I have a photo of me when I am 3 years old with a Ukulele. Mother said I loved that instrument as a kid. I have no memory of it, but it makes sense now. I wanted to learn to play the guitar in Junior High School, but mother thought that was a stupid idea. She only ever listen to talk-back-radio, never music.
The first guitar I bought was a very cheap, no name, worn out Stratocaster I bought through The Trading Post after driving out to Cabramatta, Sydney NSW to see it. The very end of 1976 or start of 1977, after finishing High School, before University started. It was a classic Sunburst finish. What I used for my first Akai 4000DS sound-on-sound recordings.
When I left Fairlight Instruments in 1986, I was given a MADE IN JAPAN 1984 SQUIRE, my first not rubbish guitar. I still have it. The only guitar I had for 35 years!
In 2005/2006 or so I discovered the Reaper DAW and got more serious in home recording again after a some 18+ years of midi only sequencer music making using a Roland D-110 multi-timbral and other synthesizers. Used MicroLOGIC for the longest time and hadn't touched the guitar.
I shielded it, and replaced the bridge pick up with a DiMarzio DP117W, a white HS-3. That finally got rid of the hum that had bugged me for many years recording with it. Standard single coil pickups are just not useable in High Gain tones.
The Tremolo, no matter what I did was always just a detuning leaver, and my solution was to put a wooden block in it. That also stops the boing boing of heavy down picking. I never learnt how to use that Tremolo.
The twilight years is an idiom that refers to the final years of a person's life. It can also refer to the transition to retirement and the time after retirement.
To me it feels like into retirement until your final days.
I had never thought about "retirement". There was always career and family, the need for money to pay the bills, interspersed with my own interests in the spare moments to fill my head and time.
I had a friend Greg, a few years older that was a primary school teacher, that retired. He then spent 3 years in his garage making model based special effect films. Like this:
Greg then very quickly died of cancer.
All seemed such a waste, and you never know how much time you, or the people you care about have left.
So 7 years or so ago, when my wife said she wanted to move back to Japan, and we did the numbers, was the first real time retirement was a thing to me. It was time. Had never considered moving back to Japan after leaving in 2001, but there were many things that made that very attractive, as a short trip in 2018 made very clear again.
Retiring from my technical career was such a huge stress relief. A massive weight I had carried finally gone from my life was something that I had NOT expected. That alone probably added years to my life.
I am amazed, my wife too, that 2024 was like "the best year ever" for me with my own creative endeavors, visiting exhibitions, friends and other events. And none of that really cost anything at all compared to just our living expenses.
I don't have any "goals" anymore. Just do the things that make me a "happy camper" and be with close family.
Hope the years moving forward are just as good, but I realize getting around gets harder the older I get, so don't know how many years that will be. Keeping fit and controlling your weight is very important.
The party just ends when it ends...
Winter Sun could also be a euphemism for Twilight Years. 😏 Though that isn't what I was thinking off when I did it, but subconsciously, I think I was.
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.
Then the very next day we did this in a few hours:
The Sony Walkman was the beginning of the end of "HiFi", and the iPod finished it off, where you could carry your whole record collection with you anywhere, and the sound quality was way better that the record players the mass market had.
Another thing that doesn't exist any more is Hot Rod model car kits in 1/24 or 1/25 scale. I was a real fan in Junior High School. More generally the boys hobby of building model kits, and the Hobby Shops you got them from has mostly vanished. GUNDAM in Japan seems a major exception though, but that is tied to the booming ANIME scene. Expect computer games and other life style changes to blame for the end of kit building.
Hot Rods, of the crazy variety, have vanished too, even though they never really existed in Australia due to the road worthy rules they had.
Rest and reflection.
Many people seem to expend much effort to be become "an influencer" or get a following on Social Media. Seems much like high school, where I was "over there out of the way" with one or two friends trying to keep away from the loud Know Nothings trying to be the center of attention.
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.
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.
