2012 is going to be an interesting year for me. Only time will tell whether it will be interesting in the Chinese sense.
As of January 31st, 2012 my contract with my employer will be ended by reason of redundancy. This hasn’t been a surprise as the possibility of redundancy was first raised circa 18 months ago and the redundancy was realised voluntarily.
I think it was the right decision.
Over the past two years my employer has been undertaking a massive process of change following a major acquisition, changes intended to make it more cost effective and fit for operating in the annoyingly persistent economic straits we all find ourselves in. The work required from my team and peers was unprecidented in novelty and volume while creating and learning new processes. Challenging doesn’t quite describe it.
In the run up to the decision whether to take redundancy I hoped that some semblance of order and calm would return, but no, the same uncontrolled pace of work and degrading (in the sense of regressing) work culture was going to continue. I wasn’t prepared to stress myself out further supporting a corporate system that was frictious, unprofessional and far from world-class. My decision wasn’t wholly a ‘push’. I’ve felt unsettled for a while now and the appeal of wholesale change has been intensifying in the run up to the turn of the decade.
Ultimately accepting the offer, including generous redundancy terms, was an easy choice…and an incredibly liberating one. On the surface at least.
So what next then? I’m going to take a few months off to relax and catch up with all those little (and not so little) projects that have never moved beyond notes in my Moleskine. I’m giving serious thought to ploughing some time and money into some qualifications including a masters degree from the Open University before actively returning to the job market. Contracting is a possibility too. The idea of being able to set the agenda and tempo for my life is exciting and challenging, not least as it will require met to acquire disciplines I frankly haven’t exercised since an undergraduate.
So the plan for the remaining 90-or so days of my contract are simple: do my job, don’t rock the boat where possible and get my finances and plans in order.
Could be worse. Avanti!
J
OK; hopefully this post will mark the start of a series of posts on music making on the guitar and the bass guitar. For me, I hope these kinds of articles will get me thinking like a music teacher of sorts (my plans for the remainder of 2011 include offering beginners classes for aspiring guitarists and bass players). For any musician who is kind enough to read my ramblings, I hope my somewhat off-kilter experiments will inspire you in your musical expressions.
Let’s start up with the humble guitar capo.
A confession to start off with: I used to view using the capo as cheating. If God gave us the barre chord, why would anyone want to use that auxiliary finger to play in those awkward keys with sharps and flats in their name. Having set aside childish things, the capo has proven its value not only in allowing me to access varying keys with the comfort of the strummers’ standard chord voicings, with a dash of lateral thinking, Capos can open up other creative opportunities to extend the reach of the guitar, emulate other instruments and access other base tunings obliquely.
The Fourth Fret
If you have experience of music transcriptions I’m pretty sure that the guitarist is rarely instructed to place his or her capo above the fourth fret. If your goal is simply to play in a key, there is no need to go above fret four with your capo as the CAGED system of chords (maybe more on that in another post) means every key can be accessed with ease using the open chords a guitar neophyte learns in their first year of playing. But there’s fun to be had by venturing further.
Placing a capo between frets 7- and 12 (heck, go further if you have access to make chords cleanly) mutates the guitar into a different instrument. Pop your capo up high and your instrument can emulate the mandolin…break out your finger-style chops and you can enjoy clean, musical box like articulations. Try playing along with someone else: one capo-less and one with capo 12 playing the same chords and you can get a passable 12-string guitar feel without the variable results of a chorus pedal or somewhat artificial munchkin special effect from octave pitch shifts.
Stop Playing With Yourself
Capos can make playing with others a more interesting audible experience. To avoid simply layering two- or more people using the same chord voicings, use a capo to or two different capo positions to create a complimentary mix of notes from different chord shapes. Try, for example, working out capo positions that mix ‘E’ type or ‘A’ type voicings with ‘G’, ‘C’ or ‘D’ voicings (there’s that CAGED system again!). Here’s an example: If you’re song is in E major, try one person playing without a capo and one with capo 2
Lazy Alternate Tunings
The standard EADGBE tuning is comforting and familiar. Trying alternate tunings can open up compositional avenues of inspiration but new tunings can feel like your first awkward strum again. However, there are compromises to be had with careful placement of a capo.
