Newly a fan, I checked out some more, such as:

and:

Seriously, how could you not love a song called “Fire, Battle, Metal!”?

Wikipedia tells me that the band was put together a bit oddly; in fact “until the moment the first promotional photos were shot, the entire band had never been in the same place at the same time before. Some members did not even know each other.” Despite that, they rock. Very much. There are shades of Maiden, shades of Priest, they’re named after a Dio album … Well cool. \m/ Some of it is also rather reminiscent of Malmsteen’s vocal stuff.

By which I don’t mean Malmsteen singing …

The intention of this day is to encourage:

• the promotion of our musical art among all sections of society;
• the application of the UNESCO ideals of peace and friendship between peoples, of the evolution of their cultures, of the exchange of experience and of the mutual appreciation of their aesthetic values;
• the promotion of the activities of the International Music Council, its international member organizations end national committees, as well as its programme policy in general.

Coooooooool. Roll on the 1st of October.

The idea was:

We hope that this first International Music Day will constitute a major achievement among our’ activities, and that it will become an annual event for the propagation of greater knowledge of our art, arid for the strengthening of the bonds of peace and friendship between peoples through music.

And I think that’s bloody brilliant.

Conversely (perhaps), Steve Silberman today tweeted a link to an article in the New York Times: “In Mobile Age, Sound Quality Steps Back”

“People used to sit and listen to music,” Mr. Fremer said, but the increased portability has altered the way people experience recorded music. “It was an activity. It is no longer consumed as an event that you pay attention to.”

Instead, music is often carried from place to place, played in the background while the consumer does something else — exercising, commuting or cooking dinner.

I’ve noticed this in my own habits recently. I don’t tend to sit and just listen to music anywhere near as often as I used to; rather I have it on while doing something else while riding the train to work. Sad, really. I’m not so concerned about the sound quality issue the article describes – except for the loudness wars: over-compressing everything till all dynamics are lost and the damn song clips. I’m thinking it might be best to steer clear of “remastered” classic albums for that very reason. Anyway, personally I think a decrease in quality is perhaps a reasonable trade-off for ease of access, and getting more people experiencing more music.

… Except that they experience it as background, as wallpaper. Hence in fact the driver for the loudness wars, because if your song isn’t as overall loud as the next guy’s, it will be experienced as lesser – or perhaps entirely missed.

I don’t really know the answer, but pushing this International Music Day might be something. Getting people to see music as something special, not as background, and to celebrate it again, would – I think – be a really great thing.

So get to it folks.

Oh. Hell. Yes.

This is truly a fantastic instrument; I can hardly keep my hands off it. It plays like a dream, and the tones it produces are fantastic. It looks awesome, and is mine – all mine. Everything about it is how and what I wanted. It’s not the product of corporate compromise, or appeal to the lowest common denominator; the good stuff isn’t kind of “averaged out”. The care and attention to detail is something that of course doesn’t happen in a mass-produced instrument, and it really does make a difference.

Anyway …

Mostly custom

This all started some years back, when for the first father’s day after our daughter was born, my wife and I agreed that I’d get a custom guitar made by Adrian Hamilton – a friend, and wonderful luthier in Auckland, NZ. The result of that was actually more of a mostly-custom, as it involved a body from an old Rockson (though Adrian made it about a googleplex times better: fixing up screwy bits, putting in beautiful bevels in the cutaways, staining it up …) and an Ibanez neck (also modified, with the locking nut gone, and replaced by a graphtech nut – and little paua buttons in the back where the screws for the locking nut used to come through). Starting points/limitations notwithstanding, it’s a fantastic guitar, and attracts a lot of comments and questions on my YouTube videos.

When we had our son then, my mind was full of plans for the fully-custom guitar that I would get for him. (N.B. by “for him” I mean that if he wants it when he’s old enough, he can have it … and I haven’t yet decided how old that is. Same deal goes for my daughter and the guitar I got for her.) Anyway … looking at what I had already, what was most obviously missing was a 2 humbucker fixed-bridge set neck sort of affair. Kind of like a Les Paul, only not – since I don’t like Les Pauls (except for Billy Gibbons’ Pearly Gates; Pearly is awesome, but all other LPs seem to have a weird fizzy, honky, quack thing going on – even with replacement pickups).

Rosewood

Cut rosewood

So Adrian and I spent about 3 months or so emailing back and forth about woods, design, specs and so forth. The starting point was a log of old Indian Rosewood he had happened upon. I love rosewood. It feels gorgeous on fretboards, and looks beautiful too. So I decided purely on the strength of that, to have a rosewood neck and fretboard.

