his pay AGAIN. Of course, no-one knew this was happening for a while until I sat down and did the accounts and looked at the receipts. Then I noticed there were two lots of payout receipts for the same boy. Did he not realise he was going to get caught? Did he think that we didn’t make records of our payouts? Did he think we were that naive and daft? Obviously so…
So I waited until one Sunday and he duly came in and claimed his pay from my wife. Then I jumped on the till and lo-and-behold he returned again for another payout. I duly pulled him up when I showed him the previous payout receipt and I watched in joy when he ran with speed from the shop. He was so fast I didn’t even have time to fire him.
Anyway, this kid comes back about an hour later and I tell him not to come back into the shop until he’s paid me the money he owes me for the weeks he has claimed two lots of pay. The kid protests: “How can I do that? You’ve fired me! I’ve got no money now.” Great logic, kiddo, you should have thought of that before you decided to steal wholesale from me.
That happened at the beginning of our term at the shop when everyone thought we were too green and believed we could be exploited at every angle. During our first week of trading we had at least four customer claim that they’d “paid with a twenty”. The old routine to claim extra change. Of course, we took their numbers and checked the till at the end of the day and we were never in receipt of their extra change. So fuck off, con man.
Today saw the culmination of a peculiar series of deceptions. One mother of a Sunday deliverer kept claiming that they were missing a particular paper from their round. Of course, you give them the benefit of the doubt the first couple of times and then the routine because that, a routine. So we began double-checking the round in question and today the routine reared its head and my mother said; “No, you can’t have an extra paper because I double-checked the round myself.” So I make up the rounds and my mother and wife have been double-checking. It is a system that works and I have an accuracy rate of 99.9%!
Anyway, this woman takes the round out to their waiting car every week and that’s where the newspaper mysteriously disappears. My mother calls me at home to tell me that this woman is cutting up rough and that she wants to talk to me. Here’s a warning, folks. Never demand to talk to me because I am the line in the sand. Don’t think you can appeal to my better nature because I haven’t got one. This is business and I am a reasonable man, but when I know someone is screwing me for whatever reason my patience becomes wafer thin.
We have a short conversation in which the woman can’t understand why the paper is missing and the inference is that I’ve made a mistake. I point it out that she is inferring that I am lying and I am not pleased. I tell her that the paper was there. Again, she protests her innocence and I really don’t like her brusque, ignorant Norfolk tones. They grate against my sensibilities. The conversation ends thus:
“All I know is that you are losing me money, so I guess we’ll have to call it quits.”
And with that our working relationship is over. I think Donald Trump and Alan Sugar would be proud of me.
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Another staple of late 70s/early 80s weekend television has bought the farm. Sadly, Lennie Bennett has gone to the great quiz show in the sky. A part of me would like to think that he’s playing an eternal round of golf with Tarby and Brucie…wait a minute, those guys are still alive!
Recorded this piece of audio fluff yesterday. It’s hardly a masterwork, it was more an attempt to squeeze myself back into recording and get my left hand working again. The focus of the track is my 6 six bass guitar, which is proving to be quite a success. For a long time I’ve searched for the “New Sound” and feel quite at home with this new instrument, the extended scale means that I can play further up the neck. The only downside is that the next is so large that when I switch to playing a regular electric guitar, my left hand feels like a bunch of bananas and I can no longer “feel” my away around the guitar fretboard. It is a weird feeling.
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Direct download: CLICK HERE
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.
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!