Some Creative Days

 

Some days, the most creative thing to do, is just enjoy the warm sun on a REALLY cold day.

The bed gets the sun across it much of the morning, and our cat stakes out that spot in the last weeks.

You need time without constant distractions to recharge your creative battery. Today is such a day for me. 

Wife is out most of the day and I don't have anything I need to do, except whatever the cat tells me to do, that is.  I really can't call him "my cat", as it is very much a situation of "I am his human" .

So a time of rest and random thoughts.

Have been playing with the 8 and 7 strings, recording into Reaper, that I recently refined the plastic nuts on, and that has really made such a big difference to tuning process and pitch stability.  Have also adjusted the EQ and "C4 trick" for my metal tones and love the current sounds.   

Have also done a few Distorted Guitar, Synths + Sequencer music clips that combines the things I like in my own "original" thing. An ex-boss said "Reminds me a cross between John Carpenter and the Theme music for Beyond 2000! Sounds great!"

To me that is a great compliment.  A track in this style: 

I now need time to come up with the next thing to use that with, or direction to go, but I am in no rush. I have no fan demand to satisfy, no sales or play goals to meet, no follower base to grow, just my own internal creative forces to deal with. 

You just don't know what the future and events throw at you. Like I have had this terrible cough for over 11 days now. Better than it was, but still keeps me up at night. And coughing fits anytime mean I aren't going outside far at all much.

So a time of rest and reflection.

Just let those thoughts percolate. There will eventually be a "a ha" thought that I then move on with.

During a routine hospital visit, my grandfather fell in a hospital corridor then died during the emergency surgery he needed.  That day didn't go as he expected at all.

Some 8 years ago, when I had surgery, I had to sign that I understood anesthetic was dangerous for someone of my age. I think of my grandfather and his end, some 40 years ago now.  

Just random thoughts, because I can, and don't have to focus on anything.

There is so much highly opiniated, wrong stuff on the internet. You are most likely to read the fix for a sicky guitar nut is to immediately replace it with a bone or TUSQ one. Maybe the BEST solution, but the correct answer is to first dress the nut correctly with files. More than likely, all that is required.

For the 7 and 8 string guitars I have, seen so many posts about needing to replace the pickups, which is just all so extreme to me.  I am with Glenn Fricker on this. The issue isn't the pickups, but the EQ and gain applied to the guitar signal, mostly through the cabinet and speaker. I will say though, as I am after High Gain Metal tones, and not playing, jazz or covers of different bands of the last 30 years, my criteria is NOT as a session guitar player. I am also not playing into a LOUD, real amplifier, where inserting a boost pedal changes the response you feel when playing. The time I did replace a guitar pickup, it was to put a humbucker in the bridge of a Squire to kill the 50hz hum of the standard single coils in the metal tone I was after.  So my situation, DI in a tiny home studio with amp and cabinet sims gives me a lot of control. 

My background is as an electronics/ audio/ music engineer, so many myths "guitar/ audio/ recording/ HiFi truths" extolled on the internet are the rantings of wacko religious cults to me. 

A time of rest and reflection.

The late '70s tech industries I studied to get into almost don't exist now. HiFi is mostly gone, Recording Studios have mostly been replaced by the musicians home project studio and musicians, for the most part can't make a living being a jazz/pop/rock/metal musician.  I also loved the 1970s book cover artwork of paperbacks and album covers. All that has pretty much gone too.

But in 2025 I am grateful I can make my own music and art in my own tiny studio and release it to the world. Even if just for myself. Being retired and off the "must make money at this" treadmill allows me that freedom.

Those Swings and Round-abouts...

A day of rest and reflection.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

Start of the New Year

 So our kids and grandson visited us the first week of 2025. He attends a preschool and had a runny nose and a bit of a cough when he arrived. They all did, one of the features of such a facility is they don't miss out on any of the bugs going around. Didn't stop them from doing everything they wanted.

And I came down with it after they left, and still have it. Mild but annoying. One of the joys of being a grandparent. All the sharing.

It has been very cold around here too so haven't been out much.  Snoozing and noodling around with some music production & pondering comic ideas. Doing what the cat wants me to do. Trying to do something musically a little bit different, as I feel most of the recent stuff I have done is pretty much variations on the same piece of music.  

I am most likely to play something well if it isn't new, and keep falling back into doing the same things.  