And a good choice it was

Mahogany

Maple

Next job was choosing body wood/s. I won’t go into the details, but we ended up with a mahogany body and a maple (not figured) cap. Unlike, it seems, pretty much everybody, I’m not a big fan of quilted maple, and I really don’t like flame maple: that tiger stripe look. So unfigured it was.

Irritatingly, I can’t make WordPress have blank space here, to make the next paragraph appear below these pics, hence this paragraph … now …

Having decided on woods, the shape was pretty important. I opted in the end for one of Adrian’s standard shapes – the Heilo – but modified a little; I wanted a more conventional lower horn (boring staid guitar player types … ). It also looked to me as though Adrian might have lifted up the lower bout just a touch. Not sure though – I should probably ask him. As well as the woods, and shape, I specified a chambered body, thinking of Robben Ford’s old Fender Elite, and more recently his custom Bakers. Adrian’s suggestion was one large chamber occupying most of the bass side of the body:

Carving body chamber

And here’s the first shot I saw of the actual shape:

Cut and shaped and glued

There the maple cap had been glued onto the mahogany body, but not carved. The fretboard had been glued onto the neck – which had not at that stage been carved to shape.

Carved and gorgeous

Adrian has a number of different carves you can choose between for the top of the guitar. I went with what he calls the “modern” carve:

You might have noticed many many holes for controls in that picture. I don’t tend to take the easy option when it comes to my guitar controls, and this is no exception. I wanted as much flexibility as possible, but I also wanted it to be simple to drive.

Alongside the two humbuckers, I opted for piezo saddles on the bridge so I could get an acoustic sound. Therefore there’s a switch to choose magnetic pickups, piezo, or both; there’s also a piezo volume knob, which has a push-pull mid-shift control, via the inbuilt preamp. There’s a master volume knob and a custom 12-way tone switch, which instead of varying the resistance across a fixed capacitance like a standard tone control – which bleeds off mids with the highs – has a fixed resistance, and a bunch of different-sized high quality capacitors. That way the mids are maintained as the treble drops – tricking the ear on some settings into almost hearing the mids as being boosted. Each humbucker has its own toggle switch for series | off | parallel wiring, and there’s a switch to put them in or out of phase with each other.

Guitar or Space Shuttle?

That’s a lot to deal with, right? Well with all those mini-toggles down, it all functions like an Ibanez JS, or Gibson Les Paul: it has a 3-way toggle switch for the two humbuckers. It also has something called a Bam-Bam (also termed by a friend, the “oh shit!” switch ) which when engaged, connects the bridge humbucker directly to the output jack, and takes everything else out of the circuit. I came up with the idea for this switch about 20 years ago, and have had in most of my guitars since, but I had to modify it for this one, so as to keep the 4 conductor wires separate for all the series/parallel switching.

Now in that picture you can see the colour. While I’m not a fan of figured maple, I am a fan of woodgrain, so I wanted a translucent stain, rather than opaque paint. Since I painted my Yamaha RGX white, none of my guitars were particularly colourful.

A colour explosion! ... not

So I decided I’d have this guitar be colourful – though still cool. I like blue, so decided to have a blue stain. This was something that I worried about through all the months of the build. Adrian and I are not in the same country, so this was all done online, with scavenged photos of guitars found on the internet and emailed across, then viewed on different computers, different monitors … I really didn’t know if it was going to come out like I had it in my head … but it did. Adrian did a fantastic job and made it just what I wanted: light enough to be bright and translucent, and wow, but dark enough to be cool as well. It’s fantastic. The body and neck are ‘unfinished’: just oiled, and what looks like binding is actually the edge of the maple cap: it’s a really neat look.

A thing of beauty it is

I also eschewed fretboard markers other than a geeky block inlay at the 12th fret Adrian has more pics on Flickr.

All of this we sorted out by email in a few months, but I couldn’t choose pickups. I’m a longstanding, certified, card-carrying DiMarzio bunny, and initially had it in my head very firmly that the pickups would be some kind of DiMarzio. As time went on I grew less sure, and at Adrian’s suggestion I went and listened to the clips on the Rio Grande website. Happily, another member of NZ Guitars had posted some clips of his Robin guitars, which both had Rio Grandes in them: a Texas in the bridge and Buffalo in the neck … which was what I had decided from the clips and descriptions was what I’d go for. These pickups are great. Lower output than I’m used to, but tone for Africa. Already I would recommend them most highly.

Soooo …

… It looks great, and has lots of switchy options, but what’s it like to play?

