5 thoughts on “Music: Dots And Loops

  1. Rob Caldecott

    On an unrelated note, here is the message I tried to send you last week (to cleek at lunarpages dot com). Apologies if the message is rambling, it was late when I wrote it.

    “Today I sat my first written exam since 1989 –
    a Java exam nonetheless (I am studying for a degree – correspondence style – and have just completed my second year – only another 3 or 4 years to go). Lucky you say? Sitting a JAVA exam? Well, when I got
    home my wife had bought me a little something to keep me occupied in the evenings when she is watching ER/Greys Anatomy and I am at a loose end (until my 2007 courses start in February).

    It’s a Crafter Twin Bird Bubinga electro-acoustic guitar.

    http://www.harmony-central.com/Newp/2004/Twin-Bird-Bubinga-lg.jpg

    No, I’d never heard of them either, but man, this guitar is frickin’ beautiful. Not only is it small (so easy to handle), sounds fantastic, but the little built-in amp thingy has a bloody TUNER! A tuner AS PART OF THE GUITAR! Such a gadget is new to me over here in
    Merry Olde England, and whoever came up with it, well, they deserve a
    medal.

    Now, this guitar can’t of been cheap. I mean, I know roughly how much it cost, and, well, you wouldn’t get much change out of $800 on your side of the pond. My wife was recently made redundant (from Sony UK
    who have outsourced her job to a really, really shitty 3rd-party) and last week received a few quid from them as thanks for her 6 years of taking it up the arse from angry customers, and what does she go and
    do? Spend a large chunk of it on me because I have been a bit stressed about sitting my first written exam in 17 years (yes, I had to write out Java code – lots of it – by hand).

    She quite literally rocks.

    Sigh. Just had to tell someone! :)

    P.S. The little amp thing has the following controls – perhaps you can shed some light on what they do (I haven’t plugged it in yet):

    Bass – OK
    Middle – Gotcha
    Treble – Uh huh
    Scoop – WTF?
    Phase button – Eh?”

  2. cleek

    wow. that’s one sweet guitar. what a gal! congrats :)

    scoop? no idea. could be similar to my amp’s “presense”, which is a high-end exciter of some kind. but “scoop” makes me think more of a midrange cut, than a high-end boost.

    phase? if there are two pickups, it could control how their signals are mixed (in phase / out of phase with each other). unless.. it has a built-in phaser/flanger/chorus, in which case scoop would control the depth of the effect and phase would turn it on?

    it sure is purty !

  3. Rob Caldecott

    Yeh, I’m a lucky guy. I’ve played it every day since I got it, and my fingertips are getting rock hard again. It also means I am spending less time in front of this bloody laptop (usually working later than I should) and I have dug out the chords to songs I haven’t played in years. My wife plays the piano and I am trying to get her to learn a few rock numbers so we can duet, but it’s hard as she has a classical background and finds rock songs really hard to play (yet she’ll bang out some Beethoven with her eyes shut). he he. I will dig out my amp this weekend, plug in and see what those controls actually do.

    Have a good weekend yourself mate.

  4. cleek

    >dug out the chords to songs I haven’t played in years

    good times.

    i haven’t played much in a while, but i’ve picked it up again pretty recently. as a challenge, i’ve been trying to teach myself LedZep’s “Lemon Song” for the past week. the basic riff is pretty easy, but i’m trying to learn it note-for-note, all the fills and licks, and the solo, too – all 6+ minutes of it. i’ve never done that with a song before, so i don’t know if it’s even possible for me to play all of the stuff he does. but, i’m gonna try anyway.

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