Remember the 'ground breakers'

In music

This week the world said goodbye to the legend who was Eddie Van Halen. I grew up with VH’s music, and Eddie’s guitar riffs feature prominently on the background canvas that was my youth. I clearly remember the first time I bought “Van Halen 1” and put it on my dad’s Yamaha turntable and listened to it. I was initially blown away by “Runnin’ with the Devil”, but then when “Eruption” came on, I reeled back. Initially with confusion and disgust. What was this weird way of playing guitar? What on earth was he doing? No one has ever used the whammy bar like THAT before!

Yep, I didn’t like it at first. But then, as I played that album over and over again, I began to love that particular 2 minutes of the album. Every time I heard it, I discovered something new. It was a multi layered, complex beast of a guitar arrangement. EVH soon became one of my top 5 guitar influences, though I never played a fraction as well as him.

Years later, my son (who was born 20 years after VH1 was released) and I were having a conversation about Eddie. I told my son that Eddie moved the goal posts. That he was an innovator that moved guitar playing to a whole new level in a similar way that Jimi Hendrix had done back in the 60’s. But initially, my son was confused, and said “But everybody plays like that now… How was Eddie different??”.

And that was the crux of the discussion. Everybody DOES play like that now, BECAUSE of Eddie. If he hadn’t had come along, the guitar playing landscape would be very different. Eddie revolutionised the whole game and pushed everyone to a new level.

In business

I see similar arguments in my working life too. I came across this tweet a few weeks ago (focus on the reply to this tweet here):

The fact is - Bezos DID do something ground breaking. Other people DID have the same idea, but couldn’t make it run.

I was trying to start an ecommerce business here in Australia at about the same time Bezos was getting Amazon off the ground. And it was hard. NOT just because of (lack of) money, but because there was absolutely no infrastructure around to do it. There was no Shopify to start a turnkey store. There was no Stripe to process credit card payments.

In fact, processing customer credit cards was a massively expensive consideration, and required merchant accounts with certain banks and exorbitant fees. There were no APIs or hosting providers that you could spool up a server quickly and get a store online in just a few hours.

I am not a Bezos fan boy by any stretch of the imagination, but he changed all that. We see the offshoots of his efforts today. In fact, my latest startup is hosted on Amazon’s AWS platform, which is a byproduct of all his learnings and efforts in setting up the Amazon online store in the first place.

The point is - everyone CAN set up a store really easily today because Bezos ‘broke the ground’ in the early days. Everyone can do two handed tapping on the electric guitar and dive bomb whole octaves because Eddie showed us it could be done (and it could be acceptable in modern music) in the early days.

Salute to these early revolutionaries. Thank you for breaking the ground for the rest of us.

Keeping it real...

Jordan-Ravi on stage at Eurovision Australia (photo credit: SBS)

We have just come back from a fantastic few days on the Gold Coast, Australia, where we watched our son Jordan-Ravi perform on stage at Eurovision Australia Decides 2020. Here is his performance on the final night:

As a father, it was a moment of utter pride, but not only because of his stellar performance where he gave it everything he had, but because of so many other things.

During those few days, I hung around with him in the 'green room', so I got to watch him interact with everyone from the back stage audio crew, the make up and wardrobe team, the media contingent always wanting his time, and his fans seeking photos and a short chat with him, and also his fellow artists, who are all at different levels of fame in the industry. In every interaction, I was pleased to see that he always always conducted himself with impeccable manners, courtesy and civility.

I guess all that time my wife and I spent ensuring that he places the feelings and wellbeing of other people at the same level as his own has paid off. I know it will be a bit of a battle to ensure that he remains grounded and 'real' while his star continues to rise in this cut throat industry, but I think he has the foundations there, and the constant open line to us, that will help to ensure he stays on course and doesn't let his ego get the better of him.

I am immensely proud of him, and where he has got to in such a short time. The doors are just opening up for him now, and his goal of releasing his own music upon the world will shortly be a reality. Go check out his work at www.jordanravi.com and please give him a follow on Instagram.