Better than … pretty much anything else I’ve played (which includes Ibanez, Fender, Gibson, ESP, and PRS – not just the budget end of things). It just feels right, and also inviting and fun – so you really don’t want to do much other than play it.

And how does it sound? …

It really did feel as though I was going on a big journey, wandering into the country somewhere … rather than heading into town, where I’ll be at work in a little over 1/2 an hour.

It was a nice demonstration of the power of music to alter thinking, perception, and experience. This is the sort of thing Dan Levitin writes about in his latest book ‘Six Songs’ … Can’t remember the full title. Problem with moblogging: can’t just go check in the other room – and can’t multi-task on the iPhone. Anyway, he writes about the importance and power of music in that respect.

Right now Stevie Wonder has begun singing ‘Lately’ and I notice my mood and energy have flattened a wee bit. The experience of the train ride has changed as well – in line with the song.

Now we have something titled ‘mixdown 2′ from a guy named Mark, who goes by the username Basket Case on NZ Guitars and is on MySpace. I feel almost as though this is an action movie, and something about to happen. It’s almost as though I should get up and run somewhere

I could go on (Ozzy now: Fool Like You) but the point is how much music can change how the brain perceives and interprets even very mundane and familiar events and experiences.

… That’s as long as you don’t just let it be wallpaper. If music just becomes background (or simply crap ) it loses some of its magic; even if it’s enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing, it doesn’t tweak our brains in the way it can. And if we accept Dan Levitin’s contention (as I do) that music evolved with us and has had a large and important role in our development as a species – rather than Stephen Pinker’s contention that music is just a meaningless accident – we should make a point of appreciating all that music can give and do, rather than just plastering it underneath and paying it no mind.

(Miles Davis – ‘E.S.P.)

This is why we have movie soundtracks: the music is there to enhance (even create) the emotional involvement in the film. Without it, or with a poor soundtrack, the pictures would be somewhat flat. As a kind if example, Avatar was fantastic, but could have been better (imnsho) if the score in a couple of places had better matched the film’s emotional tenor – and hadn’t sounded like some other piece of music (on reflection, maybe it was just that familiarity that dragged me emotionally out of the moment a bit).

So, if you generally let music just play without paying mind to its effect in your mind, try listening – really listening – and examining what happens to your emotions, perception, and thinking.

I’ve been thinking lately about what I can and can’t play on the guitar, and about the frequency with which I make mistakes when playing. I’ve thought about why that is, after over quarter a century of playing the damn instrument. I ended up thinking about my comfort zone.

In a couple of the videos I recently recorded for Ultimate Blues Backing Tracks I found myself playing more like I used to years ago. – And I think I made fewer mistakes on those videos. It dawned on me that I was further in my comfort zone while playing in those videos; because I was playing stuff I was comfortable with, and not stretching myself technically, melodically, or theoretically, I didn’t stumble (as much).

Conversely when straying outside that decades-old comfort zone, I make worse and more frequent mistakes. Lately I’ve been stretching myself a lot, as it happens: new tuning (EADGCF), new way of picking (thumb-pick and fingers), more extensive and varied use of the whammy bar … I’m not all that surprised I trip up a lot.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

So … “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Staying within my comfort zone would mean less in the way of mistakes, with the result that although I’d be playing much more “meat and potatoes” stuff, I’d probably sound like a better player – simply due to not tripping over my fingers as much. My problem with that is that I’ve already been there and played like that. It’s still fun, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t feel like it’s enough to just carry on doing the same thing for ever.

While sometimes I like just playing in the familiar old ruts, I also enjoy the feeling of pushing myself in some way – the inevitable mistakes be damned I guess if I were a professional musician I might well be looking to push that comfort zone as far as I could while practising, so that when performing or recording I could do great stuff while still in my comfort zone – thus avoiding mistakes …. On the other hand, I like the abandon of pushing oneself and seeing where you end up. I also like seeing other musicians doing that, as it shows how caught up they are in the moment.

Seven Times Down, Eight Times Up

I studied Chidokan karate for a number of years when I was younger. Kancho sensei related to us a Japanese proverb: Seven times down, eight times up (or as the interwebs tell me this evening: “Fall down seven times, get up eight .. I think Kancho’s rendering sounds better ). Every time I stumble and fall when playing, I had better be able to get up again. That, I think, is what to work on. When I make a mistake I (generally) don’t freeze like a deer in headlights. I carry on. I get up. Sometimes I turn it into something cool (which I guess is the 8th time up )

- And if I were to play always within my comfort zone, how would I learn to manage mistakes? They say jazz is three wrong notes in a row; I say if you don’t play those three wrong notes, how can you learn to make the fourth one right?

So – go forth and screw up