I am not using standard song structures, and in fact try to do something completely original, or unexpected. Most pop songs are all the same construction, and not what I am after at all.    

Came up with a great idea for a SF story a week or so ago. Not sure I want to do it as a comic though. Done a few comics, such as these:

Maybe it should be more an illustrated short story. That seems to be a more efficient way of doing something, so that it doesn't take for ever to finish.

I haven't decided anything, and really just want to relax at the moment. I had decades of working thru holidays and don't need to do that any more. I will wait at least until my nose stops running.

UPDATE: 2025/1/12 Been sleeping much of the last few days. So so sleepy, and then there is the coughing. Haven't bothered with social media. X is just terrible now and not worth visiting, and Bluesky, after an initial inrush of new folk a few weeks ago with lots of lists of what looked like interesting people to follow, is pretty much not actually interesting posts, and so uninteresting for me. Facebook is just for a few groups I am in.

I tend to think Social Media has run its coarse and will go the way of Myspace.  Engaging mainly the type of people that got high on day time soaps and The Jerry Springer Show of old. What the vast majority of people post isn't worth the effort to scroll through. Popularity seems mostly about how trivial or rage inducing, or oversharing something can be. And with no holds bar on disinformation now, not being part of it seems for the better.   Haven't missed it at all the last week.

 We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

MUSIC+COMICs

 

I made quite a few MUSIC+COMICs last year, and started 2025 with one too. See above.

I haven't seen anyone else do the same thing. An under 60 second (to directly post to Bluesky and previously X) "animation" with music as a soundtrack and a Newspaper strip-ish comic with animated speech balloons and other images. BUT it isn't an animation and there is no voice over.

Just combined my own interests of mostly "slice of life type comics" and "original music".  The music doesn't support the comic, and the comic doesn't support the comic, but gives me an outlet for both.

The 48second music track of the above in Reaper looks like this:

I like repeated old style RIFFs and melodic phrases. If there is singing, it needs to be real singing you can understand. Watching grandson start dancing to simple kids animations with songs, shows this is a rather basic instinct. to me. Most Jazz leaves me cold, as does Dream Theater and Steve Via. Joe Satriani is wonderful, as is Mattias IA Eklundh and Freak Kitchen. 

I have made some these in the YOUTUBE SHORT format too, but they aren't something Google shows to anyone (unless you make and post one daily, or something close to that to appease the algorithm) , so no one sees them unless I post to Social Media, where the chances really aren't any better. 😂 

Such as these single digit view counts, that are probably just me

I see these all as experiments, and some work better than others. Most of the time the subject of the comic is something I come up with "off the cuff" as I see how a music clip sounds as a movie with the waveform in MOHO Pro12.

I discovered years ago actually doing an animation is just too time consuming, with a similar amount of views, so the ROI of my time is just much worse.

MOHO Pro12 makes these very simple to do. Moving images around and text balloons synced to the soundtrack is fast and easy to do.

MUSIC+COMICs has the right amount of satisfaction to me against time taken to do, to make them an interesting creative outlet.  Often I will then extend the music to a 3 or 4 minute piece of music, if I like the ideas in it enough, and release it on Bandcamp, where again, no one plays it except me.

And we extended the track, and is now on Bandcamp in a collection here: CAT HOPES 2025 EXTENDED.  

And this version on YouTube showing the very minimal production. Few tracks and no automation in this case:

Making and releasing these things keeps me "a happy camper". At the moment anyway.

Over the last 5 years I have done more of one of my interests than others each year. I have yet to find the "thing" I will focus on this year.

For the next week at THE MUSEUM OF KYOTO till next Monday there is a display of art from young Kyoto artists I plan to go have a look at. Sanjo is a pleasant place to visit for me and even though it has tourists, it isn't crowded like the other places downtown, and I get to go to my fav café and restaurant.

For another month there is also the wood block print works of UTAGAWA KUNIYOSHI  in Osaka that I have already got my ticket for.

These things may inspire me somehow, or at least I do a comic on something about my trip and impressions.  Way more than anything on that time wasting, infinitely scrolling, Social Media platform of any flavor.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

Reflection on 2024

 

At year end we reflect on how the year was, and here I have two short <59sec  music+comics on my year. 

I went to more events and was out more than I have ever before, EVER. 

So in that regard it was a really good year for me. The other music comic is about the art aspect of my year. I made a far bit of stuff, including a BEST OF ALBUM  so there was a sense of accomplishment.