- Place the capo on fret two but leave the low E-string open. Strum the notes and you have a ‘Drop-E’ tuning (you may be more familiar with the ‘Drop-D’ tuning achieved by winding down the low E a tone to D). As the name suggests it’s a great way to play in E, A or B.
- Place the capo on the four highest strings (DGBE strings) and leave the low E- and A- strings free. This will give you an A6 sound when strummed. I like to use chords which modify the top three- or four strings and keep the E and/or A as a drone.
At this point, it’s worth acknowledging that using a capo to partially hold down strings can be difficult depending on what type of capo you have. The curvature of the back of the neck can afford little traction and the slightest disturbance can see the spring loaded, trigger-style capos fly across the room.
If you are feeling particularly creative (I confess at this point not to have done this myself) you can purchase capos with removable segments to derive complex combinations of capo’d and open strings. A cheap alternative would be to buy a classical guitar style capo (essentially an elasticated strap and a length of rubber tubing with a metal ‘axle’ in the core) and segment the rubber sheath into six. You can then remove and position the segments to achieve the tuning you desire.
Twice The Fun
For the particularly adventurous, two capos can allow you to move the faux-alternative tunings elsewhere on the neck, with one capo functioning as the new nut, and the second providing the partial covers. Think creatively: Deploying two capos can help with a quick key change while performing or even allow you to access different chord voicings in the same key.
So there you go. A few ideas. Give them a go and share your experiences here in the comments. If you come up with your own ideas, I’d love to hear from you too.
J
I had tentatively resolved not to catch any shows at the Edinburgh festivals this year. A quick scan of the publicity for the various competing official and fringe events suggested very few points of interest. Add to that the fact I was helping out my church with their missions fortnight would have made my fortnight off as busy as a working fortnight at the office.
My quick scan didn’t serve me too well as I completely missed the announcement that composer Philip Glass was bringing his ensemble to Edinburgh in order to accompany the Qatsi film trilogy, for which he provided the score, live on three consecutive nights. Being a fan of Glass through his (shall we say) more mainstream film soundtracks (urban horror Candyman and period piece The Illusionist among others) I wanted to catch this festival debut.
Unintentionally, attending this performance marked a continuation of a habit of seeing films with live music accompaniment, but the 12-person Philip Glass ensemble was a more imposing musical presence than solo piano tracking a Buster Keaton silent short or a doom-laden pipe organ providing the Gothic background to Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera.
I have to admit I was less than enthralled by the visuals for Naqoyqatsi as they had not aged well in the decade since its release. To me, a more or less complete fine arts philistine, it felt like I was watching an assembly of stock footage over-processed in Photoshop and overlaid with screen-savers. Not seeing the visuals was a bit of a concern at the start when I realised that a good slice of the screen was obscured by the balcony above from my position in the cheap seats of the Edinburgh Playhouse. I found myself engrossed in watching the ensemble on th stage when the visuals became too generic, so no loss there!
In the end I was able to enjoy a 90-minute ‘cello concerto by this prolific minimalist composer. I admit I did find myself listening to the work with a musicological hat on for parts of the concerto: Glass has this habit of toying with simplicity such that the parts of the piece interweave and imply complex rhythm patterns while grounding themselves in (shall we say) more mundane time signatures. Of particular interest was the way rolling arpeggios were changed subtly and not-so subtly to convey some of the complexity and mechanical themes that were appearing in the visuals. In some respect this motif evoked generative music and ambient music with their willingness to slowly imply change from a position of hindsight, and reach a climactic resolution.
All in all, I enjoyed this different side to the Festivals. I really must catch more classical and orchestral music…
J
The Lake
By J | August 12, 2011
I don’t think it will come as a surprise if I said I was a fan of the films of Darren Aronofsky’s film; if I haven’t sung his praises in an earlier incarnation of this blog (pretty sure I have) I will have certainly shared the music from his films penned by long-time collaborator and former Pop Will Eat Itself musician, Clint Mansell, on Facebook or Twitter.
While squarely art-house in style and subject, I have sought out his films having enjoyed his first two films, PI and Requiem for a Dream. I’m struggling to think of of another filmmaker with such visual flair as well as the ability to tell a compelling story*. To my mind Aronofsky’s visuals and Mansell’s composition reached their peak with the film The Fountain but that triumph is not for this blog post.