Back to classical guitar

It’s been many, many years since I’ve played classical guitar. I learned in high school, from a lovely teacher called Ms. Dunlop, but aside from romancing my wife with some classical numbers when we were courting, I haven’t really played it much in the past couple of decades.

Domenico Scarlatti (pic from Wikipedia)

Added to that, my classical guitar had its bridge lift off on me many years ago, so I haven’t really had a nylon stringed guitar around the house for a very long time now (Hmm - perhaps it is time to go guitar shopping?) :)

But just this month, I was motivated to dig up some of my old favourite pieces and give them a go again. It was surprising how much I had forgotten, but also surprising was how the muscle memory in my fingers seemed to go back to how I played 20 years ago. While re-learning and practicing, sometimes my mind would wander, and when I snapped back to what I was doing, I realised that my fingers were automatically going to the right frets like they did two decades ago. Over thinking and forcing myself to remember was actually detrimental to that process.

I have a particular affinity for Baroque era pieces. Most of my friends love the Bach Lute Suites, but for me, my favourite composer of the era is Domenico Scarlatti (and to a lesser extent, his father Alessandro). Something about Scarlatti’s pieces are more uplifting that others of that time. The fact that most of them were written as love songs for the countess he was infatuated with probably helps!

Here is my attempt at his Sonata in A minor (K.322) after about a week’s practice. I don’t think Ms. Dunlop would be too happy with my sloppy technique, but I am going to keep practicing to try and get better and smoother.

Guitar Modeller Shootout

I was looking around my audio plugins folder on my computer the other day and realised that I have a lot of guitar modeller plugins that I have collected over the years. It’s been a while since I have done any sort of shootout between them to compare, so I thought I would use this Easter long weekend to tackle this mini project.

I want to concentrate on clean Fender-y sounds this time, and what better way to test out the Strat build I just completed a couple of months ago. I just finished doing more setup work on this guitar and am enjoying playing it again.

The Guitar

It is a Lake Placid Blue Strat, with a baked maple neck. It has a set of BareKnuckle “Irish Tour” pickups in it, and I used the middle position for this experiment.

Guitar was plugged straight into my PC via an Apogee Element 46 audio interface, then routed to Logic X.

The Method

What I did was to record a short dry track into Logic X on my iMac, then copy and paste that dry track onto different channels where I set up different modellers. This way there would be NO bias towards a certain track due to my different playing styles over time. The same dry track would ensure that the input signal was consistent across all modellers.

On each modeller, to ensure some kind of consistency, I also set all knobs to ‘5’ on the amp face. I turned off any Boost or Bright switches to ensure as raw a tone as possible. I also tried to use the same 2x12 cab where possible, with a ‘57 Condenser mic placed at the 2 inches from centre and 2 inches away.

I also used a delay pedal as the only pedal in the chain for most of the modellers - set at around 250ms delay with minimal feedback and mix. Some modellers didn’t support effects pedals in the amp signal chain, so in those cases I used a separate pedal plugin by the same manufacturer to get the delay pedal in the chain (e.g. Bias and Logic)

The Modellers

Here are the 5 modellers I used, with a screenshot showing the settings that I set each amp, cab and delay pedal at.

Logic X

Yep, I admit that one of the tracks here is using the plain old in built amp modeller from Logic, mainly because I wanted to see how it compared against the other more ‘serious’ modelling plugins.

Amplitube 4

This is probably the modeller I have been using the longest - since Amplitube 2 days!

Slate TH-U

This is the newest modeller the I only got this week, and which prompted me to do this shootout.

S-Gear

Probably my favourite modeller which I use the most. This is usually my go-to solution for recording guitars these days.

Bias 2

I admit that I bought this modeller last year sometime, but just haven’t got around to using it much at all.

The Results

Here is my SoundCloud link to the sound samples for each modeller.

I may refrain from stating which modeller is which sound sample for now (No, they are NOT in the order of the modellers I listed above!). I will wait to see which ones people prefer in ‘blind’ mode first, then reveal all in a couple of weeks! <evil laugh>

UPDATED:

The modellers in the sound clip were in this order:

1. Amplitube 4

2. S-Gear 2

3. Bias 2

4. Slate TH-U

5. Logic X