I bought a velvet canary yellow desk chair. Just got the text that it arrived! (I cant believe im excited for a chair...)
Got a nice new lightweight backpack, just big enough to carry some essentials (a book, writing materials, hand sanitizer, etc) around on the train. Oh, and a few items to spiffy it up as well.
An Elegoo Saturn. It was second-hand: only used twice. So the desperate scratch-marks all over it, and the abundant splodges of grey cancer-slime don't bode well.
Hands up those whose first response to this was somewhere along the lines of “WTF’s an Elegoo Saturn??”
Assumed it's something along the lines of "Saturn coupe, hardly used, driven by Mister Magoo only on Sundays to church".
Discovered a series of photograph books by Thames & Hudson covering a huge range of renowned photographers. They’re well priced £8.99 each and best off all they’re in a regular paperback format. So often when you’re looking for this kind of thing, they’re huge hardback things and nearly always in a square format. I sense this Thames & Hudson series may be it quite collectible one day, so I’m snapping them up whenever I have a few spare quid.
This camera - the Fujifilm X70. It’s fairly old now (maybe ten years) but the styling of the X-series is gorgeous and the image quality amazing! I love that it has physical dials for aperture and shutter speed.
Bought myself a new guitar strap and put on a new set of strings Poor guitar doesn't know what hit it
Where he sits in the pew with his arms folded, glaring at the pastor, only occasionally extracting a hand to look pointedly at his watch.
I just discovered (recently got the knowledge I suppose, to make it thread-relevant) that apparently sometime in either the 50's or 60's guitarists started putting banjo stings on, I think just for the bass strings? I think I heard it in a Brian May interview. The banjo strings were thinner or more flexible, allowing you to bend them. As he put it, at last the electric guitar became a real lead instrument. Interesting. I think it was after that companies started making more bendable guitar strings (like Ernie Ball Extra Slinky).
Slinkys are good. I prefer Dean Markley Blue Steels, though. Been using them for at least the last 25 years. Not sure about the banjo string thing but that would make sense. The style of lead playing changed a lot in the 60s. Particularly after Jimi came along.
Here's the video where he said it, set up right to the spot: Now I'm not quite sure what he's saying. Put a banjo string on the top and shift all your guitar strings down? Can anybody explain that? Oh ok wait, maybe I get it. By top string maybe he meant the high G (actually on the bottom)(unless you're Hendrix and play left-handed, with the guitar upside-down ). Maybe it's lighter (thinner) than the guitar strings made at the time, allowing you to move your high G string up to the next notch, and on and on. I can see where that would let you bend it like Beckham. Or maybe like Hendrix.
He's saying that banjo strings were the only "thin" strings available at the time. The thinner the strings the easier they are to bend, which is a lead guitar tactic. An .08 is crazy thin. The modern day .10 and .11 are not difficult to bend at all, so they must have made them differently back then. Given the advances in metallurgy over the last 50 years, that isn't surprising.
Rick Beato, who does that guitar channel with the Brian May interview, is the man btw. I learned more about music theory from him than all my guitar teachers combined. Of course, I was in junior high then and not wanting to learn anything but Metallica songs.
Agreed! I've been watching the hell out of his videos for a long time now. Love when he breaks down popular songs and plays what I assume must be the individual tape elements, where you can hear just the isolated guitar, piano, drums, or vocals etc. His channel is where I learned it's common practice to double instruments (especially guitar) and vocals to make them sound completely amazing.
Oh, yeah. Old trick. Double with two different sounds. Bounce left, right, left and then blend. Harmonize in thirds, fifths, sixths... the theory is actually dipshit simple but the trick is knowing when to go hard and when to back off. Roger Waters always said the spaces between the notes where more important than the notes themselves.
I haven't played guitar or banjo or cello for so many years that I've probably forgotten which side of the instrument to play. We bought dinner for son and grandson at Texas Roadhouse to celebrate son's 33rd birthday. When the waitress came up and asked if we were celebrating any special occasions, my son growled, "If you say one word..." so of course I did. Then I told her we were keeping it quiet, so please no gathering the troops for (offkey) warbling.