Bought an 8 string guitar this year and coming to grips with it has been interesting. I made quite a bit of my silly music and put it on Bandcamp. Even Melodic Techno this year! My being out and about also made me realize I needed Name Cards again, even though I am retired now. An interesting exercise using Stickerjapan.com 

There was health and sickness. There were visits to the cinema and regular sitting in a café listening to music on earphones while sipping coffee. Freak Kitchen released a new album, and discovered the likes of Cassian, Devin Townsend and Irving Force.  

I also did grandfathering, but I keep all that personnel stuff private. I just don't see any reason to share that with people I most likely don't actually know.  

It was a good year, and I hope 2025 is too! 

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology

Harley Benton R-458MN WH MultiScale: My Setup and Modifications

 

We bought this inexpensive, 8 string guitar 6 months ago. USD$243 is around ¥39,000 ( including small import tax paid on delivery) which is more than I paid for my best guitar, the Ibanez RG350ZB with locking nut and tremolo 2 years ago (but today that RG is ¥70,000!). So it isn't actually a cheap guitar with the Japanese exchange rate for me. It is a half to a third of any other 8 string guitar around these parts, but I found no one actually had any 8 string guitars in stock around here at all. 

So I played it for a while to get used to an 8string, see how I wanted to tune it and work out what issues it really had. I will cover the issues and my fixes here, but basically the 2 issues were difficulty in tuning because of a very sticky plastic nut and intonation.

I currently like my guitars down tuned a half step, so high to low, the strings are:

 D#, A#,F#,C#,G#,D#,A#,F.  

The initial issue found that the strings on it needed immediately changing, and that the 8th string, F, couldn't have the saddle moved back far enough, without the screw hitting the string, let alone the spring allowing the saddle to move all the way back. The 1st and 7th strings had the screw hit the string issue too.

The solution to that was replace the 7th and 8th bridge bolts with cut and filled versions. Note 1st string also needs a shorter 15mm bolt to not foul with the string, the same as the 7th. Black M3 bolts just bought from a local hardware store here. To replace the bolts, you have to remove the rear screw holding the bridge body onto the guitar.

The 8th String also needed the spring removed, to allow it to move all the way back.

So the resulting bridge, for the down tuning, is now this, red arrows showing shortened bolts:

The next problem to be tacked was the sticky nut.  I ended up getting a Nut file set from Luthier of Japan, but probably could have just used 600 and 800 wet and dry sandpaper. Will do some Nut refinement of this 8 string, and the Ibanez 7 string to justify the files.

The Nut from the factory results in all the strings having two bends in them. No wonder the strings get stuck. Without fixing this first, there was no need to replace the whole nut with a "better" material one.

So the best nut slots are cut so they fan out going to the machine heads, and slope away from the string, as shown here from a STEWMAC video on cutting nut slots.

I didn't touch the fret side of the nut, other than run the correct nut file throw the slot to check it was in fact the correct width. I also only bought 6 files, but made due with the wide files for the lower two strings. It doesn't take much to tune each nut slot, adding the fanout and drop away, so the strings have a more direct path to the tuners. It is a bit subtle. As here:

Refining the slots isn't something the strings have to come off for. Just loosen a string, move it out of the slot, do a little dance with a file, polish with wet&dry, and ready to go in no time at all.

Also had a look inside the rear cover, and removed the protective plastic film from the cover that made it look much worse than it was.

Simple and the routed body cavity does have a conductive coating, that could be thicker but is okay, for shielding. I use this guitar for high gain metal tones and have no hum or noise issues with the passive humbuckers and this wiring.

My 6 and 7 string guitars are in DROP tuning, but found that makes the 8th string here too floppy, and it is best the way it is as an F.  

It now lives in a GATOR GWE Series Stratocaster case I bought locally. Japan is a country of earthquakes, so shut away in a sold case is the best option. No sitting on a guitar stand on display for me.

I don't have any issue with the standard active pickups. I am playing into the Reaper DAW, with a distortion pedal, Cabinet IRs and have fancy EQ  (ReEQ) to do what ever is needed. I am also not trying to sound like someone else, which seems to be a significant factor in people wanting to change things around. 

The thing about an 8 string is string muting becomes more of a challenge, but not much different for the stuff I play. I still need my DROP tuned 7 string though, as the one finger power chords isn't what this 8 string is about.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology