Sidingsound

If there’s one sounds in the musical instrument world which just seems to take my heart and do a 100m dash with it, it’s a properly-tuned 12-string guitar. Acoustic or electric, there’s just something magical about those unison octaves, the slight ‘phasing’ sound of two strings ever so slightly out of tune with each other… or maybe it’s a “Marmite thing”, in that you either love it or you don’t.

Well, I do, and even more so at the moment than usual, probably because I’ve been listening a lot to The Geese and the Ghost, the 1977 début solo album by Anthony Phillips, Steve Hackett’s predecessor in Genesis. The presence of layered 12-string guitars on the prog giant’s early LPs was in no small part Ant’s influence, even after he left the band in 1970, and he remains a very fine 12-string guitarist to this day (check out this video on YouTube of one of my favourite compositions of his, “Lights On The Hill”).

My Roland VG-8EX can pull off passable impersonations of electric and electro-acoustic 12-strings, but in the end there’s really no substitute for the genuine article. Unfortunately, until now, if you wanted a 12-string acoustic which didn’t have a horrid unplayable action (the distance between the strings and the fretboard), you would have to shell out a fair amount of money; however, I’ve noticed lately how good budget guitars have been getting, so I’ve started looking out for whether my theory applied to 12-strings.

Well, so far, so good. At lunchtime today, I dropped into one of my local music shops, and asked in there whether they were aware of any sub-£200 (about US$330 at current exchange rates—in other words, pretty cheap) 12-string acoustics. “See what you think of this one”, the assistant replied, lifting down a Vintage guitar (which I’m now fairly sure was a V800-12 (Correction (03/06/2009 – 20:50): it’s actually the V400-12)). I looked at the price label—£179—and instantly thought I was about to try an “egg-slicer’.

I stand corrected. I have to say that if I’d tried the Vintage blindfolded, I would’ve guessed the price was £250-300 at least. The action was a tiny bit on the high side, but certainly far better than I was expecting at the price, and the assistant said it would not be at all difficult to lower it without risking “fret buzz”. Moreover, it didn’t matter that this guitar had no pickup; if I were to buy a 12-string acoustic, it would be overwhelmingly for recording with, and I would never use the direct output for that purpose (I’d go for a condenser mike).

Money’s not exactly plentiful at the moment, so I think I’ll be saving up for this for a bit, but I was definitely surprised by the quality of this particular budget 12-string. I wonder if there are any other contenders?

This is the sort of situation where things get complicated due to posting to too many online services…

Basically, I’ve made my first YouTube video with my electric mountain dulcimer, and have posted the link to it on my Twitter feed, but also on my “tumblelog”. So, just to be complete, I’m posting it here too

Here’s the embedded version:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj9OpygSlxE]

It’s a first go, but I hope to make another demo video one day… once I’ve practiced a bit more!

Enjoy…

Last night, I posted the cryptic item below to my Twitter feed:

I just tried to tweet a YouTube URL (nothing dodgy), and it didn’t come through – what gives? Will try again in a moment…

No doubt you are just dying to know what the YouTube video in question was, so I shall keep you in suspense no longer: it was “Ondes Martenot / Messiaen 4ème Feuillet Inédit by Thomas Bloch”, a demonstration of an instrument I really want to try one day, by one of its greatest exponents.

And if that clip whets your appetite, try this one on for size (with apologies for the video quality)…

Scott Andrew drew my attention to an interesting artistic project the other day:

“DIY hand made folktronica” (it says here) artist State Shirt, is inviting folk on the Net to send him snippets of audio, which he then intends to remix into an original album project. I’m seriously thinking of bunging down a couple of electric dulcimer loops and chucking them his way, to see what he makes of them.

(Oh, and I’m glad to say my dulcimer noter—a short length of hardwood dowelling, used by traditional mountain dulcimer players to fret notes—was lost, but as of the other evening, is now found. I didn’t fancy my chances of getting another one easily…)

This time last year, I made something of a bold resolution:

2008 is the year that I will record and produce at least one album (if not — gasp — more than one).

I also made a rather rash comment, that if you couldn’t find any evidence of such a project here, that you were permitted to “do a Nelson Muntz” (“Ha-ha!”). I think my ears will be ringing soon…

OK, I admit it: I didn’t finish the album project. I did record about 80-85% of it, so the project could be said to have “slipped into” 2009, à la Guns’n'Roses.

Excuses? Plenty—mainly the obvious (family and other commitments, day job, you know), coupled with the delay in receiving an intact electric mountain dulcimer, which I wanted to use on a couple of songs. Aside from the dulcimer tracks, there are (I think) three more songs to be recorded, though none of these are particularly complicated ones so I should be able to get those onto disk without much hassle (yeah, right).

So, I’m now hoping to complete the recordings early(-ish) in 2009, when I will then have the puzzle of what exactly to do with them. However, that’s a concern for another day—in the meantime, I don’t think I’ll make a similar resolution for this new year…

Well, we’re all back in sunny (or more likely soggy) England, and with September about to arrive and the year two-thirds through… well, I’m trying not to think about it!

The Korea trip went very well, and now as we prepare to launch ourselves into the final third of the year, I thought I’d let you have a few updates here at last:

• Whilst I haven’t been posting here very frequently, I’ve got myself hooked on Twitter, the “microblogging” service. If you haven’t encountered Twitter yet, imagine a cross between blogging and instant messaging, where posts are limited to 140 characters so there’s a similarity to texting. I just don’t have the time to write big blog posts most days, and Twitter forces you to use those 140 characters wisely, so I like the discipline and the convenience of the service. Even better, I can post “tweets” to Twitter from my mobile, and do so fairly regularly (though obviously less so during work hours), so my Twitter page is probably the best way to keep up with what I’m up to.
• Before I left for Korea, I managed to do some more work on the largely-dormant concept album project, and believe I might actually be able to complete it by the end of 2008 (as I announced in January I intended to do). The track listing might be a song or two short of what I planned, and in true “Sgt Pepper” style the “concept” might end up looser too, but we may well have something to show for this particular New Year’s resolution!
• My music tastes seem to have taken a decisive shift lately, arcing back towards the British folk music I liked during the 1990s. It was initially triggered by some of the tracks on the children’s song CD I produced this year, but the shift accelerated once I found some clips on YouTube of Steeleye Span, and in particular this one of the 1970-71-era lineup performing “The Lark In The Morning”.
  What brought me up short was seeing/hearing Tim Hart playing the main accompaniment of the song on what I soon realised was a solid electric mountain dulcimer. The instrument had a jangling tone like an electric 12-string guitar, but with a persistent “drone” effect caused by the open “accompaniment” strings—interestingly, Roger McGuinn sometimes plays guitar this way (melody on one string, open strings providing acompaniment). Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was smitten, and have started saving up for an electric dulcimer (as well as trying to find the actual instrument to go for, as they’re quite hard to locate in the UK).
• Oh, and the Proporta USB Mobile Device Charger was worth its weight in gold on the Korea trip

Anyway, best wishes for September!

For my sixth birthday (1978, if you must know), my main present from my parents was a Stylophone—a tiny monophonic electronic organ played by touching the tip of a stylus on a metal “keyboard”. I had a white model, which may have been a bit rarer than the usual black-with-fake-wood-trim ones I’ve seen elsewhere—I ended up buying one of the latter from a jumble sale some years ago, and it’s still around the house somewhere. Sadly, the white one succumbed to battery leakage in the end, but at least I still have the black one (if I can find it).

Around 2000, when I had rather more spare time than I do now, I built a Stylophone SoundFont (sampled sound bank) by sampling and looping every note on my Stylo, both via the built-in line output and by miking up the speaker. I then recreated the Stylo’s vibrato in the SoundFont editor, and created a couple of patches with chorus effects. I still have the SoundFont somewhere, and might release it on this site some time if anyone is interested.

I mention this because at the time I made this SoundFont, I really wanted to make another one, this time of the Stylophone 350S. This was the “deluxe” Stylo, with a wider range of voices (organ, clarinet, etc.) and a higher price tag to match; I really wanted this instead of the model I actually got, but of course all these years later, I realise Mum and Dad would have been crazy to have bought such an expensive piece of kit for a six-year-old!

My wish to make a 350S SoundFont was understandably stymied by the difficulty of actually finding one—fully-working models are not common now, and those you do find are quite pricey—and I doubt I would find the time to sample it and produce the SoundFont these days. Just as well, then, that I no longer have to, as Precisionsound now offer a Stylophone 350S sampled “instrument”.

Something else for my pocket money to go on sometime

One of my more unusual musical activities of late (at least, compared with the rest of my musical ‘career’) is that I’ve been taking some drum lessons on Saturdays with a friend of mine.

It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for some time, not least because drums is the one instrument in the conventional rock band lineup that I don’t have at least some measure of ability with. I’ve been playing guitar to what I’d call a reasonable standard, for twenty years now; I can handle bass guitar competently enough; my keyboard skills are at what I’d call “John Lennon” level (i.e. I just about know where the notes are!); and I’d say I can pick up a few other instruments (e.g. mandolin, ukulele, recorder) and get acceptable results out of them.

This has meant that I’ve been able to record multitrack demos over the years, playing most if not all the instrumental parts myself. However, when it has come to drum parts, I have either had to program them into a MIDI sequencer, use sampled drum loops or basic drum machine patterns, play other kinds of percussion parts, or just do without them altogether.

My hope is that I will soon be in a position where I can ‘play’ drums on my recordings, if the need arises. I’d really like to buy a Roland HD1 “V-Drums Lite” electronic drum kit in the future, which would allow me to play drum parts into my MIDI sequencer, or record the actual sounds from the kit onto my audio multitrack, whichever was the best approach.

Although I doubt I’ll end up drumming for a live band, I just thought that being able to play kit drums would be a useful skill to have. I don’t know which direction this will take me in, but it should be fun finding out.

(Oh, and in case you were wondering where the ‘carrots’ part of the title came from… well, I did roast some vegetables for dinner last night, but that’s about as far as it goes!)