Musical Frolicking

If you're a guitarist, you're probably aware of bends. They're pretty common. Word of advice: practice your one-and-a-half tone bends. They were a staple of 70's rock, but I didn't much pay attention to them because a) I was always afraid of breaking strings when I was starting out and b) they were mostly used by guys like Jimmy Page in a "masturbation by proxy of guitar" sort of way that didn't really make much sense. Let's face it, that statement pretty much describes the bulk of rock and jazz guitar soloing. Then you listen to guys like Brian May.

I've been working on learning the guitar solo and orchestrations from Queen's "Killer Queen." The guitar parts are truly rich and moving. That's because Brian understands melody and harmony and how to use both effectively and simultaneously. He also uses one-and-a-half bends to get some really emotional expression injected in the melodic solo. Which means if you haven't practiced these bends and can't hit them accurately, the solo comesout sounding like shit. That's been my problem so I've been giving myself a crash course in accurate one-and-a-half bends. So far so good. Except I think I'm giving Kathy a complex between the frequent comparison of the actual notes and the bent notes, as well as hearing the solo for "Killer Queen" over and over and over and over and over and over and over and... well, get what I mean? It's finally sounding very similar to the original, though, which is very satisfying.

I busted out my old copy of SoundEffect 0.9.2 and installed it onto my iMac. Oh yeah, I borrowed the USB floppy from work to be able to do this. It works! I also copied over a bunch of 68k games but those that actually worked had no sound. Except Battleship, but that crashed when I tried to exit. I was sad that my copy of Obnoxious Tetris (yes the Randall Cook version that swears at you and taunts you and makes all kinds of bawdy noises) didn't have sound on the iMac. Oh well. I can still play it on the SE. But I digress.

I used SoundEffects to practice and figure out the guitar orchestrations in "Killer Queen." That was fun. Then I decided to record a bunchof impromptu tracks making a little snippet with guitar, bass, threepart vocal harmonies and the sound of Kathy's typing as percussion. The lyrics? "Kathy is on the forums." She was typing away in the Religious Forums as usual. She's pretty into them, especially now that she's been made a moderator. She was embarrased but amused by my little ditty. Okay, she makes apoint: I'm into this whole blog thing about as much. We're in disagreement, though, as to whose addiction is worse.

Crap, she just got me with a whammy of a point. I'm going to destinky now. Shower good.

*grunts*

*hits a giant obelisk with a bone*

Fun With Google

I borrowed this cool Google images meme from nepenthe01.

Do a google images search for significant parts of your life. Images will be behind cut-tag, but the things you're supposed to search for are:

First Car
Where you grew up
Your Name
Place you Live Now
Grandmother's Name
Favorite Food
Favorite Drink
Favorite Pair of Shoes
Favorite Smell

It's supposed to be the first suggested answer. I had to save them to my server because linking to them left a bunch of broken images. :(

( My So Called Life )