METAL MELTDOWN!!

I actually made some music today!!

Sorry. I’m a little excited It’s been a while. As if I haven’t been busy enough with work and home, I set myself foolish targets with this here blog: trying to do Midweek Medicine and Friday Filosophy both on a weekly basis. Things should be a bit better now I’ve made that somewhat more reasonable.

I even managed to listen to some music as well: some new Alice in Chains, and some old Judas Priest. My daughter was rocking out with me, as you can see:

Anyway, so as well as listening to these two great bands, I managed to find time (after getting rid of all the black-spot on the roses – which took a fair while, but my daughter helped with that too 8) ) to record a couple of videos for my youtube channel:

Hole Hearted

First up is a mucky-as-samick cover of Extreme’s “Hole Hearted”, from Pornograffiti:

This was the last crack I was going to have at recording this song. I had tried billions and billions of times, and kept screwing something up: very frequently the words (I’m so not a lyrics kind of guy), but also rather often my thumbpick – the back bit which goes around the thumb – would get caught up on the strings and cause much mistakery. In fact in this video at 1:05 (I put a comment saying 1:02, cos 1:05 links to just after it – silly youtube ) I did get a thumbpick catch, and you can see the pick fly up in a lovely arc in front of the guitar and hit the floor. But I carried on, largely because I didn’t want to play this song any more billions of times.

WTF is it with these bugs in here? We have flyscreens. Can’t they tell they’re not supposed to be able to get in? And it’s always just my office/music room. Damn bugs. BRB …

… well, I can report that the bugs Do. Not. Like. Mortein Fast Knockdown – Except now there are lots of little twitching and convulsing dying insects falling down onto my keyboard and mousepad …

Smoke on the Water

Anyway, second vid today was Richie Blackmore’s fantasmic solo from Smoke on the Water:

This is one of the very few solos I play (almost) note for note. Having tuned in 4ths (EADGCF – or at the moment, DADGCF) since I learned the solo, I had to do some adjusting, but I was quite happy with my first take, so left it at that. Contrary to (it seems) many musicians – or at least, guitar players – I (like most normal rock fans) love Smoke on the Water: I think the riff is one of the best damn bits of music ever written, and the whole song is awesome. \m/ – 8) – \m/

5am Blues

I forgot: there was another video I uploaded quite recently that I was fairly happy with:

My daughter woke us at 4am one morning (very out of character for her, and of course she “chose” a night her younger brother slept through beautifully ). By the time she got back to sleep at 5, there was no way I was getting back to sleep myself, so I played some blues. This was over a backing track called “A Minor Affair”, which I downloaded from Guitar Center when they had some competition running. This backing track was one of a few done by Pete Anderson rather than by Guitar Center themselves. Anyhow – it’s a minor blues, which I always love, so I had fun. 8)

So, I hope you enjoy the videos (I enjoyed making them). Check out the others while you’re there and don’t be shy about commenting and rating, and friending and subscribing and all those other things.

Oh, and follow me on Twitter too 8)