Aronofsky’s Oscar winner, the Wrestler, was worthy if a little dull, so the prospect of another character driven drama didn’t inspire much initial excitement. Interestingly enough The Wrestler and Black Swan would have been a single film given the early development of the story. No real surprise then that the films have a stylistic similarity.
In one sense Black Swan could have been made by director David Cronenberg given the strong body horror undercurrent present in Aronofsky’s story, but thankfully we are spared parasitic infections and auxiliary orifices from Cronenberg’s earlier work. Instead we are presented with visual representations of madness, where the discipline of the ballet dancer transmutes into perception-bending obsession
The chance to see Black Swan on BluRay afforded an opportunity to pick up on the secondary details, subtle (and not-so subtle) background configurations and characters that may have only been perceived subliminally during the first pass. It did reveal a fully realised world where the world of Nathalie Portman’s character slowly unravels in the run up to her first public performance as Swan Lake‘s Swan Queen
The film may not be to all tastes and it’s certainly not for the kiddies. Check it out and the director’s back catalogue.
J
* Sam Raimi has the visuals, David Fincher has style and precision, but not quite on par with Aronofsky I believe.
I don’t think many people could have missed the rolling news coverage of the riots in London and their subsequent spread to other cities in England. I took a special interest in tracking developments as they broke as the events were centred around the Tottenham area of North London where I had stayed and experienced not more than a few weekends ago.
I had made the journey to London to attend the High Voltage music festival in Hackney’s Victoria Park. Excluding a few visits to the Frenzy Christian music-fest held locally in the West of my home city, I hadn’t attended a ‘proper’ multi-day event since 2005 (as memory serves) when a crowd of the usual suspects attended the Wireless festival in Leeds.
I’d seen High Voltage trailed in the music magazines I’d recently taken to reading and watched the line-up unfold. A few interesting names emerged – Spock’s Beard, Neal Morse, Anathema, Dream Theater – that were on my ‘must see live’ list, so attending seemed a no-brainer.
Unfortunately my brain wasn’t fully engaged to the point where I booked my hotel accommodation in good time. In the end I took up residence in North London in a modest* hotel within walking distance of Tottenham. I shouldn’t be too hard on the accommodation, not least because it would be quite hypocritical to do so given I didn’t complain while in residence, as I did enjoy restful sleep untroubled by the perennial background noise I was familiar with from staying in Central London. At one point I was trapped in the bathroom when the lock failed catastrophically. I did try to disassemble the offending mechanism with a toothbrush shaft and a toiletries stand, before I was rescued by the hotel owner.
On paper the hotel was ‘close’ to Victoria Park, well as close as my late booking permitted, but the public transport options were a tad circuitous. While the key learning point from this visit was to plan local travel in much more detail than I did, the mixture of buses and underground trains afforded me the chance to take in a good slice of the Monopoly board during the journey.
The festival itself was a joy. Three main stages and any number of smaller, tented stages catered for fans of classic rock, metal and (of particular interest to your correspondent) progressive rock. The sound from all the stages was astonishingly good – almost hi-fi in quality in stark opposition to the poorly mixed, bass heavy mush that had marred other concerts in the past. The sound was so good that I was able to enjoy the sound while wearing my MP3 player headphone buds as an ersatz method of protecting my hearing from further loss to tinnitus**.
It was good to be able to put performances to some of the band names I’d been reading a lot about in Classic Rock Presents Prog magazine as well as a chance to see those bands I had already added to my burgeoning CD collection. Standouts? Quite a few: A joyful performance from Anathema including a dedication of their song Dreaming Light to the victims and survivors of the tragic Norwegian shootings; Neal Morse and an eight piece band bringing to life his latest album, Testimony 2; Seeing Neal join his former Spock’s Beard bandmates for a rollicking rendition of The Light; An introduction to the unabashed rock-and-roll of super group Black Country Communion; An amazing set by former Guns ‘n’ Roses guitarist, Slash, fronted by Alter Bridge frontman Myles Kennedy (what a voice!), and the event capped off by an epic headline set by Dream Theater in the fading light.
I did a lot of walking around North London on the way back from the festival without a hint of trouble. It’s sad that only days later trouble came to that part of the capital
J
* Euphemistic for ‘needs redecorating quite badly’
** The tinnitus is happily only at a minor annoyance stage where the ringing is only noticeable in the silence of night. Easily masked by radio or music.