Frabjous Day

23 Jan 2011

These last few days I’ve really noticed how awful my timing is, and I’ve been trying to work on it. Even though I don’t have much to show for it yet, at least now I’m starting to hear where I’m wrong, which is infinitely better than being oblivious. Anyway, this track’s the best I can do for the moment.

22 Dec 2010

Quantifying “Suck”

I have just done a little experiment.

I suck at guitar, see. Particularly with my sense of timing. Now, this is perhaps not surprising, given that I’ve spent all my time learning bits of solos and shit rather than, y’know, music, and as a result I probably just need to practice playing in time more. I doubt it’s an inherent deficiency.

Nonetheless, I was interested in trying to quantify exactly how poor my timing is, and I thought of a good way to do this using my audio software, Ableton Live. This not only has a good “Warp” feature that lets me slow things down a great deal while still retaining clarity, but also has the ability to minutely adjust the alignment of tracks relative to each other in time.

Here’s what I did.

I hit “record”, set up a metronome with a very clear beep and then played the same note ten times in sync with it. Then, I selected the first note of the recording, set it to loop repeatedly, and slowed it way down to a quarter its original speed so that I could hear it clearly. I was then able to slide the track forwards and backwards a little to get it perfectly in time with the metronome.

(Amount of correction needed) = (Amount of rhythmic suckage)

I then proceeded to do the same on each of the ten notes. Here’s my data:

Note 1 = -16ms

Note 2 = -28ms

Note 3 = +136ms

Note 4 = +128ms

Note 5 = +118ms

Note 6 = 0ms

Note 7 = +46ms

Note 8 = +46ms

Note 9 = +140ms

Note 10 = +82ms

Notes 1 and 2 were late, the rest were early, except for 6, which was perfect. 7 and 8 were off by the same amount.

I want to take an average of this. Now, it’s important to realise that if you were +50ms on one note and -50ms on another, the two would cancel out and give you the false impression that your timing was perfect. What’s important here is the amount you’re off by, and that means treating all the numbers as positive, rather than treating notes 1 and 2 as negative. So, by my calculations:

Average rhythmic suckage = 74ms

Also, you’ll notice that most of the numbers were early. This means that I was playing ahead of the beat most of the time. My timing is thus misaligned.

Average rhythmic alignment = 65ms early

By my calculations, even if I corrected for the earliness I’d still be off by 56ms on average.

I don’t know how important any of this is, and my methods are a bit loose and subjective and my sample size small. But I’m still curious as to whether it’ll improve with practice.

17 Jul 2010

Never really played much finger picking before. Just learned this yesterday, wish I had a proper acoustic to try it on.

8 Jul 2010

Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” recorded in Guitar Rig

Dodgy backing track courtesy guitarbackingtrack.com

29 Jun 2010

Uli Jon Roth’s “SOS” guitar intro thing, from the “Under A Dark Sky” album. Recorded in Guitar Rig.

Those big sweeping arpeggios are very dramatic when you get them right. Also very difficult, and made even moreso due to my rushing them. The last one is pretty good. I’ll record this again once I’ve practised it more.

13 May 2010

You-Know-What recorded in Guitar Rig. Loads of noise suppression added to counter my infernal noise problems, and too much reverb/echo, too, but my computer was screwing up and I was too sick of it to go back and fix it…

20 Apr 2010

Eddie Van Halen’s solo guitar track from “Somebody Get Me A Doctor”.

I’ve been blowing my brains out with this far too much recently.

This sound defines crunchy guitar. It’s so stupendously powerful.

9 Apr 2010

From ZZ Top’s First Album (that is actually what it’s called…)

I face endemic problems with muddiness in the low end. The riff at the end is very indistinct. I think it may be my guitar though, rather than a fault of Guitar Rig.

7 Apr 2010

Little Wing intro and a sort of loose jam thing for a few seconds afterwards. Recorded in Guitar Rig.

6 Apr 2010

Money where your morality is

Background context: The wonderful guitar amplifier in the clip below is made by a company named Splawn.

From the Splawn “about” page:

“At Splawn Amplification, we are committed to the highest customer service standards and product reliability, due to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The way we handle day to day business revolves around this relationship. We give all the honor and glory back to the One who is fully responsible. If you have any questions or comments about this mission statement, please feel free to contact us.”

They reference Romans 10:13. From the KJV: “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

So:

An imagined interlocutor enquires of me:

“As an atheist, would you be dissuaded from buying a product from a company that so strongly espouses religion on their “about” page?”

It’s an interesting question.

There are of course some people in the world with reprehensible views about various things, and I’d prefer not to give these people my money. I’d feel very uncomfortable buying anything at all from someone whose market stall was covered in Nazi propaganda. That’s very obvious, but there are more subtle considerations as well.

I’d feel uncomfortable supporting someone who wouldn’t vote for a black politician, someone who didn’t support equal rights for LGBTs, or a company that paid women less for the same job.

Going further, I wouldn’t want to support an organisation that had noble aims but a dishonest way of promulgating them; animal welfare groups who apparently endorse “ethics by aesthetics”, for example.

You can go a lot further still: I’d prefer to spend my money in a shop with fewer stupid restrictions on employee appearance.

But it’s useful to draw a line, at some point, separating the things we’d simply prefer from the things over which we’d actually boycott someone. This isn’t an easy line to draw, and it might not even make sense to stick to it rigidly, but it’s worth thinking about.

So what about religion itself?

Well, it’s easy to say that it doesn’t affect me much if someone thinks “Jesus died for our sins”, but that’s a fairly trivial and academic point. It’s trivial and academic because a person’s views about the world do not exist in isolation from it.

There’s no doubt that a person can be devoutly religious and still be very nice, but in my experience the sort of person who references bible quotes and uses the above kind of religious language has a nasty habit of preaching peace and love while holding deplorable views about various groups of innocent people.

There is a simple criterion here: if you disapprove of me or my friends, then I disapprove of you.

I think in practise I’d prefer not to even ask about their opinions on equality and so on, if only to avoid the risk of getting a nasty reply.

So, ultimately, yes, it does count as a point against them; bad PR at the very least.