… or the latest commenter on my All Along the Watchtower video: someone called Multishades complains about my hair movement, & the guitar – which s/he says is totally wrong … but says I sound great … but that I should “move on”.

I don’t really know what this person actually means. Really truly I don’t. Leaving aside the weirdness of commenting on my hair moving … the guitar is wrong, but sounds great, but I should “move on”?

No idea – so I thought I’d share with you all.

A while back I got a message from YouTube telling me that a couple of my videos had been flagged by their clever-dick system as containing copyright material. On those two videos advertisements appeared. Now while I don’t like having ads on my videos (because I know I hate them when I’m watching someone else’s video with ads), I realise that was fair enough: the copyright holder wants a bit of ad revenue from the few hundred (maybe) people watching me play a song to which they hold the copyright, so they can put ads on the video. Fine. No worries.

Last night I noticed that at some point between then and now, Warner Chappell, the copyright holder for Hotel California, by The Eagles, has muted the audio to my video of me playing the solo from Hotel California.

So I look a right twat in that video.

My first thought was to dispute it. After all, it’s a cover, and one can play covers, right?

… Riiiiiiight??

Turns out the answer to that is no. I’m not the first person to wonder about this, and some have asked the queyion online. Answer is that covers are not “fair use” under copyright law, and therefore remain subject to copyright requirements. What about cover bands??!! They’re playing in a bar or a club which pays licensing fees to ASCAP (I think), the copyright administering jobby, so composers get paid when their songs are played. All good, don’t get me wrong. They should indeed get those royalties.

However, all the aforegoing leads inescapably to one conclusion: Google/YouTube are a bunch of bloody stingey-arse cheapskates who are avoiding paying licensing fees to ASCAP. Consider: if they paid said licensing fees, we’d be able to play covers, and composers/copyright holders would get a share of any resulting revenue. We’re not allowed to play covers, ergo, YouTube do not pay a licensing fee.

Thy know damn well there are a lot of covers on YouTube. I figure they’re hoping that a few take-downs and mutings will keep the copyright holders happy, while they sit quietly back enjoying the fruits of having umpty-million cover videos (not to mention actual songs with slideshows) attracting lots of views.

So that’s why I’m annoyed with Google/YouTube. What about Warner-Chappell? Yes they’re the copyright holder, and yes they were perfectly entitled to put ads on my video. Hey, legally they were entitled to mute it as they have as well. The point is, first they tried the ads. Because I’m small fry with few views, they probably made no money from it. Instead of thinking “oh well that’s completely irrelevant then. We’ll leave the ads there in case, though”, they decided to mute it. Out of what? Spite? What do they gain? In a material sense what do I lose? They would get any ad revenue, not me. It’s just annoying and frustrating; no-one’s any better off.

Bloody troglodytes.

Especially Google/YouTube, who are playing both sides: denying copyright holders their proper revenue by not paying licensing fees (i admit this is an assumption, but it follows logically: if they do pay licensing fees, surely they would not have to remove or mute videos), and they crap on users like me who just want to share and interact with others playing songs we love.

Troglodytes all.

I always find it interesting to hear someone else playing on my gear; it always sounds so different. Good different, in this case.

For more Owen – and the other Ninja Monkeys – check them out in the studio:

(which by the way can be found at the awesome short url of http://met.al/ninja )

Also check out their YouTube, Twitter, FaceBook – and even MySpace  pages.

Imagine then my annoyance when into my inbox popped a notice that my latest video might be copyrighted material O_o And then another. Further annoyance followed when they stuck popup ads onto those two videos

I suppose that google has to pay royalties to the songwriters’ wossname – just like a radio station or a bar or something. And I suppose it’s fair enough they would want then to get a bit of money from videos for which they might have to pay said royalties. But I hate having ads on my videos.

So that’s really the point of this little ramble: the ads aren’t my fault, and I do apologise dreadfully for their presence.

This first is just pretty straight, with a low-gain tone, played fingerstyle:

I was going to do a high-gain semi-fusiony thing (ok ok, I was just going to noodle faster ), but sliced the middle finger of my left hand on a fence – not all that badly, but definitely enough that I couldn’t fret with it. I decided therefore to do a video just using my right hand. It was rather fumbling, until I started using my left hand and doing some of my usual odd tapping. I managed to avoid using the cut finger until almost the end – take a look:

In another attempt to keep the finger off the fretboard (though it was healing rapidly) I bought a slide. Now, i havent even touched a guitar slide in a good 20 years, and have never done any more than the main melody to Free Bird Badly So I also did some odd tapping:

After that I thought I’d have another go with the slide, but with less gain, and without the delay – and with no tapping. Being a fool, however, I went and had a go at playing with the slide over the body between the pickups – a la Jeff Beck in Angel (Footsteps):

Finally (well, no it’s almost certainly not final ) I saw the wonderful entry by Mark McGuigan (will find and add link; till then just go look on Youtube). After that I felt inspired to just play more in my natural style, and with a pick (for the first time in this competition) – cut finger be damned. First time through the backing track it hurt, but by the end it had almost stopped so I had anither run-through, and was quite happy with the result:

Jon has told me he doesn’t mind how many entries I do, so watch this space, as I just can’t leave a C minor blues alone
(note: I’m posting this on my iPhone, so all I can do is hope I’ve embedded the videos correctly. If not, I’ll correct it this evening.)