Clearing a little Confusion :) hopefully

Another rare blog update has been kinda forced on me ;)

As a musician I've always had a problem with being tied down to any one particular band or genre.

A band I play in was recently asked to play at a street party and whilst the party went REALLY well I came to realize that there's the possibility of my assuming the wrong band for an event :)

So to clear up any potential future confusion (and hopefully NOT come across as an ego-freak) here's a bit of a break down of my current musical projects...

Tip of Africa : An afro/fusion type project playing only original material

SHA : A blues/rock type project playing mostly original material but also a few covers (eg. Muddy Waters, Hendricks etc.)

Acoustic Art : A piano/guitar duo playing mostly light ambient music.

Three very different to each other gigging projects hence the potential confusion when "my band" is asked to play. :)

To add to the mix I also get involved in various collaborations both locally and internationally. These are just recordings for the sake of it.

Her Slave

Just a quickie :)

Well SHA one of the bands i play in entered a Music competition recently ... (we came 4th ;) ).

Anyways one of our fans, Mike Berry took this vid, so this is just a little post to put it up there.





My wife Muriel on keyboards, my bro-in-law Clive on guitar and vox and my good buddy Craig on drums, and me on bass of course :) .

Enjoy

A little study in E Flat

Ok, I'm back with a study just before X-mass.

This is in Eflat Major (as the title says :) and has three main parts.

1) A bit of "clawhammer" with the Right Hand to start with.
2) A "tapping" section
3) Lastly finishing off with harmonics.

This is still a work in progress, and that's my excuse for some of the rough edges on the mp3 example that you can find here.

Eflat Major study mp3




pdf is here

Tone wise I have VERY old strings on ... not my fault I can't seem to get D'Addario EXL165 bass strings anywhere in Cape Town for some reason (quite miffed) and this is what I use ... any donations welcome :) .

I use a GT-PRO into REAPER, the latter I've mentioned before, and I'm still blown by what it can do ... everything I need so far and more besides, for the GT-PRO I tweaked a patch I found somewhere on the net GT_Pro-Jazz.mid GT_Pro-Jazz.gtl and kicked off the delay.



There are a few gotchas in this piece.

Section 1) I use my RH index, middle and thumb for all but the string skipping section where I use my ring finger instead of my middle.

Section 2) Apart from where it goes down to B it's a "Victor Wooten" type pattern that recurs in major and minor arpeggios.

Section 3) I really struggled and failed with my software to notate this nicely, so you'll just have to do the best you can listening to the mp3.
The first harmonics can be natural at the 5th fret ...or... fretted at 5 and pinched at 24 which you need to do anyways for the others (ie. fret at 6 and pinch at 25) the high harmonics are pinched near around 32 or so ... near my neck pickup, you'll just have to find it for yourself. The LAST harmonic may be resolved easily by fretting the G# and pinching the high note ... or in a more flashy manner, reach over with your RH and a) tune up the string : b) grab the string behind the fretted note and bend (it's surprising how FAR you have to bend it for a semi-tone)

If anyone reads, and can make sense of this, have fun with it, comments appreciated.

A coupla tunes

Hi again,
After the (by now usual) long silence - been a bit (real world) busy in the meantime, here are a couple of tunes I've been working on.

The Elephant Song I did with Hugh Coutts, a really cool songwriter, he played guitars and sang, in a few different keys :) before we settled here.
He recorded the guitar and vocal tracks at home then brought them to me, I added and mixed the rest with a bit of backwards and forwards in between.
I'm more of an engineer than a producer when it comes to recording so I took it to a good buddy of mine Pete Stanford who then added a few deft touches, whilst giving me a lesson in things audio, thanks Pete, and here it is, comments welcome.

Looking Back (at you) I did with Lamecia who I used to play with back in the late '90s, her voice always impressed me, but we lost touch for years, then we connected again (via FaceBook), she said she has some songs, so I said lets do it.
This is one of quite a few songs, but The BarleyCorn was having a song-writing competition and as this was the one nearest completion we entered it. Again any comments welcome.

Just in-case the above links to the tunes don't work properly, you should be able to find them here.
http://www.reverbnation.com/hhhza


'till I next add something ...

Reaper

Hi again,
Just thought I'd share my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).

Well mostly the software, I'm totally converted to REAPER as my main editor.
It's fast - no long boot up and snappy when editing.
It's tiny - less than 6Mb, the size of an mp3 and it has a demo song included.
It's amazing - remarkable programing skills here with a vibrant, caring community and forum.
It's cheap

I use it both in WinXP when I need all the bells and whistles plugins and rewire, but it's really comfortable in Linux using wine-ASIO (see this thread ) which is the setup I use for my live recordings at The Barleycorn.
With REAPER's keyboard shortcuts and a CLI (Command Line Interface) I don't need a mouse to get around.

Been a LONG time

Well it's been a long time since I updated this blog, kinda like a diary when you're busy you haven't the time to write it down.
So ... the desk is working fine and I'm recording The Barleycorn every Monday as well as playing there a couple of times.
My original band (we do some Hendrix/Muddy Waters etc. covers as well) SHA (Sherwood, Haylett, Angilley) is practising more regularly.

This is our video of Quirky



You can hear more SHA songs on reverbnation.com as well as some studio (Gello) stuff.

We jammed some at the guitarists birthday (Clive Haylett) here is a clip with his son Arlo playing accoustic.



I am also working in a cover / corporate band called July Crisis for which there is a Facebook video of our first gig but I've no idea how to embed it, no doubt more gigs and vids will follow.

I also have a couple of ideas for tunes which I will put up here as soon as I have time to lay them down.

That's about it for now, will try and keep this more up-to-date but no promises.

...up and running again

Following on from my previous post re "shit happens ...", owing to the money collected from the benefit, and a top up from my studio partner we have another VS1880 (which saves having to learn new stuff), and I'm getting a second hand laptop soon, so we're back at the Barleycorn as well as being able to record bands live again.

Almost up to speed re the gear stolen (also bought a car) fortunately it's a buyers market ATM, but altogether a hefty dent to the finances.

Anyways ... life goes on ... and it's not looking too bad :)

I'll try to start putting music up here again soon ... 'till then.